Mom, Dad, College, and Me
Duhaney, Cornel
Mom, Dad, College, and Me CORNEL DUHANEY I am the seventeenth or eighteenth, possibly even the nineteenth, child of my father. But who's counting? Certainly, he's not. I don't know much about his...
...Looking back, I see my actions as ridiculous, but I was a boy with a plan...
...Mary's Parish that had one street lamp...
...My mother ungrounded me, and instead had me write an essay about a topic of her choice each week...
...Hearing this, I uprooted each and every vegetable...
...The one class I failed that year was English...
...This was not the main cause of my slacking off, however...
...It motivates me to know that she cares about my education...
...My father in Jamaica had nothing to do with my education in America...
...To both my parents, my success was a sign that I should stay in school and become a doctor or something like that...
...He will graduate from Lehman College in 2012...
...I wasn't the valedictorian at Astor Collegiate Academy, and I haven't ended up at the world's best college...
...But the greatest motivator was the belt...
...Finding out that no one would beat me if I didn't turn in my homework was like finding out that I was invincible...
...Instead, I was an immigrant kid with a funny accent...
...Nor did I want to be like my grandparents, who had never finished school...
...bullying was a problem as well...
...I had won a few thousand dollars for scoring a perfect grade of 100 in all of my classes...
...My aunt pushed me to do well in school, and hearing my mother's voice on the phone also motivated me...
...All we could hope for while growing up were sporadic visits from him...
...Because so few people have the opportunity to go to school in Jamaica, doing well academically tells others that you are worth the price of tuition...
...I wanted an education— farming wasn't enough for me...
...In Jamaican schools, if you didn't have your homework ready, you got a beating...
...It became easy for most of the students in my class to dislike me...
...I was three...
...If it had not been for my family—particularly my mother—I think that could have been my fate...
...166 in the South Bronx that September and did OK in my classes, but not great...
...All the parents I knew pushed their kids to do well in school...
...The teacher refused to accept my completed homework because I spelled the word "color" as "colour" and "center" as "centre...
...I was amazed at how kids in America could waste away the opportunity for education, when people in my country were counting pennies to achieve it...
...My dad moved in to his uncle's home, and by the age of fifteen he knew everything there was to know about a car...
...By the end of the following year, my writing had improved, and I had finally become friends with most of my classmates...
...Then came the women...
...I pronounced "vegetable" one syllable too long, emphasizing the "e" that everyone kept telling me was silent...
...James, Jamaica...
...I heard her voice more frequently than I heard my father's, despite the fact that he lived in the same parish as I did...
...I expected everyone to like me for being a good student, as they did in Jamaica...
...Like many Jamaican men, my father wasn't expected to be a nourishing parent, but he was expected to support his children financially, which he did...
...The visits didn't last long, however—he and my mother were "on and off" for the first couple of years of my life, and then they were "off" for good...
...In class I answered too many questions correctly, and the teacher told too many people that they should follow my example...
...At times, I, too, slacked off, but I always had my family and certain teachers to remind me of the importance of education...
...On the rare occasion that we spoke by phone, he would ask, "How's school...
...I would reply, "Good...
...My father was born in 1948, in St...
...Some of us were luckier than others...
...He paid for the move and supplied her with rent money each month...
...My mother's brother wasn't even able to go that far and is illiterate to this day...
...after all, they were paying for it...
...My aunt remarked, "Wow, you could be a farmer...
...She could not afford to be away from her job in America for long...
...My mother, who was born in 1966, was a bartender who left school in the eleventh grade because her parents could no longer pay for her education...
...tradition...
...Cornel Duhaney was born in 1989, in Jamaica...
...I don't know much about his relationships with all his children—in fact, I don't even know all my siblings—so I can't fully assess the level of his irresponsibility...
...Things were much tougher for their generation...
...By the age of twenty-three, Dad had four children, three of them born in the same year...
...My mother continued to push me, doing whatever it took to make me to do well...
...He has never lived with any of us in a stable household...
...He was making all the money he needed...
...And that was it...
...Thus, no one makes fun of you or picks on you if you get good grades...
...I came to America in 2000, where I met my mother for what seemed to me the third time...
...I do know that I am a number to him...
...They pushed me to come out on top in all my classes, and more often than not, I did...
...She even went as far as paying me $10 for every 100 I got...
...By the time I got to high school at Astor Collegiate Academy in the Bronx (the name sounds more prestigious than the school), I had gotten back on track with my childhood plan to go to college, get a degree, and find a good job...
...Before she went back, she told me how proud she was of me...
...I didn't see my mom again until she visited me when I was seven, but the visit was brief...
...I am on schedule to graduate in 2012, at which point I will most likely go on to graduate school to study counseling psychology My mother still asks me how I'm doing in my classes...
...My first memory of my mother is of her leaving for America...
...In the inner-city middle schools and high school I attended, I often got the sense that my classmates and I were expected to drop out and become failures— join gangs, become teenage parents, and so on...
...I feel glad, as well as lucky, that I haven't been a disappointment...
...I took it upon myself not to become like the people I saw in the slums...
...Before I was born, my father told my mother that he did not want his child to be born in Bellfield, a rundown country area in St...
...This is not uncommon in Jamaica—the price tag on high school tuition is exorbitant...
...He even gave some of our mothers businesses—usually bars—so they could make a living on their own...
...If you were smart, kids in your school would even try to be your friends...
...I may not have met everyone's expectations of me...
...I started the sixth grade at Roberto Clemente P.S...
...Needless to say, I always did my homework and never forgot it at home (as I sometimes did once I was living here...
...education systems...
...He dropped out of school at the age of fourteen to become a mechanic...
...This did not hurt his reputation among his friends...
...When I was a baby, Dad visited every other day and stayed over some weekends...
...I once planted a few seeds in the garden, and they grew within a few weeks...
...Now that I'm in college, my plan seems to be working out well...
...I'm pursuing my bachelor's degree at Lehman College, with a major in psychology and a minor in Japanese...
...He saved until he could open his own business, and when he finally did, things were good...
...Indeed, to my knowledge, my father is well respected by everyone who knows him, except for his children...
...My stepfather (Mom had gotten together with him before I arrived) grounded me immediately...
...But I have met enough expectations to avoid being viewed as yet another casualty of the Jamaican or U.S...
...She left me with my aunt and older cousin, but she called often enough that I didn't feel abandoned...
...While my father didn't want me growing up in the countryside, my mother didn't want me growing up in Jamaica, period...
...There are no "true" public high schools in the U.S...
...He never completely neglected us, and he saw to it that we were taken care of...
...The voice on the phone had a face again, and I was glad...
...In choosing which college to attend, I took into consideration my family's finances and calculated that I could always transfer to a better college if I wanted...
Vol. 58 • January 2011 • No. 1
