School Days

The Supreme Court is currently hearing a school desegregation case that has local ties to Da Ville. It has caused me to reflect on my own experiences with desegregation many moons ago.

It is ludricous to think that the Civil Rights movement of the 60's magically wiped away 246 years of slavery and 100 years of Jim Crow racism. The racial attitudes that helped shape and support the institution of slavery and Jim Crow are STILL around and permeate every aspect of American culture.

Too many white people have a naive concept of race and fail to note (or ignore) the historical contexts and reality of race in America. White privilege, atttitudes and its dominant position in American society is built on the foundation of slavery. It's also built upon 100 years of denial of opportunities for African-Americans to peacefully assimilate into American society after the Civil War.

I grew up in Houston and matriculated in HISD schools, which are themselves under a federal desegregation court order. As much as people gripe about busing, it wouldn't be necessary if white parents weren't leaving public schools for private ones with the usual 'to get a better education' cover excuse.

To give you an example, HISD has a magnet program for academically gifted and talented students called Vanguard. At the elementary and junior high/middle school level the Vanguard schools were housed on campuses in white neighborhoods. At the high school level it was housed from 1977-2001 at majority Black Jones High in the heart of South Park.

It was interesting to note that the white parents who sent their kids to VG schools in elementary and junior high, regulary bumped the 40% cutoff for white enrollment at River Oaks Elementary and Lanier Junior High suddenly had concerns at the high school level. Those parents tried for two decades to get the HS VG program moved off the Jones campus. They were usually opposed by former students and Black and Latino/a parents. They finally suceeded but the ironic twist was that all of their efforts resulted in the HS Vanguard program being moved to the former Carnegie Elementary campus in another BLACK neighborhood four miles away.

I was gratified to read a recent study that confirmed what I have known and suspected for a long time: Private school kids DO NOT outperform kids that matriculated in public school. (George W. Bush is Exhibit A for that).
It's also interesting to note that many of these so-called elite private schools have been set up SINCE the 1954 Brown v. Board decision.

It's amazing that some peeps are still so mortified at the prospect of Mackenzie and Jackson sitting next to Taquan and LaKeisha in a classroom that they are overpaying for the same level of education you can get for free in the public school arena. Maybe they should consider sending their kids to public schools and save some of that cash they pay private schools for their child's college years. The way college tuition rates have been exponentially climbing they'll need it.

I didn't get into Vanguard until the high school level. I had the grades but stayed at Albert Thomas, my neighborhood junior high. Just because a school is located in a majority Black neighborhood doesn't mean that we don't strive for educational excellence. I was in Major Works, the accelerated academic program for non-magnet school gifted students at the secondary level. Our teachers continually pushed us to excel and encouraged us to compete in academic contests. That concern even extended after we left their campuses. My brother was two grades behind me and let it slip to one of my old Albert Thomas teachers that my grades dropped during one report card period when I was in my sophomore year at Jones. She and several of my old teachers sent messages through him that it was unacceptable. Even my Little League coach got on my case when I came to watch my brother play a game one night.

If I had to do it all over again, I wouldn't change a thing. I'd still go the same route. There are certain experiences that I had at Thomas that I wouldn't have gotten in a private school environment. I wrote an essay in 8th grade that helped me win a NASA sponsored districtwide contest and was captain of the back-to-back champion History Prep Bowl team. Those History Prep Bowl championships were even sweeter because we were the ONLY predominately Black school competing in this event.
For some strange reason we didn't get an invitation to defend our title during my 9th grade year and threepeat.

Thanks to my writing skills, I earned a trip to the Johnson Space Center and got to take a tour of it beyond the standard one they usually give. I sat at the computer consoles in JSC's Mission Control. We went to the building that houses the giant water tanks that they use to train astronauts for spacewalks. We got to walk through a mock-up of Skylab. I got to meet not only Nichelle Nichols from Star Trek but the first group of Black shuttle astronauts: Guy Bluford, Charles Gregory, Dr. Mae Jemison, and the late Challenger 7 astronaut Dr. Ron McNair.

