The Substitute

PrefaceThis is as much of my life as it's safe to remember, I think. My life probably began not unlike the majority of the black people in the US. It wasn't until my last years in high school that I began to notice some of the many disparities that we were confronted with as African Americans. There were brothers and sisters who went through school getting good grades with expectations to land jobs and careers that would make life easier for them than what their parents had. I had been writing since the seventh grade. When I look back over the years, I find what I wrote on was about separating myself from others. I was too young and unexposed to really understand how or when that would happen. In the meantime, I dealt with many things that kids did. Always being athletic, track and field, baseball and football were my pastime. That in itself limited my interaction with many other kids, and I found myself drawn to older girls and boys. At fifteen, I had girlfriends 18 and 19 years old. Most of them were in some way creative people. [...]