Second Grade (Ch. 4)

By the time I graduated high school, I had attended nine schools in three states. I was enrolled in a new school every year up until third grade. I had pretty much lived with a different family member each year of my life until I moved to Louisville, Kentucky at the age of seven to live with my father full-time. My father had full custody of me since before I was one.

My father’s eldest son moved to Fort Knox for the military, and my father followed. We first lived in a senior citizen high-rise, but about a month later we moved into public housing a couple of blocks away. My father was born in 1934, my mother in 1964, and I in 1989. My paternal family likes to talk about how no one believed a 55-year-old man could raise a little girl on his own, but how he proved them wrong.

I have very little recollection of my life before the age of six, and very few of those memories are pleasant. My maternal grandmother—the only grandparent I’ve ever known—says that knowing this makes her sad. She doesn’t acknowledge the role she played in it, but I love her regardless, especially now as an adult.

Second grade was different. I moved in with my Irish godmother Lisa and her three daughters after my mother “went missing” and left me with her husband, which didn’t last long. My mother ended up in jail during that time, and my father gave Lisa temporary guardianship of me for a year while he got settled in Kentucky. My mother was later released to a halfway house.

My father’s youngest son fathered Lisa’s two youngest daughters, Shannon and Jasmine. They were technically my nieces, but we called each other cousins. I called them cousins, and they called me “auntie.” We were close in age because of my parents’ 30-year age gap—I’m one year older than Shannon and three years older than Jasmine. My father used to joke that all Lisa knew how to cook was noodles. Spaghetti with butter and salt was a staple in her house, but to a six-year-old, it was good. If we weren’t eating noodles, we were eating canned Asian soup with baby corn in it.

I would see my mother occasionally. Lisa would take me to the halfway house where she lived, and my mother would comb my coarse 4C hair. There’s a patch in the middle of my scalp where the hair doesn’t grow properly. I always told Lisa it was from when she cut out rubber bands from my hair instead of taking them out properly. My move to Lisa’s house was unplanned and happened after the school year had already started, so I enrolled in the same second-grade class as Shannon and Jasmine. Lisa used to walk us to the bus stop across a busy, multi-lane street, but eventually it was just us crossing on our own.

I have one vivid memory of struggling to cross that street during rush hour. The three of us would get ready to run, but cars kept coming, so only one of us would make it across at a time. We repeated that over and over until the last one made it, which was probably me because I was always the most cautious. When we finally made it across together, the bus drove right past us without stopping—just like all the other drivers.

I hated that bus. There were two boys who constantly picked on me for being Black in a predominantly white neighborhood and school. I was the only Black child on the bus, and it got so bad that we had to sit in the front row. One day, when we got off the bus, Shannon chased one of them down the block for bothering me. I didn’t do anything. I was always “scary.” Shannon was the tough one.

Another time, two neighborhood boys took our electric car. Shannon made us go find them ourselves instead of telling Lisa. When we caught up, she fought both of them. She held one down while the other ran off and told me to grab a wooden plank with nails sticking out of it to hit him. I ran instead. She got the car back on her own.

I was also “married” in that same park to a cute brown boy who lived in our complex. The kids would set everything up under the playground like a wedding ceremony, and I’d be cued to walk down the aisle. Every single time, I would take off running, clutching my freshly picked dandelions. They started calling me the “runaway bride.” The boy was the brother of Lisa’s oldest daughter’s friend. I didn’t like his sister because she took Gravy, the gray cat Shannon birthed, away. One night, Shannon woke the whole house up screaming from the top bunk bed. Our pregnant cat had started giving birth while curled between her legs. It was traumatizing.

One of my last memories from second grade was the spelling bee. I’ve always been strong in English—reading, writing, spelling. Our class held a spelling contest to decide who would represent us in the school spelling bee. My teacher asked me to spell “because.” I spelled it correctly the first time, but when she asked me to repeat it because she didn’t hear me, I second-guessed myself and spelled it wrong. I’m sure she knew I had gotten it right because she asked me a third time and even questioned if I was sure that was how I spelled it the first time. I lied and said yes.

I was so frustrated afterward, having to sit and watch another student stand in the spot that should have been mine, spelling words I knew—including B-E-C-A-U-S-E.

(Updated April 7, 2026)