Jovan Mays – TRANSCRIPT
As a poet in the schools, I see just under 200,000 kids every school year. I start out each session by asking the same question: “How many of you would consider yourselves to be a poet?” At the second grade level, you’ll see every hand shoot to the sky like they’re trying to grab a cloud and squeeze it dry, but by the time that I get to a room filled with juniors in high school, I’d be lucky if I saw five hands.
And I ask you today, how many of you would consider yourselves to be a poet? My point exactly. You see, I have to investigate this, because what else is a poet but a dreamer with a pencil, a strapped scribe stretching stories, the voice of the voiceless, an iniquity avenger accounting accuracy, but most of all: the exclusive author of their own story, controlling order with imagination, again and again. I was taught this by my grandmother, Marilee Roberts Mays. See, it’s third grade, family genealogy project, Southeastern Aurora. I am one black kid in a sea of white kids.
We are learning about who our grandparents’ grandparents are. I’m sitting next to my best friend, Kate Deputy. She is my best friend because we share the same birthday: Earth Day. I can recall days going out on recess and looking at the great lawn and going like this and then staring at each other and saying, “Look what we grew.” Yeah, we were weird kids, and we loved projects like this. And Kate flips the page and discovers that in her Dutch ancestry she has royalty, and I looked over at her and said, “Kate, you know what that means, right?” She said, “What?” I said, “You’re a princess, like a real live princess!” I told the whole class, “Kate’s a princess, Kate’s a princess!” and we laughed, you know? We laughed like kids laugh at that point in time. Meanwhile, my teacher, Miss Chambers, the lady who taught me poetry and how to country two-step, is sitting in the corner of the room looking like she is auditioning for a first date.
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