Imagination Experience Research Assignment

Imagination Experience Research Assignment

Instructions/Descriptions

Imagination Experience Research Assignment

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Read The Story and Answer the Following Questions Below.

1. How does the writer understand poverty as a child? How does this understanding evolve as she grows up?
2. What is it about moving from one neighborhood to the next that shapes the writer’s understanding of poverty?
3. What did you learn from this story?
4. How did this story resonate with your own understanding or experiences?

Out of the Cold House Zayda Sorrell-Medina

I was awakened by a loud thump in the middle of the night. The bedroom doors fluttered open and the light flickered on. Before me, a tall man appeared from the back room. His shirt was torn at the bottom and his hair was filled with lint. He held my eldest brother, Jonathan, eleven, mercilessly by the neck.

Jonathan’s long and lanky legs dangled in midair. His cinnamon brown face slowly turned pulsing red. He scratched the tall man’s face to fight him off, but the tall man squeezed harder. Jonathan’s arms fell to his side and his legs grew limp.

In my four-year-old mind, nothing made sense. The bustle of the St. Louis ghetto that normally bled into the night was nonexistent. The world around me stopped. The piercing sound of my eldest brother gasping for air echoed in my head. He could not breathe, and I had stood there, helplessly watching.

My brothers and sisters were at home that night. Crystal, three, and Maria, two, both fast asleep. Ricardo, five, must have been asleep in the other room. Andres, ten, who was known for his quick temperament, watched stiffly from the hallway, his nose flared, and his forehead filled with veins. He dashed into the other room and returned with a hammer in his right hand, ready to pounce. The tall man smirked.

My mother, who was out a lot, was at home that night. She saw the sinister look on the man’s face and quickly ran to Andres. “Give me the hammer,” she said, ripping it from my brother’s hand. Her terror filled eyes shifted towards the tall man, whose nails were still planted deeply in Jonathan’s throat.

She leaped into the air and swung the hammer, hitting the tall man in the temple. The man stumbled backwards, his cheeks landing firmly against the wooden floors, his mouth and eyes wide open, blood oozing from his head. The world around us stopped.

My mother stood over the bloody body with the hammer in her shaking hands. She looked over her shoulder at Jonathan, who lay on the floor gasping for air. She dropped the hammer and ran up to him, crouched to her knees, and cradled him in her arms.

I also wanted to run up to Jonathan and hold him, kiss him. I had never seen him like that before, lying helplessly on the floor. He was strong, beating all the boys in the neighborhood at flipping. He stayed at home from school to watch us when my mother was not at home. But now, Jonathan was on the floor choking, trying to catch the sweet breath of life.

“Come on,” my mother screamed, her voice pierced my ears and I turned to her. “No one comes between me and my children!” She clamped her hand around my tiny wrists and pulled me out of the bed. She threw Maria on one hip and Crystal on the other. Andres helped Jonathan up from the floor, and we all ran out of the house, down the crumbling steps of the front porch, across the empty lot, past the willows, under the moon’s beaming light.

The St. Louis ghetto was surreal. The soporific heat of the Midwest sunk into my skin, making my palms sweat. I closed my eyes and ran through the night. I glanced up at the sky, teeming with stars, and then, I turned to my mother and asked, “Are we going to the moon?” “Yes darling,” she said tenderly as we ran along. “We are going to the moon.”

I was happy to be going to the moon and leaving the ghetto behind. In my neighborhood, the houses were dilapidated, boarded up, and crumbling. Empty lots went on for infinity, filled with paper wrappings, broken glass, and cigarette buds. The streets were filled with potholes and in the crevices of the sidewalk, weeds grew.

Crime was an everyday talk. One could commonly find on any corner a woeful beggar, a loquacious alcoholic, or a coquette prostitute. There were few jobs in the St. Louis slums, if any. To survive, young boys dropped out of high school to sell drugs. Young women exchanged their paper food stamps for cash. Old women sold candy from their homes, and old men sold random items such as jewelry and shoes on empty lots.

Inside of our home, the mattresses reeked of urine, the kitchen was filled with roaches, and the floors were covered with glass bottles and dirty diapers. When it rained, the water finagled its way into the walls of our home, dampening our floors, clothes, and beds. I called our home the Cold House because we were always cold. We did not have hot water so we took cold baths, or no baths at all. We had no covers and so our bodies were always cold. When I saw the man choke my brother, my heart grew cold.

