Salon.com > Janet Mcdonald

Crystal bawl

Wed, 08 Jan 2003 20:38:00 +0000

I don't know my future after this weekend and I don't want to.

-- Bjork Gudmundsdottir

Despite what you're about to read, I am arguably not a complete idiot.

I have degrees from three Ivy League schools in French literature, journalism and law. I've authored books. Three of them, to be exact. OK, so they're not "Anna Karenina" or "The Bluest Eye" or "The Years" but still, they're published and are on display atop my mother's dresser drawer, between the Eiffel Tower snow globe and the photo of me grinning next to a life-size cardboard replica of Bill Clinton.

And I'm not some gullible white-bread girl from Kansas. I'm streetwise, born and bred in a Brooklyn housing project.

So I wonder, how did an aging and undoubtedly bleached blonde with a crystal ball and the smoky voice of a barroom broad make a loser of a lawyer and a punk of a project girl -- and walk off with 700 of my hard-earned dollars?

I know exactly what went wrong; I'm an idiot.

A dime bag for the schoolgirl

Wed, 24 Feb 1999 20:00:00 +0000

| The train conductor announced 125th Street as "the first stop in Manhattan -- next stop, Grand Central!" It amused me that he didn't say the "H" word -- Harlem. The little Harlem station, with its rickety wooden benches and peeling walls, was so different from grandiose Grand Central. I had never gotten off the train at the Harlem stop but was sure I would blend in easily in the black neighborhood. Dressed in my usual jeans and sneakers and carrying thirty dollars Daddy had sent me, I wandered up the broad street, not sure of anything -- why I was there, what I would say, how I would be received.

I headed toward a group of tall buildings. Projects. I loitered there for a while, feeling reckless. At last, a young guy approached. "What you need?" His eyes scanned the street. I felt awkward. "Uh, I got twenty bucks." I thought saying "got" and "bucks" would establish me as a homegirl. I might as well have shouted, "Excuse me. I don't wish to be presumptuous, but do you have any heroin for sale, and if so, could you provide me with the quantity/price breakdown?" He smiled. "Where you from, New Jersey?" The ultimate, humiliating insult. "No. I'm from Brooklyn." "Yeah? You seem like you from New Jersey. You sure you not from New Jersey?" His words meant something was terribly wrong with my presentation, that I appeared middle class, maybe even whitegirlish.

Black like (white) me

Mon, 24 Aug 1998 19:09:00 +0000

Few journeys are as confusing, enraging and potentially rewarding as kicking your way out of the airless box that is America's underclass. I know because I have done it. "A Hope in the Unseen" tells the story of how Cedric Jennings, a bright senior at a failing high school in Southeast Washington, D.C., manages through sheer will -- and with a couple of helping hands along the way -- to make it to the Ivy League. One of those helping hands came from the book's author, Ron Suskind, a Wall Street Journal reporter whose Pulitzer Prize-winning articles on the teen led to the book.

Suskind spent two and a half years observing Cedric's life as it unrolled -- and at times unraveled -- in school, at home, in church, in a disastrous college prep program at MIT and finally at Brown University. His book shows Cedric's mother, Barbara, as a powerful force behind her son's drive to succeed -- a woman who, with few realistic possibilities left for herself, put all her hopes and dreams in him. Cedric's father, Cedric Gilliam, is a drug abuser who is in prison. The book takes the reader along on Cedric Jennings' poignant adventure, and in doing so puts a human face on the affirmative action debate and resolves it: Cedric makes it because he is given the chance he so clearly craves and deserves; the scores of Cedrics left to flounder in troubled schools must also deserve that chance.