by Caitlin Dwyer
- This story was originally drafted as part of Creative Nonfiction‘s Writing Pittsburgh project.
Marlon is hurt. Or so he says, limping into the squash court, an exaggerated look of pain contorting his face. Coach Samantha Rosado takes one look at him and says, “Hustle up, Marlon. Okay, everybody, what’s next?”
A chorus of voices echoes around the enclosed court: “High skips!”
It’s warm-up time at Steel City Squash. Sixth-graders are lined up against the wall, fidgeting. When Rosado calls, “Go!” the students bolt forward, their kneecaps lifting high. There’s a lot of groaning. One girl waits until Rosado isn’t looking and then walks. Marlon refuses to skip, his toes dragging along the wood, grimacing. The other students are already back to the wall by the time Marlon is halfway done.
From the wall, a short kid with an oversized yellow t-shirt tucked into his athletic pants starts yelling. “Hurry up, hurry up! Quit draggin’!”
Marlon winces and limps toward the wall.
“You’re wasting squash time!” the short kid yells. His name is Tai’Mere Thompson; at 11, he’s a veteran of the squash team here and clearly feels some authority on the court.
“Shut up!” Marlon shoots back.
“Against the wall,” Rosado orders. She has already told Marlon that he can sit out if he feels hurt, but that he can’t play a game without warming up.
“Quit wasting time!” Tai’Mere repeats, and despite an admonition to keep quiet he yells on, and Marlon yells back, and pretty soon the two of them are screaming at each other. Rosado orders Marlon off the court to cool down, and he stomps off, fuming, while Tai’Mere begins his next set of drills.
Tai’Mere and his teammates come from the Hill District, a primarily African-American neighborhood in the heart of Pittsburgh. The area has some of the city’s prime real estate: rising out of downtown with views north and south. It also has some of the worst poverty and violence in the city. Three times a week, a small group of kids from the Hill District are shuttled to the University of Pittsburgh, where they are taught the basics of squash, a racquetball-like game popular in prep schools, and mentored in skills for academic success.
Steel City Squash (SCS) arrived in Pittsburgh’s Hill District in 2014, when Tai’Mere and Marlon were in fifth grade. Modeled after similar after-school enrichment programs in Boston, New York, Baltimore and Chicago, the nonprofit deliberately targeted the Hill, trying to find a place where squash would stand out.
“It is totally unknown. Squash is a white male elite culture, says SCS Squash Director Samantha Rosado. “A lot of the top colleges have squash programs, and a lot of them recruit from urban squash teams. There are a lot of scholarships… It’s essentially a way to get them to college.”
Squash may seem like a strange sport for the Hill, but that’s the point, says Jeremy Feinstein, Secretary of the Board at SCS. “It’s harnessing the traditional elitism of the sport itself,” he told me. “If you’re a college admissions officer and you find a kid from the Hill District, and not only have they done pretty well in school but they’re a squash player? That’s not what you’re expecting to see.”
The program is held at the old Fitzgerald Field House, tucked behind an indoor track and the well-lit, broad expanse of the volleyball courts. The staircase is dark and narrow. After practice, I find 11-year-old Marlon, evicted from practice for yelling, sitting on the steps with his head in his hands, crying softly.
“I always get in trouble,” he says, his voice muffled by his hands. “I got in trouble every day for a year. I keep getting blamed.” He looks up with big, round, desperately sad eyes. His hands lie upturned on his thighs. “It’s just gonna be like this my whole life. I’m gonna go to jail for something I didn’t do.”
The stakes at squash practice are not who learns to serve better, or who makes the team; they are the confidence and conviction of a boy who doesn’t believe he has a choice. What Rosado and the rest of the staff at Steel City Squash are fighting against is the proposition that the fates of these kids are already mapped out. They propose an alternate plan, one of achievement. They are fighting not only the pitfalls of poverty, which lock people into their own geography in a narrow way, but a larger system: one that repeatedly reminds kids of how little they matter.
