Kissing My Elbow

This wasn’t the trying of trying to do homework or the trying-to-be-good kind of trying. This was the true, admit-no-defeat, and never-ever-quit trying of a seven-year-old. I was determined to become a boy, and if this was the way to do it, well then, I would.

I bent my elbow. I pulled my elbow. I moved it back and forth in circles. I tried the head-down bend-over. I tried the over-the-head pull-down. I tried the left elbow and then the right. I rotated my arms around and out and around and in. I bent my forearm, pulled the elbow inward, strained my neck, pooched out my lips, lifted my chin . . . stretched . . . stretched . . . and just couldn’t do it.

There had to be a trick. If I worried it long enough, I was sure that I’d figure it out. But I never did. It wasn’t until I was much, much older (roughly ten years old) that I decided, at last, that my big mama had not told the truth. Instead, I realized, she was trying to tell me that some things are impossible. But she couldn’t just tell me. I had to work it out for myself.

Why a boy? By the age of seven I knew that boys had an automatic get-out-of-jail-free card. They never had to act like ladies, worry about their hair turning back, wear itchy ol’ lace, get their knees shined with Vaseline, or spend glorious afternoons doing dishes.

My resentments showed in my reading choices, but first I had to discover that I loved to read. I didn’t love reading — not until I was feverish with plague, trapped in a lumpy bed, and watched round the clock by a ruthless, all-seeing mother. My only hope was the library book that I had brought home from school. It was read or die of sick-induced boredom in a room the color of cold pea soup. I read, fell completely in love with Jane Eyre, and grew passionate about books.

What? You forged a connection between yourself — a little black girl in Nebraska who had gone to a segregated school in Alabama — and an English orphan who falls in love with a really ugly, soon-to-be-blind man who kept his demented wife in the attic? Absolutely! She was like me: unfairly treated, not very pretty, a girl, and lonely. Once I discovered that the secret of reading was finding books you liked and that not all books were created equal, I was hooked. Jane led to Nancy Drew, Cherry Ames, Heidi, Laura Ingalls, Pippi Longstocking, and, of course, Jo March. Yes, some of my reading friends were wimpy, old-fashioned girls, and not one of them was black, as this was well before the publishing boom in African American children’s literature. But I give the child-mind credit for resiliency: accepting what’s there and making the best of it. I learned to slip past the borders of time and place, skin color, and gender to connect my life to the stories in books. I left my basement room and led a virtual life within the pages of a book. What could be more resourceful, risk-taking, liberating, or defiant? It was even better than a get-out-of-jail-free card!

I write about young girls — girls like my remembered self. They have adventures, solve problems, and chase after dreams — disguised, of course, as chickens. They are the sisters of Nancy, Pippi, Jane, Jo, and countless others. But they are also the girl-characters of an author who once rode a dogsled beside Jack London, swished swords with Zorro, and climbed beanstalks with Jack. Somehow, deep inside where the aquifer of identity lies, filled with its blind fish and phosphorescent glimmerings, imagination shapes itself. It seeks both the possible and the impossible. It reaches beyond the boundaries set for it.

I know now that Big Mama was right. If you can kiss your elbow — at least, if you can imagine it — you will find yourself changed. I blow her a kiss, place my elbow on the table, lift my pen, and write.

From the September/October 2007 issue of The Horn Book Magazine