When I was 12, I had a well-intentioned teacher who called roll by making a rhyme out of my last name, Acevedo. He mispronounced all but its last long o and rhymed that with “hot potato.”
How do you say Acevedo? My LinkedIn profile has a recording, here. It’s “AH-suh-VAY-dough.” I have no doubt my homeroom teacher was kind-hearted because he was also my basketball coach, and I’ve had basketball coaches who scared me, while he was someone who made me want to play better, and to hustle.
Still.
What I learned from that experience is that names are very important. It’s a lesson that has stayed with me to this day. As a teacher at UC Berkeley in the College Writing Programs, I make an effort to learn what my students’ names are and how they pronounce them, and I try not to be awkward about it.
Along the way, I’ve learned a lot about names in general, and I’ve often had students say, “Thank you so much for learning my name. I’ve never had that before.” While I’m sad to hear that it’s not universal, I know that my colleagues in CWP do the same, as do my friends who teach elsewhere, and also very many other teachers, prioritizing learning their students’ names and how to pronounce them well.
I’m grateful for the chance as a teacher to honor students’ actual names.
I also want to consider how grateful I am personally for those who honor that I myself have two last names. When I first started back into the work force as a college professor after having been a stay-at-home mom for years, I used my maiden name Acevedo and my married name Butcher. I mainly did it for practical reasons. I wanted those who knew me at UGA in graduate school and others who knew me as Carmen Acevedo, to know that I am now Carmen Acevedo Butcher. However, it was an uphill climb. When I was invited to give talks and such, I’d submit all the information with my three names, but no one ever used Acevedo much. So I kind of gave up. I became Carmen Butcher.
When I became a Fulbright Senior Lecturer at Sogang University in Seoul, my husband Sean suggested we make a website so students could have my notes more easily, so we did. But all three names seemed then too long for my website, if I wanted it to be easily memorable for my students, especially from the perspective of teaching English in a country where Hangul was their first script and Korean their first language.
So my website has always been www.carmenbutcher.com. I think today if I had to do it over I’d keep all three. My Acevedo name is that important to me. I know I look light-skinned now, and I’m married to a White man from England. So I very often get slotted into that space, and I can see why.
But, (and this is another reason I try not to assume about my students), as a good, long-time friend said to me recently, “You were so much darker skinned as a kid.” And my mother would always say to me as I was growing up: “You have such beautiful olive skin and complexion.” That is how my identity formed, as that darker-skinned kid who tanned easily playing outside and felt on the margins and/or not-fitting-in growing up in mostly White communities, even as I was proud of my darker skin and loved our summer trips to Miami, to visit my great-grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins there. I was so proud to eat then and at times at home the Cuban foods of my father’s heritage, and mine. It’s one reason I use more tan-skinned emojis.
Names are complex. Names are sacred. As I began publishing, and admittedly, as society started changing in its attitudes towards names and naming, it became important to me to have my whole self on the cover, even as every book is created by so very many people, and not just one author. For my work and career as a writer, I wanted my whole self, or Carmen Acevedo Butcher there with me. Not to would have felt as if something was missing.
So I looked up to see the history on two last names. I learned that there is a most repulsive phrase for it: “double-barrelled name.” Because of its first use and association with firearms, since 1709, when Richard Steele wrote in the literary and society journal Tatler: “His double-barrelled Pistols.” I prefer “double surname” or simply “two last names.” Many join theirs with a hyphen. I don’t. It’s Acevedo Butcher.
I’m also reminded that today many of my students with Latina, Latine, and Latino backgrounds are honoring their heritage more openly as they include their double surnames in their school records, with the first being their father’s surname and the second their mother’s.
Curious one day to see my author page online, since I’m grateful to be there and wanted to check out my new digs, I couldn’t find myself under the A‘s. My heart sank a little. There I was under Butcher, so I asked the kind people who help me there to please put my author page under Acevedo Butcher. This is also why I’m so thankful when someone I don’t even know emails me to ask, “Do I cite you as Butcher, Carmen, or as Acevedo Butcher, Carmen?” I write back, “Thank you! It’s Acevedo Butcher, Carmen.” And recently, a brilliant, kind, and wise new friend messaged me on social media, “Dr. Butcher,” and I was so thrilled to hear from this friend and to be invited into a conversation with this friend that I didn’t notice until later that there was also right after a second message: “I apologize – Dr. Acevedo Butcher, I should have said.”
I think this kindness reaches so deeply for me because I’ve spent my whole life trying to build selfhood. I started life in childhood trauma that undoes the sacred selfhood, and twig-by-twig, I have been slowly building my own nest of personhood, of dignity, of self-compassion, and of compassion for others.
