CREAM OF WHEAT

I WAS NINE WHEN I STRUCK A MATCH TO MAKE BREAKFAST, and my seven year old brother struck his match to light the oven after turning the knob high overhead on the front of the stove he lay down on the floor in front of. It was our daily job... the requirement after getting up from the night's sleep awakened two hours prior by mom's gentle call from her bedroom out into the darkness of the basement apartment to rouse me... us from a night's sleep; before she left to go to work from the space our stepfather set us all into after they were married. Our five year old youger brother held the "cushy" option role of cutting a cold stick of margerine for buttering slices of Silvercup bread for toast that would accompany what was made by us, his two older siblings. We had to get our breakfast of, not cream of Wheat... I wasn't good at judging the "done" texture, so Campbell's Chicken Noodle soup, toast and milk after waking early enough for washing ourselves and getting dressed. We needed time to straighten the mess we made before leaving home. I had to remember to lock the door after successfully accomplishing our advent into the morning's tasks. We had to get ourselves to school in a new neighborhood deep inside Chicago's Northwest side. Once there, and once gone through the day well behaved, we had to get ourselves home and back inside the basement apartment to get our homework done and wait for mom to return to make dinner so that we could eat a family meal.

We were dropped at that spot on the map long before Google was created, long before commercials of "mother's love" and "granma's hands" could ever outmode the venom a step-parent could spew in his dislike for "somebody else's kid." While mom and grandparents prayed we would get the protocall straight on every morning, the stepfather cursed our existnce and our light complected intrusion into his praise of the great black society. We were not black enough. To him we were "them dayglo kids" of our caramel skin tonned mother. She needed to birth him real "black kids" or we would all be thrown out. We needed to "not be in his way" or we'd all be thrown out. She would need to "afford her own kids" or we would all be thrown out of his basement apartment and anyplace else he afforded after bringing us up out of the safe and secure homestead of our mom's mother and father. Their four bedroom home in a newly constructed subdivision of Chicago's suburbs sat on two lots along a main roadway where new homes were still being built. My brother could strike a match and light a gas oven with the right timing... without creating a flash of flame because our grandfather had drilled him time after time on how to do it calmly. There had been only one instance of terror during his training. He had allowed too much time between turning the knob and successfully striking a match to extend his hand underneath the flue. That erroneous moment had cost him eyelashes and eyebrows amid extreme excitement for what had just happened. H elearned to avoid the pain by being quick, observant and attentive to the task he was performing. My own role of getting a orning meal was simply opening a can of soup with the hand operated can opener, putting the contents to a small pot and bringing it to satisfactorily heated condition while watching the shredded toasts assembled by our younger brother. We ate a lot of burnt toast, but the soup was always to perfection!

I must have had a doorkey on a string around my neck, but I don't recall that situation. I can only call up the walk away from the apartment after closing the door. I recall the distant schoolyard to the address written on paper by our mother. I recall both my brothers leaving the apartment with me to attend the new school and the teacher in my new classroom asking if I were "new." I recall telling him that, "I was not new... I was as old as my classmates." I recall his straight lipped acceptance of me into his classroom. I don't recall staying at his school or in his classroom for very long. We were hustled out of the basement apartment and swooshed back out to the suburbs "where peple like us belonged." I thanked the host of truly black people for that. We returned to school in the south suburbs from whence we had come... eating our grandma's cream n honey drenched Cream of Wheat, sliced fruit and toast on points.