• • •
Friendship was a school like no other I’d ever been to before. Up until then, I’d gone to a Catholic school where the education was fine, I guess, but the nuns believed in beating ass. One in particular, Sister Theresa with the short hair, big butt, and habit of talking through clenched teeth, was always beating my hands and smacking my butt with rulers and spoons and her bare hands for the smallest of infractions: talking out of turn, moving too slow, breathing. I learned the hard way how to be more restrained. Then, after my mom ran out of money for tuition, I got sent to a halfway decent public elementary school. More changes followed when I was old enough for junior high. Tracking down a decent school that was educationally superior and safe took a backseat to my mom’s need to have a daughter who was reasonably self-sufficient. By the time I was headed to the seventh grade, Mom, who was toiling hard as a manager at a local department store, Woodward & Lothrop, was depending on me to be able to wake myself up in the morning, get dressed, eat my breakfast, and hustle to school before the first bell rang—on my own. The school she enrolled me in was Friendship Educational Center, a junior high literally across the street from our apartment building.
Hours before my first day there, my mother helped me lay out my clothes, fixed me my favorite breakfast—I lived for her scrambled egg sandwiches—and handed me a key to the apartment. It was official: at age thirteen, I joined the ranks of the neighborhood latchkey kids. We were the children of working parents, who made very clear that the house key came with very specific responsibilities and rules: we had to go straight home after school, lock the door behind us, refrain from bringing over company, and stay put until a responsible adult got home or risk getting our behinds beat and everybody else who wasn’t supposed to be in the house unsupervised in major trouble. My mother was strict like that; she didn’t play, and I quickly learned to make a habit of doing exactly as she said.
I was well prepared for the responsibility that came with taking care of myself in my mother’s absence, but I did get into some trouble along the way. I’m still embarrassed by that one time when I did have some friends over while my mom was at work and we called a couple of those 1-900 sex hotline numbers we saw in some late-night commercials. I didn’t know calling those numbers would run up the phone bill; the lady in the ad said the calls were free. Free. What did I know? I was in junior high and trying to impress my friends. We were curious enough about sex at that age to wonder what we’d find on the other side of the line, and we thought calling the number and listening to the women talk dirty in the phone would be fun and funny—nothing more, nothing less. It was, too, until that phone bill came the next month. Four hundred dollars—that was the damage. The look in my mother’s eyes when she waved the papers in my face, yelling and screaming and demanding to know what I was thinking, tore my heart to shreds. I knew she was a struggling single mother living paycheck to paycheck, and my thoughtlessness made her cry. I can still hear the disappointment in her voice: “How dare you be so careless? Like, really, how could you do this to me?” she asked. She called the parents of every kid who had been on the phone with me and dimed them to their folks, too. It took quite some time to live that down with them and with my mother.
Ultimately, being home alone wasn’t my biggest problem. Friendship was. This school was ghetto; once you walked through the big metal front doors, you could practically feel the hate and broken dreams. We kids sat in this big, brown building with square bulletproof windows so itty-bitty no one could see out of them, in classrooms designed like office cubicles. The classrooms had no doors, paper-thin carpet, and literally no walls.
My first day there, I didn’t know what to make of either how the school was situated or the wild students that inhabited its space. The kids made quick work of making me, the new girl, feel like I didn’t belong. I deserved some of that. After all, within seconds of my arrival, I’d already broken one of the codes: I went to the first day of school dressed up in a new outfit. I had worn floral culottes and a ruffle shirt that stretched up my neck, with a bowtie that matched the print in my pants, plus loafers with shiny pennies tucked in the slots across the top of the shoes. Apparently, I’d missed the memo that said, “Don’t be pressed to wear new clothes on day one.” More, with my hair curly and pushed to one side of my head, I looked like Laura Ingalls from Little House on the Prairie—like an Amish girl who’d just been let out into the world for the first time. My teacher made it that much worse when she made me stand up in front of everybody and introduce myself. “Hi, um, I’m Taraji,” I said, nervously fiddling with my bow tie while everybody in the classroom laughed. By the time I slid back into my seat, I was wishing the floor would open up and swallow me and my desk whole. But a quick wave from a girl who’d turned around in her seat to give me a knowing look—one that said, “It’s going to be all right and we should totally be friends”—quickly made things better. “I’m Tracie,” she mouthed, her introduction coaxing a quick smile from my lips.
From that moment on, it was Tracie and me in Friendship, the worst school ever. Looking back on my time at Friendship now, as a grown woman who put her child through a patchwork of private schools that she handpicked based on how they fit her son’s learning style, I can honestly say, “Whoa, that shit was kinda fucked-up.” They didn’t care about us kids. It was as if they were setting us up to fail. All too many of the teachers were giving a halfhearted effort, the curriculum was substandard, there was no money for books and supplies, noise from the classes spilled over into each other because of the ridiculous design, and no one could get a handle on the student body, half of whom came from homes where crack cocaine had devastated their families. These kids had issues: parents who were addicts, siblings who, caught up in the drug game, were either experiencing or committing violence or being sent to prison for dealing. They were exhausted on both a physical and mental level. Kids were coming to school hungry, confused, angry. Shit was real for them. And they brought all of that to the makeshift classrooms at our school. Honestly, looking back, it resembled juvie hall. Thank goodness I never experienced that for real, but this seemed close to it.
Tracie and I survived it, though, because we were different—we had mothers who held down jobs and worked tirelessly to keep the madness of DC’s crack epidemic from crossing our thresholds, and Tracie was lucky, too, to have her father at home. Stability at home translated into the two of us excelling in class (I even made the honor roll), diving headfirst into extracurricular activities like the pom-pom team (Tracie and I were cocaptains), and being noticed by the few teachers who cared about us kids—teachers who could identify and nurture our passions. It also opened the door for both Tracie and me to pursue our passion for acting, even in a school that fell far short in programming that appealed to that particular desire. One teacher in particular, Mrs. Hawkins, saw enough good in Tracie and me that she recruited us to star in a junior high performance of Macbeth as part of a competition in a local Shakespeare festival. We played the witches and so thoroughly slayed our performances that we won an award for it—a huge deal considering our school wasn’t known for its dramatic pursuits. The recognition, and Mrs. Hawkins’s belief in us, only pushed Tracie and me to hunt for more opportunities to show off and show out. One summer, I even put all that dancing I’d done in front of the mirror back at my grandmother’s house in North Carolina to good use: Tracie and I performed DeBarge’s hit single “I Like It” in the school fashion show, and I hit that high note El DeBarge rides the song out on like there was nobody else watching—like the world consisted of only me, the stage, and that microphone. We killed it, and we were thirsty for more.