Meanwhile I was writing a message back, “Please call me Carmen.” However, I’ll not forget that second kind message. As I was reading it, I was thinking to myself: Woah. I hope I can always be so gracious and attentive to others’ names too.
Every semester, all semester long, from Day 1 and sometimes before Day 1, I give my students surveys. Survey means to “look over,” but actually I think of them more as “listening tours.” I plan countless hours, pouring myself into course design and then into the time-intensive buildout on Canvas. Then I meet students, listen to them through surveys, in conferences, and in other ways, and then day-by-day tailor-make my courses to fit the actual individuals in them. It takes more work and isn’t always easy, but it’s worth it.
This semester I taught 3 courses, two of which were Advanced Research CWR4B, designated as fully online for students who are immunocompromised or are dealing with other challenging illnesses and precarities. They are a wonderful two sections of students, and we’ve had a good semester. But several have gotten COVID, there’ve been deaths in the family (not uncommon anymore), and they’ve known other hardships, family emergencies, and other stresses.
One survey that is pretty much given every year about this time is my End-of-Year survey. Students do it and upload it as an assignment. I give them time to do most of it in class, and most finish in the 20-30 minutes we take for it. The survey contains these prompts for my students in Advanced Research CWR4B:
Please respond to questions below. When done (only one thoughtful sentence each, please), upload your survey on Canvas:
Who are you? (one thoughtful, detailed sentence only, per prompt, please)
How has the research you’ve done influenced your understanding of who you are–how has it shaped, changed, or affirmed your identity?
Of all you learned in CWR4B, what most surprised or delighted you to learn, and/or what are you most proud of that you’ve accomplished in CWR4B this semester?
What did you learn about the research process or about libraries that will stick with you longest as you go forward in your remaining time at Cal as well as into your career? Also, please just add “yes” or “no” here: Did you meet with a librarian one-on-one? If so, with whom, and how did that one-on-one meeting help you become a better researcher? If not, just write “No.” It was not a requirement–I’m just curious.
During our many in-class and on-Canvas discussions, what is one story/experience you learned about another classmate or from another classmate that really changed how you view the world or research? You may omit or include the classmate’s name, as you wish.
What class activity or assignment most helped you understand how to navigate the library’s research treasures, and what work that you did on your own most helped you understand what it means to research?
What was your definition of research coming into CWR4B, and what is your definition now of research here in our last weeks of CWR4B?
What do you yourself most need and want to do to finish strong in CWR4B?
What can I most do to help you as our semester together ends?
A question about online class delivery, to help me help future researchers / students / R4Bears: To provide accessibility to all students, our CWR4B is designated as a fully-online learning/class to help students with immunocompromised health and/or other challenges. What is the one most difficult aspect of a fully online course that you find most difficult, and what can I do about it to make that aspect better?
I remind students of my rationale in this way: “Metacognitive activity is a strong component of any excellent researcher’s toolbox (as are empathy and compassion). You know I’ve listened to you through surveys since Day 1 and all during our time together. Here is another chance a) for you to reflect on your personal journey and identity and b) for me to listen to you and to learn more about you and how you learn and what you’ve learned. So these surveys help you, they help me, and they help future students.”
I decided to mix it up a little this year, and led in to this End-of-Year survey by asking them the class before it to answer these two questions just in the Zoom chat: “What keeps you grounded, and If you could ask me anything as a Cal professor and/or as a human being, what would you ask me?”
Here are questions from two classes of first-year students and sophomores. Their questions were so sincere and wise that they brought out in me not just ad hoc comments in the next class period (the class where I also asked them to take the End-of-Year survey) but made me sit down, take handwritten notes on my ideas for responses, and then type them up, and then revise them. I also recorded them because I only had time to read each class’s questions and my responses, since this time of year especially we have much to get done in class. If you’d like to listen to this 25-minutes “Ask Your Professor,” it’s on my YouTube Channel at “Ask Your Professor,” and you’re invited to subscribe too, once there.
If you could go back and do anything different during your time in college what would it be/ why?
Worry less about grades. But it’s complicated by the system. Studying in high school with hopes of college was my way out of trauma. My academic scholarships that paid for college were dependent on maintaining top-notch grades, so that complicated my life and added stress. People told me later I had the first 4.0 in college history. My alma mater was founded in 1873 and was known for academic rigor and grade deflation. Eventually, my whole identity was tied up in a 4.0, and that wasn’t healthy for me. I did read and learn a lot, though, thankfully. Good grades were what would enable me to get an education and change my dicey home and socioeconomic circumstances. That stress contributed to panic attacks and recurring stomachaches.