***
Steel City Squash (SCS) was, in the beginning, basically a one-man show: executive director Brad Young had come from New York, where he had worked on a similar urban squash program in Harlem. Young is my brother-in-law, a dapper white guy prone to bow ties and boat shoes. That first year, he sought foundational support, set up facilities, and hired staff. He bought a bus. He went throughout the Hill District to recruit students, speaking at assemblies and local events.
SCS aimed to provide the structure and skill sets to get poor and minority youth to college. The program recruits students in late elementary and middle school and tracks with them through high school and beyond. The goal is not to craft professional squash players; it’s to hook kids into a program that will guide them academically.
The model is effective — 95 percent of students who graduate an urban squash program matriculate into a college of some kind, according to the National Urban Squash & Education Association (NUSEA), the umbrella organization that oversees 20 programs in the U.S. That’s a high rate; nationally, low-income students enter college at around 50 percent, whereas high-income students matriculate at around 80 percent, according to FiveThirtyEight.com.
Athletics attract the kids, but the long-term academic focus is what gets parents on board. By the time the kids graduate from high school, they will have spent eight or nine years receiving intensive tutoring. “It’s primarily an academic program,” says Valeria McCrary, SCS Academic Director. “You have to be consistent; you have to be committed. That way, we can really work on getting you to college.”
Exposure to resources and new ideas helps kids cross the boundaries set by poverty, geography, and society. Rather than developing the neighborhood’s buildings or roads — changing the literal map of the Hill District — SCS wants to redraw mental maps. Over time, the program will transform these kids — physically, as they begin to train for a sport; mentally, as they learn discipline and self-confidence, and as they begin to build pieces of their adolescent identity.
When I first arrived at SCS, I worried that the price of success, for Tai’Mere and his teammates, would be a dissociation from their own neighborhood. They would be transformed into college-ready scholar-athletes, but only if they were willing to let squash, with its popped-collar prep-school style, lay claim to some of the mental territory that was currently occupied by home-grown Hill District pride. So I asked Tai’Mere what he thought.
Tai’Mere has a sweet, open face that still carries its childlike fleshiness. The first time we met, he was kneeling on a swivel chair, peering over the back. During the interview, the swivel chair scooted a bit closer to me with each question; eventually, Tai’Mere had scooted all the way across the room to be next to me. His gaze was unapologetically direct. He wanted, I think, to make sure I was listening.
He jumped right into squash, he said, without knowing much about it. “I am reckless with food and sports,” he proclaimed, which seems appropriate; when he first heard about squash at school, Tai’Mere thought it was a vegetable. “We talking about FOOD?” He grinned at me, reenacting his confusion. Tai’Mere went home and asked his mother to sign him up. After learning that SCS included academic support, she agreed to enroll him.
Despite the foreignness of squash, he quickly claimed it as his own. “I felt like this was gonna be my sport,” he said. He started playing in the beginning of the fifth grade and by sixth grade, had earned his own racket – a prize gained after a full year in the program. As part of the “team,” which means he passed fitness tests and try-outs, Tai’Mere is now a big fan of the game that a year earlier was so unfamiliar to him. Being a professional squash player has become one of his life goals, after which he plans to retire and design his own athletic shoes.
Programs like SCS do change the way that students see themselves and their neighborhood. They can expose kids to teasing and bullying. But the kids coming to squash are not being transformed against their will, or their knowledge; they are actively claiming the sport as their own, and in doing so, they are establishing complex and sometimes conflicted identities.
***
“It’s a disaster!” Crystalina says, giving me a wry look. She points to the batter, goopy and lumpy, in a mixing bowl. We are standing in her kitchen in the Hill District — there’s a big glass table, little apple-shaped ceramic dishes, and scattered bags of flour and sugar, vials of lemon essence, tins of cocoa and baking powder. It’s a school holiday, and Crystalina is baking a birthday cake for her father, who lives in another neighborhood.
At 12 years old, Crystalina Edmonds wants to be a baker. And a model-slash-actress. And a professional squash player. That last goal is a newer one, formed in the year since she joined Steel City Squash. Soft-spoken, self-proclaimed “shy,” she takes her time with her words, choosing them carefully. Yet she has a persistent curiosity that drives her to try new things despite her cautious nature — which is what drove her into squash, a sport she had never heard of before last year.
