Grade 5

Anthology  
Personal Narratives and Poetry
9 781636 028828
ISBN 9781636028828
Personal Narratives and Poetry Anthology Grade 5

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English
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Grade 5

Anthology
Personal
Narratives
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ISBN 978-1-63602-882-8

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Contents
Personal Narratives

Anthology

Personal Narratives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

The Prince of Los Cocuyos “The First Real San Giving Day” . . . . . . . . . 6
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“Hello, My Name Is” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24

Introduction to Rosa Parks: My Story and Step by Step . . . . . . . . . 32

Rosa Parks: My Story

“How It All Started” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35

“Not Just Another Little Girl” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36

“We Fight for the Right to Vote” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40

“You’re Under Arrest” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44

Step by Step “A Boy Goes to Washington” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50

“A View of the Earth” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55

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Personal Narratives:
Let Me Tell You a Story

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From The Moth, edited by Catherine Burns. Copyright ©

2013 by The Moth. Copyright © 2013 by Michael Massimino.
Reprinted by permission of Hachette Books.

Excerpts from pp. 21-37 [4558 words] from THE PRINCE OF

LOS COCUYOS by RICHARD BLANCO. Copyright © 2014 by
Richard Blanco. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins
Publishers.

“Hello, My Name Is” by Jennifer Lou from BREAKFAST ON

MARS AND 37 OTHER DELECTABLE ESSAYS © 2013 by Brad
Wolfe. Reprinted by permission of Roaring Brook Press. All
Rights Reserved.

From ROSA PARKS: MY STORY by Rosa Parks with

Jim Haskins, copyright © 1992 by Rosa Parks. Used by
permission of Dial Books for Young Readers, a division of
Penguin Group (USA) LLC.

“A Boy Goes to Washington [Chapter 2]” from STEP BY

STEP: A MEMOIR OF HOPE, FRIENDSHIP, PERSEVERANCE,
AND LIVING THE AMERICAN DREAM by Bertie Bowman,
copyright © 2008 by Bertie Bowman. Used by permission
of One World, an imprint of Random House, a division of
Random House LLC. All rights reserved. Any third party use
of this material, outside of this publication, is prohibited.
Interested parties must apply directly to Penguin Random
House LLC for permission.

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5
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The Prince of
Los Cocuyos
The First Real San Giving Day
by Richard Blanco

November came around and my teacher, Mrs. Echevarría, handed

out some ditto sheets to color for Thanksgiving. The pilgrims’ tall hats
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I colored black, the buckles on their shoes, gold; the cornucopias

of squash and pumpkins, all kinds of oranges and yellows; the huge
turkey, an amber-brown (a turkey, not a pork roast like my family
always had for Thanksgiving). As we colored, Mrs. Echevarría narrated
the story of the first Thanksgiving, enthusiastically acting it out as if
she had been there: “. . . Then the chief of the Indians told Pilgrim

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John, We make big feast for you, and Pilgrim John said, Yes, let us give
thanks for our new friends and for this new land where we are free.”
My teacher seemed to understand Thanksgiving like a true
American, even though she was Cuban also. Maybe, I thought,
if I convince Abuela to have a real Thanksgiving, she and the whole
family will finally understand too.

With new resolve and colored dittos in hand, I approached

Abuela that night as she sat at the kitchen table sorting through
receipts and making a tally of her expenses. “Abuela, do you know what
Thanksgiving is really all about—what it really means?” “¿ Qué?” she
said without looking up from her notebook. “Thanksgiving,” I repeated.
She looked up at me blankly, and I realized she couldn’t understand
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“Thanksgiving” in my properly pronounced English. So I blurted it out

the way most Cubans pronounced it, as if it were the name of a saint:
“San Giving, Abuela, San Giving.” “Oh, el dia de San Giving. Yes, what?”
she asked, and I began explaining: “It was because the Pilgrims and
Indians became friends . The Pilgrims made a big dinner to celebrate
and give thanks to God because they were in the land of the free and
living in the United States.” “What
are pilgreems? And those black
sombreros?” she asked, looking
over my dittos, “We didn’t
wear those en Cuba.”

It seemed
hopeless, but I insisted.
“Mira, Abuela—mira,”
I continued, pointing
at the dittos again.
“They had turkey on
San Giving, not carne
puerco and platanos.
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We are americanos like them now in the United States. We have to

eat like Americans, Abuela, or else they’ll send you back to Cuba.”
“Ay, mi’jo,” she said with a laugh, “we’re not americanos, but no one
is sending us back. We’ll go on our own, when that idiota Castro is
dead—and not one second before.” “But, Abuela , I don’t want to go
back. I’m American. I want to have a real San Giving this year—like
this ,” I demanded, holding up the ditto. “You, americano? Ha—you’re
cubano, even though you weren’t born in Cuba.” She chuckled. “And
what is that food in those pictures? I never saw a chicken that big.”
“That’s not a chicken, Abuela, it’s a turkey. Please—I’ll help you cook,”
I pleaded, but she kept resisting.

I had no choice but to resort to coercion; I told her I wouldn’t

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go buy specials for her anymore at Liberty Mart, the big American
supermarket. “If we aren’t going to be americanos, then why should we
shop there?” I said. She took a long pause and looked over the dittos
again before replying, “Bueno, let me think about it.”

She slept on it for two days before making a decision : “Maybe

you’re right, mi’jo. Maybe we’ll try San Giving how you say,”
she conceded, with one condition: “But I will make carne puerco too,
just in case.” It was settled. That Thanksgiving we would have turkey,
as well as pork. I was ecstatic, but the pressure was on: I knew I
wanted us all to have a real American Thanksgiving, but how? Abuela
certainly didn’t know, and the dittos weren’t enough to go by. I didn’t
know as much about Thanksgiving as I thought I did. I needed help.
That week Mrs. Echevarría had us make turkeys out of paper plates
and construction paper. Surely she would know how to prepare a
real Thanksgiving dinner, I thought, and so I asked her all about it.
“Ay, no,” she told me. “My husband’s mother does all the cooking for
Thanksgiving. His mother is an americana—thank goodness. I can’t
even boil an egg.” Great.

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The next day at recess, I asked some of the American kids in class
what they had for Thanksgiving. “Turkey—what else, dummy? With
stuffing,” Jimmy Dawson told me. “What’s stuffing? ” I asked. He burst
out laughing, thinking I was kidding: “It’s the stuff you put in the
turkey,” he tried to explain. “Oh, you mean like candy in a piñata?” I
proposed. “No, no, dummy . . . with bread and celery and other stuff—
that’s why they call it stuffing,” he tried to clarify. “Oh . . . okay.”
I pretended to understand exactly what he meant.

Nancy Myers told me her mother always made pumpkin

pie. “Pumpkin? Like in Halloween?” I asked, bewildered. Patrick
Pilkington said his favorite dish was candied yams. “Candied? With
marshmallows? Like hot chocolate? On yams?” I asked him. They each
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described the dishes as best they could, but when I asked them how to
make them, they couldn’t explain. “I dunno,” Jimmy said and shrugged,
“my grandmother makes everything.” Great.

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Given all the fuss I had made the week before, Abuela knew
something was amiss when I hadn’t mentioned anything else about
Thanksgiving. “Mi’jo, qué pasó with San Giving ?” she asked. “There’s
only five days left. I have to start cooking, no?” “Abuela,” I whined,
“I don’t know what to buy or how to make anything. What are we going
to do?” “No worry, we can have pork and black beans like we always
have—maybe some Cubaroni? That’s americano enough, no?” she said,
genuinely trying to appease me. “I guess so, Abuela, but it’s not the
same,” I said. “Espera a minute,” she said, and darted to her bedroom.
She returned with that week’s Liberty Mart flyer: “Mira, look—this
will help, mi’jo.” It was a special flyer with pictures like the ones on my
dittos and full of Thanksgiving Day items on sale, including turkeys
and something called Stuffing-in-a-Box, which immediately caught
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my attention. Could it be true? Could Thanksgiving dinner be as easy

to make as instant mashed potatoes and macaroni and cheese? With
the flyer as my guide, I made a list and Abuela calculated the cost to
the penny: $27.35 plus tax; she gave me $30 and off I went on my bike
to Liberty Mart, hoping Thanksgiving would be as easy and tasty as
Spray-Cheese from a can—my favorite!

The store was more crowded than I had ever seen it before. I
roamed around for a while looking for stuffing, but it wasn’t listed on
any of the signs above the aisles. I noticed a lady wearing culottes and
a fancy pendant necklace just like Mrs. Brady from The Brady Bunch—
surely she was American, I thought; surely she would know all about
making a Thanksgiving meal. I worked up the nerve to ask her where I
could find the stuffing, pointing to the picture of it on the flyer. “Well,
how sweet. You’re helping your mother fix Thanksgiving dinner?” she
asked as if I were three years old. “Yes,” I said, seizing the opportunity,
“but I don’t know where to find anything.” “Oh, don’t worry, honey,”
she continued, “just go to the end of aisle eight. They have everything
you’ll need, pumpkin.” Did she call me pumpkin? Why? Or did she

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mean they had pumpkin pie there? I was confused. “Really? Even
pumpkin pie?” I asked. “Oh, I don’t know, honey. I always buy the
frozen ones. It’s so much easier than making one from scratch,” she
offered. Frozen pumpkin pie? Could it be that easy?