What has been a memory that has impacted your life? Has this influenced why you wanted to become an educator?
I’ll never forget when I went for my college interview. Dr. Paulina Noble, an English professor, interviewed me. She must have seen a skinny brown kid who was shy, hunched, not confident, but here’s what she said to me: “You have smart eyes.” I carried that comment with me like a powerful secret, wore it inside me like a magic cloak for years, never forgetting her words. This small award-winning liberal arts college in northwest Georgia offered me the most in scholarship money, so of course I chose it. That and for Dr. Noble.
Was there a turning point in your life that guided you to be where you are (career wise, mentality wise)?- open to interpretation
I don’t know what age I was because there were many growing-up years that were and are a blur time-wise. But I remember sitting cross-legged on a rough-textured, late-1960s-era, garish orange carpet, quite worn but always clean. I was high school or maybe college age. This is my childhood bedroom. Suddenly I realized I had to forgive someone because if I didn’t it would be mortally unhealthy for me. And I asked the Universe for that. Help me forgive x-person for x and x and x and x. I don’t want to, but if I don’t, I’m worried for myself. I don’t know how to either, but help me do it. Somehow. I felt a shift. New space opened. I can’t explain it, and it took time, and honesty about my experience, and new boundaries, and it was hard, but after some years, it was done. In some ways, it goes on even into today, because healing from trauma takes ongoing self-compassion, much learning about and honoring of my voice, much meditation, and lots of healthy community.
Could you give us one piece of advice as college students?
Trust your gut.
Who was/is your role model and why?
Well, at 6, it was Batman. The cartoon version from the 1960s. He had genius-level intelligence, was a master detective, a master escapologist, was in top condition physically, was a martial artist, and fought for good and for the underdog—all things I wanted and felt I lacked. Later, my true role model has always been my first and longest best friend, my mother, who exemplifies that person who believes in you, no matter what, and who tells you, always, that they believe in you 100%. She has always seen people as people, never valuing a CEO or a Superintendent or a wealthy person over a cleaning person or a teacher or a person who is homeless or poor. She treats everyone with respect. Her model taught me a lot about kindness. How kindness isn’t earned by some rules that change depending on whether someone is “useful” to another or not, but that kindness is given to all. My mother is the type of person whose heart aches knowing that one person in the world is hungry, without a home, without healthcare, and without love, so that sticks with me, because she has lived out that concern-for-others her whole life.
It honestly surprises me that some educators care a lot about their students (you!) but others just teach the course material and provide minimal support. How would you inspire other educators to provide the care that students appreciate and need most times?
Thank you, first. Your kind words encourage me. I don’t know how to do that, how to inspire others in this way. I think that intention matters because as a teacher, there is so much listening involved, and no matter how much you plan and prepare (which for me is countless hours), you have to be a kind of jazz musician, where you also are willing to turn up, listen to your students and their situations and strengths and needs, and then respond in the moment to those unique human beings who make Cal great (you all). That means you have to be willing to revise your carefully planned curriculum as you go, rather like an experienced, much-practicing-beforehand jazz musician riffs. Michelle Obama said in an interview, “Don’t hug unless you mean it, because people will know the difference.” Her words made me think: “Don’t teach unless you mean it, because people will know the difference.”
If you could have any other career what would u have done?
Race car driver in Europe or a therapist.
What’s your least favorite part about being a professor at Cal?
Grades. I could write a paper or even a book on how I think grades are tied to an ancient oppressive system that doesn’t encourage learning; however, I teach composition, research, and public speaking, where students aren’t learning how to do heart surgery. I do think we are learning comparably important skills: how to spot mal-, mis-, dis-information, how to respect each other and have cross-cultural conversations, how to be good citizens, how to cultivate healthy community, how to honor your voice, and how we can contribute to the Common Good.
What is one piece of advice you would give a college student for the future?
VOTE.
If you decided not to be a professor/writer, what do you think you would be doing right now?
I’d be lonely, because students have brought such meaning to my life! (I really like how you put together “professor/writer” here in your question.)
What is the best gift you’ve received?
So many. Life. My children. Sean.
Did you face any hardships while a student and female that made you question your profession/career? If so, how did you overcome it? I’m interested in stories of overcoming adversity from a female perspective.
