Raven King- My Journey To Finding Myself

My Journey To Finding Myself

Parents teach their children everything they need to know for the future.  They teach you how to read, walk, and become your support system in this world where every man for themselves. If I had to put a finger on it, I would say that my parents had a major impact on my willingness to learn.  Not only because they wanted me to succeed, but because they wanted better for me than they did for themselves.  Being immigrants from Haiti and Barbados, they instilled in my siblings and I the importance of knowledge.  Instead of making learning a dreadful experience like learning math in school, they made it fun.  We would take trips to the museum on the weekends and my mom would tell me about the animals and exhibits about important people from our history.

I was always interested in where I came from and all aspects of my background.  Being from a multicultural family, it was hard to find myself and where it was I belonged.  My mom was born to a mother who was Haitian, Native American, and French, and a father who was Haitian and Chinese so she would tell me stories about the struggles she faced as a child. She came to the United States at the age of 8 years old with my grandmother and her 5 other children.  They didn’t speak English, only Creole and were forced to get accustomed to the public school system.  Because English wasn’t their first language, they were put into ESL classes that made them a target for bullying from their peers.

As a child, I was very inquisitive and wanted to know all the details in every situation I was in.  My mom would tell me stories about her parents and her childhood, but I never felt like I could relate.  It even came down to the way my family looked; my mom’s hair was a different texture than mine, hers would curl but stay long and silky and mine would grow out like Diana Ross.  When it was time to comb my hair it took more effort to straighten my ringlets than her waves.  I would cry and fuss on Sundays because I knew what was coming, it was time to wash y hair and I couldn’t figure out what the difference was.  So this curiosity is what started my love for reading and exploring because I needed to know more.

Literacy was so important to me as a child.  I always wanted to know about everything around me.  I love learning, because it not only has a way of teaching me about myself but the world that surrounds me. Being the first born, my parents would keep me entertained with books.  When I got to about the 5^th grade, I would read more and more books about history and the beauty of African Americans.  Before, I was unsure of my features and wanted to look more like my mom but as I got more into reading it all became clear.  I would see pictures and read great stories about women who looked like me and who were recognized for their greatness.  It was important for me to understand that there wasn’t just one standard of beauty and I needed to see that my version existed as well. For me to know where I was going, I had to know where I came from.

In school we only learned what the teachers wanted us to know, not what we needed to know.  I wanted to learn more than what we were taught in class.  The teachers would talk about the same inventors over and over again, but they never mentioned the ones that really made a difference.  From the invention of the dry cleaning, perms, hair straighteners, it was always as if we only got half of the story when it came to history.  Our textbooks didn’t say much and only continued to explain the lack of information we learned in class.  So I started asking more questions to figure out the missing pieces of this information.  Because you see, that’s how my brain works; it puts things together like parts of a puzzle.  When I got older crossword puzzles became my best friend.  They would be my way of distracting myself from the outside world.

It took me a while to see that it was my job to learn the things I wasn’t being taught in school.  I had to take responsibility for the knowledge I gained in order to pass it on to future generations.  Questioning myself and what I knew led me on a journey to finding who I was by learning about those who came before me.  The history of African Americans and all people of color was getting lost in translation and people were becoming oblivious to that. So literacy my eyes to what I needed to know.