A lanky, pretty girl with delicate features and long braids, Crystalina lives with her grandmother in the heart of the Middle Hill. Her birth mother is not in the picture. Their narrow, brick-sided house stands alone in a weedy, overgrown field. Crystalina navigates her neighborhood block by block, house by house. She tours me around with a childlike sense of place: each home anchored to a past event, a particular character. She doesn’t know street names; she knows stories: “I sold candy to them. That’s my friend. I don’t know them, I know them. I don’t know those last two houses. My friend lives over here. I used to ride past them all the time, and that’s the little after-school program [where I used to go]. That, that, and that.”
“Do you like your neighborhood?” I ask her.
“Yeah…” Her voice trails off. I ask why she hesitated.
“I’m not sure because the store up the street…it’s really crazy up there. They be shootin’. But down, like, where I live, just down the street, it’s all calm.”
This, too, is part of Crystalina’s map of the Hill: Chauncey Drive, a street that runs behind the Bedford Dwellings apartments, about three blocks from Crystalina’s house, is notorious for drugs and gun violence. She isn’t allowed to go to the store nearby to buy her baking supplies; she has to “keep straight” to another store for her flour and sugar. “They usually don’t shoot when I’m walking past,” she tells me. But nevertheless, she and grandmother, whom she calls Mom, have mapped out safe and unsafe routes, and Crystalina, like a princess in a fairy tale, stays on the paths marked safe and avoids the thorns and thickets. The demarcations matter. Even though violence is nearby, it feels far away from the areas that are known, safe, and peaceful.
“They’re neck and neck, but not really neck and neck.” She touches her thumbs along their outer edges, making a flat surface across the backs of both hands, and I understand that she means the two areas are side-by-side. “It’s like you walking into a new world.”
This is another way of looking at the Hill: not as a single neighborhood, but as a series of pockets, individualized blocks, some of which are dangerous and some of which are family-oriented and full of children playing in their weedy yards and baking cakes. To set characteristics across the whole neighborhood is to miss the subtlety of walking it as a child: Here but not here. The candy shop. My friend’s house. The good store. The bad store. The noisy neighbors. The place with the funny Halloween decorations. The boring place.
The boring place is school: St. Benedict the Moor, a Catholic K-8 in the center of the Hill. A serious student, Crystalina is a member of the recorder society and a lover of languages (she is currently studying six languages via an app on her phone). Her curiosity makes her impatient, which is what makes school so boring. Take Spanish class, for example: “Everybody cuts her class, it’s the last period, they pay her no attention, so it’s really hard to learn. I don’t wanna listen no more!” She breaks into giggles, shy yet defiant.
This is part of Crystalina’s burgeoning adolescence: an impatience with adults that she feels are wasting her time. She wasn’t always sure, for instance, that squash was worth the time it demanded. When she first started at SCS, her main thought was, “When am I gonna go home?” She didn’t like the drills. “My arms started hurting… we had to do this thing where we bounce the ball and my arms were hurting the next day.”
The next time, however, she was convinced: “It was, like, fun…I was used to the pain.” She added the Field House and Trees Hall, the university fitness center, to her mental list of places. Now, she travels there along the fixed route of the shuttle bus three times a week, and like her baking and her recorder and her language studies, she is mapping herself a new hobby, new habits, new goals.
Crystalina says that the SCS kids get teased at school. “They’re like squash isn’t even a sport,” she tells me. “I don’t say nothing. Well, you can say football ain’t a sport. I don’t even care to be in on that. It’s drama.” Her posture is strong, evasive, almost defensive. She repeats again, with the deliberate apathy of adolescence: “I really don’t care.”
The cocoa frosting concocted, I bid Crystalina goodbye. She walks me to the door, explains how to drive back to the university, and stands on the porch watching me go, waving her long, thin arm.’
About an hour later, I see that I have a phone message from Crystalina. A little worried, I call her back. In her reserved way, she says simply, “I just wanted to make sure you got home safe.”
It is the first time I have ever had a twelve-year-old call to check up on me. A few minutes later, I get a text of the cake, HAPPY BIRTHDAY scrawled in goopy letters across the top.