My father told me I couldn’t go to college. He said he had three children behind me, and he couldn’t afford it. He wouldn’t help me, and I shouldn’t even apply. I was a senior in high school. So I used money from my job at Granny’s Fried Chicken and quietly applied to three colleges, and it was so expensive to do that. I was the fast-food restaurant’s opening employee, getting there at the crack of dawn to set up the ice cream machine, stock out the restaurant, get the tator tots ready to go for deep frying, chop the coleslaw by hand with a huge knife, sweep the parking lot, and get the cash registers up and running. Once I made it into college, I worked as a secretary to a professor to earn money to pay for my books. This was 1979, and one semester a professor had us buy 8 books, all expensive, and my book bill was $400, which for that time was hugely costly. I looked it up. That’s about $1,650 in money today, for one semester’s worth of books. And all during my years at college, there was hardship at home. I treated schoolwork like it was a job. I worked hard to stay in school and was stressed 24/7, but a few kind professors helped me keep going, too. I’ve never forgotten them or their kindness. I try to pay it forward.
What are some of your favorite books/ books you recommend to read!
There really are too many to mention. I’ve spent countless hours reading. Some of these are from my growing-up years. Pippi Longstocking. The Alchemist. All of Carl Jung. Flowers for Algernon. Anne of Green Gables & Percy Jackson, which I read to our children. Watership Down. Kon-Tiki: Across the Pacific on a Raft. Tolkien, especially The Hobbit. All of Mary Oliver, poetry and prose. Diary of Anne Frank. The Outsiders. Heidi. The Little Prince. All of D. W. Winnicott. All of Ann Ulanov, especially Primary Speech.
What was the worst piece of advice someone gave you?
An English professor at my college whom I looked up to told me when I shared my desire to write children’s books: “You don’t want to do that.” Then told me: “Here’s why you don’t want to do that.” This professor’s response helped me see what not to do. I would listen instead.
A piece of advise for finding your passion
Be self-compassionate. Be kind to you. Listen to your heart. Be with people who support you 100%. Don’t be shy about telling people what you bring to the table. Hone your public speaking skills in your downtime, even if by practicing what you’d say if someone asks you: “Tell me about yourself.”
What is one awesome thing about being a professor that you’ve discovered over the course of your career?
I realized over time that what I say to students and genuinely mean, and what I hope for students (which is that you self-actualize and succeed), I also hope for myself. I only realized that fairly recently. Cal students taught me. So I truly mean: “Honor your voice. Contribute to the Common Good. Go forth and conquer, O ye mighty ones.” And also I think, I’m reminding myself of all that.
What is your dream destination to vacation at
Georgia—to see my family. Next—Anywhere in Hawaii.
What keeps YOU grounded?
Meditation. Breathwork. Walking. Walking meditation. Being out in nature. I go to the marsh to see creation’s beauty. I go to remember I can’t fly and how beautiful bird flight is. To marvel. Family and friends keep me grounded.
What do you think Cal can do better?
Listen to students and act on what is said.
What’s the most interesting thing you have experienced or the most interesting interaction you’ve had?
Standing before the Grand Canyon. That awe is profound. And I’ve had the joy of meeting a lot of people (especially authors) I respect and admire who are also famous, but that’s not what stays with me in the end because everyone is just a person, no matter how accomplished. So here’s my story. When I was in graduate school, my brother was in a severe wreck, he and his friends hit by a drunk driver, who died. Two of my brother’s best friends died. They were in their late teens, early twenties. Gone. I left graduate school at UGA for a week to tend to him. He had nearly died. I was trying to make all As since that was what was expected, and UGA had just shifted to a new way of testing Ph.D. students, and a lot of my friends had failed out of the program, which was distressing. It was all about intellect and analysis, and the stress to perform was heavy. At the end of my time in grad school, I was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa, so I made it, but this was during my Master Degree, so my success was by no means assured yet. Meanwhile, my brother had a cracked skull from the wreck and a chip had come off of it. I saw it. He was also in a back brace, sleeping on the sofa because it was stiffer and also he couldn’t be moved back to a bedroom yet. One night when he was asleep and I was up watching him, ready to bring him water, and help with whatnot, I was thinking how he almost died. I looked over, and he was enveloped, even cocooned in a white light the likes of which I’d never seen before nor since. A graduate student trained to question everything, I was like, This can’t be. I must be imagining things. So I closed my eyes, turned away, kept them closed for a beat to “reset,” then turned back, and opened them. This white light that I’d never seen before and I’ve not seen since was still there. I did that a third time. Still there. So I stared at it. It wasn’t scary but it also wasn’t earthly. It was Other. All I could figure was it was like my brother had been to the other side, he’d been dipped in it, and he had somehow come back. This light was from that dipping. I still don’t know what it was.
Anything I would ask Professor would be what motivates you to wake up every morning? For students it’s to push through schools, or grades, etc. but what is that thing for you?
