Twenty-eight years to the day was the start of a six-year odyssey of torture, disillusionment and rebirth. It was in the midst of the worst of times, for me if for no one else. It was my first day of middle school, my first day in Humanities. My first day of realizing that some people saw me as inferior to them. My first day of six years of learning how to cope with the vast contrast between my time at school and my life at home.

This is not another “feel sorry for the author” story about my not-so-wonderful years in Mount Vernon, New York — although you can feel sorry for me if you choose. It’s more about what I learned in those first couple of years, those two years at the A.B. Davis Middle School that have served me well, particularly in graduate school and in the world of work. It’s funny to think that those years would serve me better than my high school or undergraduate experiences. Yet it’s not so funny to recognize that the folks with which I attended school were more diverse and less open to diversity that any other group I’d encounter until I became a doctoral student at Carnegie Mellon. And because of my kufi, as well as my idiotic mouth, I include myself in that category.

Perhaps it was because so many in Humanities had formed cliques long before I’d ever met them. So many of them were in the elementary version of it that I would’ve been at a significant social disadvantage even if I had grown up solidly middle class and with my current level of wisdom by the time I arrived in seventh grade. But the cliques that formed in the weeks after the start of seventh grade — in part a response to the pre-existing cliques — would be of interest to any sociologist, psychologist or sociocultural anthropologist. There was what I called the Italian Club (long before we actually had one as a class), the middle-class-Black-girl clique, the Afro-Caribbean clique, the Black male clique, the affluent Jewish/WASP girl clique, and so on.

Few within our subset actually ventured outside of those cliques and formed lasting bonds during those two years. There were enough exceptions to prove the rule, though. Those exceptions occurred with those designated to have special gifts, talents, backgrounds that made their crossings of divides possible. Kind of like the way we see our current president and others like him today.

But I think that there was a bigger fear among us, one bigger even than race or class, religion or gender. It was even bigger than trying to be cool or not being able to fit in somewhere. It was the fear of competition, of giving anyone in Humanities an added advantage by coming to their defense. It was a fear, a worry, an anguish that was with many of us every day regardless of race, ethnicity, gender, religion or level of affluence. When combined with the unacknowledged diversity of Humanities, it led to a cliquishness that would define most of our in-school friendships and relationships until college.

Perhaps that was why some in our classes could get away with their brand of verbal harassment because the alternative meant sticking your neck out for someone you might prefer not to be in competition with in the future. If you were weak enough to knuckle under because one of the Italian students called you a “monkey” or a “brainiac” for a month, then you didn’t deserve to be in Humanities. A program where the ultimate show of strength was your grades. Not to mention your ability to negotiate the social terrain of the in-crowd, the folks from Grimes and Pennington who’d been taking courses together since at least second or fourth grade. If you failed in one, you had a chance to redeem yourself with the other. If you failed at both, you’d likely either drop out of Humanities or fade into the background.

Despite whatever I thought about my grades at the time, I knew deep-down that I was as good as the best and brightest in Humanities, and better than most of the Whites who were there. As for being a part of the in-crowd, I accepted that this was likely to happen only when there was peace in the Middle East and my stepfather Maurice was out of our lives. At least one out of two wouldn’t have been bad. My strategy from the end of seventh grade on was to at least be on the margins of what was considered “in” socially. If that opened more doors to social acceptance, that was fine. If it didn’t, that was fine, too. At least it beat being a total outcast or an ostracized nerd.

That’s the ultimate lesson I learned in those first couple of years in Humanities around race, class, gender, religion, and grades. That no matter my talents and abilities, my wittiness or lack thereof, that my race and religion brought with it automatic assumptions of weirdness and inferiority, at least for my Italian classmates. That and my mouth made me a Humanities outlier for folks who were in the front and center of the social circle. In climbing out of the social hole I had inadvertently dug for myself this time twenty-eight years ago, I learned so much about diversity and negotiating difference, all of which would help me after my Humanities years.

I’m back. I needed a week off to get ready for the fall stretch. Hope that no one missed me.

It’s been twenty-five years since I wore my kufi for the last time. It was a long hard road that I probably could’ve avoided traveling, three years and three months of constant stares, awkward moments and social isolation. By the end of the summer of ’83, I had stopped believing in the whole Hebrew-Israelite thing. I saw it as the reason for our family’s plunge into poverty, the reason that my idiot stepfather could justify abusing me and my mother and the barrier between me and every person who was a part of my life.

