A story of mine is in the spring 2020 issue of Oxford American. Here’s an excerpt, but you can read the whole thing online:
Towana Pierre-Floyd said we’d reach the ocean soon. We’d flown over the Gulf of Mexico on our way from New Orleans to Belize, then boarded a bus south. Outside, the road was dust, pocked by craters our chartered bus swerved to miss, but Pierre-Floyd said she could sense it: the Caribbean Sea was close. It was mid-May, technically the first week of Pierre-Floyd’s summer vacation, but she was the kind of high school principal who preferred spending her first days of freedom with students. Pierre-Floyd stood up, stretched her arms above her 5′9′′ frame, then looked back at the two dozen teenagers she’d brought with her to Central America. Most were already lost in their own worlds, sleeping against the bus windows, or staring at their phones, futilely willing Wi-Fi to appear. Only Endiah Guyton, a fifteen-year-old who’d chosen to sit next to Pierre-Floyd for the three-hour bus ride, was still paying attention. Pierre-Floyd sat back down and turned to Endiah.
“We’re about to be on the beach,” Pierre-Floyd told her. “I’m so excited.”
Endiah groaned. She closed her eyes and imagined the sea and the sand she knew would sneak into everything. She worried the waves would undo the soft curls she’d formed into a perfect bun she called “the puff.” What if seaweed scratched her ankles? She opened her eyes, then leaned across the aisle to talk to me.
“I’m not trippin’,” she said. “Salt water is just not my thing.”
Endiah looked out the window for a while, studying the palm trees and wood-frame houses as they blurred by. After half an hour, the landscape no longer surprised her, so Endiah bent back toward me and asked a dozen questions.
“What is your favorite color for eyes?” she asked me. “Do you prefer the major or the minor key? What was college like for you? Do you keep your cell phone bright or dim? Do you watch The Vampire Diaries? What is your best friend’s name? What is this article about?”
I wasn’t sure how to explain to a rising high-school junior why I’d followed her and her classmates to Belize. I’d met Pierre-Floyd a few months before during a tour of Frederick A. Douglass High School, the Ninth Ward charter school where she works, and she’d told me, in passing, that she planned to take twenty-five kids to Belize. Pierre-Floyd said she’d been the first in her family to graduate from college and she thought a high school trip she’d taken to Ghana had helped her earn a degree. She wanted to give her students the same experience.
After the tour, I couldn’t stop thinking about the upcoming trip. Pierre-Floyd and I are the same age. Like her, I was the first in my family to go to college. (Pierre-Floyd is black, and I am white.) I grew up poor in Monroe, Louisiana, and while richer kids went to Paris and Amsterdam during summers, I spent mine in Monroe, circling the beige, one-story Pecanland Mall with no money to spend. None of Pierre-Floyd’s students were rich. Most came from families whose incomes were low enough that the teenagers qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. And yet, they wouldn’t have to feel that they were the only ones who’d never been anywhere. They would show up to college with passports, with blue-circle stamps marked Belize.
I’d spent the school year reporting about New Orleans, a city whose population is one-third white but whose public schools contained nearly all children of color, most of them black. Many of those schools were led by white principals and a fleet of white teachers. By the time I met Pierre-Floyd, I’d talked to dozens of students who said the white educators were well-meaning but often expected black kids to enroll at majority-white colleges and meet white ideals of success. Pierre-Floyd is different. She’s black, a New Orleans native, and a graduate of a historically black university. She didn’t want to take her students to Amsterdam. She wanted them to experience Ghana and southern Belize, destinations with communities as black as their high school.
“The article is about the trip,” I told Endiah. “I’m just going to write down everything that happens to y’all this week, and if you feel like telling me how you feel along the way, I’ll write that down, too.”
Endiah nodded in approval. She stuffed earbuds into her ears, selected a song from the X-Men: The Last Stand score, then twisted around to survey the group. Near the back, girls in blue and burgundy braids flirted with boys in spotless sneakers.
Endiah’s two best friends—skinny, bespectacled guys who dreamed of careers in computers—played cell phone chess in the row behind her. She wished she could bunk with them. Instead, she would spend the week sharing a room with a freshman she’d never met and a junior named Tayla. Endiah pulled out one earbud, then tapped the principal on the shoulder.
“Mrs. Pierre-Floyd,” Endiah said. “How did you organize the rooms? I don’t know my roommates.”
Pierre-Floyd looked up from a spreadsheet she was studying.
“That’s the beauty of the trip,” she told Endiah. “You meet people you didn’t know before.”
Endiah nodded her head tentatively, then turned to me. “I want new experiences,” she told me. “It’s just . . .” She trailed off. That morning, she’d taken her first plane ride, and her ears still ached with a pressure she hadn’t expected. She wiggled her jaw and checked her phone. The beach was an hour away. She paused the X-Men score, then pressed play on the video she’d shot from the sky that morning. She’d taped the liftoff and the moment the plane cut through clouds. On her screen, New Orleans grew smaller, then, for a few seconds, all Endiah could see was a vast, inscrutable white.
Read the rest at Oxford American.