***
“The Hill District is definitely a dangerous place,” says George Satler. A Pittsburgh homicide detective for 18 years, Satler has worked many cases on the Hill. Shootings are often drug-related and involve ongoing feuds that simmer and occasionally break into violence. Because of the unemployment rate, violence can occur any night of the week.
The surprising thing for Satler has been the pull the Hill exerts on people. When a homicide witness is placed in witness protection and offered relocation to another neighborhood, he says, they often decline. “They say, my cousins are back here, my relatives are back here, my friends are back here, all the businesses that I frequent are here… so I’m going to stay here,” Satler says. Even the financial support of witness protection – and the threat of retaliation for talking with police — isn’t enough to move people out of the neighborhood.
Perhaps that’s because, although rough, the Hill District is rich in community. In the 1930s and 40s, it was a center of culture. At Greenlee Field, the nation’s first electric stadium lights twinkled over the famed Pittsburgh Crawfords baseball team: Josh Gibson, Satchel Paige, and Cool Papa Bell ran the bases, then later the clubs on Center Street. Nighttime meant the tap of high-hats and the blare of trumpets, as Lena Horne, Count Basie, and Duke Ellington played the Hurricane Club, the Crawford Grill, the Melody Bar. Shoppers moved between immigrant Italian, Jewish, and African-American businesses and homes. The Pittsburgh Courier, a black newspaper with national distribution and influence, championed the Double V campaign during World War II: a two-fold victory against Hitler abroad and discrimination at home. The Hill had poverty, but also industry and identity.
These days, a close community inhabits the Hill, many of them generations born and raised in the neighborhood; it is both intimate and closed, cautiously welcoming but essentially self-contained. Many homes are vacant or dilapidated; their shutters sagging, their porches rotting. The brick homes were once stately, but are now surrounded by weedy lots. A bustling new YMCA shines with promise and welcomes kids to play. The small library across the street is quiet and calm. Some blocks feel lively and commercial; others feel sapped, enervated. For a kid in the Hill District, navigating the safe and unsafe spaces is part of growing up.
The neighborhood is wary of outsiders looking to rewrite the map for their own residents. In 1957, the Lower Hill was razed to make room for Pittsburgh’s Civic Arena. Businesses disappeared and homes were leveled. The incident infected the consciousness of the neighborhood. Murmurs about gentrification ripple and subside. Now when people come in looking to “change” the Hill, there is an understandable suspicion of their intentions.
If a program wanted to be a part of this Pittsburgh neighborhood, why choose squash as the catalyst for transformation? Why not football, baseball – sports deeply rooted in Pittsburgh’s own history and community? Among their peers, the SCS kids have encountered resistance to something seen as external and foreign. Like Crystalina, some of them ignore it; others succumb, quitting mid-season to try out for other sports. SCS’ enrollment dipped at the start of last basketball season, and they are still trying to make back their numbers.
***
“We got a lot of negative comments when we started. What is squash? Why are you letting him play squash? You don’t even know what squash is — ” Temie Thompson’s voice rises.
“And you rippin on it — ” Tai’Mere jumps in eagerly, finishing his mother’s thought.
“And you’re talking negative about it. So I tell people about the program, but they really don’t take interest,” Temie concludes. She shakes her head, unsure if she wants to continue.
It’s a Wednesday, 5:30 p.m., and Temie looks tired. She wears a jean jacket and cute thick-rimmed glasses. We’re sitting in a classroom at Trees Hall, just up the street from the Hill. This tag team conversation between mother and son — where the sentiments rocket back and forth, echoed and amplified — is common for Temie and Tai’Mere. They operate as a team (“I’m not a very good parallel parker, but this one talks me into the space — and he’s only 11!” Temie claims), and the 6th grader seems to pick up naturally on what his mom needs, rushing into the conversation to support her.
Temie raised her sons in the Hill District. She herself was born in the neighborhood and adopted by her grandmother because her own parents struggled with addiction. Now she works at a bank to support the family and is also completing her schooling to become qualified as a paramedic. While she and Tai’Mere’s father agree on most parenting decisions, she remains the primary caretaker. She loves the long-term, personal approach at SCS, and that it keeps Tai’Mere out of trouble — a more difficult task as he gets older.