Just as Mrs. Brady said, I found everything in the special

Thanksgiving display at the end of aisle eight, including the Stuffing-
in-a-Box. I read the instructions on the box: Boil 1-1½ cups water and
¼ cup margarine in a medium saucepan. Stir in contents of Stuffing
Mix pouch; cover. Remove from heat. Let stand 5 minutes. Fluff with
fork. Just as I had hoped— easy as mashed potatoes. Abuela’s saying,
Cómo inventan los americanos, rang truer than ever to me then.
There were also cans of yams at the display, alongside bags of tiny
marshmallows, just as Patrick Pilkington had told me. What he
didn’t tell me (or didn’t know) was that the instructions for candied
yams were right on the marshmallow bag: Put mashed yams in
casserole. Mix together margarine, cinnamon, brown sugar, and honey.
Top with miniature marshmallows. Bake at 325 degrees until heated
through and marshmallows are bubbly. Even Abuela could make that
once I translated for her. There were also cans of something called

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“Cranberry Jelly” piled up high. Jelly in a can? I wondered. None of

the American kids had mentioned that, but I saw other customers
tossing one or two cans into their carts. I followed suit, figuring it
was important for something.

All I needed was the turkey. Will Abuela know how to cook
something that enormous? I worried, staring at the case full of frozen
turkeys. Sure, the turkeys on the dittos had looked big, but these were
three, four, five times the size of a chicken. Would Abuela freak out?
But I noticed the turkeys also had cooking instructions printed right
on the wrapper. I read them over and discovered the turkey had a timer
that would pop up when it was done—¡cómo inventan los americanos!
The instructions also recommended three-quarters of a pound per
person, so I started counting relatives and family friends who we
considered relatives anyway, blood or no blood: tío Mauricio and my
bratty cousins , Margot and Adolfo; tías Mirta, Ofelia, and Susana; my
godparents; tíos Berto, Pepé, and Regino; the mechanic, Minervino,
and his wife. Altogether, about twenty-something guests,
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I estimated, and figured I needed at least a twenty-pounder. There was

no way I could carry it on my bike all the way home with the rest of the
groceries. I’d have to come back just for the turkey.

Considering the number of guests, I went back to the display

and got two more boxes of stuffing, six cans of yams, four bags of
marshmallows, and three cans of cranberry jelly (whatever that was
for), and then I picked up a frozen pumpkin pie like Mrs. Brady had
suggested. Proud as a Pilgrim in 1621, I floated down the aisles with
my loaded cart, ready for my first real Thanksgiving. When I got
home, I set the bags down on the kitchen table and explained to Abuela
that the turkey was too big and I needed to go back right away. “Pero
how you going to carry it?” she asked, concerned. “Your Abuelo can’t
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take you—he’s at a baseball game with Caco . You’ll have to wait until
mañana.” But I didn’t want to wait until the next day. What if they ran
out of turkeys? I told Abuela I’d tie the turkey to the handlebars on
my bike. She thought it over for a moment, then handed me a piece of
twine from the kitchen drawer where she kept twist ties, matches, and
birthday candles.

I hopped back on my bike, darted to Liberty Mart, got my

bird, and tied all twenty-one pounds of it across the breast onto my
handlebars. But getting it home wasn’t as easy as I thought it would be.
When I rode over the pothole in front of St. Brendan’s rectory like
I always did for the heck of it, one of the knots slipped and the frozen
turkey slid like a shuffleboard puck down the sidewalk and into the
gutter before stopping inches away from the catch drain. No problem,
I thought; it was frozen and sealed in plastic. I picked it up and tied it
even tighter with a few extra knots. But while I was cutting through
a parking lot, it fell again and skidded under a huge four-door sedan.
I crouched down and tried to grab it, but it was just out of my arm’s
reach. Finally I squirmed under the car on my belly and yanked it back,
the turkey and me emerging grimy and blotched with oil.
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By then, the sweaty condensation on the bird made it impossible

to tie to the handlebars. I took off my T-shirt, wrapped it around the
turkey like I was swaddling a baby, and retied it for a third time,
thinking that would do the trick. Not so. Crossing Eighty-seventh
Avenue it came loose again. I swerved to avoid running it over and
fell off my bike. There we were: me and a twenty-one-pound turkey,
lying on the pavement in the middle of a four-lane road just as the
traffic light turned green and cars began honking incessantly. Surely
the Indians and Pilgrims must have had an easier time, I thought.
With one hand on the handlebar and the other barely able to carry
the turkey, I managed to inch my way over to the sidewalk. “That’s
it!” I yelled at the bird. I tied it to the bike seat and walked my bike
the rest of the way.

Once home, I washed off the scuff marks and grime with the
garden hose before presenting the turkey to Abuela. There was a tear

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in the plastic seal, but the turkey was still frozen and intact. “Qué
grande. Qué lindo,” Abuela praised it, none the wiser, and made room
for it in the freezer. Mamá poked around and snooped inside the
grocery bags. “What’s all this for?” she asked Abuela, who looked
at me to answer her. “We’re gonna have a real San Giving this year,
Mamá. Abuela’s going to make a turkey and yams and everything,”
I explained. “¿Cómo? Turkey? Nobody knows how to make that.
Especially not your Abuela. She can’t even cook Cuban food too good,”
she jabbed. “Don’t worry,” Abuela said, trying to remain calm. “You
just sit down and relax—like you always do. Riqui is helping me—and
he knows what he’s doing.” “Bueno,” Mamá replied, “I don’t know, you
better cook something else too—some carne puerco, just in case.” “Sí, sí,
sí—whatever,” Abuela said just as the bird slipped through her hands.
It slid across the terrazzo floor, bounced down the single step from
the kitchen into the Florida sunroom, and knocked into the TV. It lay

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there, mocking us, mocking me, basking in the sunlight, enjoying the
breeze whispering through the jalousie windows and the view of the
backyard mango tree framed by the sliding glass door.

Early on Thanksgiving morning, Abuela told me to put the turkey

outside. “That’s the best way to defreeze it,” she said with authority. I put
the turkey in a baking pan and placed it in the middle of the backyard
terrace where the sun could shine on it all day. And Abuela faithfully
followed all my instructions as I translated them to her, without adding
any additional ingredients of her own: no saffron, no garlic, no cumin.
By two o’clock the yams were ready for the marshmallow topping and we
had finished a pot of Stuffing-in-a-Box. “¿Cómo? Why? Where?” Abuela
asked, as bewildered by the concept of stuffing as I was, despite Jimmy
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Dawson’s explanation, which I parroted to her: “Yes, Abuela, inside.

That’s why they call it stuffing.” We stuffed the bird and put it in the oven
alongside Abuela’s just-in-case pork shoulder, which she had marinated
overnight with bitter orange and garlic mojito.

Wafts of roasting turkey. Wafts of roasting pork. The competing

scents battled through the house while I helped Papá and Abuelo set up
folding domino tables on both ends of our dining table . We assembled
a mishmash of desk chairs, beach chairs, and stools stretching from the
kitchen into the living room to seat all twenty-two relatives. I spent the rest
of the afternoon making construction paper turkeys like Mrs. Echevarría
had taught us in class. I placed one at each setting, then drew pumpkins
all over the paper tablecloth and cut into its edges to make a frilly trim.
Abuela added a bouquet of gladiolus, which didn’t fit the theme but made
the table look better, despite the plastic plates and utensils.

“¡Ay, Dios mío! Come over here!” Abuela yelled for me. “What
is that blue thing?” she asked, alarmed by the pop-up timer in the
turkey, which she hadn’t noticed before and I had forgotten to point
out. “Relax, Abuela. It’s nothing. It’s supposed to pop when the turkey

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is cooked,” I explained. “ Really? Cómo inventan los americanos. They

make everything so easy,” she said, relieved, then slid the turkey back
into the oven, only to call me over again twenty minutes later. “Bueno,
the puerco is done. The turkey must be done too— look at it,” she said.
“Pero, Abuela, the blue thing hasn’t popped up. We can’t take it out!” I
demanded. “Ay, mi’jo, look at the skin, toasty like the puerco,” she insisted,
knocking on it with the back of a spoon. “It’s done I tell you. Además, it’s
already seven o’clock. We have to put the other things in the oven before
everyone gets here.” “Pero, Abuela, we can’t,” I repeated. She ignored my
protest. “What do you know about cooking? Give me los yames and el
pie.” I knew it was useless to argue any further and hoped for the best
as I topped the yams with marshmallows and cinnamon and took the
pumpkin pie out of the freezer.

The doorbell rang. “I told you,” she said smugly. “Ándale—

get the door.” It was the Espinoza clan who arrived first— all three
generations: tía Mirta with her showgirl hips; tío Mauricio wearing
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a tie and jacket, unwilling to accept that his days as a Cuban tycoon
were over; their two children—my cousins—with fancy names:
Margot and Adolfo; and their grandmother Esmeralda, who was
constantly picking food out of her ill-fitting dentures. They burst
through the door with kisses, hellos, and Happy San Givings. Tía
Mirta handed Mamá a giant pot she brought with her. “Mira, here
are the frijoles. I think they are little salty, pero Mauricio was rushing
me,” she said. Minutes later cousin Maria Elena arrived with her hair
in curlers and a plastic-wrapped glass pan full of yuca con mojito.
Happy San Giving. Then tío Berto with four loaves of Cuban bread
under his armpits. Happy San Giving.

