liberal arts college than a traditional private school. A pond sits in the middle of campus; a stream winds between athletic fields. The students are empowered to be part of decision-making about the school but not in a ridiculous way where you end up having every kind of cereal for lunch every day. At Park, they recognize that students are people and worthy of being listened to, but they’re also a school and, as such, recognize that children are lunatics.
This lunatic thought he had died and gone to heaven when he enrolled at Park in fourth grade. It is hard to put into words how perfect an environment it was for me. The faculty saw me. That’s the whole thing. They saw my creative spirit and my curiosity and my tactile learning habits and my aversion to being outside and they affirmed all of it. Prior to Park, I’d gone to a very tiny arts conservatory that may have been a Ponzi scheme, to a Baptist elementary school, and, for three months, to public school. At the public school, one of my classmates bit me on the hand in protest for having to share computer time with me, and my mother rolled up on that place like a flash flood to whisk me and my lightly bleeding hand out of there.
The people at the school had the temerity to try to keep the computer lab fee my parents had paid at the beginning of the year. Guess how well that went over? My mother arrived at school to collect me, most of my hand, and our computer fee, wearing a black wool pantsuit with chalk stripes that I knew as “Betty Grey’s suit.” Betty Grey, a woman at our church, had befriended my mom and offered her some of her professional attire at some point. When my mother talks about it, her voice gets soft; it catches a bit. “She didn’t have to do it,” she will say. “She could have thrown them out or kept them. But she knew I needed clothes to wear to work, and that generosity has always stayed with me.”
Betty Grey’s winter-weight blazer and skirt were the most serious of the items in my mother’s closet. She wore this outfit to funerals and to meetings in which she had to set someone straight. She called it her death suit because if she was wearing it, “either someone is already dead or someone’s going to die.”
We didn’t have money in Bubbleland, but we were rich in bon mots.
* * *
—
The world outside Bubbleland was unjust and frightening and sometimes violent, but inside was different. Inside, our futures were brimming with possibilities and our backs were straight and we had as many choices available to us as any of our contemporaries. And that bubble extended seventeen minutes up I-83 to Park, where I was classmates with the daughters and sons of some of Baltimore’s wealthiest families. We rode horses as an after-school activity and I went to bar and bat mitzvahs in every fancy building in the city. I knew I was not the same as my classmates, but I was compelled to believe that my options were just as promising. Demographically, I, a black male growing up in West Baltimore, didn’t have great odds. But inside the bubble, even statistics seemed to work differently.
Not everything at Park was foreign and new to me. Though we couldn’t necessarily afford the resources that some of my classmates’ families could, my parents used everything at their disposal to expand the walls of our bubble. They filled our home with new experiences and ideas; they took every opportunity to expose us to the worlds outside of our neighborhood; they told us about the things they couldn’t yet show us. They crafted new spaces inside our minds and our imaginations just waiting to be filled up with details and experiences. And I brought all of that to Park with me. I didn’t always feel different. I think that’s the point. Most of the time, I actually felt like I belonged there.
* * *
—
These days we tend to talk about bubbles like they’re bad things. A bubble connotes a lack of awareness of what’s really happening, a disconnect from the real world. But bubbles have transparent walls and gossamer skin that allows sound to permeate. Bubbles, like the kind you blow from a wand dipped in soapy liquid, don’t keep anyone out or anyone in. They’re just different environments.
I also