The Color of Pickle

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by Gina Coggio | Feb 27, 2006 8:49 am

(1) Comment | Commenting has been closed | E-mail the Author

Posted to: Gina Coggio

The Independent’s schoolteacher diarist meets up with Brinn — at work, over dinner, and in a classroom for expelled students. Will she come back?

Feb. 16, 2006

“Miss,” Brinn says as she throws her arm around my shoulders, “I think I need to take you out to dinner.”
We are at her workplace and I’ve come to visit her on my lunch break to collect the work she was supposed to have completed. Every time I show up at this fast-food place, she greets me with a hug. I watch her working as I stand behind other customers who are waiting to order, and I see how quickly she moves around in the kitchen and at the take-out window. When we meet eyes, she always does a double-take; then her face breaks out into a wide grin—a million bright white teeth against her dark skin. She drops whatever she’s doing to walk in front of the counter to hug me.
“You do?” I ask as I walk her back to the counter so she can continue working.
“Yeah. What are you doing tonight?”
I tell her I can meet her after school when I finish up working with other kids.
“You can pick me up at my school,” she tells me. I know she’s talking about the school she’s attending while she’s been expelled. She gives me directions, and I tell her I’ll see her later.

When I arrive at her school, I see her down the hallway.
“What up, Coggio!” she shouts. We walk toward each other, and she’s all smiles. I have to go meet her teacher, she tells me, so I can sign her out and find out what I have to do to report her grades to the expulsion teacher.
Brinn pulls the door to the classroom open and announces, “This my teacher.” I can already feel myself blush as six adolescent faces turn towards mine. I’m wearing a green down jacket. I know the kids are looking at me and judging my “style.”
I hear a few kids whisper under their breaths. I take a seat next to the teacher. Brinn sits at the table across from me, next to the other students. The classroom we’re in is an elementary school classroom, so the chairs and tables are really short. There are bright colors on the walls, pictures of capital and lowercase letters taped above the blackboard, and the teacher’s desk at the front of the room. I don’t really care about the classroom; I’m mostly interested in the kids who are sitting around the table. I wonder how they feel—all of them having been expelled for any multitude of violations—doing high school work in an elementary school classroom. I might be the only one in the room for whom the chairs are definitely not too small.
One girl looks at my jacket and mumbles something while I’m talking to the teacher. But Brinn comes to my defense.
“Nah, she’s ghetto,” Brinn tells the girl. That’s a good thing.
I look at the girl—beautiful smooth light brown skin, soft blue eyes, and a bandana around her forehead. I smile a little, knowing she’s just made a crack on my jacket.
“You talking about my jacket?” I ask her.
The girl seems surprised that I’ve heard her, so she doesn’t say anything. But the girl next to her says, “Green is my favorite color. That’s a good color.”
I tell her I think it’s a lucky color. I tell her it’s a money color and that even though I don’t have a lot of it, I sure do like it. She giggles. And the teacher next to me tells me that a lot of New Haven teachers don’t have a lot of it, either.
I stay for a few minutes talking with the teacher and finding out what I need to do for Brinn. As Brinn and I stand up to leave, she says, “Come on, Pickle.”
“Pickle?” I repeat.
“That’s what they called you,” Brinn tells me, pointing at the girls who were across from me.
The blue-eyed girl raises her hand as she tells me, “That’s what I called you.”
I wink. She smiles back.

Brinn takes me to Chile’s, or rather I drive us both to Chile’s on Dixwell. She can’t stop talking. When I took her out to dinner at Roomba a few months ago, the night we went to the bookstore, she did the same thing. I think she’s just glad to have someone to talk to, so I sit back and listen. She complains about her living situation—she’s now living with her sister because her stepfather has kicked her out and changed the locks on her in the matter of a day. She sleeps on the couch at her sister’s, while her little brothers share a bed. She’s eager to have her sister get a new place to live. She says she’s in the middle of nowhere (which I have a hard time believing since I come from a place in the middle of nowhere in Vermont; Hamden is not in the middle of nowhere).

When the food comes, we pick at what we’ve ordered. Meanwhile the conversation flows. She has so much food left on her plate because of all her talking; I finish mine because of all my listening. I ask her about what we’ve been talking about at school recently—the slavery project and about the terms “black” and “white.” Although she says she doesn’t like the terms, she doesn’t use any other terms while we’re in conversation. But she does tell me that she confronts racism on a daily basis at her job. She tells me about a white woman who refused to place money in her hands and instead left it on the counter. Brinn told the woman she was being rude.

Our dinner lasts for an hour and a half. I really haven’t done much talking—mostly because she’s been chattering away for so long, but also because I feel like I’m getting sick. I can hardly hear what she has to say because my head and ears are stuffy and I keep sniffling. (The adjustment back to staying up late at the restaurant is a difficult one to make.) But I let her talk and keep talking.

This whole time, while I’m in the stuffy silence of my head, I wonder if I will ask Brinn if she’s going to come back to our school. Every time I see her, she tells me she’s going to pick up her transfer papers to go to a different school. I don’t want to believe her. I tell her, always, “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.” I feel like she’s asked me out to dinner so she can tell me her plans. But neither of us approaches the subject. That is, until I ask her how she’s been doing on the homework I gave her—twice.

“Miss. I don’t know why you think I’m going to do that work. I’m not going back to that school.” But she’s smiling so I don’t really know if she’s serious.
“Well,” I say, carefully choosing the words, “if you go to a new school, I won’t be there. None of the teachers who know you will be there. You’ll have to be starting all over again with teachers and students who you don’t know. Have you thought about that kind of transition?”
“Yes, Miss.”
“And what will you do about college applications? About college recommendations?”
“You won’t write me a recommendation?”
“I’ve known you for a year and a half, Brinn. I could write you one based on the time I’ve known you. But think how much better it could be if you stayed at school and I could be with you one more year.”
Her face gets serious then and she looks down at her lap.
“I’m not college material, Miss.”
“Don’t let me hear you say that again. Of course you are. You’re going. And that’s it. End of story. Change the subject.”

I bring Brinn back to her sister’s house (which is in a great neighborhood) without knowing even an ounce more than I did before about whether or not she’ll come back to our school. But I do know that what she will respond to is my—and our school’s—fight for her. She needs us to stay on her about what she’ll do with her life. She needs to feel protected. I know she won’t get that way if she goes to a new school. But at our school, she’s got a few teachers who will watch over her no matter what. She’s eligible to return to us on Feb. 28. I’ll give her a call soon to find out for sure.

Comment

posted by: Aldon Hynes on February 27, 2006 1:42pm

I don’t know a lot about Brinn’s particular strengths. All I know is what I’ve read about her here. One important strength she has is a bunch of people that believe in her. It kind of makes me think of a famous black New Haven woman who went on to great things with the help of the belief that others had in her.

Brinn should study the life of Constance Baker Motley, go on to college, and make us all proud of her accomplishments.

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