For the Love of Money (5 page)

“And she can
still
fail with a
C
? I just can't understand that.”

I don't think this woman was interested in seeing her daughter's marks at all. She just wanted me to pass her that morning like presto magic or something, but I was not planning on being a magician. Her daughter was going to summer school. That's all there was to it. It wasn't that I disliked the girl, because I had been there myself when I was young, she just hadn't done what she was supposed to do to pass. I had only failed seven students out of nearly one hundred and thirty that I taught that year, because I was very tough on them to learn their work.

“Well, is there anything we can do?” her mother asked me. She had a nerve to try and act civil too, as if that was going to change something. We were four days away from summer vacation. All we were doing was finishing our final paperwork as the students said their last good-byes until September.

I looked that woman straight in her face and said, “She can make it up in summer school.” I meant that too. It would be a lesson for LaKeisha in the future.

Her mother returned to sour in a snap of a finger. “Well, who the hell can I talk to about this? Because I don't
believe
she needs no damn summer school.”

I could not
believe
what I was hearing.

I asked, “What do you believe she needs?”

The woman looked puzzled for a second. She responded out of spite, looking me over. “She needs a damn teacher who
cares
instead of one who's just working for a
paycheck.
That's what she
needs.
Gon' tell me she can make it up in summer school.”

That's when the kids began to laugh and snicker.

“Well, you can go to the principal's office then,” I finally told her. Although that wouldn't change her daughter's grade either. I said, “LaKeisha knows the way there,” just to add my own spice to the issue.

The woman looked ready to jump me so I stepped aside. Elder or not, I wasn't about to let her kick my ass. I would have broken every nail on my fingers to protect myself.

She looked me over once more before she left and grumbled, “You
think
you fuckin' cute. That's
your
damn problem. Come on, girl,” she snapped at her daughter.

I was through! I didn't have the skin to be a schoolteacher in the nineties. At least not at a neighborhood school. Maybe I should have tried a private or Catholic school where more parents were serious about education. However, I thought that would have been a sellout.
I
didn't go to private or Catholic schools. The inner cities
needed
qualified teachers, and I
was more than qualified. Many of the inner-city teachers were barely passing their teachers exams. They were just slipping into the system based on need. So I thought I had something extra to offer.

At the end of the day, nearly every teacher in the school had heard about my stand that morning. A few of the older teachers advised me on how to deal with parents, but some of the teachers didn't particularly care about my master's degree and my high standards of instruction. Maybe they felt that passing students kept the peace, but I thought that only set students up to fail in the future.

“I heard what happened this morning,” one of the science teachers said to me as I stepped into the hallway and locked my classroom door. I was heading out to my car in the parking lot.

Desiree Johnson had been teaching for four years. She was twenty-nine and had a degree in chemistry from Maryland. We clicked immediately. We both believed in excellence and we were teaching to try and make a difference. Desiree just had a longer fuse than I had, and she had tougher skin. She was athletic and feisty, with a natural short crop of hair.

“Yeah, I guess I might as well get used to that, hunh?” I said to her.

“Unfortunately,” she answered. “But don't give up on them, Tracy. It's not the
kids'
fault.”

I smiled and shook my head, thinking about the children of students like LaKeisha. If my assumptions were right, she would
definitely
be having them. The boys were already eyeing her, and she didn't have the head strength or the smarts to turn them away. At least
I
was strong enough to
choose
who I wanted to be with. That helps you to
choose
not to get pregnant. Like the saying goes, If you don't stand for something, you're liable to fall for anything.

“So whose fault will it be when
her
children are failing twenty years from now?” I asked my fellow schoolteacher.

Desiree chuckled, taking in my glum outlook. “It's a long cycle that needs to be broken,” she said. She was right. I just wasn't so sure that
I
was the one to do the breaking, and with every step we took toward the exit that day, I continued to think,
What the hell am I doing trying to teach anyway?
I still had this inner desire to be someone special, someone who would shine. I couldn't shine at East Germantown Middle School.

We made it out to the parking lot where I was stunned by the broken glass, the graffiti on the walls, and the dullness of the place, as if it was my first time noticing it. I loved Philadelphia, but I realized at that moment that I needed
more
than a regular job. I would suffocate and die there, spiritually.
I just needed ...euphoria, and teaching wouldn't be able to do that for me. I needed that rush of energy that chasing after fast and dangerous guys gave me. I needed the attention that wearing sexy clothes and having things my way out on the streets gave me. I wanted the whole temptation of going for forbidden fruit again, ignoring my parents and doing something wild and crazy. I was just bored out of my mind as a teacher, and I needed a reckless challenge in my life like I had so much of in my younger years.

“So what do you plan to do for your vacation?” Desiree asked me at our cars. She was parked not far from me.

I did not have the faintest idea what I wanted to do for my summer. I said, “Good question. What about you?”

“I'm teaching a couple of summer school classes. After that, my boyfriend and I are going to Hawaii.”

“Hawaii?! You
really
picked a place to vacation,” I told her. I was jealous. I needed a Hawaii vacation of my own. I also needed the type of boyfriend you could take on a vacation.

“Well, hang on in there, Tracy. It gets easier. The first couple of years are always rough.”

“So I've found out,” I joked, but it wasn't funny. I had a lot of thinking to do.

I drove home to my two-bedroom apartment off of Lincoln Drive, and took a long look at myself inside of the full-length mirror on my bedroom door. There I was, wearing tailored suits, with manicured nails, jazzy hairstyles, designer shoes, and looking good, just to go and teach middle school students. Not that they didn't need something to aspire to, and someone to show them the way, but maybe that parent was right. I was too damned cute and maybe just a touch superficial for the job.

