Checkmate (2 page)

Schools focus students’ learning in a
meaningful way by teaching subjects that have been proven to be useful over a period of time and also by correlating the learning process and the real world (jobs!). Without this guidance, education would be a hit-or-miss proposition that would reflect and exaggerate differences between rich and poor students. Schools are, in effect, the major avenue of equal opportunity.

The Anti-School Position
By Bobbi McCall

As a practicing salmon I feel my life and sense of adventure have been seriously limited by having to swim in a school. I would like more independence and the ability to cruise anywhere I want. Also, this swimming-upstream-to-mate business is sexist and generally not to my liking.

The Editorial Board of
The Palette
regrets that the
Cruiser
representative did not treat this subject matter seriously.

W
hat I was thinking was that something had to have happened for Sidney Aronofsky to get involved with the police or with drugs. Sidney was the straightest guy I knew at Da Vinci, and one of the brightest. When I first transferred to the school the Gifted and Talented program was just getting started. There were some thuggy butts there from the old program, and the first day two of them came up to me and put me against the wall.

“How much you going to pay us not to kill you?” one of them said. He had his hand on my neck and was trying to push my Adam’s apple through the wall on the third floor.

I thought for sure I had seen the guy on the six o’clock news wearing a ski mask and holding a nine, or maybe in the zoo swinging from one of the old tires they hang in the gorilla cage. That’s when I met Sidney.

“How
dare
you push him!” He stood right next to Thuggy Butt and looked him dead in the eye.

Okay, so Sidney is, like, five and a half feet tall, round from his knees up, with a big head full of curly hair. He’s got blue eyes that get wide when he’s excited. Also, he kind of puffs himself up, getting bigger and bigger until you think he’s going to explode. It’s weird but impressive.

I thought he must have been a karate expert or something to stand up to the thug holding me against the wall. Even after the guy turned and knocked him down I expected that Sidney would jump up and bust out some cool moves and some oriental-style noises.

What he did was to slowly get up off the floor, wipe his bloody nose on his sleeve, and get right back into Thuggy Butt’s face.

The next time he got knocked down he stayed down.

But that’s the way Sidney was. He stood up for what he believed in. He also got knocked down a lot for what he believed in, but it didn’t seem to matter to him. He couldn’t fight and he had stood up for me. I had to stand up for him if I could, or at least be by his side if he flamed out. I had grown a lot taller than I had been when
I first arrived at Da Vinci, and I had grown a lot inside, too. Being in the Cruisers was part of that growing.

Right after the first marking period Mr. Culpepper had picked out four kids he thought weren’t trying hard enough and brought us down to his office. He said that he had also noticed that we hadn’t joined any of the good-doing groups the school had. It was all about being cool and showing the world that Da Vinci Academy was turning out class A citizens. He said we should have been the Harvard of the middle school experience.

“But there are clearly exceptions!” he said, raising his voice.

The first thing he wanted us to do was to show we were into the Da Vinci experience by joining something. I said I had already formed a group and Mr. Culpepper jumped all over that. He wanted to know who was in the group except me.

“Kambui?” I said, looking at him.

Kambui nodded and, before I knew it, LaShonda and Bobbi were nodding, too. That’s how the Cruisers were born. When Mr. Culpepper asked us what we did it was Bobbi who said we were going to publish an alternative newspaper.

Kambui Owens is my best friend and a really dynamite
dude. He’s into photography and one day hopes to go around the world taking photographs that make a difference in people’s lives. Kambui lives with his grandmother not too far from me in Harlem.

LaShonda Powell is at Da Vinci because of her ability to design clothing. I mean, she’s really good. She can design clothing and she can sew. I think she’s probably going to be famous one day and have her initials on handbags. She and her brother live in a group home and she has a few issues about that.

Barbara “Bobbi” McCall is quirky, the kind of person I don’t know anything about but I like her a lot. Her thing is numbers. She’s fascinated with anything that has numbers attached to it and she can play around with numbers and come up with stuff that looks absolutely useless but is still somehow interesting. She also plays second board on the chess team, so you kind of get the picture of what her brain must look like.

I’m Alexander Scott but my friends call me Zander. I would like to be a writer one day. My folks are divorced and my dad lives all the way out in Seattle. He’s a local weatherman. My mom is a model and sometimes she gets small roles in films or television.

Mr. Culpepper liked to say that he hated faces.

“Show me a child’s face and I don’t know anything about him,” he would say. “Show me his school record and I will tell you everything about his past, present, and future!”

The grades of the Cruisers were mostly in the just-get-by range, but the thing about the kids at Da Vinci is that we’re all smart. You can almost hear the wheels clicking when we start thinking.

“The paper will be the bomb,” Kambui said. “It’ll be the four of us keeping it real and speaking truth to power.”

Mr. Culpepper smiled. It was the kind of look that an alligator gets just before he pounces. The grades of all the kids in the room were floating around the C+ area, and he couldn’t get us on that. But if we messed up with the newspaper idea, and you could tell he thought we would, he would have us.

“Well, it sounds like a plan, doesn’t it?” he said. “But we will see,
won’t
we?”

Mrs. Florenz Maxwell, our principal, is a saint. Where Mr. Culpepper is loud, she’s quiet. When he gets excited, she is calm. Sometimes I think they work together, but I hope she really doesn’t like him. I know she likes the Cruisers because she told me. So when Mr. Culpepper
called the Cruisers into his office the day after he had called me at home and I saw her sitting there I felt good.

Okay, we were in the office. Mr. Culpepper shuffled through the papers he keeps around just to shuffle, then he cleared his throat and spoke.

