In elementary school, I won a
medal as my first and only writing prize. I had created a picture book called Shirley’s Blocks about a girl named
Shirley who wished for a set of blocks for her birthday. Or, maybe it was Christmas—plot is not within
reach of my memory right now. Although I don’t
think it is as important as what I do remember, such as the bright lights of my
classroom, the comforting isolation of concentration while coloring in a green
turtle or tracing my careful and deliberate penciled lettering with a black pen,
the shadow of my body hovered over the white paper as I positioned the turtle
next to Shirley, a little black girl with long hair, holding a red block.
This is my earliest writing memory.
I named her Shirley after my
aunt, my father’s sister. My mom and dad were
never married and had me at a young age, my mom
17 and my dad 20. I must’ve seen my Aunt
Shirley the weekend before I wrote the story. My parents shipped me back and
forth on the weekends, and I lived mostly
with my great-aunt on my mother’s side the rest of the week. My Aunt Bee Bee woke me for school in the mornings, helped
me get dressed, fed me breakfast or gave me money to eat it at school, made
sure I was outside waiting for the bus, especially on cold mornings when the
warmth from the kerosene heater reached the far edges of the house and into my
bedroom, the comfort of the bed I shared with her more enticing than those
bright classroom lights waiting for me beyond the hour bus ride.
I was to receive my award at
a large, fancy ceremony at what used to be called The Mosque in Richmond, Virginia, but is now called Altria Theater. I
wore an uncomfortable velvet dress and white tights. I’m not sure how the
ceremony was explained to my mother, but she was not in a rush to get me there.
We arrived late, very late, and as we ascended the stairs to where the usher
told us to go, we met my teacher. My memory flickers here, like an old-time
movie with scratches and ticks and skips. In the way of my understanding what
happened is the lingering confusion of a seven-year-old who only knows that she
was supposed to walk up to a stage, have a medal threaded with a satin sash
placed around her neck, and be told that her book was the best in front a
crowd.
But in between those scratches
and ticks and skips of memory, I recognize, now thirty years mature, the glance
of irritation from my teacher sliced toward my mother’s direction. This look in
my now adult mind reads as some expectation of disappointment, and I think my
teacher probably wished I’d come from a different home, a different family, one
with a better sense of haste, with parents who weren’t children themselves. I’d
missed my award. Missed the whole damn thing.
My teacher had my book. I had
not seen the final product. It was perfectly bound and laminated with my drawings
of Shirley and her blocks. I don’t know if I cried or not. I think I must have
because I still carry with me the disappointment and anger from this moment,
conflated by the raw eagerness of childhood emotions still worming through my
psyche.
My journey across planet
write is circuitous, where I am always
chasing this memory and the feelings from it, hoping that when it comes back
around again, I can smother it, erase it, make it flick and fade away with the
joy I get from writing and sharing my work with others now. And then other times, when that rotation comes back
around and I am forced into that sadness I associate with some of childhood and
with using that childhood to express myself, I deliberately wallow inside the
dark lines of the flickered memories, wanting to root and curl up in
those feelings that make the stories I tell real. I return to the comforting isolation of concentration,
the hovering shadows my body makes as I crouch over my laptop or journal, choosing
each word deliberately, hoping to tell the story of little black girls who look
like me, who remind me of my Aunt Shirley, who are as special to me as those
women who woke me in the mornings for school and who made me miss my medal,
because, without them, my first writing memory would not have so much power.
And I want my writing to have power.
Here is a story by Tyrese Coleman:
Prom Night
Outside
fogging car windows, empty parking lot lights glowed like part of a fairy world
Keisha wasn’t allowed in. X, still wearing his tux, passed the blunt toward the
front seat to his boy dressed in a white tee; he hadn’t gone to prom. The radio
played 90s hip-hop—money, cash, hos, moneycashhos—they rapped along. The
fairies outside her window were blond and pristine with stars for eyes and
gold-coin titties. Could heavy-breasted black girls be fairies? Nah—her magic
was lost at ten when her mother’s boyfriend fingered her, taken when men at her
grandmother’s house parties grabbed her, made her sit on their hard laps and
bounced, bounced, bounced her soft baby-girl body against dirty construction
clothes rotten from sour Wild Irish Rose. Gave the magic away at fourteen to an
older boy who said he loved her. What else was she supposed to do with it? So,
did it matter if she let these boys have some of it too? Did it matter if they
laid her flat, pressed her face against the blue leatherette seat, did a
Chinese fire drill around the car to switch places when the first was done,
high-fiving on the way around like teammates through an obstacle course, while
Keisha suffocated silently until every drop of any magic she’d ever had was
gone?
She sucked the
fat brown tube when the blunt came her way. Her fingertips tingled
unpleasantly. She shivered in the boiling car. X said her hands were cold. He
kissed her. It was messy despite his soup coolers, wet, his breath tasting of
stale cigars and McDonald’s chicken nuggets. Keisha and X were alphas: smart,
popular, college bound. His friend, she couldn’t remember his name, was the
Nobody, the Dope Boy, the Sidekick. Nobody was the poor kid the hot guy
friended in elementary school, or his cousin he shared sloppy seconds with.
Nobody faced
the steering wheel while Keisha and X kissed. She sensed Nobody’s hard-on,
lingering in the air with the weed smoke. What did he think? That this is how
it happens in pornos, his anticipation a tight spring before release? She knew
nothing about him, and his power scared her. X pulled away. Nobody faced
Keisha. She stared at her shoes.
Nobody got
out of the car—was it too late to say no? X massaged up her thigh. She looked
over the front seat through the windshield to a haze of black, golden darkness,
like Christmas, wishing she could fade into the land of the little white
fairies, fly into the iris of a glowing dot of light between dark trees with
notched, shadowy holes. Be magical, like what she’d dreamed this night would be.
The
headlights of a security service car turned a corner, tiger eyes burning
brightly. Nobody jumped into the front seat, turned the engine over, and drove
off. The boys wanted to park somewhere else, roll a new blunt, drink more beer,
listen to more music, and run a train on her.
But—the
engine’s vibration. The car’s motion. The taste of open air, fresh air—warm,
spring air struggling to breathe while summer sits on its face—the taste, the
caress over her bare shoulders and open toes. A spell broke. She made them stop
the car. Eyelids half-shut, she walked home in her slinky dress, her pumps
glittering an unearthed enchantment across the blacktop.
__________________________________________
Tyrese L. Coleman is a
writer, wife, mother, and
attorney. She is also the fiction editor for
District Lit, and an associate editor at
SmokeLong Quarterly. A 2016 Kimbilio
Fiction Fellow and a nonfiction scholar at
Virginia
Quarterly Review's 2016 Writer’s Conference, her prose has appeared in
several publications, including
PANK, Day
One, Buzzfeed, Brevity, The Rumpus, Hobart, listed in
Wigleaf's Top 50 (very) short fictions, and forthcoming at
The Kenyon Review. She can be reached at
tyresecoleman.com.