At first I thought it was Abuela who didn’t trust that a purely

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American meal would satisfy. But when she was totally surprised by
tía Ofelia’s golden caramel flan, I knew it wasn’t her; it was Mamá
who must’ve asked everyone to bring a dish to sabotage Abuela’s first
attempt at a real San Giving. My suspicion was confirmed when tía
Susana arrived with a platter of fried plantains in a bed of grease-
soaked paper towels. “Mira,” she said to Mamá, handing her the platter,
“los plátanos that you asked me to bring— I hope they are sweet.
Happy San Giving.” “Oh, you didn’t have to bring nothing, pero gracias
anyway,” Mamá said, casually placing her palm against her cheek, a
gesture that always gave her away when she was lying.

Abuela served the pork roast next to the turkey, pop-up timer
still buried in the bird. A Cuban side followed every American side
being passed from hand to hand. “That sure’s a big chicken,” tío Pepé
chuckled as he carved into the bird and then the pork. “What’s this, the
innards?” he asked when he reached the stuffing. I had to explain the
stuffing concept again to all the relatives as he piled generous portions
of turkey and pork on everyone’s plates. Papá was about to dig in when
I insisted we say grace, proudly announcing I would read a special
poem I had written as a prayer in Mrs. Echevarría’s class.
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Dear God:

Like the Pilgrims and Indians did long ago

we bow our heads and pray so you’ll know

how thankful we are for this feast today,

and for all the blessings you send our way

in this home of the brave and land of the free

where happy we shall forever and ever be.

Amen.
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As soon as I finished, tía Susana asked tío Berto, who then asked
Minervino, who then asked Maria Elena, who then asked me what the
heck I had just said. None of them understood a single word of my
prayer in English. “Bueno, ahora en español por favor,” tío Mauricio
requested, and I had to do an impromptu translation of my prayer in
Spanish that ended with a resounding Amen and a roar of “¡Feliz San
Giving! ¡Qué viva Cuba!” from the family. Nothing like the dittos.

And so the moment of truth was at hand, or rather, at mouth, as

everyone began eating. Not even a minute later Mamá asked, “What’s
this with canela y merengue on top? So sweet. Are you sure this isn’t
dessert?” Abuela instantly responded to her spurn: “They are yames,
just like yuca but orange and sweet—that’s all. Just eat.” “Ay, Dios mío—
orange yuca! What about blue beans?” Mamá laughed, and the rest of
the family joined in. “They are not like yuca. They are like boniato.
It’s what they ate on the first Thanksgiving ,” I explained. “Really . . .
they had march-mellows that long ago?” Mamá quipped. She saw my
face crumple. “What else do you know about San Giving, mi’jo?” she
asked me, changing her tone and taking an interest. I went on for a
few minutes, telling the tale of the Pilgrims and Indians in Spanish so
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that everyone could understand. But soon the conversation changed

to tía Mirta’s black beans. “You make the best frijoles in all Miami,”
Papá complimented her, and everyone agreed as they poured
ladlefuls of black beans over their mashed potatoes like it was gravy.
Nothing like the dittos.

“What’s this baba roja for?” Abuelo asked me, holding a dish
with a log of cranberry jelly. I was embarrassed to admit that I hadn’t
figured out what it was for. “Well, it must be for el pan,” Abuelo
assumed, and he began spreading cranberry jelly on his slice of Cuban
bread, already buttered. “Oh . . . sí . . . sí.” Everyone responded to the
solved mystery and followed suit. It was the thing they all seemed to
enjoy the most, besides the roasted pork, of course, which tío Berto
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couldn’t stop praising as perfectly seasoned and perfectly tender. He

spooned the bottom of the roasting pan and poured pork fat drippings
over the lean slices of turkey on his plate. “Ahora sí. Much better. Not
so dry,” he proclaimed after a taste, and then proceeded to drench the
platter of carved turkey with ladles of pork fat swimming with sautéed
onions and bits of garlic. Nothing like the dittos, but at least after that
everyone had seconds of the turkey.

After dessert, Abuela made three rounds of Cuban coffee. Papá

turned on the stereo system and put in Hoy cÓmo ayer, his favorite
eight-track tape with eight billion songs from their days in Cuba. The
crescendo began and Minervino took his butter knife and tapped
out a matching beat on his soda can. Before you could say Happy
San Giving, there was a conga line twenty Cubans long circling the
domino players around the Florida sunroom.

When the conga finished, the line broke up into couples dancing
while I sat sulking on the sofa. You can’t teach old Cubans new tricks,
I thought, watching the shuffle of their feet. There seemed to be no
order to their steps, no discernible pattern to the chaos of their

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swaying hips and jutting shoulders. And yet there was something
absolutely perfect and complete, even beautiful, about them, dancing
as easily as they could talk, walk, breathe.

As I began picking up the rhythm, Abuela dashed into the room

twirling a dishcloth above her head and demanding, “¡Silencio! Silencio,
por favor!” Papá turned down the music and the crowd froze waiting
for her next words. “Tío Rigoberto just called—he said he heard from
Ramoncito that my sister Ileana got out—with the whole familia!” she
announced, her voice cracking as she wiped her eyes with the dishcloth
and continued: “They’re in España waiting to get las visas. In a month
más o menos, they will be here! ¡Qué emociÓn!” She didn’t need to
explain much more. It was a journey they all knew—had all taken just
a few years before. A journey I didn’t know, having arrived in America
when I was only forty-five days old. But over the years I had heard the
stories they always told in low voices and with teary eyes, reliving the

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plane lifting above the streets, the palm trees, the rooftops of their homes
and country they might never see again, flying to some part of the world
they’d never seen before. One suitcase, packed mostly with photographs
and keepsakes. No more than a few dollars in their pocket; and a whole
lot of esperanza. That’s what the Pilgrims must have felt like, more or
less, I imagined. They had left England in search of a new life too, full
of hope and courage, a scary journey ahead of them. Maybe my family
didn’t know anything about turkey or yams or pumpkin pie, but they
were a lot more like the Pilgrims than I had realized.

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The next morning Abuela made toaster treats and café con leche
but didn’t eat, complaining she had had stomach cramps all night long.
She said Abuelo was still in bed, nauseated. Mamá admitted she threw
up before going to sleep, but thought it was the strange Stuffing-in-
a-Box. I had diarrhea, I confessed, as did Papá. Caco claimed he was
fine. None of us knew what to make of our upset stomachs until tía
Esmeralda called. She told Abuela she had been throwing up all night
and was only then beginning to feel like herself again. She blamed it
on those strange yames. Then tío Regino called and said he’d had to
take a dose of his mother’s elixir paregórico, which cured anything and
everything; he blamed it on the flan, thinking he remembered it tasting
a little sour. The phone rang all day long with relatives complaining
about their ailments and offering explanations. Some, like tía Mirta,
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blamed the cranberry jelly; others blamed the black beans or the yuca
that was too garlicky. And some, like me, dared to blame it on the pork.
But surprisingly, no one—not even Abuela—blamed the turkey.

In 1968, Richard Blanco was born into a family of Cuban exiles

in Spain. Shortly after he was born, the family emigrated to the United
States, where they settled in Miami, Florida.

While Blanco was passionately creative growing up, he was also excellent
at math and science, leading him to become a civil engineer. However,
his creativity was not forgotten, and he went on to lead a double life,
pursuing writing alongside his civil engineering career. His dedication
was met with wide success, including the honor of being chosen to read
his poetry at Barack Obama’s second Presidential Inauguration.

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Hello, My Name Is
by Jennifer Lou

The author of “Hello, My Name Is” calls her narrative a graphic

essay. That’s because she carefully selected images to add meaning to the
words of the text. As you read “Hello, My Name Is,” think about how
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the images provide details and descriptions beyond what is stated in the
written words alone.

[Link] charts Jennifer as the most popular girl’s

name in the 1970s, the decade I was born.

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There were so many people in my high school named Jen that

I learned to not respond to it unless my last name followed.

To understand how I got my name, you’ll need to know the name

of everyone else in my family. When my father came to the United
States from China, he chose the name Nelson for reasons he can no
longer remember. I like to think it’s after Nelson Mandela or even
Willie Nelson, but it’s more likely that it’s because his Chinese name,
Neng-Yin, also begins and ends with an N. When my parents had
their first child, they wanted his name to start with that same letter.
They also wanted something unique. My brother’s English name is
Norbert . [Link] shows that Norbert topped the charts
at number 222 in 1920. It wasn’t even in the top one thousand in the
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1970s, the decade he was born.

My parents also chose Norbert because of its meaning: northern

brightness. It’s Germanic in origin. Two years and ten months after my
brother’s arrival, I was born. By then, my mother had learned that you
could never buy souvenirs with the name Norbert on them.

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My mom’s chosen English name is Julie. So when I was born a girl,

they scoured the baby name book for popular “J” names. And they fell
in love with the name Jennifer for both its popularity and meaning: the
fair one. What my mom hadn’t anticipated was that because the name
was so popular, souvenirs with my name were often sold out.

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So my full name is Jennifer Lou. No middle name. Nothing.

Everyone else in my family has their Chinese name as their English
middle name. It’s on official documents, passports, licenses, and in my
brother’s case, his birth certificate. The middle name field on my birth
certificate? Blank. A parental oversight because they hadn’t made the
time to select a Chinese name.
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Having no middle name is even more significant when you grow

up in white, middle-class Connecticut where everyone has one.
It was a rough childhood. Not only did I have to learn how to ski,
how to play tennis, and how to tie sweaters around my neck, I also
had to navigate Puritan New England middle name–less. “You’re
incomplete!” friends would say.

