Even before I begin to write, I am already thinking of a way to talk about this without sounding snotty, or pretentious, or overprivileged, or proud. And that is part of it, I think. That is part of what we learned: humility.
A hard lesson to learn, that one. But not so hard as the lessons that the other people had to learn. No, not so hard.
That is because I am educated and I am American and I am white. My demographic is the center of the world, just ask us.
A little background is in order. My elementary school - the place where I was first identified as gifted - was predominantly black and poor. A small population of white kids were bussed in from the next town over. Integration, they called it. I was not one of those, though; I happened to live in the school's district. I was one of the few.
In my mind I cannot separate the experience of being in the gifted class from its beginnings, those early days when we ten or twelve students attended class in a "portable", physically removed from the rest of the school. There were only a few of us from each grade so they mixed us together. We made breakfast and our teacher played guitar and read The Hobbit and engaged us in competitive games like, Who Can Find this Word in the Dictionary the Fastest? And I - always the competitive one - would strive to be the first to solve the riddle, or score the highest, or complete the tasks to utmost perfection. A perfectionist, I was, but I am no longer. Not like that. I've let it go. I'm embarrassed to even think about it.
Gifted class was unstructured, everything was posed as a game. We had almost no rules, no rote learning methods. It was spontaneous. It included exercises like donning blindfolds and walking around the playground in order to imagine what it must be like to be blind. We made a rocket. We learned disco dancing.
I don't remember any books in there, not until I was ten. Just the dictionaries.
I do remember feeling that what we did in gifted class was somehow secret, that it was so unconventional that we should not mention our activities to anyone outside of the class. When questioned about what we did during those hours, we would invariably say that we learned grammar and arithmetic. We would never mention how we sat in a circle - eyes closed - and imagined being a cougar, or a wolf; imagined our hands transforming into paws and racing on all fours through the woods. We would never have admitted that we secretly thought it was possible to turn into a bird and fly away, if only we concentrated hard enough.
You might suppose that we thought of ourselves as special or elite, but that wasn't it, not exactly. We felt as though our activities were not truly sanctioned and, therefore, we were getting away with all this free play at school. Perhaps we felt we were frauds.
One of the boys in my class was black - my best friend in the third grade, Elliott Fuller - and I always loved his name for all of its double consonants - but everyone else in gifted class was white.
If I was ever hated or ostracized for being white, I never noticed it. It's entirely possible that I was. Everyone is a racist. Not everyone is a hateful racist, but we are all birds with our respective feathers: blacks, whites, asians, north americans, europeans... gays, rich folks, intellectuals, potheads, Nascar fans. We are each a certain way. If you deny it, you are lying. Let's not pretend to be the same. It may make you feel less alone or more human or gratifyingly liberal, but in the end we are different. If we pretend to be alike, it will be just one more secret between us.
So I was white and American and - starting in the second grade - I was in the gifted class. The Gifted Class. This is because I scored well on exams, possessing a preternatural gift for finding the correct answer on test questions. I never agonized over the answers like some of my classmates; to me, each question was invented by someone who put one correct response and three false answers on the sheet, and it was simply a matter of identifying the proper one. I remember being aware of this even in the first grade. It had little to do with actual knowledge, believe it or not; and if you don't believe it, ask anyone who was in gifted class and they will tell you the same thing. I guarantee it.
At this point I did not notice any difference between us and the others: the ones in regular, non-gifted classes. I didn't even notice I was white. I should say, it didn't occur to me at that point that we were white and black. These observations came later, in middle school. The only time it crossed my mind was in the fifth grade, when a black boy taunted me. James, that was his name, and he was large for his age. One day he picked me up in the hallway and turned me upside-down until my dress fell down around my head and my panties showed. I was upset about it: the raw physical contact, the embarrassment of it all. I was called into the counselor's office and questioned about it. About the black boy. James. What did he do to you? they wanted to know. I didn't want to admit what happened, didn't want anyone to get into trouble, but there were too many eyewitnesses and eventually I caved.
The boy apologized; he never touched me again. He even tried to be nice to me. I forgave him easily. The truth was, I was shaken up for a few hours afterward but I didn't feel threatened or horribly upset about it, not in the way that I did after the wanker exposed himself to me when I was all alone on the road after school. But that was much later, that was in high school. And he was an adult, that wanker fellow, a very bad man who knew exactly what he was doing.
James was just a child. We both were children. It didn't mean anything,
In this day and age, I know it would have been labeled a racial incident, but I never knew why he did that, if it was because I was white, or because I was in gifted class, or because I was a girl. It may have even been that he was flirting with me, in a ten-year-old kind of way, that it was not a hostile act at all.
I know one thing: it was harder for him than it was for me. Like everything, I suppose. After all, he was not gifted or white. For me, it was not so hard.
No, not so hard at all.
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