A Dream Revisited

By Billy Keefe

Thursday, March 20, 2008

I first read A Dream Deferred in 7th grade. I know because my English teacher was Miss Harding. She was the type of woman who knew her gas station clerk by first name. She was an unnatural blond with a serious caffeine addiction, I am sure the clerks knew her name too.

She strolled into work each morning wafting an intoxicatingly nauseous blend of nicotine and coffee fumes, often double fisting a canteen and a stack of novels. She would breeze by the nuns who frowned upon everything about her and wink at the science teacher, who was married.

Her English class was unbearable. For the life of me I could not figure out what a comma splice was. The difference between a run on sentence and a compound sentence seemed so subtle that I thought only a genius, like Phil Ticknor, could figure it out.

Phil Ticknor knew everything. Tuesday mornings we had confession in the back corner of my home room. If I hadn't felt so much Catholic guilt at saying the words aloud, I would have confessed repeatedly to coveting Phil Ticknor's brain. Phil always got a big red 100% and a "Well Done!" on every test, assignment and pop quiz, including, 5 years later, the SAT. (Was that another comma splice?) He knew the answers to questions before they were done being asked. He single-handedly won our school the junior high trivia trophy. I was an alternate, the only girl on the team and I cheated on the test to make sure I even got my spot as an alternate.

Plus, Phil Ticknor had read Shakespeare. The only author any of us knew by name.

When Miss Harding announced that we were ending our grammar unit and starting work on poetry it hardly inspired me to shake off the drunken sun that shown on the back row of seats where I spent most of English class thinking of things other than diagramming sentences.

A pile of papers came back down the row. To my dyslexic delight, poetry was short. The lines were well spread out. There were ONLY eleven of them:

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up

like a raisin in the sun?

Or fester like a sore--

And then run?

Does it stink like rotten meat?

Or crust and sugar over--

like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags

like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

I got a little caught up on the word 'deferred'. I kind of knew the word, I mean I had heard it used before, but I wasn't exactly sure what it meant there.

Miss Harding finished passing out the carefully measured stacks of photocopies then retreated to the edge of her desk where she sunk into a long tug on the straw to her 2 liter of Coke.

I was done reading the poem by the time she got around to asking if anyone would read it aloud. My hand went up. "Uhm, yes, Miss Keefe," she managed through her surprise and soda.

"What happens," I began, "to a dream deferred?" I finished reading, then did a quick third read, anticipating the oncoming questions. I became consumed with that line - Does it fester like a sore?

"What is this poem about?" asked Miss Harding, staying off another nicotine fit with a gulp of Coke. I couldn't understand why dreaming would be deferred. I imagined a person thrashing in bed. I imagined a dream in their head, heavily sagging, then the head exploding and brain bits splattered on the pillow and head board. Surely that wasn't what this Langston Hughes was talking about! What nonsense.

Fucking Phil Ticknor raised his fucking hand. Well, he said, referring to the itallicized paragraph after the poem, "Langston Hughes was an influential part of the Harlem Renaissance. Harlem, where black people live. Renaissance, rebirth. This poem is about the rebirth of black people."

God, if you are real, PLEASE let him be wrong, please let him be wrong, please let him be wrong, God.

"Very good observation, Phil, well done," said Miss Harding.

Damn you, God, you're such a phony. I racked my brain for something better. Silence.

"What does the word deferred mean, anyone?"

"It's like when you let someone else talk for you," I said, "You defer to them."

"Close, but not quite what I am looking for."

Phil raised his stinking hand again, "It means delayed." Fucking encyclopedia head over there. Too bad he sucks at drawing, and hockey.

"What does the first sentence mean?"

I looked at the words and I remembered a TV commercial I had seen, "Raisins are grapes that shrivel up in the sun." Then it clicked. I heard it through the Grapevine! The dancing raisins. "The raisins are like black people," I said.

"Wow. Very good, Miss Keefe." Eat that, Ticknor. "What about the second line?"

"Well," I said. "if something festers, it like gets worse and worse."

"And . . .?" I didn't know. How does a sore run? "What happens to a boil when it bursts?"