I took matters into my own hands. When I started seventh grade at

Sage Park Middle School, I enrolled as Jennifer Elizabeth Lou. I picked
Elizabeth because it was the whitest name I could think of. And, my
God, I wanted to be white because in Windsor, Connecticut, where less
than one percent of the population was Chinese, white, to me, meant
belonging. It meant being pretty and popular, and that boys would like
me. I had it in my head that they didn’t like me because I was Chinese.
Different. But really, they didn’t like me because I was ugly.

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This is my seventh grade yearbook photo. The antithesis of

delicate and fair. Notice the layered, ’fro-like perm, the buck teeth,
and fangs. Thankfully, the black-and-white photo softens some
of my brilliant fashion choices: a cantaloupe-colored T-shirt with
concrete gray collars and a smoking hot, pink pair of glasses, thicker
than a Coke bottle.

By ninth grade, I was ready to shed my inner white Elizabeth,

mainly because I thought the initials JEL looked stupid. I returned
to plain Jennifer Lou, and I started to like that I didn’t have a middle
name. I liked that I was the only one in the family whose Chinese name
wasn’t their English middle name. I was two separate entities.

My Chinese name is (Lù Wǎn Yú). One May I asked,

“Mom, what does my Chinese name mean?”

“What?” she said, annoyed. “It doesn’t mean anything.”

“Well, what’s Norb’s Chinese name mean then? Also nothing?”

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“Oh, no, his name means ‘joy to the world.’”

Of course it does.

I later pressed for more clarification. I discovered why my

Chinese name never became my English middle name. When I
was born, my mom didn’t have a Chinese name picked out for me.
Instead, my mom sent all my birth information back to Taiwan to a
Chinese astrologer. She needed to know what elements to include in
my name based on my birth details. If you know nothing else about
Taiwanese culture, know that they are crazy superstitious. You can’t
leave rice uneaten on your plate, put your chopsticks standing up in a
bowl, give an umbrella or knives as gifts—and your daughter can’t be
named without an astrologer.
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The astrologer said that my name needed jade. This is the

character for jade:

This is a common variation of the character for jade:

In Chinese culture, jade is said to possess the five essential

virtues of Chinese philosophy: compassion, modesty, courage,
justice, and wisdom. Virtues she thought I might need when trying
to be “the fair one.” So, as she created my name, my mom weaved as
much jade as possible.

Lù, my last name, means land:

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Wǎn means gentle, gracious. Wǎn is traditionally written with the

female root:

But Mom took it out and swapped in the jade root:

Yú is an antiquated version of the character for jade:

I guess that makes my Chinese name mean “the land of gentle

jade.” Pretty lame compared to “joy to the world,” if you ask me.
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So that is how I ended up with two names: a simple English name,

and a customized Chinese one. Actually, if you count my nicknames,
I have at least fifteen names. They range from obvious abbreviations
like J-Lou to more story-oriented ones like Gimpy, Potty Lou, and Evil.

Then there are the nicknames that reflect my stage in life. Five
years ago, in the midst of a post-breakup, mid-career crisis, I came to
a realization. There was no point in trying to be something I wasn’t
(white) or something others wanted me to be (the fair one). I started
making mass changes in my life—challenging old, traditional beliefs
from my past, particularly the negative, self-destructive ones, and
exploring new and healthier trains of thought. When you clean house
and tear down that Great Wall, it’s easy to second-guess what you’re
doing. But I persevered, and through it, I gained a greater sense of
confidence. I started feeling free to be myself, enough so that the
spunk and spark returned to my life, enough so that a good friend
started calling me “Jen 2.0.” I would spit out a sassy, witty comment
and he would hiss, “Watch out! It’s Jen 2.0!”

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I had become a newer, speedier, more enhanced version of the

old me. And I began to love my names for what they are, for what they
aren’t, and for the betweenness that they capture. Because I finally
learned to love the uniqueness that is me.

So if you’re ever in the market for a name, drop me a line; my

family knows a good astrologer.

Jennifer Lou grew up in Windsor, Connecticut in the 1970s. Lou is

a writer in San Francisco, whose work focuses on her life as a Chinese
American. She has founded a group for humor storytelling, works
for a digital publisher, and serves on the board of Youth Speaks, an
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organization dedicated to supporting young poets and writers. She spends

her downtime volunteering at the Monterey Bay Aquarium.

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Introduction to
Rosa Parks: My Story
and Step by Step

In 1954, in the case of Brown vs. Board of Education, the United

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States Supreme Court ruled that the Constitution does not permit laws
requiring the separation of African Americans from whites. Before
then, however, such laws were very common, especially in the South,
where African Americans often had to use separate bathrooms, ride in
separate train cars and attend separate schools. This forced separation
of the races was known as segregation.

In theory, the separate African American facilities were supposed

to be equal to those provided to whites, but this was hardly ever so. In
the case of education, the results of segregation were especially harsh.
Many state governments provided no support to African American
schools, leading to many African American children receiving very
poor educations.

The next two personal narratives are by African Americans who

grew up during the era of segregation. Rosa Parks’s memoir, Rosa Parks:
My Story, written with Jim Haskins, describes her childhood in rural
Alabama, where African American children attended a run down one-
room school house, while the whites in the area went to a very modern

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school that Alabama paid for. Parks also writes about her efforts to fight
segregation, including a very famous act of protest on a public bus.

Bertie Bowman, the author of Step by Step, also grew up in

the south during segregation. At the age of thirteen he moved to
Washington D.C., and despite widespread prejudice against African
Americans, he achieved great success as a business owner and working
for the United States Senate.
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Rosa Parks: My Story

How It All Started
by Rosa Parks with Jim Haskins

One of my earliest memories of childhood is hearing my family

talk about the remarkable time that a white man treated me like a
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regular little girl, not a little black girl. It was right after World War I,
around 1919. I was five or six years old. Moses Hudson, the owner
of the plantation next to our land in Pine Level, Alabama, came out
from the city of Montgomery to visit and stopped by the house. Moses
Hudson had his son-in-law with him, a soldier from the North. They
stopped in to visit my family. We southerners called all northerners
Yankees in those days. The Yankee soldier patted me on the head and
said I was such a cute little girl. Later that evening my family talked
about how the Yankee soldier had treated me like I was just another
little girl, not a little black girl. In those days in the South white people
didn’t treat little black children the same way as little white children.
And old Mose Hudson was very uncomfortable about the way the
Yankee soldier treated me. Grandfather said he saw old Mose Hudson’s
face turn red as a coal of fire. Grandfather laughed and laughed.

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Rosa Parks: My Story

Not Just Another Little Girl
by Rosa Parks with Jim Haskins

I was about six when I started school. Sylvester started a year later,
when he was around five. We went to the one-teacher black school in
Pine Level, in a little frame schoolhouse that was just a short distance
from where we lived. It was near our church, the Mount Zion A.M.E.
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Church, right in the churchyard. In many places the church was used
as the school, but in Pine Level we had a separate schoolhouse on the
church grounds. We had first grade to sixth grade, and there were about
fifty to sixty children in the one room. We sat in separate rows by age,
and at certain times the larger students would go up to read or recite and
then at other times it was the smaller ones’ turn.

My first teacher was Miss Sally Hill, and she was very nice. I
remember she was a light-brown-skinned lady and she had really large
eyes. When the children would tease me or say something to me about
how small I was, I would start crying, and I would go up and sit with
her. And sometimes she would call me up and talk with me.

I was already reading when I started school. My mother taught

me at home. She was really my first teacher. I don’t remember when
I first started reading, but I must have been three or four. I was very
fond of books, and I liked to read and I liked to count. I thought it was
something great to be able to take a book and sit down and read, or
what I thought was reading. Any books I found where I couldn’t read
the words, I made up a story about it and talked about the pictures.

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At school I liked fairy tales and Mother Goose rhymes. I remember

trying to find Little Red Riding Hood because someone had said it was
a nice book to read. No matter what Miss Hill gave me to read, I would
sit down and read the whole book, not just a page or two. And then I
would tell her, “I finished this book.” Then I started learning to write,
making my letters.

I had Miss Hill for only a year. After that Mrs. Beulah McMillan
was our teacher. We called her Miss Beulah. She had been a teacher for
a long time and had taught my mother when she was a girl. My mother
had a picture of this same little school with the students in front of the
schoolhouse on the steps—in
rows on the steps and down
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on the ground. The shorter

ones and the boys were on
their knees on the ground. My
mother never wanted me to
show it to anybody because
it was a real battered-up old
picture. But I liked it. I used to
take my magnifying glass and look at the faces, which were very small.

I liked Miss Beulah, and I liked school. We had fun there. At recess,
the girls would play what we called “ring games” like Little Sally Walker
Sitting in the Saucer, Rise Sally Rise, and Ring Around the Roses. The
boys would play ball. I don’t think the girls played much ball at school.
We used to play at home a little bit. My mother would buy us a ball, and
we’d have to be very careful because pretty soon a rubber ball would be
lost. It didn’t last too long. We called what we played baseball. I wasn’t
too active in it, because if I tried to be active I’d fall down and get hurt. I
wasn’t very good when it came to running sports.

