I Offered My Best to a System Not Meant For All the Others I Am

Katrina Byrd-Lanier High School-Class of 1990-Jackson,Mississippi

“She can’t even see the ball,” said the kickball team captain on Holy Ghost Elementary School playground. The sun beat down on me, visually impaired since birth, and all the other brown-faced nine year olds. I had no snappy comeback to escape humiliation back then. Crying was weak. Yelling provoked more insults.  Fighting meant a suspension. With no other options, I stood and absorbed all the messages of how my sight struggles made me worth less than my classmates. 

Four eyes, blind, Coke bottle glasses, cross-eyed left a mark on me.  I was made fun of on the playground, in the neighborhood, and in the classroom. I’m not sure what was worse, insults from children or insults from teachers.

At my eye doctor’s advice, my mother insisted I read regular print like the rest of my class. Sitting in my desk, my nose would be inches from the open book, smothered by a blanket of humiliation.  “Don’t slump like Katrina,” one teacher said to my Holy Ghost Elementary second grade reading group. All eyes on me. 

Time came for Hardy Middle School and Lanier High School... “This child can’t see and she got all A’s” “…blind bitch…” “… with yo’ cross eyed ass…” “She’s outta step… she just can’t get the routine…”  “Ain’t nobody said nothin’ to you…” “Rabbit eye…”  “Yall leave her alone. You know she can’t see.” “Sweetheart, if you can’t see, you shouldn’t be here.”

I made it through. Finally on a beautiful sunny day, my high school principal stood on stage at graduation rehearsal. “You can’t march,” he said in front of an audience of two hundred. Actually, he wasn’t talking to me but to Carrie, the special education girl sitting beside me who’d just had hip surgery. She started sobbing at his declaration. 

I’d always been short of allies so I couldn’t stand by and let Carrie face the slap alone. This wasn’t right. I could feel it in my bones. How do you challenge authority? An unknown author writes, “Hard things are put in our way, not to stop us, but to call out our courage and strength.” Angry, I left my seat. The principal sat in a plush chair when I approached. 

“She will march.” I towered over him with clenched fists.

“She’s too slow.” He crossed one leg over the other.

“If she doesn’t march, I don’t march,” I said. “And If I don’t march Jessie Fields (my daddy) ain’t gonna be happy.”

“She’ll have to be at the end of the line,” he said. “And you’ll have to be back there with her.”

Four hours later, Pomp and Circumstance played. I held Carrie’s hand. We took each step together as her mother’s voice filled the auditorium. “Y’all made it!” she repeated more times than I could count. But where had we made it to? I understood Carrie’s mother’s joy. Completing high school was a worthy achievement, but what was next? Were we, two young girls of varying disabilities prepared for the next leg of our journey? Together we took each calculated step, barely sure of the first before taking the next, knowing the slightest mistake would prove our unworthiness to participate in what we’d earned. Pomp and Circumstance goaded us to dare our attempt at normalcy, pondering the paths available to our disabled bodies.

     After high school, I did three years at University of Southern Mississippi. My first college choice was Millsaps College, which rejected me because my grades were too low. Several years after dropping out of USM, I attended Belhaven College. I think it’s no coincidence that I finally succeeded when I found happiness and acceptance in my personal life with my partner Dora. She encouraged me to apply to Millsaps’ Adult Degree Program. At age 27, I enrolled. The experience was different this time. My attitude toward college changed. Also, being at a smaller college with smaller classes meant more time for discussion. Sharing my perspective and hearing others’ gave me a better relationship to what I was learning and made me want to study harder. I realized that I was running across teachers who had my back. I succeeded. At my 2004 Millsaps graduation, I walked across the stage not sure which was more frightening: people who saw me as nothing or those who saw my true potential.

My Millsaps community and Dora supported me as a writer, and I began to believe in myself. Ten years later, at Dora’s request, I enrolled into Mississippi University for Women Low-Residency MFA in Creative Writing Program. I graduated in 2018. During my MUW time, Dora edited my writing and helped purchase supplies. She drove me to the long and short residencies held on campus. She’d stay in Columbus with me to make sure I had a ride throughout our stay. She wanted me to succeed. 

