It doesn’t always have to be out in the open. Sometimes I can just sense it. If a person calls me a “beaner” or a “wetback” to my face, it takes the guesswork out of it, but there are times when a racist doesn’t have to be an outright racist—I can just sense it; and it was during my fifth grade year at Andrew Johnson Elementary School that I first started to pick up on the icky vibes of covert racism.
It was 1985 in a West Texas City, at a time and place when forced desegregation busing was doing its part to break down racial barriers by transporting low-income minority kids into wealthy suburban schools. I was one of those poor bus riders, and every morning and afternoon I shared a clunking old GMC Carpenter with three other Hispanics, a couple of Koreans, and about twenty-five black students. I guess you could say our bus was predominantly black, or I guess you could say what a lot of the white kids at Andrew Johnson used to say about our bus whenever it rolled up on campus: “It’s the sooooul traaain!”
Our bus driver was Mister Jackson. He was an old, feeble black man that a bunch of the kids must have known from the neighborhood because they used to call him Leroy.
“Don’t call me by my first name.” he would insist, “Long as I’m wearin’ this here bus driver uniform, my name ain’t Leroy. It’s Mista Jackson.”
“Aw, shut up, Leroy!” These kids would fire back. They had balls. I had never heard children talk to adults this way, especially old folks, and I liked it! “Just play this tape for me!” one sassy kid would demand, and he would play it! You see, Leroy had installed a sound system on the school bus, a decision I’m sure had not been proposed to, much less approved by, the Transportation Safety Board—or whatever group was responsible during that time for preventing an emergency vehicle from getting t-boned by a school bus whose elderly driver couldn’t hear the approaching siren because the music on the stereo was turned up too loud. Then again, this was the 1980s. Nobody wore motorcycle helmets, seat belts, or condoms in those days so who knows if such an entity was even operating back then.
At first, Leroy played his own cassette tapes, and our morning and afternoon drives were initially accompanied by the sentimental sounds of early rock-n-roll, vintage Soul and classic R&B, but that didn’t last long. Kids brought in their own tapes and the dotard’s nostalgic jukebox was gradually replaced by an updated playlist of current pop tunes. Michael Jackson, Prince, Lionel Richie, Donna Summer… for a while it was all Top 40, but that didn’t last either; not after we heard that wild new sound that would soon come to dominate our daily commute.
And I’m not talking about the time when my buddy Claudio (one of the other Hispanics on the bus) failed in colossal fashion to enlighten the group with a musical selection none of us will ever forget. I remember I sat next to him on the bus that day (because we always sat together) and I remember he boarded the bus before anyone else (because by then it was common knowledge that all musical requests made to Leroy were granted on a first-come-first-serve basis) and I remember it was a Monday (as it had also been established that the chances of your tape finding its way into Leroy’s coveted tape deck after the first day of the week when his cassette case was already brimming with request tapes, were slim to none).
By the time I boarded that morning, both the bus and Leroy’s case were already at maximum capacity. I had been running late and I remember thinking to myself that my own musical selection would have to wait yet another week before it would see the light of day. I took my saved window seat next to Claudio as the squeaky doors slammed shut. We pulled away and the wheels on the bus went round and round for about a block before we heard the urgent holophrase of an impatient passenger: “Music!”
Leroy hit play on the stereo and for the first few seconds, no sound was heard. I’m sure if Claudio knew then what he knows now, he would’ve welcomed perpetual silence … but it was not to be. The tune that eventually came on was a Tex-Mex song called “Que Dolor” by Mazz and the kids only heard ten seconds of it before they erupted in a collective outburst of intense vocal displeasure. “What the hell is this shit?!”
Five seconds later, the Spanish lyrics kicked in and all hell broke loose. Kids leaped out of their seats in violent protest. They ripped opened their backpacks and hurled textbooks and school supplies toward the front of the bus until Leroy finally ejected the tape and tossed it over his shoulder.
The crowd cheered with approval and then clamored in the interim as they blustered for immediate sonic relief from the apparent aural torture they had just been subjected to. Another tape was popped into the player and when Eddie Grant’s “Electric Avenue” came pouring out of the speakers, everybody lost their fuckin’ minds again—this time in jubilant fashion.