Some of the older boys at school were very good at running sports
and playing ball. They were also the ones who were responsible for wood

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at the school. The larger boys

would go out and cut the wood
and bring it in. Sometimes a
parent would load a wagon up
with some wood and bring it to
the school, and the boys would
unload the wagon and bring the
wood inside.

They didn’t have to do this

at the white school. The town or county took care of heating at the white
school. I remember that when I was very young they built a new school
for the white children not very far from where we lived, and of course
we had to pass by it. It was a nice brick building, and it still stands there
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today. I found out later that it was built with public money, including
taxes paid by both whites and blacks. Black people had to build and heat
their own schools without the help of the town or county or state.

Another difference between our school and the white school was
that we went for only five months while they went for nine months.
Many of the black children were needed by their families to plow
and plant in the spring and harvest in the fall. Their families were
sharecroppers, like my grandparents’ neighbors. Sharecroppers worked
land owned by plantation owners, and they got to keep a portion
of the crop they grew. The rest they had to give to the owner of the
plantation. So they needed their children to help. At the time I started
school, we went only from late fall to early spring.

I was aware of the big difference between blacks and whites by the
time I started school. I had heard my grandfather’s stories about how
badly he was treated by the white overseer when he was a boy. My
mother told me stories the old people had told her about slavery times.
I remember she told me that the slaves had to fool the white people
into thinking that they were happy. The white people would get angry
if the slaves acted unhappy. They would also treat the slaves better if
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they thought the slaves liked white people.

When white people died, their slaves would have to pretend to
be very sorry. The slaves would spit on their fingers and use it to wet
their cheeks like it was tears. They’d do this right in front of the little
slave children, and then the children would do the same thing in the
presence of the grieving white people.
I was glad that I did not live in slavery times. But I knew that
conditions of life for my family and me were in some ways not much
better than during slavery.
I realized that we went to a different school than the white
children and that the school we went to was not as good as theirs.
Ours didn’t have any glass windows, but instead we had little wooden
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shutters. Their windows had glass panes.

Some of the white children rode a bus to school. There were no
school buses for black children. I remember when we walked to school,
sometimes the bus carrying the white children would come by and
the white children would throw trash out the windows at us. After a
while when we would see the white school bus coming, we would just
get off the road and walk in the fields a little bit distant from the road.
We didn’t have any of what they call “civil rights” back then, so there
was no way to protest and nobody to protest to. It was just a matter of
survival—like getting off the road—so we could exist day to day.

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Rosa Parks: My Story

We Fight for the Right to Vote
by Rosa Parks with Jim Haskins

The second time I tried to register to vote, I was put off a

Montgomery city bus for the first time. I didn’t follow the rules.
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Black people had special rules to follow. Some drivers made black
passengers step in the front door and pay their fare, and then we had
to get off and go around to the back door and get on. Often, before
the black passengers got around to the back door, the bus would take

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off without them. There were thirty-six seats on a Montgomery bus.

The first ten were reserved for whites, even if there were no white
passengers on the bus. There was no law about the ten seats in the
back of the bus, but it was sort of understood that they were for black
people. Blacks were required to sit in the back of the bus, and even if
there were empty seats in the front, we couldn’t sit in them. Once the
seats in the back were filled, then all the other black passengers had to
stand. If whites filled up the front section, some drivers would demand
that blacks give up their seats in the back section.

It was up to the bus drivers, if they chose, to adjust the seating

in the middle sixteen seats. They carried guns and had what they
called police power to rearrange the seating and enforce all the other
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rules of segregation on the buses. Some bus drivers were meaner than
others. Not all of them were hateful, but segregation itself is vicious,
and to my mind there was no way you could make segregation decent
or nice or acceptable.

The driver who put me off was a mean one. He was tall and
thickset with an intimidating posture. His skin was rough-looking,
and he had a mole near his mouth. He just treated everybody black
badly. I had been on his bus as a passenger before, and I remember
when a young woman got on the bus at the front and started to the
back and he made her get off the bus and go around to the back door.
One day in the winter of 1943 the bus came along, and the back was
crowded with black people. They were even standing on the steps
leading up from the back door. But up front there were vacant seats
right up to the very front seats. So I got on at the front and went
through this little bunch of folks standing in the back, and I looked
toward the front and saw the driver standing there and looking at me.
He told me to get off the bus and go to the back door and get on. I
told him I was already on the bus and didn’t see the need of getting off

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and getting back on when people were standing in the stepwell, and
how was I going to squeeze on anyway? So he told me if I couldn’t
go through the back door that I would have to get off the bus—“my
bus,” he called it. I stood where I was. He came back and he took my
coat sleeve; not my arm, just my coat sleeve.

He didn’t take his gun out. I was hardly worth the effort because
I wasn’t resisting. I just didn’t get off and go around like he told me. So
after he took my coat sleeve, I went up to the front, and I dropped my
purse. Rather than stoop or bend over to get it, I sat right down in the
front seat and from a sitting position I picked up my purse.

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He was standing over me and he said, “Get off my bus.” I said,

“I will get off.” He looked like he was ready to hit me. I said, “I know
one thing. You better not hit me.” He didn’t strike me. I got off, and
I heard someone mumble from the back, “How come she don’t go
around and get in the back?”

I guess the black people were getting tired because they wanted
to get home and they were standing in the back and were tired of
standing up. I do know they were mumbling and grumbling as I went
up there to get myself off the bus. “She ought to go around the back
and get on.” They always wondered why you didn’t want to be like the
rest of the black people. That was the 1940s, when people took a lot
without fighting back.
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I did not get back on the bus through the rear door. I was coming
from work, and so I had already gotten a transfer slip to give the next
driver. I never wanted to be on that man’s bus again. After that, I made
a point of looking at who was driving the bus before I got on. I didn’t
want any more run-ins with that mean one.

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Rosa Parks: My Story

“You’re Under Arrest”
by Rosa Parks with Jim Haskins

When I got off from work that evening of December 1, I went

to Court Square as usual to catch the Cleveland Avenue bus home.
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I didn’t look to see who was driving when I got on, and by the time
I recognized him, I had already paid my fare. It was the same driver
who had put me off the bus back in 1943, twelve years earlier. He was
still tall and heavy, with red, rough-looking skin. And he was still
mean-looking. I didn’t know if he had been on that route before—they
switched the drivers around sometimes. I do know that most of the
time if I saw him on a bus, I wouldn’t get on it.

I saw a vacant seat in the middle section of the bus and took it.
I didn’t even question why there was a vacant seat even though there
were quite a few people standing in the back. If I had thought about it
at all, I would probably have figured maybe someone saw me get on
and did not take the seat but left it vacant for me. There was a man
sitting next to the window and two women across the aisle.

The next stop was the Empire Theater, and some whites got on.
They filled up the white seats, and one man was left standing. The
driver looked back and noticed the man standing. Then he looked back
at us. He said, “Let me have those front seats,” because they were the

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back entrance
front entrance

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front seats of the black section. Didn’t anybody move. We just sat right
where we were, the four of us. Then he spoke a second time: “Y’all
better make it light on yourselves and let me have those seats.”

The man in the window seat next to me stood up, and I moved to
let him pass by me, and then I looked across the aisle and saw that the
two women were also standing. I moved over to the window seat.
I could not see how standing up was going to “make it light” for me.
The more we gave in and complied, the worse they treated us.

I thought back to the time when I used to sit up all night and
didn’t sleep, and my grandfather would have his gun right by the
fireplace, or if he had his one-horse wagon going anywhere, he
always had his gun in the back of the wagon. People always say that
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I didn’t give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn’t true. I was
not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of
a working day. I was not old, although some people have an image of
me as being old then. I was forty-two. No, the only tired I was, was
tired of giving in.

The driver of the bus saw me still sitting there, and he asked was
I going to stand up. I said, “No.” He said, “Well, I’m going to have you
arrested.” Then I said, “You may do that.” These were the only words
we said to each other. I didn’t even know his name, which was James
Blake, until we were in court together. He got out of the bus and stayed
outside for a few minutes, waiting for the police.

As I sat there, I tried not to think about what might happen. I

knew that anything was possible. I could be manhandled or beaten.
I could be arrested. People have asked me if it occurred to me then
that I could be the test case the NAACP had been looking for. I did
not think about that at all. In fact if I had let myself think too deeply
about what might happen to me, I might have gotten off the bus.

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But I chose to remain.

Meanwhile there were people getting off the bus and asking for
transfers, so that began to loosen up the crowd, especially in the back
of the bus. Not everyone got off, but everybody was very quiet. What
conversation there was, was in low tones; no one was talking out loud.
It would have been quite interesting to have seen the whole bus empty
out. Or if the other three had stayed where they were, because if they’d
had to arrest four of us instead of one, then that would have given me
a little support. But it didn’t matter. I never thought hard of them at all
and never even bothered to criticize them.

Eventually two policemen came. They got on the bus, and one
of them asked me why I didn’t stand up. I asked him, “Why do you

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all push us around?” He said to me, and I quote him exactly, “I don’t
know, but the law is the law and you’re under arrest.” One policeman
picked up my purse, and the second one picked up my shopping bag
and escorted me to the squad car. In the squad car they returned my
personal belongings to me. They did not put their hands on me or
force me into the car. After I was seated in the car, they went back
to the driver and asked him if he wanted to swear out a warrant. He
answered that he would finish his route and then come straight back to
swear out the warrant. I was only in custody, not legally arrested, until
the warrant was signed.

