“That stupid witch!” Mama is pissed. I can tell. As she was cooking, I could hear her stirring something in a pot, cutting something on the cutting board, and moving things around, but as I got deeper into my story, the noises stopped, and I knew I had all her attention. “I’m glad the other coach confronted her about that! Who is she to say that you don’t deserve to be there? She sounds like an ignorant bitch! Afraid that you will tarnish the pure, white image of the team? Ridiculous! I’m coming up there to talk to the head coach about this immediately.”
“No, Mama, please. Don’t do that,” I plead. The last thing I want is this escalating and Mama loves to escalate everything. Daddy was the one who could calm her down and make her think things through. “Seriously, it’s fine. It’s over. I told you what Torres said, so I’m not alone. I’ll just keep my distance from her and hope she does the same.”
“I don’t like that, Amby. It shouldn’t be like that on a team, especially not with one of your coaches. Are the other coaches like that? The head coach and the goofy-looking man who scouted you?” The goofy looking one being Coach Mills.
“Not at all. I like them…and it’s not just that coach acting this way.”
“What do you mean?”
I pause, debating whether I should add fuel to the fire. But I tell Mama everything, and honestly, I need to vent right now. “Some of my teammates give me weird looks too, like I don’t belong on the team.”
Mama groans. “Lord. I can’t deal with this. See, your father? He’d know how to deal with this. He would go straight to that school, get down to the bottom of it, and make everyone respect you by the end of it.”
“Yeah.” And Daddy would too. Daddy couldn’t stand being disrespected. I said I’m used to getting stares because I am. I got a lot of stares, since I competed in private track leagues that costed a lot of money. It was very rare to have any kids of color on the leagues.
Daddy never had to pay because he was a coach, but the looks shot at him I can remember very well. The kids in the private leagues were predominantly white, of course. They had parents who drove Range Rovers and Mercedes Benz’s. The mothers had blond, and brunette hair, never a tendril out of place. Some of them wore business suits. Some of them dressed up just for the hell of it. There were some good eggs, don’t get me wrong, but there were the few who gawked and glared at me, or side-eyed me like I was some kind of lost, brown animal.
A lot of them made remarks about my hair, which is natural and wild. I like it that way. Janine said it was billowy, and that’s a good way to describe it. I have “big” hair, which apparently isn’t all that acceptable in today’s society.
In fact, for some reason hair like mine is so unacceptable for some that there is an act that was passed in several states as a law called the CROWN Act, to protect people with hair like mine so we can wear our hair the natural way in schools, work places, and even in public. Don’t know much about it? Look it up.
Anyway, the person who gave me a speech about the gawking and the staring was Daddy.
“There will be a lot of people in this world who will see you differently, Amber. They won’t see you as their equal. They’ll only think of you as beneath them, but that’s why you practice, and you train well, so that you can prove you are just as worthy to be on the track as they are.”
My eyes are hot and prickly again. I change the subject. “So, my psychology teacher is nice,” I tell her, and it’s enough. Mama takes the bait and transitions into the topic of my classes, then she asks me if I’m getting enough to eat. She also mentions packing up a care package for me for the end of the month so that I don’t run out of food to eat at the apartment.
“I’ll come up there sometime this weekend and we can go food shopping. I don’t want you eating out too much, Amby. You have a kitchen you can cook in. You have to stick with good, healthy eating with all that running. I’ll bring up pots and pans too.”
“Okay, Mama.”
“Okay, well, I love you, and let me know if that mess with the coach happens again. I’ll be at that school so quick she won’t even see me coming.”
I laugh. “I will. Goodnight, Mama. I love you.”
“I love you too, baby.”