In the wild celebration that followed, Claudio went to the floor to collect his rejected mix tape labeled MUSICA MAS CHINGONA but a stomping high-top sneaker beat him to the punch and smashed it to pieces. He crawled back to his seat empty-handed and looked over at me with shame and regret. “Tex-Mex music?” I asked, shaking my head with disapproval. What he didn’t know was that I had been planning the same thing. I had been carrying around one of my dad’s La Mafia tapes in my backpack for weeks, waiting for the right moment to spring it on my fellow bus riders and blow their minds with a musical force they had been robbed of their entire lives. Obviously, it didn’t pan out that way. They didn’t shit their pants with excitement and start a cumbia line down the aisle like I had imagined, but Claudio had tried to introduce our music to the masses; and even though it was him instead of me who ended up testing the waters and drowning in a riptide of humiliation, I always admired his cojones for it.
But I’m not talking about that. I’m not talking about Claudio and the Tejano Music Revolt of 1985. I’m talking about Hip-Hop. That was the wild new sound that eventually came to dominate our daily commute for the remainder of the school year, and pretty much the rest of my childhood, and my adulthood, and probably my elderhood as well. It all started with “The Message” by Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five, and when that song debuted on the bus that afternoon, I wasn’t hearing it or listening to it for the first time—I was experiencing it. Hip-Hop was raw and powerful like a punch to the gut, and I liked it! We all did, because after that, it was nothing but rap tapes in Leroy’s cassette case, much to his chagrin.
Occasionally, one of the kids would raise his hopes with a pre-recorded tape from his era like Chubby Checker or something and he would quickly pop it into his tape deck only to have his expectations crushed by what would turn out to be just another rap tape. Sorry, Leroy. I was guilty of that a few times, but it was foolish of you to take pre-recorded tapes at face value in those days. Most of us couldn’t afford blank tapes to record on so we rigged an old write-protected cassette by covering the socket on the top edge of the housing that a certain mechanism in our player locked into to prevent recording. All we had to do was place a strip of Scotch tape over the hole and presto! Curtis Mayfield became Kurtis Blow… Fats Domino was turned into The Fat Boys.
When it came to mixing tapes, many of us couldn’t afford the original Hip-Hop albums either, nor the hi-tech equipment needed to transfer them to cassette tapes in a seamless manner, so we used cheap boom boxes to record whatever tracks were played during a Hip-Hop program that aired nightly on a local radio station. The music was great, but crappy equipment combined with crappy commercial edits created abrupt transitions between songs that resulted in equally crappy mixes. And even the most gifted radio-mixer among us couldn’t avoid the occasional baritone drawl of the post-hitting DJ as he stepped all over the intro of a song. “This is the jam that put Hip-Hop music on the map! From Englewood, New Jersey it’s ‘Rapper’s Delight’ by the Sugar Hill Gang on K-WES one-oh-two!” Or, “Yo, that was ‘Planet Rock’ by Afrika Bambaataa & The Soul Sonic Force!” when he interrupted the outro.
But we made the most of it. That’s what poor people do: they don’t just show up to Andrew Johnson in a rundown bus; they roll up to Andy J in a Soul Train bumping bootleg rap. When you’re thrown into a world that has everything and you have nothing, you have to pretend like you have something. It makes fitting in a little bit easier, and as low-income outsiders looking for acceptance and a sense of identity in a wealthy environment, we needed all the edge we could get.
Of course, when I say we had nothing, I mean it financially. The phrase “Attention Kmart Shoppers!” was embedded in most of our psyches and our cafeteria meals were bought and paid for by the National School Lunch Program, but when it came to athletic ability, I would say a number of us possessed a great wealth of it. We were a level behind academically in most subjects, which meant that we were often separated from the herd during daily lessons to engage in our own remedial studies, but whatever we lacked in the classroom we made up for in recess with our penchant for outdoor sports and physical activity.