I get up wanting to help students honor their voices and succeed. I am still so grateful for teachers K-12 and professors who did that for me. There were many. I want to help empower and inspire students to invest in themselves and (continue to) contribute to the Common Good. To do that, two things are needed. I’ve got to continue trying to honor my own voice (a work in progress), and I’ve got to figure out new ways daily to listen to my students, to what they are really saying, and then act on that.
what inspired you to write a lot of your books on spiritual translations?
First, for my own healing. They pulled me to them inexplicably even before my intellect quite knew what they were offering me. The works I’ve translated are widely acclaimed ancient medicine for the soul, self, body, and mind. Childhood trauma led me out into nature, as it did Mary Oliver, the poet. While there, nature saved me, as it did her, and I started meditating, without and before knowing it. The books I translate are all about kindness. They are universal, for everyone. They have global appeal and reach across religious, wisdom tradition, and other divisions, to anyone wanting to know how to be more human (in the best sense of that word). Their authors lived in the 900s, in the 1300s, in the 1600s, and in other ancient times. Though these authors are technically “dead,” they are alive to me, and translating them is what first gave me a community of friends who help me a) deal with my shadow self and also b) discover the gold in my shadow, the good in me and my talents. Since then, I’ve been fortunate, through translation, to make friends with those who are doing this work also today.
What’s your favorite part about being a professor at cal
You. You all. Period. My students. Learning from and teaching my students. You all inspire me. Daily.
what is your favorite part of your career? As an author/professor/translator…what do you like about each job?
As an author, I love how writing articles and books helps me be and stay a student. As I’m researching and writing and revising, I regularly experience those moments of “WTF am I trying to do here? What does this mean? How will I organize this?” Genuine confusion. That’s part of the learning process, when done well. So being an author reminds me how students feel starting something new. It makes me more compassionate as a professor. Then, as a professor, I love when a student says, “I see!” after many struggles, and when a student writes me years later to say, “Thanks for the recommendation. I got my dream job!” As a translator, I love how translation requires me to listen actively so that I can hear what the work and what the author are actually saying rather than what I wish they were saying. That means, I only translate texts that are kind and open-minded inherently. Translating is the most intimate form of reading, it’s meditation, and it requires applying all of my linguistic and scholarly skills in an intense way over sustained periods (a marathon of sorts, and one I love, and trained for). Translating, I find that these classic texts translate me to myself. I grow. I heal. I translate these works for everyone, including my students, and I do it with an inclusive mindset, hoping we can find more peace, meaning, and joy in these texts.
What’s your favorite way to spend a day off?
With my family on a hike in Briones Regional Park. Or, alternatively, with a book and a cup of coffee or tea.
I would like to ask how do we manage stress and emotional downfalls towards the end of the semester? It’s been a rollercoaster of emotions this week and sometimes I just feel like I am stuck.
I’m so sorry to hear you feel stuck. We all know this feeling, and it’s never fun. The awareness of it is helpful, though, so I applaud you for that. It seems for me the solution is complex—being with family and friends; trying to eat well, sleep, drink water, meditate, exercise (one reason walking meditation is so helpful to me); having a support group I check in on and who check in on me; and going to therapy (is sometimes exactly what I’ve needed)—and Berkeley has student-to-student therapy too (which I learned about from student leaders when I was on the Mental Wellness Taskforce, nominated to that by students: https://cabutcher.weebly.com/support-for-students.html Student-to-Student Peer Counseling at Cal and Lean on Me are two programs you can find there on the collaborative teaching website my CWR1A and CWR4B students made. Please try to be kind to yourself. Also, practicing self-compassion (as researched by Kristin Neff) helps me to no end.
What is the best piece of advice you have received?
Three come to mind. A student once said about a comment I made in class, “You do you, Dr. Butcher.” I love that. My therapist in Rome, Georgia, said to me often, “Trust your gut. Don’t forget—trust your gut.” That has stuck with me. A wise person once said to me, “Forgive yourself for where you’ve let yourself down or hurt others. Then ask for forgiveness from anyone you have hurt, and atone, do better. Change. Always practice self-compassion.”
What’s a piece of art (movie, book, music, etc) that changed the way you looked at the world?
Monet. I mean, there are so many movies, books, music, etc, but Monet comes to mind at once. I love how he paints Rouen Cathedral and haystacks, so many of these “same” paintings but at different times of day and/or year, which makes all the difference. He finds the beauty in the nowness of today’s light and this time of day in this season of the year. Those series of paintings are remarkable. When I was a Rotary Scholar at The University of London, these paintings by Monet were exhibited at London’s Royal Academy, I went alone. With Sean. With friends. With family visiting. With friends visiting. I went and went and went. And when I was a Rotary student at Heidelberg eight years before that, right after I graduated from college, I was just an international student from a very rural part of Georgia, Monet was NOT part of my vocabulary, nor were museums. A friend invited me to Zürich, Switzerland, and I went to the Kunsthaus (Art Museum), and there was a wall-to-wall water-lily painting by Monet so all-encompassingly and unbelievably beautiful that before I knew it my usually conscientious, color-within-the-lines 22-year-old self heard an alarm going off. A security guard approaching I darted off realizing I’d touched it without knowing I was going to. Something about Monet.