“Shit!” I cursed myself, stripping from my clothes. I felt guilty. I knew I didn't have the long-term dedication to teach those kids who needed it. I just wanted what
I
needed. Recognition. Was it so wrong to want to feel special and to do something about it?

I sat down on my bed in panties and bra and pulled out my notepad to write a poem about my feelings of mortality. I had always been special. I used to think of myself as a goddess, but suddenly I wasn't special anymore. I could not handle my new reality, so when I had finished my poem, I decided to call my girl Raheema in New Jersey for a little pick-me-up.

Raheema was doing a fellowship at Rutgers University after finishing her degree in African-American Studies at Cornell and her master's at Yale. She was really doing it up! I was proud of her. She was on her way to being
one of those big-time scholars who knew something about everything, and I was in luck. I caught her at her office.

“Hey, Ra-Ra. You wanna go to the mall? I hear there's some cute guys up there,” I joked with her, reminiscing on our teen years.

She broke up laughing and played her part.

“Tracy, I don't care about that. I have homework to do.”

“Girl, this is Saturday. You can do your homework tomorrow.”

“I'm going to church tomorrow, Tracy. I don't have time for the mall.”

“Well, how 'bout you go to a party with me tonight?”

“For what?”

“What do you mean, ‘for what?' So we can meet some guys.”

She let out a long sigh and said, “Tracy, how many times do I have to tell you. I am
not
interested in boys.”

I broke out of my role-playing and complained, “Raheema, I am just
too through
with this teaching shit! Do you know I had a parent who came up to the school today and asked me why I failed her child when the damn girl didn't do anything for the entire fourth quarter? Some of these parents are a pain in the ass! They want their kids to get a damn free ride in life.”

Raheema paused before she said anything. That meant she had a lecture to give me. She was always thinking. That was just her personality.

“Actually, Tracy,” she started up, “when you decided to go for that master's degree in English at Hampton, I was really surprised. Then when you came back to Philly and took that teaching job, I just did not know
what
to think. I just
knew
that you would be married and working on your third or fourth child by now. At least that's how you were heading when we were still in high school.”

“Yeah, well, you know who fucked that up. Gon' get out of jail and hook up with some damn house mouse,” I snapped, referring to my teenage sweetheart and his new wife.

“House mouse? How do you know that Victor's wife doesn't work?”

“I
don't
know. I'm just calling her a house mouse based on what I
do
know,” I said. “She's one of those sisters who will do just about anything to satisfy a man's ego. ‘Oh, I'll do it, honey. What do you need me to do?'”

Raheema laughed and said, “If I remember correctly, Victor had
you
that way too.”

“Yeah, until I grew up and he couldn't handle me on equal terms. That's just how these black men are nowadays. They all want you to be some damned young girl who doesn't know shit. Well, fuck that! Those days are over with for me and I know
too
much.”

“So my mother was a house mouse too?” Raheema asked me.

She knew the answer to that, so I was plain honest with her.

“Raheema, your mother was a
big-time
house mouse, and you know it. But she's okay now. So I guess you work through it, but I'm not planning to be one at all. But let's not get into that, because I called you for a pick-me-up, if you have time to chat,” I told her.

She said, “Yeah, I have time. I just finished eating a late lunch.”

“So what do I do about this whole teaching thing?” I asked her flat out. That was what friends were for, honesty.

Raheema started to laugh again. “Here we go. The same old Tracy,” she said. “You want someone else to tell you what to do, so you can go right ahead and do what
you
want to do anyway.”

She was right. We knew each other's personalities long before we had our first periods.

“All right, so give me your opinion then,” I said, smiling. I felt better already, but I still needed a solution to my problem. What the heck did I want to do with myself?

Raheema said, “Tracy,
we both know
that you are
not
going to be happy until you get
whatever it is
that you want. So I say, stop wasting your time with everything else and go after whatever
scheme
you have in your mind to do. And I won't judge you for it, because that's who you were born to be, just like I was born to be me.”

“Well, why does it have to be a ‘scheme'?” I asked her. She made it sound like I was still a gold digger.

“Because whatever it is, I'm quite
sure
that it's going to be hard to get. That's just how you are. If it's too easy, you don't want it.”

I broke out laughing. Whatever it was that I wanted, it was so hard to get that I couldn't even figure out what it was.

Raheema asked, “Isn't your book
Flyy Girl
being republished this year by a major house?”

Prior to September 1996, my novelized life story was only a local thing on the East Coast.

“Yeah, and I'll be getting more royalties from it,” I told her. “I already received my part of the advance.”

She said, “That was real cool for Omar Tyree to write your story like that, or should I say
our story,
but I kind of thought that you would follow up with that and become a writer of some kind yourself.”

“I
do
write. I still write my poetry,” I said. “I Just finished one before I called you.”

“And how does it make you feel when you write and perform them?”

“Oh, girl, you know my poetry is the shit,” I bragged. “That's when I really get a chance to sit down and think and bring stuff together.”

“Well, why don't you go for that?”

I said, “I've been told that poetry doesn't really sell like that unless you get a contract to do music with it or something. Everybody can't be Maya Angelou and Nikki Giovanni, you know.”

“Well, there you go. It's hard to do, so go ahead and do it then. That sounds right up your alley,” Raheema advised me.

I was very hesitant about the poetry thing, even though I knew my stuff was good.

“Or, you could even become a screenwriter or something, because once they put that book out nationally, they might want to take it to film, and that would
really
make us famous,” she joked. It was a shock to everyone when
Flyy Girl
came out, especially how people began to like it and talk about it. Most of the people who read it just couldn't believe how fast I was as a teenager, but it was all the truth. However, I had calmed down a lot since then. I was a mature woman, or trying to
be
mature.