And these are just the bus boys I’m talking about right now. I’m sure the bus girls could have run circles around us if they wanted to but most of them were busy excelling in their own interests: chiefly singing and dancing. Many were advanced beyond their years at both art forms but none were professionally trained at either. They were Baptists! The majority of them had grown up performing gospel music in church choirs from an early age. And I realize it seems stereotypical now to say our predominantly black school bus was made up of rap-loving athletes, Baptist entertainers and almost no bookworms (I think the Korean kids did pretty well) but that’s how it happened to be in our case: recess and music class were our strongest subjects. I can’t say however that either gift yielded much credit, since we didn’t get graded on recess and the girls’ talents were seldom recognized by our music teacher Mrs. Worley.
“Miss Worley don’t like black church music because she old and white,” said one black girl on the bus one day.
“Uh-huh” agreed another. “The kinda old and white that ain’t too keen on black folks.”
“Mmmhmm. You can feel it.”
I remember being confused by their comments at the time. As a nine-year old Mexican-American kid, I had been at the receiving end of racial name-calling but I was either too young to take offense or too naïve to know what the insults meant (What the hell is a pepper belly?), but to hear fifth grade girls identify discrimination without being called the N word right to their faces indicated a heightened sense of awareness that was foreign to me. Did they possess a spider sense? How did they acquire it? I know now that recognizing racial prejudice is not instinctive. The ability to perceive it is something learned, which means that those poor girls at the tender age of nine must have experienced so much racism they developed a sixth sense about it. I couldn’t fathom it, or maybe I just didn’t want to. It was easier to dismiss it as paranoia and chalk the whole thing up to “playing the race card” (as it would be called today), but as I would later find out, their icky vibes would tell no lies.
It all started with an announcement by Mrs. Worley. The bus riders usually ignored such notices because they usually didn’t pertain to us. It was always the same messages about music shows or performances revolving around the calendar of events at the local center for the arts—concerts and theatrical productions that were fun for the whole family! But not my poor minority family. We didn’t take in a symphony by the local philharmonic orchestra. We stayed home and tried not to bother each other.
But there was something about Mrs. Worley’s excitement that got our attention that day, and when she told us that she was mounting a school-wide variety show that would be full of musical acts, dance numbers, and a show-stopping acrobatic routine with tumbling stunts and aerial feats, many of us bus riders perked up—seeing it as an opportunity to showcase our talents. The bus girls zeroed in on singing and dancing, and a handful of us bus boys set our sights dead on the show-stopper.
When the day arrived for tryouts and auditions, there were seven stations set up for each act of the vaudeville program. I, along with Oscar (the only other Hispanic in the tryout group), and five black kids (Kordell, Sammy, Torvis, Cookie and his sidekick Peanut) joined a party of local white kids at the “boys acrobatic” station. We were told by the gym teacher Mr. Carmona that the act was called “Clowning Around” and that it would consist of half-a-dozen kids dressed as circus clowns performing various athletic stunts. Tryouts began forthwith and they made us jump through hoops—literally. We did handstands, cartwheels, back flips, and jumped through hula hoops. We tumbled, constructed a human pyramid, and leaped over rows of other kids laid out on floor mats. It was a piece of cake for us bus riders but most of the white kids were uncoordinated and struggled to negotiate many of the maneuvers. Mrs. Worley must have felt bad for them because she intervened and gave them a second chance to try out while the rest of us stood around and watched. It didn’t occur to me right away that race had anything to do with her decision. I just thought she was being a good teacher by imparting her students with a lesson in perseverance. The Anglos gave it another go and as spectators, the rest of us encouraged them to succeed. A couple of us even gave them tips on how to properly execute the stunts, to no avail. It wasn’t until Mrs. Worley gave them a third chance to prevail that they finally got the hang of it, and I finally got suspicious.
A few days later, the results of all the tryouts were posted on a bulletin board and when I looked at the list of names listed under “Clowning Around,” none of them belonged to me or my bus mates. Instead, our names were clustered together under something called “Chinese Dragon.” An announcement was made to report to our designated stations and in the bustle that followed, we noticed six of the third-chance-white-kids skipping off to celebrate at the “Clowning Around” station. My bus mates and I stared at each other with stunned looks on our faces.
“Must be a white thang,” said Torvis before we shuffled over to our station without uttering another word.
“Chinese Dragon” was a musical dance number where seven kids dressed in black attire created the body of a fire-breathing dragon by wearing cardboard boxes over their heads. Each box had a pair of eyeholes cut out for (limited) vision and each student was required to paint dragon scales on their own box with glow-in-the dark paint. The act would be set to an annoying piece of Chinese music and performed in the dark so the audience could only see the floating body parts of a ridiculous square dragon moving in a choreographed pattern of utter nonsense.