What was your most wonderful experience in college?
College was hard for me. Sorry to disappoint, but it was, every day hard for me. I was living through family hardship then, and undiagnosed dyslexia and depression, and putting one foot in front of the other was a gargantuan achievement that cost me so much energy. On the face of it, I looked happy, accomplished, thriving, doing all the extracurriculars and well, but I was dying inside. Among all that, having a kind, brilliant teacher take my writing seriously—Wilson Hall—he commented on my work as I do on yours—gently and specifically. He helped me move from perfectionism in writing to trying to honor my voice. Also, during college we went on field trips for Dr. Hall’s environmental class, up in the beautiful wilderness of northwest Georgia Appalachian foothills. We went hiking and canoeing the rapids, and we all spent one night alone, apart from the group, all by myself, just twinkling stars in an ink-black sky, and that experience has been formative and generative for me, to this day. And I’m very grateful not to be living with depression now and that’s one reason I emphasize therapy and asking for help.
Thank you for asking me these questions. You all rock, Go, Bears!
Please note: I am proudly a lecturer, an adjunct professor, thankful to be teaching at a school that encourages respect for all people, but “Ask Your Adjunct Professor” doesn’t have quite the same snazzy, short ring to it as “Ask Your Professor.”
This whisper glides effortlessly across the bituminous tarmac with the lazy downward drift of a paper airplane perfectly creased then released. It sounds astonished, not malicious. Escaping with crystal clarity under the cracked-open glass of a narrow, five-foot-long steel-awning schoolroom window, it reaches the Fiver-like, olive-skinned ears of a skinny eleven-year-old, whose bony shoulders have already begun hunching for other reasons. For one, she’s an introvert who loves books. Hearing this surprisingly feral, disembodied curiosity, they inch an indiscernible fraction more in the direction of the cloudless sky, as she and her family navigate a scorching asphalt parking lot, a patch of melting blackness stranded smackdab in seemingly endless, green, cow-grazing pastures.
With each step, left then right, new sneakers reluctantly leave the sunned and sticky surface with a slight suck-suck sound.
She focuses her gaze resolutely forward, refusing a strong impulse to look left where the long pushed-out window is, but all the same she feels unseen eyes on her and her two sisters.
Her ears burn.
“ÆSˈ ə veɪdʌ.”
“HⱭTˈ pəˈteɪˌtʌ.”
“OƱˈ sʌˈvi doʊ.”
That’s roll call. I wince and pull the corners of my lips up and go along. It’s one reason today I pay attention to how my students’ names are pronounced.
It’s / Ɑˈ səˈveɪ doʊ /, I would say now.
At that point, though, we’re the only Acevedo in the White pages of the phone book. When I check, twelve by then, I don’t need another reason outside my own changing body to make me feel alien and not belonging, but there it is.
This changing makes me self-conscious because it feels like a threat. My bones warn, You drew the short gender straw. My mind asks how long I’ll evade the consequence by choosing too-big t-shirts that bury tender, growing peaks brushing up against their cotton, simultaneously thrilling and scaring me in a society signaling they will not be mine.
At home in the blue-green foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, I grow up eating steaming plates of fried chicken with collard greens and arroz con pollo, not at the same meal. My family and I fork fried liver and onions into mashed potatoes, and spoon black beans with rice and pork. We devour hot fluffy biscuits, we consume fried ripe plantains. We eat salty beef stew, we have spicy chicken fricassee. We enjoy homemade lemon meringue pies, and caramelized flan.
I drink gallons of ice-cold sweet brown tea. I mean Petticoat Junction water towers of it. Also as a kid visiting my dad’s relatives in Miami, I’m granted a grown-up’s breakfast that stars a hot demitasse cup filled to the brim with espresso-shot café con leche, and to the side, toasted Cuban bread for dunking. That is heaven.
Then for lunch we go out with an aunt who always wears bright colors and perfume even to a corner store for some Cuban sandwiches. That simple, underestimated combination of Cuban bread with ham, pork, cheese, pickles, mustard sets a never surpassed standard for sandwich excellence. In between meals, my cousins sneak my brother and me sugary contraband chunks of gritty dark-red guava paste sandwiched between impossibly thick, wonderfully creamy slices of sharply savory orange cheese.
