How I Learned to Read: An Abecedarian Primer

At first I couldn’t read the words on the page, but I loved the soothing musicality of hearing them read aloud, so I was motivated to try. I wanted to sing the words to myself. I learned to sing to myself at a young age, reading every book that was put in front of me

because books were always

comforting, always present in our home, tall bookcases full of books in our small apartment(s);

despite not always having electricity, despite sometimes having clothes on layaway, despite eating Miracle Whip sandwiches. Chile, we been havin’ books.

Each page: a portal.

For a long time, I read for pleasure, imagining myself in a wardrobe or on a giant peach, racing through summer library reading challenges to get sticker after sticker after sticker. Mom would take me to all the libraries in Los Angeles that we could get to by bus from Pico and Fairfax; I liked to pull the cord for our stop. But I remember one day when the Central Library burned down, or rather, I remember mom saying, “the library’s on fire” while she watched the news and I read my book, but I didn’t know which one, so I imagined every single library in LA going up in flames, all of my beloved books turned to smoky char and ash. But where will the Wild Things live? Six years later when we no longer lived off Pico, Grammy would say the same thing, “the library’s on fire,” but really, she meant the strip mall where the library was temporarily housed. The strip mall on Figueroa was on fire. She only said the library to get my attention as the Rodney King riot coverage steadily hummed from the living room and I sat staring at our bookcases half-listening to the reporter trying to contextualize the violence. The news said: “King was put in special education classes because of difficulty with reading, according to teachers there.” I said: “Grammy, can you change the channel? The last episode of The Cosby Show is on.”

Grammy, the matriarch of our multigenerational household, made sure I could read for real: she taught me how to scan, how to interpret, how to read a room, how to be fluent.

However, I really learned how to read in my tenth grade honors English class that one semester when we read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and I was the only Black kid in the room; when we started reading aloud and the dialect was so, so funny, it was the best part really, that round-robin reading when everyone got to say “shut de doo chilly” and Nigger, and then again Nigger—“popcorn, Jake!”

I didn’t know I was illiterate until that class.

Jim exposed me, my teacher exposed me, my friends exposed me. “Shut de do’, chile.” What

kind of

language did I speak?

My ancestral lineage is rooted in resistance and ways outta no ways, and my people’s love language is language itself, which is why, maybe, my mom was such a committed reader, why she had so many books. But Mom’s reading troubled some folks. It troubled Grammy because it meant we had to pack up all the books every time we moved, which was often. But it troubled everyone else because it was threatening; she always had her

nose in a book. The alphabet is an abolitionist. ^#

One Thanksgiving, the one a few weeks after my twenty-second birthday, the one where my mother had just disappeared again and no one talked about her absence, my grandfather showed up at my auntanduncle’s house in Escondido. I had never met this man, my grandmother’s ex-husband, only heard the stories about his abuse, how much mom hated him, that time my mom’s senior year of high school when he went in her room one day while she was out and threw away all her books. It was hot like summer that Thanksgiving in Escondido, and I sat alone downstairs in the cool TV room, legs stuffed up beneath me on the couch, turkey deep-frying outside on the patio, the Dolphins and the Cowboys running around the field muted while I read my book. My grandfather came downstairs and the first and only thing that man said to me was, “mus be Cheryl’s kid. Readin,’ jus like yo momma,” the word reading used as a

pejorative ^#. He strolled right by me out to the patio with the turkey smoke swelling and I just sat there. Said nothing. Remained

quiet and

remembered learning somewhere there are five ways of reading. One of them is reading suspiciously; the Suspicious Reader asks: “What’s silenced to leave room for what’s said?” I ask: What’s the onomatopoeia for

silence?

To be honest, I really, really learned to read when I realized that some people read to know and not for what’s possible—to understand the world as it is, not as it could be. They see words as strict, neat, forgetting that language holds a history and a spirit, that it burns through silence. They don’t sing words the way I do, they don’t love language for what it is: vibrant, evolving, survival. For some, language isn’t just powerful, it’s a way to hold power over others. To fixate, think rigidity can keep people in their place. Some people are

uninterested in progress and possibility. These people are so

vexed by misuse and grammar rules that they can’t say what they mean. But

we been knew. Not a book knowledge, not a classroom knowing, but something that’s lived, passed down from breath to breath, between syllables. Vernacular

X-rays will reveal

years and years and centuries and lifetimes of knowing. Knowing that refuses to be erased, knowing built in the friction of daily lives lived between cultures and tongues. Something passed between breaths, between words. An inherited resistance, passed down in the words we speak, write, and need. We are not better because we understand this; we are alive because we understand this. We’ve lived lifetimes.

Zillions of lifetimes. Lifetimes of expressing ourselves into existence, unwilling to shut the door on our linguistic legacy. No fire, no separation, no denotation can keep us in the margins. We will teach our children to read, to twist and stretch, to burn, to sang, to make the words their own, to make them more.