Ms. Messiah was a pretty, Black, deeply accented Texan with an easy laugh. And she was tough. You had to work hard in her 8th grade social studies class to get what could be considered a passing grade and damn near devote all your energies to get an A. She took an affinity to my parents and started calling them “mom” and “dad” when she came to visit, sitting on the front step or watching a football game in the den with us. I think, in hindsight, she was a young teacher at the time, maybe 33 or 35. She was single and, I naively thought, teaching was her life. I trusted her implicitly. And I think because she ingratiated herself to them, my parents did too.
Children need adults that they can look up to. Any educator, parent or human being worth their salt would attest to that.
In Ms. Messiah’s class, a small group of students (those who were high performing and those who were able to fundraise half of the funds) got to choose a country to go to in the Spring. To this day, I don’t know how she found the other half of the funds through the New Haven public school system but she did and after a class vote, a mad fundraising mission, and several coordinating meetings through the cold early spring months, we were off to Italy. I woke up to bright sunlight on the morning we left, my family already gathering downstairs. At the bus station, our parents, plus my cousins and aunts waved us off, sending peace signs and thumbs ups as the bus pulled out. I was too excited to be nervous.
I remember being awed by the beauty of the countryside as the plane banked sharply over small Italian towns before landing outside of Venice.
We visited Venice, Assisi, Florence, Pompeii and Rome on that trip. We shared an ancient hotel room with a small balcony. We passed under the bridge of sighs where prisoners caught their last sight of sunlight in a gondola. We bought miniature masks on a small, dim corner in the labyrinth of streets in Venice. Previous groups of students had eaten copious amounts of gelato and we raced to beat their record. We climbed Vesuvius. We giggled when the bus driver and the cyclist he nearly unseated flipped each other off. We walked through rain soaked Florence and had our portraits drawn at the base of the Spanish steps and threw pennies into the Trevi Fountain in Rome. But what sticks with me most is watching Ms. Messiah move through the country with a fluid ease. As if she were born and raised there.
We ate Gnocchi, the dense, tiny, dumpling like pasta everyday for lunch. Ms. Messiah would either listen to our excited chatter or talk about the next day’s itinerary while we ate in exhausted silence. Watching her bring her whole self proudly (woman, Black, southern, etc.) and blend it seamlessly as she spoke in fluent Italian and laughed and bargained and chastised and rested in those spaces blew my world view wide open. I had an identity growth spurt. For the first time I saw the kind of educator I wanted to be. But more importantly, I saw for the first time the way I wanted to show up in the world.
Children need adults that they can look up to. Any educator, parent or human being worth their salt would attest to that. The experience was profound for me because it was the first time I had ever encountered a person who looked like me, bringing her whole identity and moving about in a space outside of the United States with comfort. It showed me that, one, it was possible and, two, I could do it. The 8th grade, however, is too late to teach the particular lesson that as a brown girl, I can take my whole self into any space I chose and thrive. This is a crucial first lesson in early identity development for children of color. It is crucial to learn this in their first years so that as they grow and encounter messages that tell them they are only meant to occupy certain spaces and certain identities they can boldly respond, “no, I know something different about myself.”
