The Stutterer Moves On…

“And don’t condescend to me, take your leave, take your leave, take your leave of me… Disappear, through the air,  I wish you gone and I don’t care…”

Stevie Nicks ~ The Planets of the Universe 

I was a very odd child, I had a lisp and a stutter; I was too tall, too skinny, so awkward that even a kind look in my direction could bring me to tears, I was ambidextrous,  clumsy, ate too slowly and suffered from headaches and nosebleeds and needed braces on my teeth.  Not exactly the perfect Jamaican child that my parents wanted.

I was also an artist, drawing was one of the few things that made me feel good about myself and my life, one of my teachers even wanted to enter me into an art competition, until the day another one of my teachers noticed I was writing with my left hand.  By the end of the day she handed me a note for my parents to sign and return to her.  When I got home and showed the note to my mother, I learned that I would no longer be allowed to use my left hand.  That’s the day I stopped drawing and began to hate writing.

My family doesn’t seem to remember that I had a serious speech impediment back then, but when I was little having both a lisp and a stutter made me stand out for all the wrong reasons.  The lisp combined with my Jamaican accent was bad enough but when I started to stutter, that was like the end of the world to me.  Even at the young age of 6 I knew the stutter came from fear and the more stressed out and worried I was, the more my tongue would get twisted in my mouth.  I used to console myself with the thought that I didn’t want to talk anyway, didn’t want to be noticed, invisibility being easier.  Home was a scary place and school was like a foreign country, I was very rarely happy and my poor tongue paid the price.  I was pulled out of class one day and walked to a janitorial closet.  Inside were stuffed 4 student desks and a chair for teacher.  This little dungeon was where elocution classes were to be held.  I would repeat tongue twisters all day until my speech became acceptable.  Funny thing about this class was that I was the only one who was there for speech therapy, the other kids were in some form of detention and they found my little problem very entertaining.  I can’t remember how long the class went on but I know by the time it was over I could speak without stuttering and I no longer had a lisp or a Jamaican accent.  I had given up my cultural identity in exchange for un-stilted speech, which made me even more of a misfit around Jamaicans; I no longer had a speech impediment but now I was labeled “American” which was not meant as a compliment.

This drove me further inward and made me more conscious of the fact that I didn’t fit in anywhere.  I was born in Jamaica but apparently that was just a place I went to in the summer that I had no right to call home.  Luckily I grew up in Astoria, Queens, a mostly Greek neighborhood, where I observed Greek kids my age, some  of whom had never even been to their country, nonchalantly claiming their heritage and it occurred to me that I had that right too.  An elderly teacher’s aid in my class used to pull me into the hallway and tell me that she hated “immigrants and blacks” and I just couldn’t figure out why I was the object of her contempt.  All throughout my school years and into my working life I was constantly being scolded that I shouldn’t call myself Jamaican because I had no Jamaican accent.  I finally started to understand that being both black and an immigrant is too much for some people to comprehend unless you’re kissing your teeth and speaking patois.  Meanwhile almost every time I find myself speaking more than a couple of minutes I’m reminded that there’s a skinny, awkward, stutter inside who can take over at any moment.

Thank God in the years since that janitor’s closet I’ve only gotten tongue tied a handful of times which has helped me keep my stutter a kind of secret.  On other occasions when I am called to speak in front of a group in my capacity as a health coach, there were times I started out weepy, emotional and sweaty, until I make it through the first couple of sentences and then I’m able to breathe… and to shake off the memories.