Dora’s support and love made all the difference. We were in a loving relationship for 23 years despite outside rumblings of racism, homophobia and ableism that intruded in our path from time to time. On February 2, 2020, Dora died of the one hundred percent fatal disease amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, known as ALS. Currently, I continue to stay in the house we shared for twenty years, a snug home on a north Jackson corner surrounded by camellias and yellow and pink Angel Trumpet bushes. 

    In Jackson, Mississippi in the late 1970s and 1980s, my schooling took place in the Black blue-collar neighborhoods of North Midtown, Ellis Avenue and Maple Stree. Did I blame my mistreatment particularly on my own community? I did.  I also blamed my mistreatment on attending sighted school rather than attending the Mississippi School for the Blind. I experienced ableism long before I experienced racism. I also attribute it to ignorance on how people with disabilities should be treated. As a result, I never expected sensitivity from any race. I often felt cursed. If my own community didn’t like me, then why would any other community like me? Of course, I was aware that many White students in Jackson attended private schools. There were very few Whites at any of the schools I attended. I attributed that fact simply to having money for private schools rather than due to overt racism. Due to the pain of my other-ableness, I knew reducing everything to skin color was too simple. I have the stories to prove it. 

    And yet, just this year at age 50, I was shaken while watching a Mississippi Free Press webcast https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAoxFH72MJ0&t=23s on the impact to public schools of the white reaction to school integration. The conversation was on the white Mississippians response to school integration when ordered by the courts in the 1960s. “People have to imagine it. It’s complete white resistance,” said editor Donna Ladd. “White families are not just setting up these schools but transferring tax money into them and very deliberately.” I never realized there were towns that handed over school buildings and textbooks for the use of whites-only academies. That was property paid for by Black taxpayers as well as white. 

The state provided 185 dollar vouchers for white students to use in academies in 1964, a practice struck down by the federal court in 1969. The siphoning is going on to this day, in fact. In 2020, the state legislature greenlighted donors getting state tax credits, not just deductions, for donations to private schools, including the legacy white academies. So far this year, over seven million dollars has been siphoned from state tax collections that could otherwise go to public schools like mine and to infrastructure. I had no idea that actual public resources flowed out of the public school system to reinforce the academies. I had no idea how rigged the system was, actually taking away from public schools like mine.

Through all the shaming during my time in Black schools it never occurred to me that the system was never intended to be fair to any of us. Even as I was regularly humiliated, I felt I owed the system my best effort. Throughout grade school, college and grad school, not once did I ask for Americans with Disabilities Act accommodations. I worked hard to be normal. I didn’t question the system, however much the system didn’t specifically support me. I never questioned that I didn’t owe it my best self. There’s a saying that a system can’t fail those it was never designed to serve. Maybe my pain should have given me a sharper cannier perception overall. Maybe I should have been the first to know that a system that had so little care for me probably didn’t work that well for anyone. I didn’t. 

I know better now. To put that truth in the affirmative, I know that if I can thrive in a system, that’s a signal that it’s likely a thriving one, one that works for all. I’m other-abled, bisexual and Black. I think not fitting in anyone’s boxes shouldn’t make life so unnecessarily hard. My hope is that Black spaces, white spaces and human spaces make room for every kind of other.

That’s why I write. That’s especially why I write this.

Katrina Byrd is a writer and teacher in Jackson, Mississippi. Her play Standing Tough in the Buff was staged in Bay St Louis, Mississippi at Bay St Louis Little Theater. She teaches in the Millsaps College Community Enrichment Series and is a five-time Mississippi Arts Commission Artist Mini-grant recipient. After her partner’s death from ALS, Byrd began advocating for a cure with I AM ALS. Presently, Byrd partners with several ALS organizations: ALS Problem Solvers, ALS TDI and Everything ALS. She has presented at the Henry David Thoreau Society in Concord, Massachusetts four times.