Recitation

In the bathroom stall, I hold my breath as Mom pulls the white dress over my head. Today, I am Harriet Tubman, all dressed in the costume Mom has assembled. We fit the headscarf over my neat black braids. Anyone who didn’t know would think I was a nurse. A little, black, wheezing nurse. My adenoids are still blocking my tiny breaths, and my tonsils swell and swell. I wonder, each day, how it feels to breathe like the other children, like the pretty girls whose mothers let them wear their hair down, like the boys who can fly across the kickball bases. The beads on my braids make noise and so does my breathing—every breath comes and goes with a cluttered sigh from my mouth, forcing me to show the teeth I’m so ashamed of, the gap that will eventually close. Do you know your poem? Mom asks, smoothing the dress and fastening its buttons. I’ve never felt so safe at school—Mom is here to protect me from the blacktop bullies and my gifted teacher who treats us like adults. I am seven years old and reading way above my grade level. I am seven years old and all I want is a friend who doesn’t ask what we do in that strange gifted class. I want to cross the orange hallway to the other classes, the ones with twenty children and no special projects and no required number of AR points and no 6th grade word problems. I want to have pizza parties and use those little plastic bears to do math. Do you know your poem? Practice it. Mom is almost done primping me, and I take a heavy breath—bricks in my lungs and Eloise Greenfield crawling over my tongue. I begin, careful to soften my perfect English for the sake of the vernacular: Harriet Tubman didn’t take no stuff and wasn’t scared of nothing, neither…or is it either? Harriet Tubman didn’t have time to worry about grammar, and neither should I. None of my classmates are dressed as slaves. I’m the only one, proud to be wearing something other than my school uniform, to use the closest thing to Ebonics my sharp and proper tongue can manage, to play at being a woman, even if it’s just for thirty minutes. I wonder what it means to guide a railroad that doesn’t exist, what it means to be a little slave running through the night. What it means to take a breath through unblocked nostrils instead of the lake of swollen tissue keeping me from a clear sinus cavity, freedom, sweet respiration.