Sneak peak at my book the Man who set himself on fire

Chapter 4 School

During my early years in school; it was cool to be a kindergartner. You only had to stay half a day. It was so fun and so easy. Basically you played with inflated rubber balls and painted, paid your 25 cents for cookies and milk, took a nap, and then shipped home. School was great but I couldn't understand why we went to school for something I could have done at home.

School became real different as I began to move up in grades. Let me give some explanation to how home made school rough. We lived in a three-bedroom brick home; we didn’t live in the projects. However, two blocks over, there they were—the government housing projects. I had been sheltered from the world until school. My father’s Pentecost Religion didn’t allow us to participate in most worldly activities.

My sisters, Angela and Kizzy, are older than me, which meant I was left alone most of the time with no friends. It was not well with my soul, so to speak, being the only boy that was small in size for his age, in a family that was dead broke. I had heard of resurrection in church and the sermons about resurrecting things in life, but there was just no way was our financial condition going to get raised up at the pace we were moving. Being broke also meant that I wore really cheap clothes and shoes. That signals school problems for a kid in any grade, and I was now going into first grade. It was when I first started to understand hoping for the best, but smelling trouble after you left the house. It was there, everywhere, just waiting.

One thing that was going in my favor, even though we didn't live in the projects and associate with those "distance" kids, my sisters both rode the school bus with me. They were distant from our house, and we wanted them to be distant from us everywhere. But I'm telling you; they got on the bus every day with a really bad attitude. They did everything me and my sisters were taught not to do. In retrospect, it was just a few of the kids doing this stuff, but to a scared, confused, smaller than them first grader it seemed like the world was falling and there was no place to run, and definitely no place to hide.

I will never forget the day that one of the older boys decided to make me a target of his relentless jokes and taunting. He turned the crowd of kids into a vicious mob as they were mesmerized by the words that flowed effortlessly from the bully's mouth. "Look at those shoes!" "Where did you buy those pants?" Word-by-word, phrase-by-phrase these repeated blows hit me as much as a two-by-four. Every day it was the same thing. The ride to school quickly became the ride to hell.

Their continual laughter and finger pointing began to develop a savage roar deep within me that I couldn't discuss with anybody, not even my sisters. One day my fingers started to curl into a tight fist. Then there was a voice speaking to me from the inside out, "Hit him. Go ahead, punch his lights out." I knew I not a good match against this much bigger third grader but blind rage carries a fierceness all its own. I swung my small narrow fist up into the air in an attempt to slay this goliath. There you have it, I struck first blood; to my disappointment the blow of thunder had no effect on the giant.

In uncharted water the tooth picks which I stood on called legs, stood still as the man-child retaliated, but just like superwoman coming to a call of distress, Angela grabbed the youngster by his shirt and swung him around like a pit bull shaking your mom's new sofa seats. (Just as wrong but fun to watch).



( Some of this project was edited by Bishop Suan) if you would like to help bathroom minister complete this project please send me an message on in the inbox be bless