The head of the dragon was the most realistic part. It was made up of two boxes—a large box and a smaller box taped together to form the unmistakable shape of a dragon’s head. We were told the mouth (the smaller box) would eventually contain dry ice, which would emit fog and further-perpetuate the illusion of a fire-breathing dragon. Kordell, the biggest and the strongest, was assigned the head. Cookie got the middle box that required dragon wings, and Torvis, Peanut, Sammy, and Oscar made up the rest of the body. I got the tail, and some icky vibes to go with it. To say that we had been discriminated against was an understatement, but am I overstating it when I say that Mrs. Worley was rubbing our swarthy faces in it by making us hide them behind a layer of cardboard? That’s what it felt like to me, and I didn’t like it!
On the bus ride home after school, we listened to Run-DMC’s “It’s Like That” and its lyrics resonated in my head and set my wounded heart ablaze with indignation. I gathered the other parts of the dragon and told them that we needed to do more than just “make the most” of it. If we were going to restore our pride and dignity, we needed to elevate ourselves and make our shitty routine the best part of the show. The dragoneers agreed and we talked about improving the dull choreography with our own touches of flair and pizzazz. It was clear that the dull steps needed spin moves and moonwalking, and we were just the b-boys to provide it. By the end of our powwow, we were all convinced that with a little razzmatazz here and a little razzle-dazzle there, we could turn “Chinese Dragon” into the real show-stopper of the evening.
Rehearsals followed for the next few weeks and every time we tried to spice up any of the steps, Mrs. Worley would shit a brick and order us to do it the way we were taught. The dragon lady finally got so frustrated one day that she yelled, “This is a Chinese Dragon! Not some Ghetto Rat!” I couldn’t believe it. Up until then, I had only heard other students talk to each other like that—never an adult. I guess I always figured that even the most bigoted educators operating at that time had enough sense not to make the same derogatory remarks ignorant peers were leveling at each other on the playground. After all, Mrs. Worley was a grownup, and grownups know how to hide that kind of thing, right? I mean, isn’t there a social filter they develop that forces them to bottle up their hatred from society so they can hold down a job or run for public office? Can’t they wait until they get home after a long day of internalized racism before they start rattling off ethnic slurs in front of their parroting children? I know the maturity level of a child doesn’t allow for that suppressive device. They don’t know any better. When they repeat those words on the playground, they’re just mimicking adults—usually their parents. Kids are just kids, but Mrs. Worley was an adult, and when she uttered that racist remark, it confirmed to me what those black girls on the bus had alleged all along: Worley wasn’t keen on color. Icky vibes.
The variety show was set for two performances: a matinee during the school day before Andrew Johnson students and staff, and an evening performance in front of an audience of parents, families, and I’m guessing other supporters of children’s theater from around the community. The bus riders and I decided that we would perform two versions of our act: Worley’s vapid arrangement for the daytime show and a secret, hyped-up version that would bring the house down later that night and steal the thunder from that awkward bonanza of Bozo shenanigans known as “Clowning Around.” They were the last number of the show—right after ours—and it had always been considered the grand finale, but we were sure that once that prime-time audience got a load of our top-secret, super-fly dance moves, “Clowning Around” would be reduced to nothing more than just the final act. The way we saw it, “Chinese Dragon” was the only bit performed in the dark. It had an edge to it that made it stand out, and with all the slick MTV video steps we had added to the choreography, there was no way that it wasn’t going to be hailed as the true show-stopper of the evening.
The big day arrived and we were backstage preparing when Mrs. Worley informed us that our dragon would not be fire-breathing. We grumbled with disappointment and she launched into a scientific discourse about dry ice—or CO2 as she called it. She told us that the desired fog effect was achieved by the chemical reaction that occurs when frozen carbon dioxide is placed in a tub of hot water—or H2O as she called it—and that dancing and liquids (heated or otherwise) DID NOT MIX. We didn’t understand chemical reactions too well—I still don’t—so her little episode of Mr. Wizard’s World sounded fabricated, which conjured up more icky vibes. Why is she blinding us with science? Did she find out about our top-secret moves and decide to sabotage our performance? That’s the kind of paranoia that was created by her discrimination, and by my ignorance of basic chemistry. I had to gather myself and regroup. I listened to “Magic’s Wand” by Whodini on my portable tape player and it inspired me to assemble the dragoneers for another pep talk.
