Driving to drum practice, I catch sight of Cal’s hair in the rear-view mirror with the twists a teacher at his school gave him. The black spirals rise out of the clean geometry of his scalp, neat and tight, giving me a new angle on his face. He’s going to turn fourteen next month. I’m not sure how much more self-direction I can keep up with.
For years, Cal has looked at pictures of Black and Puerto Rican boys with locs, braids, twists. Dave and I offered, time and again, to take him to a barber. Last year a teacher even offered to do it for him. He refused.
Now he’s sitting behind me in his blue soccer jacket, music binder tucked under his arm, like this new hairstyle ain’t no thing. He looks so confident, so…self-satisfied, I have to remind myself to look at traffic instead of my son’s new ‘do.
I ask him what changed. I had assumed he hadn’t done this before because he didn’t think he could sit that long, or didn’t want his hair pulled. One of the moms once said he was “tender-headed.”
“All the kids told me not to,” he says. “They said it wouldn’t look good.”
I ask which kids, were they? The white kids? He answers absently, “Mostly” and then reviewing it he corrects himself, “Yeah, all of them who said that were white.”
A lot of white people have an opinion on Black people’s hair
I tell him that a lot of white people think they should have an opinion on Black people’s hair. I talk too much about history and culture but then I realize I should just say, “I’m glad you did what you wanted.”
The twists weren’t the first sign. In the last six months Cal asked to go off his medication, accepting responsibility for his behavior in a way he never had before. For Christmas he asked to redecorate his bedroom into a deep-purple, LED-saturated den that had me thinking of Tim Meadows’ The Ladies Man skit from SNL.
And then there was school: he no longer wants to go to the school we worked hard to get him into. He was so afraid I’d say no that he went to his brother Sam and his grandmother first. I had to admire how thoughtfully and strategically the kid was working toward his goals.
I, in turn, crashed out on my therapist, convinced this transition would become my whole life again, waking up at 3 a.m., spiraling, straining to keep an even keel as Dave joked that I was “Sherlock Holmes-ing” the Committee on Special Education.
My therapist said, “Let Cal do this with you…”
My therapist said, “Let Cal do this with you. Last time it was so hard because you did it alone. Now you have him.” So I did what she suggested. I asked him to write a letter to his principal. This is the letter he wrote, edited for grammar and conventions.
Dear Principal Timm,
Thank you for taking the time to read my letter. Today, I would like to talk about some new goals I have in my life. I hope you will want to help me reach them. My goal is to go to Our Lady of Victory (OLV) elementary school in Lackawanna. It’s a small school with four students in the 7th-grade classroom. I would like to join their soccer team and chess club.
The school goes to 8th grade, which means if I went there, I would go there until I apply to go to Timon. I like how the older grades get to help the little kids. I am good with little kids and showing kindness to others. I can handle being in a regular classroom now. I’m better at listening, following rules, and dealing with other kids.
When I first started at Falk, I didn’t know how to read, write, or even talk to my peers without getting out of control. I started in 4th grade, and I had just come out of being home-schooled; that was hard for my mom to see, that I wasn’t getting a good education.
Before that, I used to go to a school named EVCS. They didn’t teach me how to read or write, and they kept me out of the classroom a lot, so I didn’t get to see my friends in class. But when I came to Falk, everyone helped me, especially in 5th grade. I had a teacher who cared about me. She helped me when kids were saying stuff to me out of school, and she helped me read and write. She pushed me to my limit. She saw how I could do good in life, and now I want to be that person.
On top of that, my mom, dad, and my grandpa enrolled me in Sylvan Learning, where they helped me get my reading skills up-to-date. Now I am reading at a 6th and 7th grade level. I
have earned Merit Roll and Honor Roll since I’ve been at Falk.
So, dear Principal Timm, I would like you to help me reach my goal of going to OLV. I would like it if you would sit down with my mom and help me come up with a plan to reach this goal.
Thank you for your consideration.
Sincerely,
Cal Ferguson
This is a kid who has taken stock, understood the trade-offs, and is choosing his next step with purpose
On the ride home from drums, Cal said he will feel sad to leave Stanley Falk, not sad like regret, but sad because striving means sometimes you have to leave the thing that made the next step possible. He said if he does change schools, he’ll miss the Black teachers who welcomed him into Black culture in ways that felt natural, nurturing, and affirming. One of those teachers gave him a rite of passage by twisting his hair. He knows his next school won’t offer that.
That’s the difference I keep seeing now: this isn’t a kid caught in the swirl of his own nervous system, reacting impulsively to frustration or trying to whirl out of discomfort. This is a kid who has taken stock, understood the trade-offs, and is choosing his next step with purpose.
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