Furlena Hampton
Furlena Hampton
Stuck in Between
Growing up in the 21st century, I quickly learned that everything in life isn’t always black and white. At age ten I moved to Las Vegas, where my reality would quickly change. As any incoming freshman in High school, everyone’s highest priority is to “fit in.” However when a few of my closest friends and I received a zone variance letter, the end of the world was near. The state of Nevada assigned school zones through out Clark county, which enforced students to only go to the assigned school within there zone variance. This meant I had to eat lunch alone, social suicide.
It wasn’t until the bus drove up the palm- tree filled road, and I saw BMW’s filled the student parking lot that I realized class differences. The weekend before school I was begging to have my grandpa’s -seen its last day- Buick when I got my license. These kids were rich and they were sure to let you know it. I felt like an outcast. Who am I kidding I was an outcast, for a while. My family couldn’t afford a Louis Vuitton back packs or coach shoes. My family shopped at JcPenny and was proud of it! My fears of sitting alone had withered away when a meet a girl named Kennedy. We ended up hanging out more, and we would always hang out at my house. One day her mom wasn’t able to come pick her up, and my grandpa was going to have to drop her off. She hesitated and said that she would just walk, “seriously, It’s not that far” My grandpa wasn’t going to let a fourteen year old girl walk home alone at night. Even through it seemed like we lived in a re- run of a leave it to beaver episode, you never know anymore. As we got closer, Kennedy became extremely quite and seemed uneasy. When she instructed my grandpa to turn left, she kept her head down. I didn’t understand until I looked up and saw a sign that read, welcome to sunflowers trailer park. One line divided across Clark county open my eyes our society’s perception of class. I was just a girl trying to fit in, stuck in between.
My second awakening to life’s gray areas was when I visited my cousins for the summer. They lived on the south side of Chicago and even though we were from the same bloodline, who would have know our worlds we be so different. All of my life I have been raised in majority white neighborhoods, I went to majority white schools and you guessed it played with majority white kids. So when I went to visit my cousin, she asked me, “Why do you speak so proper? I had no idea what she meant, until she started calling me white girl around her friends. She even told me that I need to stop acting “white” and be real with myself. I wasn’t always accepted at school because I was black, but know I’m not accepted because I was “white”? As I grew older I grew more comfortable in my own skin and what in essence made me, me. Yes my “hood” looked like an ad for new real estate, but does that make me any less black? Lessons I quickly learned, has shaped me into the women I am today. But at that moment in my life, I was still just a girl wanting to fit in, stuck in between.
~By Furlena Hampton