We did not go to the moon that night. Instead, somehow, we ended up at my grandparent’s house around the corner. I remembered that night my mother was restless. She stood by the window in the living room peeping through the blinds. I pretended to be asleep, but from the slit of my eyes I studied the geometry of her face.

Her copper yellow skin filled with freckles, high cheekbones, and paper-thin lips. Her deep brown eyes stared fiercely out the window. This was the only memory of my mother before my siblings and I were taken away by the state due to my mother’s drug addiction. Some of us were adopted, others went to foster care, and I was sent off to live with Aunt Doris.

I wanted to say goodbye to the park: its avocado green grass my brothers and sisters ran through barefoot; the scented flowers at the entrance; the hot rocks that burned our feet and made us jump; the old women who gave out free summer lunches in church hats with feathers, ribbons, and flowers; the girls with their tightly fitted jeans and hoop earrings; the children from the neighborhood who ran frantically when we played tag; the swings, the slides, and the tire that hung from the tree.

I wanted to say goodbye to my neighbor Jasmin. We were around the same age. I knew that she was rich because every day she wore a different outfit. Moreover, her clothes were always neatly pressed and her thick hair nicely braided. When my toilet did not work, I used her bathroom.

Her restroom had two toilets; one for big people, and another one for small people. I loved the feeling of the steaming hot water, foamy bubble gum soap, and thick towels against my skin when I washed my hands in her bathroom. The air conditioning blowing from the wall. The beach wall paintings hanging above me.

One day when I used her bathroom, a brown critter crawled into the faucet. I jerked back and pointed.

“What’s wrong?” she asked. “I saw something brown.” “A roach?”

“You mean, you have roaches too?” Jasmin rolled her eyes in annoyance. “Everybody got them.” “Everybody?” “Everybody.” I couldn’t believe it. Rich people had roaches too.

I later learned that Jasmin was not rich, as she lived in the same insulated ghetto that I did. The only difference was that her home was well groomed. The lawn neatly trimmed and the bed of flowers plump. Inside of her there was frosty air conditioning. Despite these material things, Jasmin was subject to similar environmental woes that the ghetto brought. Street gangs, violence, and crime.

It was nonetheless better in my young imagination to experience this kind of poverty. The kind of poverty that was loose, relative, and not socially defined. One that could be eradicated through the acquisition of wall paintings and air conditioning, rather than generations of intentional dismantling.

It was a poverty that was marked with a deep sense of resilience, community, and strength. Similar to the look on my mother’s face when she escaped the tall man. This was the poverty that knew. However, this new kind of poverty for which I later discovered, penetrated identity, culture and politics. It was relative. Social, politically, and scientifically constructed. Pervasive. Reinforced and reproduced through legitimate means.

It was not until some years later when I moved to the suburbs with my new family that I became aware of the true extent of my childhood poverty. This spatial movement from the ghetto to the suburbs was met with a new set of cultural values. For instance, my suburban high school was in what people referred to as “the good part of town,” much different from my previous one. For instance, for fun, students read books, played chess, and studied Latin.

They were connoisseurs of classical music and English literature. It was plausible that, for them the ghetto was a faraway place that existed only in the imagination. I quickly adapted to my new existence, neighborhood, and school. Reading books became a hobby, a practice that was stigmatized in the ghetto. I became vegetarian—because it was stylish—listened to Avril Lavigne, used high phrases such as recoil, perpetuate and per se, and wore exotic colors such as neon white, burnt orange, and electric indigo. This was the new me.

My understanding of poverty continued to evolve throughout high school. Namely, spending a grand portion of my high school years homeless, bouncing back and forth between families of disparate economic and cultural back grounds, had me questioning the degree of my poverty. Was my poverty based on my family’s income?

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Which family? My birth family, or my adopted families? How does one measure poverty? On the flip side of the coin, moving from one neighborhood and family to the next, also meant that my life experiences were remarkably rich.

It was through these adventurous journeys, that resilience and tenacity were cultivated. Education, something that I hadn’t valued previously, became incorporated into my value system, thanks to the mentors and teachers who molded me. In fact, it became a means for which I transcended poverty.

The ghetto nonetheless never escapes me. It continues to appear in my imagination just as

real as it did in reality. This place, that which is poverty stricken, continues to bring me zeal, strength and fond memories.

Imagination Experience Research Assignment

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