“Sidney has been arrested for attempting to buy drugs from an undercover policeman,” Mr. Culpepper said. He looked around at us carefully before going on. “He was down in Alphabet City.”

Da Vinci Academy is in Harlem. Alphabet City is what they call the section where the avenues are Avenue A, Avenue B, and Avenue C. I don’t know if they ran out of names or what, but everybody knew there was some drug dealing going on down there. Also, a bunch of good poetry and some great music.

“I think that since he only inquired as to the availability of drugs, and the particular amount involved is not classified as dangerous, there won’t be further prosecution,” Mr. Culpepper said. “What we were hoping was that some of his peers, you people, could talk to Sidney and see if there are problems that need handling. He won’t tell us anything.”

“We want to do everything we can for Sidney,” Mrs.
Maxwell said. “But sometimes we don’t know what to do. If he has a problem at home, perhaps we can point him in the right direction before he gets into further trouble.”

“What do you think, Bobbi?” Mr. Culpepper looked toward her. “You’re both on the chess team, aren’t you?”

“Beats me,” Bobbi said. “I’m really surprised. Zander’s his friend.”

“Mr. Scott?” Culpepper looked in my direction.

“Sidney’s okay,” I said. “We’ll talk to him.”

“Our concern is that there is a slippery slope that has to be avoided when any drugs are involved,” Mr. C. went on. “Sidney’s a major asset to this school and we don’t want him incapacitated.”

“Or be by himself if he has a real problem,” Mrs. Maxwell added quickly.

“And this won’t excuse you from the IL program,” Mr. Culpepper said. “Independent Learning will be the wave of the future, and Da Vinci will lead it in the city of New York.”

“If I were being burned at the stake would it excuse me from any of your programs, Mr. Culpepper?” Bobbi asked.

“If you were burning yourself on school property you would be completely responsible for any damage you caused,
Miss McCall,” Mr. Culpepper said. “Away from school property would give you more leeway, of course, but would not offer an excuse to be delinquent in your assignments.”

“I thought so,” Bobbi said.

Outside of Mr. Culpepper’s office we decided to call a meeting with Sidney to talk over his problems. Everyone except LaShonda thought that was a good idea.

“It won’t work,” she said. “Sidney ain’t stupid. He knows drugs are wack. So what are we going to say to him?”

“If we tell him how much we care about him it could make a difference,” I said.

“And how much we need him on the chess team,” Bobbi said. “I heard that Hunter is hiring a professional chess coach to work with their team.”

“We can’t do anything until we scope the problem,” I said. “Let’s talk to Sidney and see what’s happening.”

Everybody agreed to that and I was feeling good about it. Then Bobbi and LaShonda got into it again.

Me and Kambui usually take things pretty easy. The two girls, LaShonda and Bobbi, get excited about everything. LaShonda is always excited to begin with, and Bobbi, who is always smiling and always giving out her
squinchy-eyed look, is not excited until you disagree with her. Then she gets mad. So when Bobbi announced that she had entered a project for the Cruisers in the Independent Learning Project and LaShonda didn’t like it, the sparks began to fly.

“Yo, girl, who are you to tell all of the Cruisers what we’re going to be doing?” LaShonda asked.

“Yo, girl, if you want to be into some project away from the Cruisers, just go for it,” Bobbi said. “You probably can’t handle the theme I put out anyway.”

“I can snatch all the hair off your little round head!” LaShonda said. “And then beat your butt until you turn red, white, and blue.”

“How intelligent!” Bobbi was getting up into LaShonda’s face.

Kambui separated the two girls by stepping in between them.

“What is your project?” he asked Bobbi.

“Well, we have to learn one subject all on our own and prove it to a teacher,” Bobbi said. “So I thought we could learn the statistical basis of basketball. I call it In-Your-Face Probability Theory.”

“You can’t learn no …” LaShonda tilted her head to one side. “You mean like what percentage of shots they make and stuff like that?”

“There are a lot of basketball stats we can use,” Bobbi said. “And since the final result is numerical, there has to be some angle we can work.”

“If we can get a math teacher to approve it,” Kambui said.

I liked the idea of getting basketball involved in an academic program. I was also thinking it would make the Cruisers seem even cooler.

“I’m not sure, but I’ll go along with it,” LaShonda said.

“You know, Sidney is good in math, too,” I said.

“And that can be our way of getting to talk to him without looking too stupid!” LaShonda said. “Zander, you are smart.”

I knew that.

Kambui and I had History together and headed toward class. On the way he started talking about Sidney. He said nothing was going to work because people who used drugs wanted to be drug addicts.

“We don’t know he’s using drugs, Kambui,” I said. “All we know is that he asked about how to get some.”

“Zander, who doesn’t know drugs are bad?” Kambui
asked. “Everybody knows that. You see crackheads lying around in the street, leaning against buildings, running around looking desperate. They know they’re messed up and they all look miserable. You can’t talk to them because they know everything you know already. And how’s he going to play chess with his head messed up?”

He had a point.

I
don’t believe it,” LaShonda said. “Sidney is too straight to be running around trying to cop no dope.”

“Culpepper wouldn’t make it up,” Kambui said.

“Sidney plays chess down on Henry Street,” Bobbi said. “I think the settlement house has a team. So that’s near enough to Avenue A to make it seem real.”

“I don’t know why Mr. Culpepper thinks we can help him,” I said. “But if the rest of you guys are down with it, I’d sure like to try.”

“He’s probably thinking that you should know something about drugs because you’re black,” Bobbi said. “I mean, he can’t simply walk up to people and say, ‘Hey, I notice you’re black, can you deal with a drug problem?’ ”