Vinny was losing his marbles about his stuff and wanted to go back inside. James had to hold him from running in and pulled him back screaming, “It’s over!”
I felt sort of numb thinking about the outfits and supplies in my room. I had more where that came from and had lost it all once before. I already didn’t miss the mildewy bathrooms of the Blue House. But what about the boys who were here because they had nowhere else to go?
Usually, when the fire alarm went off accidentally, we would wait outside until the firefighters came to stop it. Within ten minutes, I would walk tiredly back to bed.
That was not the case tonight. In the event of an actual fire, no one came.
The flames left a black cloud rising into the air, its smog so thick it traveled over to the manicured side of campus—the side you saw in the pamphlet.
Our dorm building was made of something so flimsy and flammable I couldn’t believe it supported us in the first place. But I’d met fire before. I’d met it head on.
I went back to that place as I watched the flames...
This boy from my neighborhood, Ronald, came banging on the door so hard one night that it startled Pa. He opened the door just to hear “There’s a fire at the hospital!”
We sped downtown in the car, both of us in silence, and arrived to find the fire had eaten the exterior of the hospital, and where solid walls had once been, the bricks had crumbled away, exposing structural beams and metal. That was the hospital where my mother, her face bright and her steps light, once lifted me onto a doctor’s table—the same place she turned to for work after leaving her job as a teacher. She spent long nights there, making sure birthing mothers received the care they needed.
I ran inside to find her, and Pa called after me to stop me, but I got past the flames and started screaming, “Mama!”
By the time I realized it was a lost cause, the smoke had blocked the exits and my airways. Pa came in to save me and scooped me up, but he couldn’t find my mother. He was stuck with only me. And the way he only said a few words to me in the years after, unless they were for discipline, proved he wished he could’ve saved her instead.
A fire had taken my mother. A bullet had taken my father. And one fire had come for me. How had I escaped these fates?
I could hardly feel a thing in the days that followed, but my head thumped with this anxious thought I couldn’t get rid of—Where were the firefighters?
I hadn’t been protected a day in my term at that school. It made me wonder why I even tried. If excelling would put a target on my head, what reason did that give me to excel?
It was like Mr. Wallace said on his final day,They’re afraid. That if we rise, we’ll do to them what they do to us.But I didn’t want to rise in violence! I only wanted to rise in truth!
I found three different headlines on a newsstand at the corner café, just down from Auntie and Uncle’s, and brought them home. Coverage on the fire flooded the Harlem presses, but it seemed there was barely any investigation into who’d done it. No one even cared who the culprit was. Headlines read:
Integrated Schooling Effort Goes Up in Flames
Where Will the Blue Boys of West Egg Go?
Arsonist Targets Elite West Egg Academy
I couldn’t think straight until I knew more.
The timing, the suddenness—it ate at me. My paper hadn’t sat well with everyone. I’d torn the veil, exposed the truth! Discomfort was inevitable. But then the fire, right after it hit the halls...
Had my words done this? Was this my fault?
The thought made me sick—the thought that something I wrote could’ve driven someone to try to kill me. But wasn’t this what happened to writers? Wasn’t this why Pa had warned me away from it? Keep your head down, or risk flames licking at your door.
This wasn’t some accident. I was a target. And the same hand that fed me at this school—it could just as easily choke me dead.
Days later, I sat frozen in my room at Daisy’s house, trapped in my thoughts. When she came home, she invited herself through my open door and dropped a stack of poster board and cardboard onto the bed.
“The UNIA and the NAACP are organizing protests,” she said. “They think it was a hate crime. The UNIA’s even making space for some of the boys to sleep—for now, at least.”
There was no time to waste before joining them, and we immediately started to paint signs in the driveway of the house.
Daisy had been wanting to protest for some time now. New York liked to pretend it was different, but it still shut doors in our faces. Lots of stores were denying Colored girls access in Manhattan, so there was a bar for fashion that Daisy wanted to reach but the city was denying her.
“Nobody better buy my jacket before we break their windows,” Daisy said as she painted anAinto the cardboard sign. Her sign was going to sayFree Education.
“Nobody’s breaking any windows,” Auntie Lorraine said firmly.