“We don’t need no special effects, ya’ll,” I assured them. “We got badass moves that we pull off like The Solid Gold Dancers. So let’s just get this over with now and concentrate on stealing the real show tonight!” I got up to leave but not everyone followed. Cookie and Peanut were tired of licking their wounds.
“We wanna do the badass moves now,” said Cookie.
I sympathized with their eagerness to repair our injured pride. They had no desire to go out there and be a part of Mrs. Worley’s punk ass routine. None of us did, but showing our hand too early would’ve blown up our spot.
“We can only do it one time,” I reminded them, “and that’s tonight, because when Mrs. Worley sees that we broke her rules, she’s gonna shit a whole brickyard.”
“Maybe she won’t,” added Peanut.
“She will,” I asserted, “And she’ll probably cut our whole part outta tonight’s show … after we get suspended.”
“Not if she likes it. She might think it’s fresh.” Cookie’s optimism surprised me. I almost laughed at his presumption that once Mrs. Worley saw how great we were, all would be forgotten.
“She won’t,” I argued. “We could go out there and turn into a real fire breathing dragon and she still wouldn’t give a shit. ‘Cause to her we ain’t shit. Know what I mean? She’s The Man and we gotta do what The Man says … or else. Y’understand?”
That’s when big ol’ Kordell piped up.
“He’s right,” he mumbled, “Worley ain’t never gonna git what we done or why we done it. This is a black thang now.”
Everybody looked up at Kordell (you had to—he was already five feet tall in the fifth grade) and quietly nodded.
We took the stage and got in our starting positions. They killed the lights and the curtain came up. It was daytime so even with the lights out the efforts of the glow-in-the-dark boxes were futile. The audience could clearly see our legs (and eyeholes) as we stood in a single file line waiting for that annoying music to cue that insipid “square dance.” We knew it had all the makings of a steaming turd but we had to swallow our pride and take comfort in knowing that our moment in the sun would some later on when the sun went down.
The music began and we went through Worley’s lifeless routine with selfsame execution. The nonexistent dry ice had more stage presence. We must’ve looked less like a dragon and more like slow children wandering around in boxes because occasionally I would catch glimpses of various audience members through my eyeholes and every fifth grade face I saw looked more befuddled than the next. The only reason I didn’t feel as ashamed and embarrassed as I thought I would is because I had a box over my head to conceal my identity. When it was over, there was weak and scattered applause, and we didn’t bow like we were supposed to. We just limped off the stage as the curtain dropped.
Stagehands rushed in to set the stage for “Clowning Around.” We still hadn’t seen the act in its entirety so a few of us hung out backstage to catch the performance. I remember hoping it would fail so it would give our group the schadenfreude we needed to lift our spirits, but it didn’t. “Entrance of the Gladiators” started at curtain-up and the clowns hit the stage in a parade of cartwheels, tumbles and round offs. It was clear from the first handspring that those gangly white kids had not taken the charity of their second and third chances for granted. They had obviously worked hard to master each of the stunts and the result was a thoroughly entertaining final act that lived up to the hype as the true show-stopper of the program. But that was only the matinee.
After the show, Oscar suggested that we practice our clandestine moves one last time in the bathroom and we did. The moves were so fresh and tight they restored our confidence about proving ourselves at the evening show. After school we listened to Newcleus and The Treacherous Three on the bus ride home and it pumped us up something fierce, but when we returned for the big event later that night with our families in our respective family cars, we were in a weird funk. It was the only time any of us had travelled to Andrew Johnson in a vehicle other than a bus, and seeing our school at night was also disorienting, but that’s not what had us feeling physically out of sorts backstage. It was beginning to sink in that the seven of us were standing at the doors of rebellion, waiting to make our big entrance. We were about to perform an act of defiance before a sold-out audience and the thought of making a stand against The Man began to worry our pretty little box-covered heads.