My father and me
My mother and me
With a White mother and a Brown father, I’m born into multiculturalism. At first it means summer trips to Florida from Georgia, a hardworking, taking-nothing-for-granted, overcompensating, flamboyant, brave grandfather who has a thick accent and difficulty with plurals, a different skin tone from those around me, and more, delicious food choices.
It becomes that happy energy I love when my aunts and uncles are all talking at once sitting on the front steps after supper, becoming more animated as the light goes and filling the night air in Little Havana with one “¡Mira!” and “¡Claro que sí!” after another, and smoke curling up from waved cigarettes. It’s being kissed on one cheek, then the other, often, hugged and patted by everybody.
It’s the flickering strangeness of tall votive candles lit and left burning at all hours, with figures on them like a woman looking down, eyes closed, her hands pressed together, dressed in a colorful robe from head to toe, short yellow-orange rays outlining her body. It is also on display on a table in one uncle’s TV room—the biggest, heaviest, loveliest round glass bottle I’ve ever seen, holding a darker-than-tea liquid, and when the sun shines through the window, it looks like amber, but the label on it reads R-U-M.
My skin is not as dark as my Miami cousins’ nor even my father’s Café Bustelo café-con-chocolate tone, since mine has a splash of my mother’s milk and of his mother’s added to it. I’m neither this nor that, but I love my olive hue, write about it in my journals, and feel very Brown looking at those around me.
This mixed-race background, and my gender, are not a fit for the 1970s-1980s South. I look and look for my place. Exclusively run by one end of the Fitzpatrick scale, and by strict commands in Genesis for some to “rule over” me, this world affords me scant space.
But my brave, indefatigably cheerful, hardworking mother faithfully makes PTA phone calls, organizes school fundraisers, bakes endless pound cakes that squeak, cleans up after Halloween school fests, keeps babies in the church nursery, and always makes time to do whatever others ask of her. The community’s respect for her many contributions plus her pigmentation largely protect me.
I thought even then, Others live differently from me—is so fascinating. It makes me feel alive tasting strangely sweet, sandy guava paste for the first time between two smooth slices of tangy cheese. It’s what I think going to school should be like, truly learning, without the torturous spelling tests and other challenges. Multiculturalism experienced as family and self is my first inoculation against society’s suffocating, and inherently violent binary codes.
The main discrimination for me—gender. Two exist then, one strong, one weak. One free, one government-legislated. One virile, one hysterical. I see a future of dishwashing, cooking, and diaper-changing ahead of me. A curtain coming down at the end of a play. Early on I sense that to complain about each unfairness will require constant interruption, incur punishment, and I’ll never get to do the things I want, so I know my place and stay in it, and work like the devil.
This prejudice is mainlined three times a week when my parents take my younger brother and two sisters and me on Wednesday nights and twice on Sundays—with the precision of an addiction—to a Southern Baptist church. Women are not equal with men there. This inequality does not make a person feel like a person.
We’re the only mixed-race family in the pews under that sharply white steeple. My mother and brother look local, she teases the mailman must’ve come through, but the rest of us are decidedly other. Still, my handsome father, who looks a lot like a Cuban Elvis Presley, becomes a glad-handing deacon and gets to stand solemn at the end of pews, one brown hand over the other, both resting where his jacket buttons, waiting straight as a sentry for the gleaming shallow dish, heavy with quarters, to make its way back.
During long church services dark suits stride cleanly up the steps to the pulpit to speak. Often they scream at me with authority. Decreeing women are made inferior by God and are required by divine law to be subservient to their husbands. In Sunday School I’m trained in Evangelical womanhood, which is that the highest, most noble possibility in life is marriage to a man, serving him as my superior; children shall follow, and the woman shall raise them.
As a child, this arrangement puzzles me to no end. If God is loving, how could he make me less-than someone else? Why do just men speak from raised places of power? Why do they shout angrily at me in church, towering over everyone else, while quiet women are always invisibly working, doing things behind-the-scenes that keep the church ticking over?
These questions have never been answered.
My school years are a mess. That likely makes me a kinder teacher.
We move once every two years or so, as my father has difficulty holding a job, and I find it hard to form new friendships that often.
As a student, I always feel wrong, incapable. Reading seems impossible. The words will not stay still. They float in and right back out. Letters switch places, s and c, d and b. Also words like now, no, know. I can’t focus. Standardized reading tests are the worst experience. They make my brain seize and halt. You have to read a passage you have no relationship to, like some jargon-laden textbook excerpt, which wouldn’t intimidate me today, but as a high school student, I’m caught in an undertow. At home we have Reader’s Digest, Guideposts, plus Billy Graham’s Angels on the lid of the toilet tank.
