Dear Bully (14 page)

Simplehero
by Debbie Rigaud

I’m not what you would call a tough girl. In fact, I’d say I’m more of the scaredy-cat persuasion. I’ve never been in a school-yard fight. I was always of the opinion that someone as bony as I should avoid physical confrontation. So imagine my confusion when my friend Desiree told me that I protected her from a notoriously fearsome bully our freshman year in high school.

“You don’t remember?” she asked me during a recent phone conversation. “That’s how we became friends!”

Me? Defend Desiree? Desiree is one of the boldest people I know. Smart and opinionated, the girl can debate any attorney, seasoned politician, or TV judge to the ground. And with a flash of her dimples and a quick turn of phrase, she’ll yank you out of your proverbial box and introduce you to a fresh perspective. But that’s the Desiree from the later high school years and beyond. As she tells it, she was in a very different place at the start of freshman year.

“Tanya
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wanted to fight me, so she made up this story that I was talking about her brother on the bus,” recounts Desiree. “I was terrified—Tanya was huge, and I’m not a fighter. You and Rhonda were there, and you said, ‘She didn’t say that. I was on the bus and I know that’s not true. She doesn’t even catch the bus!’”

The story started to sound vaguely familiar to me, but it wasn’t crystal clear until Desiree uttered Rhonda’s now legendary words: “You’ll have to get through me to get to her.” That’s when I got a visual on the day. We were in the school’s lower level in the hallway by the lockers. As she charged toward Desiree, Tanya looked ten feet tall. She was wild-eyed with flaring nostrils, and her husky voice blared a loud and angry alarm. I remember thinking, Tanya’s got the story all wrong. So I told her the truth. But Rhonda’s style of defense was on a whole ’nother level. Rhonda matched Tanya in size, so she stepped between Tanya and Desiree and said, “I will not let you touch this girl. You’ll have to go through me to get to her.” That quelled everything outright. Tanya backed down and walked away.

I knew Des had run-ins with bullies her freshman year at our all-girls academy. But I never understood why. Des was as unlikely a target as I was a bodyguard. She is a tall, attractive girl from a prominent family in her suburban town. She has five older brothers—one of whom was an NFL player at the time. But as Desiree explains it, two things made her a target throughout her childhood—her dark skin and her Caribbean heritage.

In grammar and middle schools, she was called every derogatory name for “black” by lighter-skinned African-American classmates. The catchy commercial jingle lulling TV viewers to “Come Back to Jamaica” became “Go Back to Jamaica.” And each year she dreaded the public reading of her classmates’ annual “hot list” of girls (ranked by the boys) and boys (ranked by girls). Desiree was always at or near the bottom of that list. “I wanted to quit school even back then,” she recalls.

Things changed in high school—but only slightly. Thanks to the rise of Afrocentric lyrics in rap songs, being dark-skinned became acceptable, and even cool. Yet Desiree was still singled out by bullies because of where she was from. Unlike most of the handful of African-American students who came from urban towns, Desiree lived in an affluent suburb. And while most of the black students rode the city bus to school, Desiree was driven. She missed out on all the critical bonding time on the hour-plus commute to school. (Looking back at these “commuter” and “urban dweller” categories, it seemed that—if you were black—you were all right if you fell under at least one of the categories. I fit under both categories. My close friend Cara was from the suburbs, but she caught the bus. And oddly enough, Desiree’s tormentor Tanya didn’t catch the bus. But she was from the city. Des, on the other hand, was 0 for 2.)

And it didn’t help matters when other kids jumped on the bullies’ bandwagon, joining in the chorus of insults against her. The girls Desiree thought were her friends reported to the bullies that Desiree’s mother has an accent and isn’t American. This led to even more taunting. “They really stuck on the ‘ugly’ thing for a while,” she remembers. (Even though my parents are also immigrants, Des believes I was spared for having had older sisters and a cousin at the school.)