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On Summer Experiences
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In Their Own Words
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On Summer Experiences
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In Their Own Words
Fire, Water, Family: Moving Past Fear into the Future
by Cleopatra Counts
It was hot that night on Gordon Avenue in Providence, so hot that it made people take cold showers.
I was about twelve years old, and the streetlights had been on for hours. I stood around with my
friends enjoying the summer night, people watching out for us from the windows of our two-story wooden houses.
Nobody expected the black cloud that came all at once from the factory across the street and
swept through the neighborhood like butter on toast. As flames erupted from the building,
all down the street shadowy figures began to run from their houses through the smoky haze,
like it was raining gold coins instead of fire. As the heat from the flames got worse, the fire trucks
had to push their way down the street through the crowd that stood and watched. People scattered
frantically, screaming and falling on each other. From where we took shelter inside my house, we
could see that the wind was blowing the sparks to the roofs of nearby buildings that were
catching fire, too. We knew our house was probably next, but for a long while we stayed inside
where the firefighters had told us, until we got so scared that we had to leave.
Looking back, I can see moments of intense fear all through my life so far. Some of them,
like that fire in our neighborhood, came from actual physical danger. I remember falling
overboard into Zone 5 whitewater on a Maine rafting trip I took with the Crusaders, a youth
group I was in when I was thirteen. Until I was finally rescued I spent at least half an hour being
thrown by the freezing cold water into whirlpools and against rocks. I tried to hold on to my
friend’s hand before she was swept away, tried to time my breathing so I wouldn’t
drown with water in my lungs, tried to catch the lines they were desperately throwing me from
the raft. On the way home from that trip, our big yellow school bus swerved to avoid a truck
that had hydroplaned on the rainy highway and we ended up in a collision. Please, just
let me get home, I was thinking.
How do I move past my fear and live from day to day? I do it by finding a light inside me, an
inner peace and faith where I can always take refuge, where nothing can enter unless I let it.
I remember that that everyone has that light inside them, and so I don’t choose to throw
back at other people the things they say to me. Instead, I think of positive things about myself.
And I try to keep the light alive by surrounding it with the things it needs.
When I am upset, I use writing or crying as my outlet. At school
we write in our journals three times a week, whatever we are thinking
about or feeling. Our advisor writes back to us, letting us know
that someone cares. I listen to the slow songs of Mariah Carey;
because she is multi-racial, I can relate to her and feel like I’m
not alone. I make a plan every day of what
I need to do, and then I do it. All these things have helped me
learn to walk right through my fears like they’re not even
there. A lot has happened to me, but I try not to dwell in my problems
and fears. I know something better is out there for me, and I am
ready to take it as it comes.
Cleopatra Counts is a senior at the Met
School in Providence, Rhode Island.
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Some of my fears come from inside my family, not from outside. I have never really known my
father, who is Portuguese and Cape Verdean. Because my race was not the same as his, he
rejected me and my mother when I was born. My mother and her other children are all
African-American and Native American, and my brothers and sister used to hit me and verbally
attack me, calling me “white girl” and “mutt.” I remember being locked
in my mother’s dreary bedroom, lying on the arctic floor and crying, my brother’s
spit on my face. I remember my mother kicking me out of the house, and staying with friends and
relatives until I finally moved back in. I had nightmares about getting cancer after my grandfather
died from it, my grandmother got breast cancer, and then a dangerous tumor appeared on my
mother’s arm. I dreamed of going bald from chemotherapy, of my flesh decaying on my bones.