"OOOH, the juice comes out!" I knew this from my mother's (The Midwife) graphic description of infections. This incited a whole host of ews from the girls in the room, who then immediately seemed to write poetry off as a boy thing.

Phil was searching for something to say, but the hard parts of the poem were already figured out. I read it again. It wasn't about a dream you have at night, it was about the other kind of dream, the ones you have when you are awake. And it was about being black. I imagined a black man, hanging from a noose, his body covered with sores from the sun. And the thought occured to me, this is what it feels like to be black, you put your dreams on hold until you feel like you are going to explode.

I felt like I was going to explode every minute in junior high. I had no friends. I was picked on mercilessly. I frequently got into fights. I imagined all the things that troubled me suddenly creating oozing boils on my skin, as I struggled under the weight of a yolk. I fell in love with poetry immediately.

Then there was a commotion at the windows. Frank Rogers, one of the great assholes of our lives, pointed at something. The neighborhood our school was in had gone from a good Catholic neighborhood when I started there in Kindergarten to a bad, presumably Godless neighborhood now that I was one year from graduating. Later, I came to understand that 'bad neighborhood,' when falling out of the mouths of good Catholics, meant a 'black neighborhood.'

One twin toddler who lived on the second floor of an apartment house across the street from our school had climbed over the edge of his porch and was walking on the roof. The other twin had one leg over the edge of the porch and was teetering close to a two-story fall. Their white diapers gleamed against their dark skin. Suddenly, their father came running out. Screaming. Swearing. Swinging. He grabbed the first twin by the diaper and yanked him back into a hail storm of slapping until the child fell down crying. Then he saw the second child. He straightened up and pointed at the edge. The boy backed away from him, stepping ever closer to the end of the roof.

"No," I said, go back. The dad lept over the railing. The kid began running in evasive circles. At every turn I was sure he would fall to his death. The whole class was glued to the windows now. Miss Harding ran down the hall to call for help. The safe twin went inside and shut the porch door, apparently locking it, because when the father finally caught his arrant son and pulled him to safety by his arm while his feet drug protestingly on the floor, he found they were locked out. He eventually shimmied his way down a drain pipe and went in the front door of the house.

With the major action over, we started giggling and shuffling. Then Frank Rogers, true to form, said, "Ah funny little niglets." The white boys laughed uproariously. The white girls giggle coyly. And my anger festered like a boil. I saw Phil Ticknor's smile suddenly retreat and he turned and slunk to his desk. I knew, in my indignation, that he and I were no longer rivals.

Lawrence.com blogs are collections of short, frequently updated posts by members of the Lawrence community. Blog writers, and comment posters, are solely responsible for what they say. (Please take the time to read our full policy.)

If you're interested in writing a blog on lawrence.com, send us a couple of sample entries.

Comments

lawrence.com does not necessarily agree with comments posted below - responsibility lies with the relevant user alone. Read our full policy

Posted by matt (Matt Armstrong) on March 21, 2008 at 11:41 a.m. (Suggest removal)

Please tell me you are publishing. Please. Your writing has gotten so delicious.

And no, it wasn't a comma splice. That's my trick, no one would call it a crutch.

Posted by mitzibel (Misty Nuckolls) on March 21, 2008 at 12:21 p.m. (Suggest removal)

I second that. Stellar, as always. This had *such* an awesome flow and pacing to it.

Posted by billy (Billy Keefe) on March 22, 2008 at 5:51 p.m. (Suggest removal)

Publishing, ha! I am too busy trying to make enough money to eat. I just think up these posts on the subway, then type them as fast as humanly possible in between teaching classes, shooting video and applying for odd jobs. The rigor of publishing is intimidating. I might have to EDIT! Hehe. For example, there are several punctuation errors in the above story I haven't taken the time to fix. It isn't really laziness, I just have grammatical inertia. I would have to not do something else in order to fix them.

Posted by DOTDOT (anonymous) on March 23, 2008 at 1:38 a.m. (Suggest removal)

Hey! Writing is a pretty odd job.

No?

A Dream Revisited

Comments

Post a comment