I have problems with No Child Left Behind. It was designed by people who hate public schools. As a child of an educator and coming from a family of them I'm not a fan of teaching a test. Schools are supposed to teach you how to critically think, not rote memorization of a test or unquestioning obedience to authority. I am skeptical of a program designed by voucher advocates and highly suspicious of an education bill that DOES NOT apply to private schools. Either private schools need to be held to the same standards or else NCLB needs to be abolished. Some of the more memorable teaching experiences for me were situations in which teachers were allowed to unleash creative lesson plans on us.

In 8th grade, my history teacher Mr. Sanders went BEYOND the textbooks and taught us the little known historical events that had major implications on history. In high school I had the history of the Holocaust come to life thanks to Kaye Arnold. We spent a day role playing various characters in Nazi Germany. I found myself tossed in the 'concentration camp' when my character was trying to rat on his suspected Jewish neighbor to an 'SS officer'.

I went through such trying times in junior high with math to the point where it made me loathe the subject with a passion. My high school math teachers Dana Read, Diane Servance, and Henry Stevenson Jr got me to a point where I actually liked math again.

I also had memorable teachers in elementary school like my kindergarten and 1st grade teacher Ms. Ray Williams, Ms. Emily Hurd in 2nd grade, Ms. Carolyn Dickson in 4th grade, and Ms. Dorothy Ware-Hagans in 5th and 6th grade.

Can't leave out some of my more memorable junior high ones like my History Prep Bowl coach Ms. Melina Harris, my English teachers Ms. Doris Maxie and Ms. Faye Mitchell, and my typing teacher Ms. Felecia Thomas. She was fresh out of college herself and her sense of style and fashion combined with her model quality beauty had many boys on campus drooling over her. I admired her for another reason ;)

But back to my experiences with integration HISD style. HISD came up with a pairing plan in which an all-white and all black school were zoned together. One would teach grades K-3, the other grades 4-6. When it was implemented I was in second grade at newly opened (and all-Black) Law Elementary School which I was zoned to attend after I finished kindergarten at JJ Rhoads. My neighborhood was rezoned to the school I'd just left, JJ Rhoads. I had go back to Rhoads for one year, then to Frost. I ended up attending three different elementary schools in a two year span because of the pairing plan. It would have been four had I gone to River Oaks Elementary where the Vanguard gifted and talented student program was housed. But once again I would have been there only for a year before moving off to junior high school. Unfortunately, because of white flight from South Park to southwest Houston and to the counties surrounding Houston Frost Elementary became majority black by the time I hit 5th grade.

By my sixth grade year HISD shifted focus to using magnet schools with voluntary busing. But that meant that since many of these initial magnet school campuses were in white neighborhoods the Black kids attending them were enduring one to two hour crosstown bus rides in Houston rush hour traffic. Magnet campuses housed in Black neighborhoods didn't get the same level of white participation.

Was it worth it? Yeah. I got to flex my intellectual muscles with Asian, white, and Latino/a kids from all over Houston. At Jones I attended a school equipped with two state of the art (for the late 70's) Control Data PLATO computers. In my junior year I participated in the Houston area Model United Nations hosted at the University of Houston. I expanded my circle of friends beyond my immediate neighborhood and was exposed to people of many different cultural and religious backgrounds. Some of those friendships endure today and being exposed to various cultures has helped me immensely during my lifetime.

When I describe the things I did and experienced to people in this area many assume I went to private school. Nope, I'm a proud HISD alum.

So yeah, good old fashioned racism STILL plays a part in the education issue, too. The sooner that we realize that, the sooner we can come to a consensus on what to do about it. Here's hoping the Supremes do the right thing and leave the Louisvlle and Seattle school districts alone.

I'm not holding my breath on that.

Hail Cougars? Hell Yes!

Cougars fight for dear old U of H
For our Alma Mater cheer.
Fight for Houston University
For victory is near.

When the going gets so rough and tough
We never worry cause we got the stuff.
So fight, fight, fight for red and white
And we'll go on to victory.


Congratulations to the University of Houston Cougars football team for winning the C-USA title for the first time in 10 years last night. They beat their longtime conference nemesis Southern Mississippi 34-20 in front of a record crowd of 31,000 at Robertson Stadium to take the crown. They have earned a trip to Memphis and the Liberty Bowl to take on Steve Spurrier's South Carolina Gamecocks December 29.