For the moment, however, she looks hesitant. We’ve hit some kind of awkward moment, so I decide to venture a guess at what’s making her uncomfortable.
“It’s kind of a sport for rich white people,” I suggest, and a relieved smile breaks across her face.
“I didn’t want to say it, but we got a lot of, ‘That’s a white people sport, white people play that.’” She sighs. “No, all types of races play all types of things.” She supports her son in finding what works for him — even if it means being the odd one out.
When Tai’Mere goes to visit neighborhood friends at football practice, they rib him about squash: “They gonna say, what is squash, why you playing that dumb sport, you softie.” He narrates the conversation for me, but adds: “I ain’t paid them no attention, because they don’t even know what it is.”
And yet later, he admits that he “wants to try” football. His bravado about squash weakens. His dad promised, he says, to sign him up in the fall.
***
Enduring a bit of teasing is part of the deal. 19-year-old Elhadji Mare attended Harlem StreetSquash, a well-established urban squash program on which SCS is modeled. He is now a sophomore at Trinity College. Although he no longer plays tournament squash – Trinity has the best men’s team in the nation – he credits the Harlem program with helping him gain discipline and stay focused through high school. He got teased a little, but “there’s always going to be somebody teasing you about doing something different than what’s around your community,” he said.
That novelty — doing something different than your peers – may cause some rifts, but it is also what attracts. “It’s actually the first sport I ever played,” Brandy Williamson, another StreetSquash alum, told me. Several of the students I spoke with mentioned this idea – that squash was finally right, after more traditional activities had failed to engage them.
Urban squash programs are very effective in leveraging that interest. The goal is always college. Anyone who doesn’t fit that model, or that goal, can’t take part; and one of the criticisms that alumni have for urban squash is that the programs are narrow, aimed at one single mode of transformation. A student with goals to pursue art, or join the military, or learn a trade, might struggle with the constant college academics focus; as would students with other barriers on their time, such as those with families. Urban squash programs craft a certain type of student into a certain type of scholar-athlete, readying them for college life — but it isn’t a program that serves everyone. It serves a small group of committed kids, and usually the ones who stick with it are the ones who feel like they found their sport.
“It was so addicting. I just wanted to get better and better and better. I wanted to commit and get good at it,” Williamson told me. “It was just the perfect place for me.” She now plays competitively on the Mt. Holyoke women’s team. She adds that being a Harlem-born squash player isn’t as unusual as one would think.
“There’s so many urban squash players in college that most of my matches are with somebody that I know. It’s always cool to see somebody that you know on another team, and know that you came from a similar program,” she replied. “I take pride.”
***
It’s 3 p.m. and chaos reigns at St. Benedict the Moor: kids are darting in and out, school buses are idling, parents are trying to keep up. A teacher pulls aside a young lady for yelling in the hallway. Brad Young is networking the halls, shaking hands with a smiling parent and saying, “We’ll see you Saturday.”
St. Benedict the Moor fits SCS’ socio-economic profile. To send their students to the program, schools must have minimum 70 percent free and reduced lunch population. So far, SCS has three partner schools and a total of 37 students, with a goal of 45 by the end of the year. A few individuals come from other schools; to qualify for the program, they must speak English as a second language, be from a recognized minority group, or be the first from their family to go to college.
The squash kids spill out of classes in fits and starts. They wear blue slacks, white shirts, and plaid ties that look like miniature cravats. They seem uncontrollably excited and utterly bored at the same time.
We lead them outside and through the crowds and onto the mini-bus. Physically, they could walk to the SCS program. The distance is less than a mile and easily traversable for energetic young legs. But between here, the safety and structure of school, and there, the safety and structure of the university, there are too many distractions, too many offshoots in the wrong direction. So every day, SCS staff pick up the kids and drive them just five minutes to a world that is both proximate and new.
“It’s not really bussing these kids out of the mean streets of the inner city. It’s walkable. It’s an adjacent neighborhood,” says Jeremy Feinstein. “And yet the invisible boundary between a place like the Hill District and the University is vitally important to cross.”
