My Voice: A Memoir Read Online Free Page A

hours—an hour on the A train to Jay Street–Borough Hall and then another hour on the F train toward Coney Island. Despite the long subway ride, we would still manage to go back and visit family almost every weekend.
    Brooklyn seemed cool. The proximity of Beach Haven to Coney Island was a plus. There was grass outside our building, which was a big deal, and it was directly across the street from this big tennis bubble that looked like some old monument, where people would play tennis indoors. I didn’t know anybody who played tennis uptown.
    Best of all, there were lots of kids in the neighborhood. Shortly after we moved in, my mother and I were in the hallway of the building when we got to talking with another mom and her daughter who wasabout my age—a pretty Jamaican girl who was tall and thin and who turned out to be Nikki, my future best friend. It all came from her mom and mine talking about how we were both eight years old and both going to PS 216. The moms decided that since the school was about a dozen blocks away, it would be nice if we could walk there and back together. And not only did we do that, but we did it every day for the next four years, sharing almost every experience.
    Every morning we’d stop to get a bagel and two quarter waters for a dollar. That was our daily routine. All we needed was a dollar. Either she had the dollar or I had the dollar, or we scrounged change together to make a dollar. Nikki and I backed each other up, no matter what. She was the most reliable, honest, trustworthy friend any kid could have.
    Nikki lived in 5H, on the fifth floor, with her mother and her two sisters and brother; I lived in 1H, so we’d constantly be running up and down the stairs to go to each other’s apartment. It didn’t take long for her family to become my family and my family to become hers. Now, Nikki’s family is Jamaican, so I’d be the little Puerto Rican girl at full-on Jamaican parties with their family, eating oxtail and rice and peas. That’s how I grew up from then until high school—being raised in part by a Jamaican family. If they were going on a family trip, the first question would be, “Is Angie coming?” And my family embraced Nikki just the same, and so she was raised eating rice and beans and
platanos
. For our mothers, both single working moms, having that extra support system had to have been helpful.
    On top of that, since both of our mothers worked full-time, after school on most days Nikki and I hung out at the neighbor’s house, a West Indian woman from Trinidad named Ann Marie who had two daughters of her own. She did have a lot of rules though.
    Rules? Oooh, not my favorite. Never a fan of too many rules
.
    Ann Marie had a rule that if you wanted to drink orange juice, youbetter not pour it straight out of the container. You better fill the cup halfway with water and mix the juice into the water. “How dare you drink orange juice just by itself?” I guess this was her way to make the orange juice last longer. She also had one of those living rooms that you weren’t allowed to go in and one of those plastic-covered couches that you weren’t allowed to sit on. She was a really good lady, only she was tough and very stern in her rules.
    It was at Ann Marie’s house that I first heard Kurtis Blow’s “Basketball.” I remember getting such a kick out of it and thinking it was so funny that he would be “playing basketball without a basketball.” I needed to learn the lyrics immediately, so I got out a notebook and listened to it on repeat until I could write down every single word and memorize it. This became my thing. I had to know every word of it. And I had to know it better than everybody on the block.
    While there were only a few kids on my block as interested in hip-hop as I was, it didn’t stop me from venturing out to find it. At night I would sneak out to make the ten-block walk from Beach Haven to the Coney Island amusement park—where I’d go