In the months before I became a Christian, I thought about the prospect of not wearing the kufi to school anymore. At least I wouldn’t get weird looks, have kids laughing at me, and draw unnecessary attention to myself. This was a cop-out, a cowardly way of solving a problem that was about more than a piece of clothing. Wearing the kufi every day was just as bad. Not so much because of others’ reactions. If I didn’t believe in the religion of my mother and stepfather anymore, that meant that I didn’t believe in anything else. If I turned away from their version of Yahweh, who would I turn to as The One? I’d been defined by what I wore on my head, what I ate for lunch, what holidays I celebrated, and what I looked like to others for almost two and a half years. Now I was questioning whether I believed in any God at all. If I gave up wearing my kufi now, I might as well have said that the last few years of my life were a waste of time, a denial of things and foods, peoples and cultures that I could’ve embraced all along. If I continued to wear it, I was a hypocrite, someone who’d rather go through the motions of a dead and bizarre religion than stand up for his spiritual well-being.

Darren, meanwhile, had decided that “the day of atonement” and all things Torah went against his digestive tract right from the beginning in ’81. I frequently watched him take his kufi off as he boarded his bus for school. I thought about doing the same thing, many times, in those years. But it wasn’t until after I became a Christian, after trying out for football in August ’84, that I took my kufi off in public for the first time.

On the first day of school, as I was about to walk out of the house with kufi on head, I got really pissed. I couldn’t live another day like this, pretending to be something I wasn’t. I took the symbol of my oppression off my head and threw it on top of the refrigerator by the front door and foyer. I knew that I’d have to answer to Maurice when I got home that day. But I didn’t care anymore. Maurice or not, I was going to live my life as a Christian, on my own terms.

My whole first day of school was spent hearing words like “Congratulations!” and “Wow, what happened?” and other exclamations of pleasant surprise. No one was happier for me than my eventual Crush #2. She gave me a brief hug. It was the second time in less than a year that my classmates had come out in force to support something I’d done. I felt euphoric, like I’d been on-stage performing at a concert in front of a sellout crowd, giving me a standing ovation in the process.

Most of my teachers had no idea why my presence in class had caused such commotion. I knew some people would be surprised by my religious coup d’etat. I even knew that a few folks might be happy for me. But almost to a classmate, it was as if I’d escaped the gulags and defected from the Soviet Union. Five years before the Berlin Wall fell, my Shalom Aleichem wall came tumbling down. If my idiotic mouth was a reason for some of my first problems with my classmates, my kufi and all that it represented must’ve created a permanent sense of separation between me and them. I felt overwhelmed, like I’d won a prize that I wasn’t expecting to get. I also felt ill-at-ease. They might’ve been a few months older, but weren’t these the same folks who hardly talked to me this time the year before?

When I arrived from school that afternoon, my mother was practically waiting for me at the front door.

“You forgot your kufi this morning,” she said, looking as if she knew what I was about to say.

“I didn’t forget. I’m not wearing it anymore. I’m a Christian now,” I said. My mother pleaded with me to wear my kufi when I left for my regular grocery run.

“You know what Judah’s gonna do when he’s see you left it?,” my mother said, almost begging me to put the kufi on again.

“I don’t care!” was what flew out of my mouth as I left for the store.

That evening was when I faced Maurice’s anger. Apparently someone in the neighborhood who went to MVHS told him about my transgression.

“Boy, where’s your kufi?”

“Where it belongs. Off my head.”

“Why didn’t you wear it to school today?”

“Because I didn’t want to. I’ve converted to Christianity.”

“Listen here. I’m gonna whup yo’ ass if you don’t wear it tomorrow.”

“You can kill me if you want to, but I’m not ever going to wear that thing again! I’m a Christian now, and if you kill me, at least I’ll go to heaven!”

At that point, my mother stepped in. “Leave the room,” she said as she got in between me and Maurice in the middle of the living room. I went into my old bedroom, which wasn’t my bedroom during our Makeda days. Even with the door closed and the TV on, I heard them.

“That boy’s defiant. I won’t tolerant it in my house!,” my stepfather half-yelled and half-whined.

“You lost, Judah. If someone’s leavin’ this house tonight, it’s that woman or you!”

About five minutes later, I went back in the living room. Maurice had left, presumably to get some kosher pork fried rice, one of his favorite after-dinner meals. My do-or-die stance had caught Maurice completely by surprise. I never heard about kufis or yarmulkes again.

That kufi was as much as symbol of oppression when it came to my stepfather and family as the N-word would’ve been if I wore that on my head. It symbolized a bizarre religion, our family’s stupidity, my own stubbornness and unwillingness to embrace other people’s ideas, cultures, emotions and intelligence. My teenage years were years to be amazed, but had begun as my years of shock. Maybe, just maybe, I could begin to be a teenager again, without the kufi.