Off the bus, kids straggle into a classroom and dump their backpacks into laundry baskets. Valeria McCrary moves with graceful reserve, greeting them and giving each student a little squirt of hand sanitizer. Some kids go to change into athletic clothes; others grab fruit from a basket. One girl is doing push-ups in the center of the room while someone else tries to stand on her back. Tai’Mere’s squash shoes — all team players get a standard pair — have been mixed up with another student, and he is running around lifting everyone’s feet up and peering at the soles for the initials Sharpied there, bemoaning the fact that his feet are the same size as a girl. Crystalina and her friend are applying perfumed lotion to their arms. McCrary approaches students individually, not intrusive but checking in, reminding, prodding, prompting, asking. Eventually, they start to take seats.
As the Academic Director at SCS, McCrary oversees the hour of homework help during the week and provides academic enrichment on weekends. She meets with families as well as the kids’ teachers from school. With a background in counseling, she focuses not just on academic skills but problem solving, self-discipline, and self-expression: “We’re trying to tackle the kids from a more holistic approach.”
Today, Crystalina is practicing spelling. She mutters under her breath, repeating the words. When McCrary calls her up to show her the Star Chart, Crystalina gets a smile on her face and bounces back to her seat. She has gold stars all across both Squash and Academics. McCrary likes to make sure the kids get positive feedback, and she calls parents regularly to inform them of their child’s progress in the program.
Tai’Mere has a spottier star chart — a few stars here and there, but some empty spaces, blank days. I ask McCrary about his progress.
“Tai’Mere…” She pauses, chuckling. “He does well academically, but the only thing that brings him down is his mouth. He talks a whole lot. He wants to say what he has to say before he forgets it, but sometimes it’s just not the right time. It’s getting him in trouble.”
With a Chicago Bulls hat strapped to his backpack and a reading assignment spread in front of him, Tai’Mere looks relatively quiet at the moment. He found his shoes; he was separated from another girl for tickling her, then from another boy for bothering him; and now he’s reading about the history of video games. After a long silence, he looks up from his homework: “Did you know that the first video game ever made was in 1958?”
McCrary raises her eyebrows. “I did not know that.”
Tai’Mere sings, a made-up tune: “Nine-teen-fifty-eeeeeight.”
“Shhhhh,” McCrary says.
He goes back to his work. The electric lights buzz; someone is typing; McCrary speaks in a low voice with another student. Another moment goes by.
Tai’Mere sings: “Nin-ten-dooooooh.”
He continues to punctuate the quiet with outbursts, comments, scraps of songs. When he finishes reading, he asks permission to use a laptop so he can research African-American attorneys for a report. I suggest Eric Holder, the former attorney general of the U.S.
“No, I want someone black,” he says.
“He is black,” I tell him, but Tai’Mere chooses Michelle Obama because she is “both a woman and a lawyer.” He reads Wikipedia for the next 30 minutes, with occasional outbursts of “WHERE’S HARVARD?” and “IS SHE REALLY ONLY 51?” tossed over his shoulder, more comments than actual posed questions.
The other kids ignore him. McCrary shushes him half-heartedly, smiling at his enthusiasm when he isn’t looking. At 4:30, Rosado pokes her head in the door. “Ready for squash?” she asks, and Tai’Mere slams the computer shut. Crystalina places her homework into her backpack, smiles, and goes to line up behind him.
***
“I work on the Hill, my family lives on the Hill, they go to school on the Hill,” says Temie Thompson. “Technically, we just sleep in another neighborhood.”
Born and raised in the Hill District, she has based her life there — even though a recent raise at work disqualified her family from their income-based housing. As a result, the Thompson family moved to another neighborhood last fall. She wants to move back as soon as they can figure out housing. Her voice is full of conviction when she adds, “We’re from the Hill. I’m from the Hill District.”
“Me too,” adds Tai’Mere, who is sitting nearby.
His little brother, who is playing the corner, lifts his head and chimes in, “Me too!” I can hear the sense of belonging. They are knit into the neighborhood; Temie admits that it’s not an easy place to grow up, but her daily life and her community are there. Leaving is difficult and undesirable.
