Chapter 21 - No Heat

The same year I had to go back to school and when I went it
seemed like it was nothing like when I had left before I had
the boys. Everyone seemed to be so immature. I had to get out
of there so Kaki and Kathryn took me to take the test to get
into Community College of Philadelphia and January of 1999
I started classes.

From “My Life as I Know It,” by Tahija Ellison



“At what temperature does your breath do this?” I asked Tahija, puffing out smoke as we climbed the stairs to her typing class. We’d been to a doctor’s appointment and I was dropping her off late at school.

“The temperature we’re at,” she said.

Copies of paintings by the European masters hung in the main hallway of Dobbins High School, but there was no heat. It was early December.

Tahija’s high school was a great disappointment. She went half days: gym, lunch, English and typing. Gym was jumping jacks then basketball, with most of the girls watching. Lunch she didn’t eat because of the pork threat. English was worksheets: grammar and punctuation — none of the fiction, poetry, and drama that would have developed her already good ear for language and broadened her perspective. And typing — we’d reached the classroom — appeared to be a study hall.

“That the one going to write ‘Leave me alone today?’ on the board?” I asked, looking in.

“That’s her. Counting the hours till retirement.”

“Well, try to learn something.”

“She gives me work I’ll do it.”

“I know you will,” I hugged her goodbye.

In junior high Tahija had won an essay contest. The prize was a weekend in Atlanta visiting Morehouse and Spelman colleges. Only to graduate to no heat, no challenge. TANF gave her an incentive to stay in school, and she was trying to make it work, but that effort was beginning to seem an empty exercise in compliance.

Driving home I mulled it over. What was my responsibility as her legal guardian? At the very least, I should know a lot more about the public schools. In Philly, they were effectively segregated, thanks to white flight to the suburbs and to the private schools that sprouted like mushrooms after court-ordered desegregation. And because the public schools were funded by local property taxes, and not, like everything else important, by state and federal revenues, they were also broke. There were magnet schools, and soon the state would sanction charter schools. But the first had long waiting lists and the second was yet to come. Tahija seemed stuck. No options — a good definition of dire poverty. But Kaki and I weren’t poor. What options did we have that we could extend to her?

There’s not much I can claim to have talked Tahija into over the years, but I did manage to get her to attend an open house at the Community College of Philadelphia. She liked it: the high-ceilinged library, the sunny hallways, the small, engaged classes, the diversity. Before long we found ourselves standing in line to register for spring term courses. In front of us three guys went on and on about their amazing and bizarre psychology professor, while two girls behind us quizzed each other for an anatomy test. Purposefulness was in the air, and that air was heated.
In January of 1999, two months into her sixteenth year, when the boys were almost a year old, Tahija enrolled full-time at the Community College of Philadelphia, which folks called just Community. Her math and English courses were pre-college level, but if she passed with a C or higher she’d advance on to the freshman curriculum.

It seemed a good move. Under welfare reform the first twenty-four months of a sixty-month lifetime entitlement could be used for education and job training. We’d already used ten months on the second half of tenth grade, the first half of eleventh, and the summer between. That left fourteen months — time enough, if she went four semesters straight, to earn an A.A. degree. With that, and maybe a work-study job under her belt, she’d enter the job market as something more than a nail head under the hammer of minimum wage.

Along with job readiness, I hoped college would give her a wider perspective on life. I knew her well enough by then to know she was hauling considerable baggage. When it came time to start opening those suitcases I wanted her to know that others had been through what she’d been through, and more, and had come through, and left a record.

It was a record she had a right to know about. It was her inheritance as a human being.




“So I think, ‘when is he gonna check the homework?’ Because sometimes he does and sometimes he doesn’t, right?”

We were in the shamrock room eating our favorite meal of grilled salmon, mashed potatoes, garlic bread and broccoli. Lamarr was upstairs watching TV with the boys.

“This is the one wears the same shirt every day?” Kaki asked.

“The English teacher, yeah. And I think, dang, here I stayed up till 3:00 A.M doing it and he’s not even going to check it. But just as everybody’s filing out, he comes up to my desk, and he says, ‘Le’ me see your homework.’ Like that, like some mafia guy.”

“He doesn’t ask anybody else?” I said.

“No, just me.”

“And you have it.”

“I have it. I flip open my notebook, and there it is. Done.”

“Ha!” Kaki said, dolloping mashed potatoes onto her plate. “He asked the wrong person.”
Or the right one, I thought, grateful, knowing how little he earned (two or three thousand a course and no benefits, if he was an adjunct).

This teacher of the limited wardrobe challenged and inspired Tahija. One day years later, when she holds cut-off notices from the water department and the gas company both, when college is a dream deferred, she’ll meet him on the Avenue. She won’t recognize him at first, but he’ll recognize her.

“I can see it in your eyes,” he’ll say. “You’re not making anything of your life.” Then he’ll remind her what he used to tell her back when she was the youngest student in his class, probably in the whole college: “I know you have something wonderful to contribute to this world.”

She felt good all the rest of the day, she told me. “Like somebody gave me money.”