As they were driving me to the city desk, at City Hall, near

Court Street, one of them asked me again, “Why didn’t you stand up
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when the driver spoke to you?” I did not answer. I remained silent
all the way to City Hall.

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Rosa Parks was born in Tuskegee, Alabama on February 4, 1913.

Known as “the first lady of civil rights,” Parks was a lifelong civil rights
activist and a member of the NAACP, where she worked as a youth
leader, and then as secretary to the NAACP president.

On December 1, 1955 in Montgomery, Alabama, Parks refused to give

up her seat on a public bus for a white passenger after the whites-only
section of the bus filled up. She was arrested, and the legal case that
followed became the starting platform for the citywide Montgomery
Bus Boycott, which would then launch a nationwide effort to end the
segregation of public facilities. Parks died in 2005, and is remembered as
an icon of the Civil Rights movement.
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Step by Step
A Boy Goes to Washington
by Bertie Bowman

BERTIE BOWMAN, you are only thirteen years old and here you
are, on your way to the big city, I thought, feeling the seat under me.
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I watched the scenery from the windows, the flat landscape, and the
farmers walking around in their fields in the distance.

My mind was closed to all things past. I was not going to look
back on my farm days, hog slopping, or the long hours of toil. I
didn’t give a thought to things back at home. That train rolled on
all day long, to the song of the metal against the tracks, the blur of
the towns and villages moving past my eyes. I wasn’t going to get
to Washington until around eight o’clock that night, and I told the
porter that I would be glad to work if he needed anyone to help him.

“We’ll see,” the porter said, very aware of the white conductor,
who could make trouble for him if he wanted. “There’s always
something to do around here. But be careful of the conductor. He’s
in charge of the porters and attendants.”

The conductor walked back and forth through the aisle,

checking on the porters and attendants, all colored, making sure
that everything was up to standard. I watched the porter, who kept

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out of his way but did his work. His job was to help with the bags,
to meet the requests of the riders, and put out the steps when the
train stopped. All the attendants worked in the kitchen, cooking
meals and serving the commuters. I learned much on that train.
Everything was so new and different in this environment outside of
Summerton. It was my first experience in a much bigger world. For
example, the train featured a flush toilet and I was only familiar with
outhouses in my rural town.

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As soon as the train made its first stop, I learned how to

put down the steps, gracefully without much fanfare, and then
I watched the porter assist the white ladies in all their finery off
to the platform. We loaded their baggage onto carts. The colored
passengers traveled in separate cars from the white people, cramped
from inferior passage, and did not get the porters’ assistance. They
got off the best way they could. According to the rules, the colored
riders could not put their bags on a cart; they had to carry them.

Later, after I had eaten my lunch of ham and bacon sandwiched

between biscuits, I helped out in the kitchen cleaning off the
tables, and they rewarded me by giving me a free dinner. I took the
dinner back to my seat in the segregated car where all the colored
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passengers ate food that they had brought with them. In that time,
we could not go on the train without taking along our own food and
drink, because we could not buy any in the dining car. That was only
for white people.

The train trip and helping those guys out were very positive
experiences, ones that convinced me that I’d made the right decision.
I could survive away from home. I knew I could survive in the
big city. If I could help those men do their work, after all, I could
certainly hold down a job when I got to the city. Unlike some of the
young guys, I was not too serious about myself. I could get along with
anybody. The porter and the attendant seemed to like me, kidding
me constantly, joking that I acted as though I was just hired on.

“Are you trying to take over our jobs?” they asked me. As it
turned out, it wasn’t just a joke, because later, when the train got
close to Washington, they asked if I would really like a job on the
train. They also said the white conductor said he would hire me
because of the excellent work I had done that day.

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But I had a mission. One mission alone: to be a success in the

city. I told them no. The main reason I did not take that job was that it
interfered with the game plan I’d had in my head for so long. I was going
to go to the city, where I could get a job wearing a uniform, wearing a
hat, and driving a shiny car. Who wanted to go back down South? I knew
I would like it here, with its opportunities. I knew I could do a lot of
growing up here and mature into quite a man. Also, the porter informed
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me a lot about his work schedule, and how he would work without any
time off all the way from the South to New York City and back again.
It sounded almost as exhausting as farm work.

When the train pulled into Washington, I had never seen so

many lights. It was like the world was on fire. As I gathered my stuff,
the porter asked me again if I wanted the train job.

“No,” I said. “I am finally in the city. This is what I have been

waiting for all my life.”

Bertie Bowman was born in Summerton, South Carolina in

1932. The fifth of twelve children on a poor farm, Bowman dreamed
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of leaving for Washington D.C. In 1944, Bowman met campaigning

senator Burnet Maybank, who declared that if anybody in the crowd
that day came to Washington, D.C. they should stop by and see him. At
thirteen years old, Bowman ran away from his home and the farm and
took Maybank up on his offer.

Maybank helped young Bowman get a job sweeping the steps of the
Capitol Hill building. From there Bowman made a place for himself.
Over the next sixty years Bowman would rise through the ranks to
become a staffer for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He kept a
diary of his experiences through those remarkable years, which became
the basis for his autobiography.

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A View of the Earth

by Michael Massimino

In 1984 I was a senior in college, and I went to see the movie

The Right Stuff. And a couple of things really struck me in that movie.
The first was the view out the window of John Glenn’s spaceship—
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the view of the Earth, how beautiful it was on the big screen. I wanted
to see that view. And secondly, the camaraderie between the original
seven astronauts depicted in that movie—how they were good friends,
how they stuck up for each other, how they would never let each other
down. I wanted to be part of an organization like that.

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And it rekindled a boyhood dream that had gone dormant

over the years. That dream was to grow up to be an astronaut. And
I just could not ignore this dream. I had to pursue it. So I decided
I wanted to go to graduate school, and I was lucky enough to get
accepted to MIT.

While I was at MIT, I started applying to NASA to become an

astronaut. I filled out my application, and I received a letter that said
they weren’t quite interested. So I waited a couple years, and I sent in
another application. They sent me back pretty much the same letter.
So I applied a third time, and this time I got an interview, so they got to
know who I was. And then they told me no.

So I applied a fourth time. And on April 22, 1996, I knew the call
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was coming , good or bad. I picked up the phone, and it was Dave
Leestma, the head of flight crew operations at the Johnson Space
Center in Houston.

He said, “Hey, Mike. This is Dave Leestma. How you doing

this morning?”

And I said, “I really don’t know, Dave. You’re gonna have to tell me.”

And he said, “Well,

I think you’re gonna be
pretty good after this
phone call, ’cause we
wanna make you an
astronaut.”

Thirteen years
after that, it’s May 17,
2009, and I’m on space
shuttle Atlantis, about

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to go out and do a spacewalk on the Hubble Space Telescope. And

our task that day was to repair an instrument that had failed. This
instrument was used by scientists to detect the atmospheres of far-off
planets. Planets in other solar systems could be analyzed using this
spectrograph to see if we might find a planet that was Earth-like,
or a planet that could support life. And just when they got good at
doing this, the power supply on this instrument failed. It blew. So the
instrument could no longer be used.

And there was no way really to replace this unit or to repair the
instrument, because when they launched this thing, and they got it
ready for space flight, they really buttoned it up. They didn’t want
anybody to mess with this thing. It was buttoned up with an access
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panel that blocked the power supply that had failed. This access panel
had 117 small screws with washers, and just to play it safe, they put
glue on the screw threads so they would never come apart. You know,
it could withstand a space launch, and there was no way we could get
in to fix this thing.

But we really wanted the Hubble’s capability back, so we started

working. And for five years, we designed a spacewalk. We designed
over one hundred new space tools to be used—at great taxpayers’
expense, millions of dollars, thousands of people worked on this.
And my buddy Mike Good (who we call Bueno)—he and I were
gonna go out to do this spacewalk. I was gonna be the guy actually
doing the repair.

And inside was Drew Feustel, one of my best friends. He was

gonna read me the checklist. And we had practiced for years and years
for this. They built us our own practice instrument and gave us our
own set of tools so we could practice in our office, in our free time,
during lunch, after work, on the weekends. We became like one mind.

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He would say it, I would do it. We had our own language. And now
was the day to go out and do this task.

The thing I was most worried about when leaving the airlock that
day was my path to get to the telescope, because it was along the side of
the space shuttle. And if you look over the edge of the shuttle, it’s like
looking over a cliff, with 350 miles to go down to the planet. And there
are no good handrails.

When we’re spacewalking, we like to grab on to things with our

space gloves and be nice and steady. But I got to this one area along
the side of the shuttle, and there was nothing good to grab. I had to
grab a wire or a hose or a knob or a screw. And I’m kind of a big goon.
And when there’s no gravity, you can get a lot of momentum built up,

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and I could go spinning off into space. I knew I had a safety tether
that would probably hold, but I also had a heart that I wasn’t so sure
about. I knew they would get me back, I just wasn’t sure what they
would get back on the end of the tether when they reeled me in. So I
was really concerned about this. I took my time, and I got through the
treacherous path and out to the telescope.

The first thing I had to do was to remove a handrail from the

telescope that was blocking the access panel. There were two screws
on the top, and they came off easily. And there was one screw on
the bottom right and that came out easily. The fourth screw is not
moving. My tool is moving, but the screw is not. I look close and
it’s stripped. And I realize that that handrail’s not coming off, which
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means I can’t get to the access panel with these 117 screws that I’ve
been worrying about for five years, which means I can’t get to the
power supply that failed, which means we’re not gonna be able to fix
this instrument today, which means all these smart scientists can’t
find life on other planets.