But leaving is what the SCS kids will do, eventually. That idea bothered me: was this weird sport dividing kids from their neighborhood? Then I talked to Leroy Dillard.
“It isn’t weird,” he admonished me. “It’s a beautiful game. Youth today need other activities besides basketball, basketball, basketball.” A coach in the Pittsburgh school system for four decades, Dillard was born and raised in the Hill District. He has no involvement with Steel City Squash, but he knows sports, and he knows the Hill. Good athletic programs are not about the identity of who runs them, he says, but about the attitude of the coach. “They don’t have to come from the Hill District… it’s just that they have to know how to deal with the kids,” he told me. “You have to know where they’re coming from.” Like Brandy Williamson, Coach Dillard doesn’t think of squash as different or weird; it’s just another option.
When Tai’Mere proclaims, “I felt like this was gonna be my sport,” part of what a good coach has to do is grant him that. It is his sport. Tai’Mere is not borrowing squash from the Ivy League. He is not trying it out in order to see if he fits into that world; he doesn’t even know where Harvard is. His vocabulary is entirely personal: I like this. This is mine. My sport. To place identity markers onto him — this is a weird sport for you — is almost an act of severance – of denying him a prior claim, stripping him of something he’s already sunk his teeth into.
Setting new goals, whether they be athletic or academic or personal, is one way of claiming identity. Tai’Mere and Crystalina are beginning to shape their own hopes for the future, and if those goals sometimes conflict with their peers’ expectations or the expectations of the outside world, that’s not their problem. Their only job, as middle school students, is to establish and expand the boundaries of their own expectations for themselves. Crystalina, for example, has thought about joining the army to help her see the world. We are mixing dough, our hands caked in flour, when I suggest that she could become an army doctor. She scrunches up her face.
“Yeah, but then I have to go to school for doctor…ing.” Still hesitant, she asks, “Isn’t there something like docterette…a doctory diploma?”
“Oh a doctorate!”
“Yeah, my friend’s mom went to school for a doctorette… I think that’s the word. But that’s too long. I could go to school for a long time, but I gotta pay for it.” But she looks thoughtful, and later, when the cake is in the oven, tells me that she has been teaching herself Mandarin Chinese, and that she wants to go to Alaska. For a kid who has carefully stuck to the delineated boundaries of her own neighborhood, she is starting to think outside the box.
Valeria McCrary thinks exposure to new opportunities is an advantage the SCS students can return home with: “Don’t forget about where you came from. Even though you can leave your home and get your education, come back and make change to your community.”
For the kids in SCS, leaving the Hill District is still a long way away. Decisions about college are distant. For right now, they have to worry about drawing a Sumerian wheel for social studies, or memorizing the word patrician, or hitting a solid serve-and-return in practice — which can be challenging enough.
In practice the next day, there’s a new recruit in the program who doesn’t know how to handle his racket; he’s flailing and whiffing. Rosado puts him in a court with Tai’Mere to run some drills. There’s a risk that Tai’Mere will get impatient and stomp off the court, or just start to yell again.
Instead, he walks over to the kid and helps him adjust his grip. “Here, hold it like this. You gotta get the grip right so that when you swing, it’s like, goin’ down, and then don’t swing all crazy. Here, like this.”
The new boy watches, unsure, and imitates the motion. There is a patience to Tai’Mere suddenly. His manic energy is gone. He knows how to do this. He has become a teacher.
I get a glimpse, in that quiet, intimate moment between two young boys bent over a racket, of how this works. Buried under the fidgeting and complaining is an unconscious map. Discipline, knowledge, and confidence have sketched new behaviors and habits, and for these kids, squash isn’t unfamiliar. It’s theirs. This is their territory, newly claimed and just barely explored: a whole world, waiting.
Caitlin Dwyer is a freelance writer and teacher who often writes on education. She holds a Master of Journalism degree with honors from the University of Hong Kong and a B.A. from Pomona College. Her literary journalism has appeared in Quartz, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Asian Review of Books, and others. She is also a monthly columnist at Buddhistdoor Global.