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400 Days of Oppression

Wrath James White

To Mom

Prologue

It was the last day of school. The bell rang, signaling the end of another grade and the beginning of three joyous months of summer. Kids flooded from the old, red-brick middle school building like a swarm of ants from a poisoned nest. Smiles were the dominant expression but not the only ones. There were fights, kids making the most of their last opportunity to settle year-long scores, the haunted expressions of those who had received bad report cards and were terrified at the thought of what their parents would do to them when they got home. A mix of emotions from outrage to apathy painted the features of the students who’d learned they needed to attend summer school to complete the grade and those who learned they would not graduate to the next grade no matter what they did.  

Notes were passed and dates were hurriedly made. Girls and boys exchanged phone numbers, promising to stay in touch over the summer. There were a few tearful goodbyes from kids who had graduated and were moving on to different high schools. Kenyatta was one of the latter. He turned fourteen this year. He would be entering the ninth grade at Creative and Performing Arts High School in the fall. This was his last chance to tell Christie how he felt about her or he would likely never see her again.

Kenyatta was in love. His teenage hormones and emotions were a raging wildfire within him. He felt like he was losing his mind. He’d been walking Christie home from school each day for the last six or seven weeks. Ever since he found out she’d told someone that, if she ever dated a black boy, it would be him. He’d been deeply flattered, but it was more than that. He was interested and soon that interest became an obsession.  

Christie was pretty, adorable, so different from the hardened hoochies in his neighborhood. She was quiet and shy. All the girls he’d grown up with were loud and obnoxious in comparison. She didn’t wear gold chains or big earrings with her name on them. There were no designer labels on her clothes.

She was simple, sweet, more like the girls he saw on television who were so innocent and…white. He couldn’t help wondering if he was obsessing over her solely because of the color of her skin. That’s what his mother and his aunts would think. They hated the idea of white bitches taking all the good black men. Was his affection for Christie a reflection of his own self-hatred? He didn’t know. All he knew was ever since he’d found out she was interested in him, he wasn’t interested in anyone else.

Kenyatta was one of the most popular kids in school. He was the president of the student council, an honor roll student, and he was captain of the basketball team. He’d dated the most popular girls in school. There wasn’t a black girl in Taft Junior High who wouldn’t have fallen all over themselves to date him and many of them were much sexier than Christie. But none of them had made him feel like this before. She liked to read as much as he did, geeked out as much over the release of the next Stephen King novel as he did, loved Prince and Stevie Wonder and poetry and trips to the art museum and picnics. She was romantic and so he didn’t feel like an idiot thinking romantic thoughts about her. He had never considered dating a white girl before. Not that he was ever opposed to it or saw anything wrong with it. He had just never entertained the thought in the past. It had never occurred to him as an option. As much as the world had changed in 1995 compared to when his mom was in high school, during the height of the civil rights movement, it hadn’t changed that much in Philadelphia. The racial divides were now marked by street signs. On one side of Frankford Avenue, there were projects filled with blacks and Puerto Ricans. On the other side, were poor whites and farther down Frankford Avenue were middle and upper-middle class whites. This area was less a melting pot than an arena with teams marked by their accents and skin color.