“I think we should go back to the Worley routine,” said Cookie.
“Yeah. Me, too,” echoed Peanut.
I almost sided with them this time. My own fears and doubts were conflicting with my desire to maintain our resolve but I knew in my heart of hearts that we had to stay the course. “Whatchya’ll talkin’ ‘bout?” I asked.
“I don’t wanna get suspended again,” answered Cookie like a man on parole, “not offa some bu’shit.”
“I don’t wanna get suspended either,” I said, “but it’s not bullshit. This is important.”
“Why?” asked Peanut. “It’s just some dumb show.”
“Nah, Peanut. This is life!” I must’ve raised my voice because they all looked at me, somewhat startled. It was the same way my father had said it to me once when I downplayed some seemingly insignificant chore. No, son. This is LIFE! It had stuck in my mind and it seemed to be having the same effect on the dragoneers when I repeated it to them. I had their undivided attention, and I ran with it.
“If you let yourself get pushed around now,” I started, “you’re gonna get pushed around the rest of your life.” It didn’t come out as effectively as I had hoped so I turned to Kordell for more support. “Right, Kordell?”
“I ain’t gonna go through my life like no sucka,” he proclaimed.
I jumped back in, “That’s right! They pushed us to the edge, man. And this is our chance to push back. It’s like Grandmaster Flash in ‘The Message.’ What does he say? Don’t push me ‘cause I’m close to the edge…”
Without skipping a beat, they all joined in: “… I’m trying not to lose my head! Uh-huh-huh-huh-huh!” It was a corny moment but it was enough to get us back on track. Fifteen minutes later, it was time to stick it to The Man and become the true show-stopper of the evening!
The stage was black as pitch when we got in formation. The colors of our dragon were bright and vibrant and I remember relating to Michael Myers’ POV from the original Halloween as I peeped through the eyeholes of my box, sweating and breathing heavily like a deranged lunatic. The annoying Chinese music began and we kicked into gear, promptly with a bang. It was still the same synchronized pattern from the original scheme but the atmosphere and our dynamic spin moves created an energy that got the crowd behind us early.
The cheers continued as we shifted to and fro, meeting in the middle and moonwalking back and forth like a well-oiled b-boy machine. The packed house started clapping along in thunderous accompaniment and it must’ve disrupted Oscar’s timing, or maybe it was too dark, or maybe he was so amped up on adrenaline that he didn’t realize his proximity to the edge. I don’t know what it was but at one point, he broke wide and fell right off the goddamn stage.
I saw it with my own two eyeholes. Homeboy plunged headfirst right into the front row and landed with a crash. The audience gasped and I reacted the only way I knew how at that age—I exploded into an uncontrollable fit of laughter that reverberated inside my cube like a tiny echo chamber. I couldn’t help it. Oscar had just added a whole new meaning to the term “downstage” by accidentally committing the first stage dive in history and all I could do to commemorate the moment was laugh my balls off. But I wasn’t alone. I couldn’t hear it over my own braying laughter, or see it clearly because my eyes were too watery from laughing, but the other glowing boxes appeared to be aimlessly bumping into each other in a similar state of hysterics.
The house lights came up and the laughter subsided. Oscar was still down, writhing with pain inside of his smashed box. His parents were in the audience and they came to his aid as a voice over the PA system announced the end of the show. Members of the audience filed out of the auditorium and the dragoneers and I sat there, taking it all in. We couldn’t believe it. We had stopped the show. After all that bullshit, our routine had in fact become the true show-stopper of the evening.
Oscar was taken to the hospital and his X-rays revealed that only his box and his spirit had been broken. He was lucky they said, but Mrs. Worley wasn’t so lucky. She was suspended the next day pending an investigation on charges of endangering the welfare of a child, or whatever they called it back then when a teacher lets a kid dance around on a stage in the dark with a box over his head. Hey, I guess there was some kind of safety board operating back then after all. They must have been close to letting Mrs. Worley go because she never made it back to Andrew Johnson. She quit before they could fire her. At least that’s how I remember it, which makes it seem like she was unwilling to admit her mistake and accept the blame, but that’s okay. Her substitute and eventual replacement was a sweet lady named Mrs. Morgan. She never gave us icky vibes… and we liked it!