A Nigger No Longer Caged :: Graduate Admissions Essays

A Nigger No Longer Caged   I taught myself to read when I was twenty years old. The book I started with was I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, by Maya Angelou.   I was raised in Huntington, West Virginia. Living in Huntington was like living at the substructure of a bottomless pit. The hills defining our valley town were four insurmountable walls, imprisoning me in that special hell reserved for children of miscegenation. My mother had broken one of Huntingtons greatest taboos - she had mothered three children by a black man. After three kids and numerous beatings, my mother bravely left him. Disowned by her family and ostracized by the larger white community, her specialisation did not last long she started on the long road to alcohol and drug dependency.   My mother did not suffer in silence instead, she passed on to us the tainted wisdom that her parents gave to her. Her most frequent reminder to us was, Youre not worth anything, you will never be worth anything, b ecause youre niggers We rarely had food, and many winters we had no working gas for heat or hot water. My mother would conveniently go stay at her boyfriends for weeks at a time. Sometimes she would leave me decennium or fifteen dollars, and I would buy a weeks worth of food cereal and milk, hamburger, bread, and potato chips, and Little Debbie snack cakes. When that ran out, my brothers and I had some pretty tricksy ways of finding more talking my father out of some money, begging, or stealing.   My mother had a house in the white part of town, astir(predicate) a block from the geographic dividing line, so we went to the white school. I was one of three blacks in the entire high school. I remember my welcome signalize the first day of school GO TO HERSHEY HIGH NIGGER spray painted on my locker, signed in red by the KKK. In my secondary year the school decided to celebrate Black History Month by devoting one afternoons history class to a discussion of Black achievements. I was so anxious and excited. I was hoping to learn something more than the words of Dr. Kings I Have a Dream speech. My excitement was quickly shot down as my teacher turned to the only Black in the class - me - and asked if I had anything to offer.