And I’m to blame for this.

And I could see what they would be saying in the science books
of the future. This was gonna be my legacy. My children and my
grandchildren would read in their classrooms: We would know if there
was life on other planets… but Gabby and Daniel’s dad…My children
would suffer from this.

Gabby and Daniel’s dad broke the Hubble Space Telescope,

and we’ll never know.

And through this nightmare that had just begun, I looked at

my buddy Bueno, next to me in his space suit, and he was there to
assist in the repair but could not take over my role. He had his own

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responsibilities, and I was the one trained to do the now broken part
of the repair. It was my job to fix this thing. I turned and looked into
the cabin where my five crew mates were, and I realized nobody in
there had a space suit on. They couldn’t come out here and help me.
And then I actually looked at the Earth; I looked at our planet, and I
thought, There are billions of people down there, but there’s no way I’m
gonna get a house call on this one. No one can help me.

I felt this deep loneliness. And it wasn’t just a “Saturday afternoon

with a book” alone. I felt…detached from the Earth. I felt that I was
by myself, and everything that I knew and loved and that made me feel
comfortable was far away. And then it started getting dark and cold.

Because we travel 17,500 miles an hour, ninety minutes is one

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lap around the Earth. So it’s forty-five minutes of sunlight and

forty-five minutes of darkness. And when you enter the darkness,
it is not just darkness. It’s the darkest black I have ever experienced.
It’s the complete absence of light. It gets cold, and I could feel that
coldness, and I could sense the darkness coming. And it just added
to my loneliness.

For the next hour or so, we tried all kinds of things. I was going up
and down the space shuttle, trying to figure out where I needed to go
to get the next tool to try to fix this problem, and nothing was working.
And then they called up, after about an hour and fifteen minutes
of this, and said they wanted me to go to the front of the shuttle to
a toolbox and get vise grips and tape. I thought to myself, We are
running out of ideas. I didn’t even know we had tape on board. I’m gonna
be the first astronaut to use tape in space during a spacewalk.

But I followed directions. I got to the front of the space shuttle,

and I opened up the toolbox and there was the tape. At that point I was
very close to the front of the orbiter, right by the cabin window, and

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I knew that my best pal was in there, trying to help me out. And I
could not even stand to think of looking at him, because I felt so bad
about the way this day was going, with all the work he and I had put in.

But through the corner of my eye, through my helmet, you know,

just the side there, I can kinda see that he’s trying to get my attention.
And I look up at him, and he’s just cracking up, smiling and giving me
the okay sign. And I’m like, Is there another spacewalk going on out
here? I really can’t talk to him, because if I say anything, the ground will
hear. You know, Houston. The control center. So I’m kinda like playing
charades with him. I’m like, What are you, nuts? But he’s saying, No,
we’re okay. You just hang in there a little bit longer. We’re gonna make it
through this. We’re in this together. You’re doing great. Just hang in there.
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And if there was ever a time in my life that I needed a friend, it

was at that moment. And there was my buddy, just like I saw in that
movie, the camaraderie of those guys sticking together. I didn’t believe
him at all. I figured that we were outta luck. But I thought, At least if
I’m going down, I’m going down with my best pal.

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And as I turned to make my way back over the treacherous path

one more time, Houston called up and told us what they had in mind.
They wanted me to use that tape to tape the bottom of the handrail and
then see if I could yank it off the telescope. They said it was gonna take
about sixty pounds of force for me to do that.

And Drew answers the call, and he goes, “Sixty pounds of force?”

He goes, “Mass, I think you got that in you. What do you think?”

And I’m like, “You bet, Drew. Let’s go get this thing.”

I get back to the telescope, and I put my hand on that handrail, and
the ground calls again, and they go, “Well, Drew, you know, you guys
are okay to do this, but right now we don’t have any downlink from
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Mike’s helmet camera.” I’ve got these cameras mounted on my helmet,

so they can see everything I’m doing. It’s kinda like your mom looking
over your shoulder when you’re doing your homework, you know?

And they go, “We don’t have any downlink for another three
minutes, but we know we’re running late on time here, so if you have
to…” And I’m thinking, Let’s do it now while they can’t watch! Because
the reason I’m taping this thing is if any debris gets loose, they’re gonna
get all worried, and it’s gonna be another hour, and we’ll never fix this
thing. We’ve been through enough already.

So I’m like, Let’s do it now, while Mom and Dad aren’t home.
Let’s have the party.

So I say, “Drew, I think we should do it now.”

And Drew’s like, “ Go!” And bam! That thing comes right off. I
pull out my power tool, and now I’ve got that access panel with those
117 little bitty screws with their washers and glue, and I’m ready to get

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each one of them. And I pull the trigger on my power tool and nothing
happens, and I look, and I see that the battery is dead. And I turn my
head to look at Bueno, who’s in his space suit, again looking at me like,
What else can happen today?

And I said, “Drew, the battery’s dead in this thing. I’m gonna go
back to the air lock, and we’re gonna swap out the battery, and I’m
gonna recharge my oxygen tank.” Because I was getting low on oxygen;
I needed to get a refill.

And he said, “Go.” And I was going back over that shuttle,
and I noticed two things. One was that that treacherous path that I was
so scaredy-cat-sissy-pants about going over—it wasn’t scary anymore.
That in the course of those couple hours of fighting this problem,
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I had gone up and down that thing about twenty times, and my fear
had gone away, because there was no time to be a scaredy-cat, it was
time to get the job done. And what we were doing was more important
than me being worried, and it was actually kinda fun going across that
little jungle gym, back and forth over the shuttle.

The other thing I noticed was that I could feel the warmth of the
sun. We were about to come into a day pass. And the light in space,
when you’re in the sunlight, is the brightest, whitest, purest light
I have ever experienced, and it brings with it warmth. I could feel that
coming, and I actually started feeling optimistic.

Sure enough, the rest of the spacewalk went well. We got all
those screws out, a new power supply in, buttoned it up. They tried
it; turned it on from the ground. The power supply was working. The
instrument had come back to life. And at the end of that spacewalk,
after about eight hours, I’m inside the air lock getting things ready
for Bueno and me to come back inside, but my commander says,

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“Hey, Mass, you know, you’ve got about fifteen minutes before Bueno’s
gonna be ready to come in. Why don’t you go outside of the air lock
and enjoy the view?”

So I go outside, and I take my tether, and I clip it on a handrail,

and I let go, and I just look. And the Earth—from our altitude at Hubble,
we’re 350 miles up. We can see the curvature. We can see the roundness
of our home, our home planet. And it’s the most magnificent thing I’ve
ever seen. It’s like looking into heaven. It’s paradise.

And I thought to myself, This is the view that I imagined in that

movie theater all those years ago. And as I looked at the Earth, I also
noticed that I could turn my head, and I could see the moon and the
stars and the Milky Way galaxy. I could see our universe. And I could
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turn back, and I could see our beautiful planet.

FPO

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And that moment changed my relationship with the Earth.

Because for me the Earth had always been a kind of a safe haven, you
know, where I could go to work or be in my home or take my kids to
school. But I realized it really wasn’t that. It really is its own spaceship.
And I had always been a space traveler. All of us here today, even
tonight, we’re on this spaceship Earth, amongst all the chaos of the
universe, whipping around the sun and around the Milky Way galaxy.

A few days later, we get back. Our families come to meet us at the
airfield. And I’m driving home to my house with my wife, my kids
in the backseat. And she starts telling me about what she was going
through that Sunday that I was spacewalking, and how she could tell,
listening, watching the NASA television channel, how sad I was. That
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she detected a sadness in my voice that she had never heard from me
before, and it worried her.

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I wish I would’ve known that when I was up there, ’cause this

loneliness that I felt—really, Carol was thinking about me the whole
time. And we turned the corner to come down our block, and I could
see my neighbors were outside. They had decorated my house, and
there were American flags everywhere. And my neighbor across the
street was holding a pepperoni pizza and a six-pack of beer, two things
that unfortunately we still cannot get in space.

And I got out of the car, and they were all hugging me. I was still
in my blue flight suit, and they were saying how happy they were to
have me back and how great everything turned out. I realized my
friends, man, they were thinking about me the whole time.
They were with me too.
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The next day we had our return ceremony; we made speeches.

The engineers who had worked all these years with us, our trainers,
the people that worked in the control center, they started telling me
how they were running around like crazy while I was up there in my
little nightmare, all alone. How they got the solution from the Goddard
Space Flight Center in Maryland, and how the team that was working
on that Sunday figured out what to do, and they checked it out, and
they radioed it up to us.

I realized that at the time when I felt so lonely, when I felt detached
from everyone else—literally, like I was away from the planet— that
really I never was alone, that my family and my friends and the people
I worked with, the people that I loved and the people that cared about
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me, they were with me every step of the way.

Michael Massimino was born in Franklin Square, New York

on August 19, 1962. After attending Columbia University where he
earned a degree in Industrial Engineering, Massimino attended the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology for graduate school, receiving
a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering in 1992. During his time at MIT
he applied to NASA to be an astronaut four different times until he
was finally chosen as a candidate in 1996.

Massimino has been on two space flights, logging a total of 571 hours and
47 minutes in space, including 30 hours and 4 minutes of spacewalking
across four space walks. Both of his flights were launched to service the
Hubble Space Telescope, including the final Hubble repair mission.

