Three Miles in Baltimore

Chapter Six: "Ms. Earth"

In my last year of elementary school, I was in an after school program called, KidsGrow.

It was all the geeky kids, the weird kids, the ones who volunteered in the cafeteria; helping the lunch ladies clean the tables. The cool kids had a bunch of friends to go home to. The cool kids were Mariah Madison and Lashay and Latrice Hayes. I can't even begin to tell you how many fights I got in with Latrice Hayes, even once we went to middle school. She just hated me. (Years later I found out that she really liked my brother, Randy.) She was a big girl for her age, and by big I don't mean in weight. She was taller than all of us, she had really thick thighs and wore lip-gloss already. She was not afraid to talk about her being on her period; walking the halls, proclaiming herself as a woman. She wore a bra, like an actual bra, that snapped in the back and was held up by two thin straps. (Her breast were HUGE!) I had two little knots on my otherwise flat chest that I held down with a training bra, a bra I had to pull over my head and slide down my arms.

In my after-school program, there was a lady assigned to be one of the two teachers for the class. A white lady who smelled so peculiar that it was borderline rank. She smelled so strange to me that I always wondered why she never felt the need to bathe herself - at least I thought she smelled that way from not bathing. She had long cascading graying-brown hair, very oily looking, and filled with random braids. She wore absolutely no makeup, had a large beak-like nose, and a small thin sparse mustache above her upper lip. She would smile happily as she played her guitar; singing songs about composting and peace on earth. She wore chunky rainbow twine bracelets and layers of red plaid shirts and denim vest with khaki baggy pants. I couldn't help that I thought she looked like the homeless men I would see on Martin Luther King BLVD. The ones near the underpass, holding the sign that read: Need $3.00 for the bus.

I regret to say that my wonderful memory has failed me on her name. I have searched high and low for years to find out her name. I even called my old elementary school and asked them to go back in their files and locate the name of an after-school teacher from eighteen years ago. They couldn't help me.

For the sake of this story, I will call her, Ms. Earth. Throughout the course of the school year, I became very close with Ms. Earth. (I want to point out that I had no sexual attraction to Ms. Earth. She was just someone I felt related to, almost like a mirror- recognizable.) She was so different to me, so odd and out-of-place without a care, without a thought. She was always so happy to be at my school, sitting on a desk before us kids, and singing about her love of dirt. Although she stuck out from everyone, including the other white people in my school, in my neighborhood; I never received an inferior complex from her nor a white savoir mentality. She truly loved her job. She genuinely loved being with us although she did not live among us. (I have never seen anyone so happy about recycling.)

I know she did not live among us because one day, with only a little over a week remaining in the school year before the Christmas holiday, I did something I had been afraid to do for months. I asked my mother if I could stay the weekend with my teacher, Ms. Earth. My mother knew Ms. Earth as my hippie after-school teacher. In Elementary School, my mother was very active. She attended plays that I was in, cheered me on during spelling bees that I always lost, and walked the short walk to every Parent/Teacher night that my school held. She didn't start losing her interest in our school life until middle school.

Like I said, my mother felt she knew Ms. Earth. She felt she could trust her with her daughter. So much so that she said yes to my request. YES! MY MOTHER, crazy DeeDee from Lafayette projects allowed her daughter, me, to go to a semi-strangers home for the entire weekend.

My mother said yes and that Friday, after school, I climbed into the beat-up pale yellow car that belonged to Ms. Earth. She waited patiently as I struggled to buckle myself in, trying to find the locking clip that was being swallowed by the chair cushion. As we drove away I watched as the neighborhood that I knew and loved faded in the distance. It never occurred to me that Ms. Earth lived so far away, so far from my school. It took us almost forty five minutes to get to her house located in Hydes, Maryland. When we turned onto her street, the first thing I thought, in my childish mind was: Trees. Trees were everywhere. On both sides of the street. So big that I did not see many houses from the curb, I had to look beyond the trees to find them. I think that's what I have always remembered most about her street; it looked better than mine. While my neighborhood also had trees, we did not have this many. Each tree on Ms. Earth's street was tall. Some taller than the last. Mature trees so thick that even if you tried, you could not wrap your arms around them in hopes of locking your fingers. They were all somehow spaced perfectly from one another, uniformed. Some trees even had branches and leaves that connected into one another, making for one big green tree. I felt like I was dreaming. I had never seen a street like this before in my life.