I get in trouble for talking in class. I have several years where I must have been such an annoying student. I try to remember that now, as a teacher. There’s even a black-and-white elementary school photo where I’m turned around talking to someone behind me. In another city a teacher puts me out in the hallway, right beside the classroom door, and the rite of passage is that kids file by on their way to the lunchroom and snicker and point. Even earlier, I’m sitting on a bench waiting for my mother to come pick me up, lucking out since she drove my father to work that day and has the car, and the memory is of soaked underpants and the soggy back of a Singer-sewn dress sticking to the cold metal, making me shiver.
I don’t begin to understand these failures until I’m helping a student who describes his difficulties with reading, which I silently notice resemble my earlier ones, and he says, “I have dyslexia.” I’ve never heard that word before, or if I have, it hasn’t registered. Next I happen on “Words Failed, Then Saved Me” by poet Philip Schulz in the New York Times, describing his late-diagnosed dyslexia, and it resonates. I’m like Ah, I see. I’m well into middle age, too, when I begin to have some compassion for my struggling childhood self.
Today the letters and words rarely switch places, but on occasion they do so gently, without impeding my reading much now. But from kindergarten through college, and beyond to a Ph.D., undiagnosed dyslexia causes me untold grief. I cannot focus and am always anxious. I never sit down to a college test that I’m not holding one hand over my stomach as cramps begin an hour before it and only subside that evening, only to start again with the next test.
Still, I have a deep well of stubbornness, which turns out to be useful. I like books, I just can’t read well. So I read and read and read. One of my favorites is Watership Down. It’s hard going, but life-altering experiences like identifying with the puny rabbit with a sixth sense are what keep me pushing and very gradually allow the act of moving my eyes over printed pages to become one of my greatest joys.
But I remain frustrated for years, watching as friends nail perfect SAT scores and big scholarships to expensive schools. My standardized test scores lag. It’s embarrassing.
My friends have firm plans to go to college. I envy them. Studying is painful, hard, and slow, but I want to go to college too. I’m chopping coleslaw at Granny’s Fried Chicken when my father says to me: “You can’t go to college. I’ve got three more kids after you. I can’t afford it. Don’t ask me again.”
We live in an unincorporated community called Macedonia, near the then equally small town of Canton, Georgia, which doesn’t have a movie cinema. We have well water. It’s soft on hair but bad on teeth. I love our neighbors Hoyt and Earcell, they raise chickens and garden, and let me ramble for hours over their rolling green pastures and woods whenever I am sad or bored or need to flee problems at home, walking miles with only the red-tailed hawks soaring overhead for company. But I itch to see more of the world.
Some teachers help me, and I do the work. Even though I see no progress. What else is there? Behind my father’s back, I apply to colleges, paying for the fees with money from my fast-food job, hoping scholarships will happen that will enable me to go to school; otherwise, I cannot go.
Miraculously they do. I choose the school that offers me the most money. It’s an award-winning liberal arts college offering small class sizes, each not over twenty students, and individual teacher attention for every student. The downside is it’s only two hours from my home in northwest Georgia, but it’s a start, a chance.
Once there, however, I feel awkward. I’m on academic and need-based scholarships and do work-study as a secretary to pay for the expensive books. I type for a professor while many classmates drive new cars. Kind teachers, friends who overlook my oddities, like the semester I wear blue bib overalls solidly, and my doggedness somehow see me through.
My sophomore year brings an unexpected freedom. My Cuban grandfather shoehorns people’s feet into espadrilles and brocades and Oxfords and boots and sneakers and more at a department store, and when he shoehorns enough pumps onto middle-aged women’s callused feet, flashes his mustachioed grin, and charms them into purchases with his enthusiasm, he’s able to buy his long-awaited Oldsmobile Delta 88, and gives me his ten-year-old, faded green Vega. I feel like I am driving a Cadillac. I’m so happy, I don’t care I must turn the AC off to go more than 10 mph up hills, or that it requires me to store quarts of oil in the back and chug in one or more every other time I fill up with gas, or that sometimes it belches heavy white smoke, sometimes black, causing one motorist to shake his fist at me through the fog.
When Ortega (the Vega) dies a few years later, I get a used, dark blue metallic Chevy Chevette hatchback. It looks how a car would if it were mimicking a sneeze, the tiny wheels especially. It, a teaching assistantship, suppers of tuna, canned mixed vegetables, baked potatoes, sometimes Ramen for variation, and not otherwise shopping, for my mother keeps making my dress clothes, carry me through grad school in Athens.