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Glossary for Personal Narratives

A
abuela, n. grandmother (Spanish)
airlock, n. a chamber astronauts must pass through when entering
or exiting a spacecraft
amiss, adj. improper
antithesis, n. opposite
appease, v. satisfy
astrologer, n. person who predicts the future based on the positions
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of stars and planets

B
blurted, v. said suddenly

C
capability, n. power; ability
Caucasian, adj. white
charades, n. a game in which players act out a word or phrase
without speaking
civil rights, n. protections from discrimination and other
unjust treatment
conceded, v. admitted defeat
conga line, n. a popular Cuban dance

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cornucopias, n. horns containing food and drink

crescendo, n. section of a song where the music becomes loud
and intense
crewmates, n. members of a group that work together on
a ship, aircraft or spacecraft
culottes, n. shorts that resemble a skirt
cumin, n. a spice often used for cooking
curvature, n. bend
customized, adj. built according to individual requirements

D
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detached, v. separated
detected, v. observed
discernible, adj. recognizable
ditto sheets, n. paper copies

E
ecstatic, adj. very happy
eight-track tape, n. a music player that was popular in the
1960s and 1970s
enhanced, adj. improved
España, n. Spanish word for the country of Spain
esperanza, n. hope (Spanish)
expense, n. cost

115
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F
fair, adj. attractive; having a light complexion
fare, n. payment for public transportation

G
gladiolus, n. flowering plants in the iris family
graduate school, n. a school for post-college study
grime, n. dirt

H
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haven, n. safe place

Houston, n. the control center for NASA space flights, located
in Houston, Texas
Hubble Space Telescope, n. a space telescope that orbits the earth

I
incessantly, adv. without stopping
innards, n. internal parts of a body
intimidating, adj. threatening

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J
jalousie windows, n. windows with adjustable blinds
John Glenn, n. one of the first seven American astronauts
jutting, v. extending outwards

M
manhandled, v. physically mistreated
mira, v. look (Spanish)
MIT, n. a university in Massachusetts famous for teaching science
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and engineering
momentum, n. force of movement

N
NASA, n. the United States agency that oversees the space program
Nelson Mandela, n. a South African civil rights leader

O
orbiter, n. part of the space shuttle that carries the crew
overseer, n. supervisor
oversight, n. careless error

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P
parroted, v. repeated
persevered, v. persisted in the face of obstacles
piñata, n. a paper mache figure filled with candy
plantation, n. large farm on which the laborers usually are not
the owners
pothole, n. a hole in pavement
public money, n. government funds
Puritan, n. member of a branch of Protestantism
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R
realization, n. a clear understanding
rectory, n. a house attached to a church
rekindled, v. reawakened, brought to life again
resolve, n. determination

S
saffron, n. a spice often used for cooking
shuffleboard, n. a game in which players push a puck with long sticks
smugly, adv. with confidence that one is correct
sombreros, n. large hats traditionally worn in Spain and Mexico
space shuttle, n. a type of spacecraft used by NASA from 1981 to 2011
spectrograph, n. a type of camera attached to the Hubble Space
Telescope
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spunk, n. spirit; liveliness

stepwell, n. stairway
sulking, v. behaving as if one is unhappy
swaddling, v. wrapping up tightly

T
terrazzo floor, n. tiled floor
tether, n. a cord fastening something or someone to a base
The Right Stuff, n. a 1983 movie about the first seven
American astronauts
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thickset, adj. having a broad body

treacherous, adj. dangerous

V
vacant, adj. empty
visas, n. documents sometimes required for travel between countries
vise grips, n. tools used to hold things firmly in place

W
wafts, n. aromas
Willie Nelson, n. a famous country music singer

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General Manager K-8 Humanities and SVP, Product

Alexandra Clarke

Chief Academic Officer, Elementary Humanities Texas Contributors

Susan Lambert
Content and Editorial

Content and Editorial Sarah Cloos Michelle Koral

Laia Cortes Sean McBride
Elizabeth Wade, PhD, Director, Jayana Desai Jacqueline Ovalle
Elementary Language Arts Content Angela Donnelly Sofía Pereson
Patricia Erno, Associate Director, Claire Dorfman Lilia Perez
Elementary ELA Instruction Ana Mercedes Falcón Sheri Pineault
Rebecca Figueroa Megan Reasor
Baria Jennings, EdD, Senior Content Developer
Nick García Marisol Rodriguez
Maria Martinez, Associate Director, Spanish Sandra de Gennaro Jessica Roodvoets
Language Arts Patricia Infanzón- Lyna Ward
Rodríguez
Christina Cox, Managing Editor Seamus Kirst
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Product and Project Management Product and Project Management

Stephanie Koleda
Ayala Falk, Director, Business and Product Strategy, Tamara Morris
K-8 Language Arts
Amber McWilliams, Senior Product Manager Art, Design, and Production

Elisabeth Hartman, Associate Product Manager Nanyamka Anderson Emily Mendoza

Raghav Arumugan Marguerite Oerlemans
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Dani Aviles Lucas De Oliveira
Spanish Language Arts
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Edel Ferri Darby Raymond-
Thea Aguiar, Director of Strategic Projects, Pedro Ferreira Overstreet
K-5 Language Arts Nicole Galuszka Max Reinhardsen
Parker-Nia Gordon Mia Saine
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Isabel Hetrick Nicole Stahl
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Other Contributors
Bill Cheng, Ken Harney, Molly Hensley, David Herubin, Sara Hunt, Kristen Kirchner, James Mendez-Hodes, Christopher
Miller, Diana Projansky, Todd Rawson, Jennifer Skelley, Julia Sverchuk, Elizabeth Thiers, Amanda Tolentino, Paige Womack
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Series Editor-in-Chief Design and Graphics Staff

E. D. Hirsch Jr. Kelsie Harman

Liz Loewenstein
President Bridget Moriarty
Linda Bevilacqua Lauren Pack

Editorial Staff Consulting Project Management Services

Mick Anderson [Link]

Robin Blackshire
Additional Consulting Services
Laura Drummond
Emma Earnst Erin Kist
Lucinda Ewing Carolyn Pinkerton
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Rosie McCormick Kelina Summers
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Liz Pettit
Tonya Ronayne
Deborah Samley
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Kate Stephenson
Elizabeth Wafler
James Walsh
Sarah Zelinke

Acknowledgments
These materials are the result of the work, advice, and encouragement of numerous individuals over many years. Some
of those singled out here already know the depth of our gratitude; others may be surprised to find themselves thanked
publicly for help they gave quietly and generously for the sake of the enterprise alone. To helpers named and unnamed
we are deeply grateful.

Contributors to Earlier Versions of These Materials

Susan B. Albaugh, Kazuko Ashizawa, Kim Berrall, Ang Blanchette, Nancy Braier, Maggie Buchanan, Paula Coyner, Kathryn
M. Cummings, Michelle De Groot, Michael Donegan, Diana Espinal, Mary E. Forbes, Michael L. Ford, Sue Fulton, Carolyn
Gosse, Dorrit Green, Liza Greene, Ted Hirsch, Danielle Knecht, James K. Lee, Matt Leech, Diane Henry Leipzig, Robin
Luecke, Martha G. Mack, Liana Mahoney, Isabel McLean, Steve Morrison, Juliane K. Munson, Elizabeth B. Rasmussen,
Ellen Sadler, Rachael L. Shaw, Sivan B. Sherman, Diane Auger Smith, Laura Tortorelli, Khara Turnbull, Miriam E. Vidaver,
Michelle L. Warner, Catherine S. Whittington, Jeannette A. Williams.
We would like to extend special recognition to Program Directors Matthew Davis and Souzanne Wright, who were
instrumental in the early development of this program.

Schools
We are truly grateful to the teachers, students, and administrators of the following schools for their willingness to field-
test these materials and for their invaluable advice: Capitol View Elementary, Challenge Foundation Academy (IN),
Community Academy Public Charter School, Lake Lure Classical Academy, Lepanto Elementary School, New Holland
Core Knowledge Academy, Paramount School of Excellence, Pioneer Challenge Foundation Academy, PS 26R (the
Carteret School), PS 30X (Wilton School), PS 50X (Clara Barton School), PS 96Q, PS 102X (Joseph O. Loretan), PS 104Q
(the Bays Water), PS 214K (Michael Friedsam), PS 223Q (Lyndon B. Johnson School), PS 308K (Clara Cardwell), PS 333Q
(Goldie Maple Academy), Sequoyah Elementary School, South Shore Charter Public School, Spartanburg Charter School,
Steed Elementary School, Thomas Jefferson Classical Academy, Three Oaks Elementary, West Manor Elementary.

And a special thanks to the Pilot Coordinators, Anita Henderson, Yasmin Lugo-Hernandez, and Susan Smith, whose
suggestions and day-to-day support to teachers using these materials in their classrooms were critical.
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distribution or reproduction of these materials is forbidden without written permission from Amplify.

All illustrations by Dan Baxter

Illustration and Photo Credits (Personal Narratives)
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distribution or reproduction of these materials is forbidden without written permission from Amplify.
This file is provided exclusively for use by students and teachers for whom the corresponding materials have been purchased or licensed from Amplify. Any other
distribution or reproduction of these materials is forbidden without written permission from Amplify.

  
9 781636 028828
ISBN 9781636028828
Personal Narratives and Poetry Anthology Grade 5

Grade 5

Anthology
Personal Narratives and Poetry
English