When I was attending UH we were an elite level football powerhouse. We were in the mix for the Southwest Conference Championship every year. When I arrived on campus in the fall of 1980 the Coogs were just coming off our fourth trip in five years to the Cotton Bowl.

I took it real hard along with other Cougar alums when we shockimgly weren't invited to join the Big 12 Conference in 1996. I suspected (along with many other Cougar alums) that the University of Texas had a hand in that decision. A football juggernaut in Houston impacts their recruiting ability in one of the best regions in Texas for high school football talent. Their refusal to play any UH athletic teams on a regular basis only fossilizes that impression for Cougar Nation.

There's a long history of Hateraid between us and UT. During Beat Texas Week we have a giant barbecue at the student center featuring Bevo burgers (the name of UT's longhorn mascot). The Cougar paw hand sign had its origins in an incident that occurred during the first UH-Texas game in 1953.

Our cougar mascot Shasta I caught her front paw in the car door transporting her and one toe had to be cut off. During the game which UT won 28-7, UT players discovered what had happened to Shasta I and began taunting UH players by holding up their hands with the ring finger bent, saying UH's mascot was an invalid and so were our players.

Upset UH students began using the sign as notice that they would never let UT forget the incident and later adopted the Cougar Paw as an official symbol of school pride. In fact one of the sarcastic comments on it that I heard while I was there in the early 80's was that the middle finger is a half a peace sign to the Longhorns.

During the second meeting in 1968, armed with African-American players and Bill Yeoman's newfangled Veer offense we fought Texas to a 20-20 tie.

We've also never let them forget our debut game as a member of the Southwest Conference in 1976. In front of the then-largest crowd in DKR-Memorial Stadium history of 77,809 fans, we spanked them 30-0 on the way to our first SWC championship and Cotton Bowl appearance.

But enough about Bevo conspiracy theories and the fun we and Texas A&M have making Longhorn fans as miserable as they make us. This is about the Coogs. I'm looking forward to making the trip to Memphis and watching Kevin Kolb, Jackie 'The Battleship' Battle, Anthony 'Quick' Aldridge and the current crop of Cougar footballers kick butt.

Eat 'em up, eat 'em up, rah rah rah!

It's almost like old times. The Cougars football program on the rise. The baseball team is preparing to make another run at a College World Series appearance. The UH basketball program under Tom Penders is clawing its way back to the Phi Slama Jama level and national B-ball prominence. I'm looking forward to the game next month in Lexington against UK.

While I'm on that subject, it's past time to induct Guy V. Lewis into the Basketball Hall of Fame. The man went to five Final Fours, was one half of the historic 1968 UH-UCLA game in the Dome that paved the way for college basketball to be televised on TV and coached NBA Hall of Famers. Let him in while he's still around to enjoy the moment.

Yeah, thimgs are definitely looking good on Cullen Boulevard these days.

I Am Woman

By D. Cookie Fields as told to Michelle Burford
from Essence Magazine
November 2006 edition


As a man he joined the Marines, married the love of his life and had two children. All the while he struggled with the sense that he was meant to live his life as a woman. One day he decided to make a change.


As far back as I can remember, I had felt like a stranger in my own body. As an only child growing up among rambunctious boy cousins and friends in a working class Chicago suburb, I knew I wasn't quite 'right.' I think my mother suspected something, too. When I was 4 she found me coloring my fingernals with crayons.
"Little boys don't do that," she whispered as put away the Crayolas and scrubbed my nails clean. Later I would borrow her skirts, earrings and shoes to play dress up. I often told her I that I felt different, not like other boys. "What do you mean," my mother would say. "You fit with our family." I know she had no idea how it felt to me-a girl trapped in a boy's body. Back then my parents could not have conceived that I would one day board a plane to Thailand as their son, D, and return as their daughter Cookie.

By the time I reached adolescence, I regularly dressed up as a woman, though I knew enough then to hide it. If Mom discovered my stash of heels, dresses, bras and makeup hidden in the house, she admonish me by saying "You've got to stop this!" But neither she nor my father ever had a direct conversation with me about my cross-dressing. Maybe they thought it was a phase I'd outgrow. I never did.


LOVE AND MARRIAGE

I wasn't gay. I've never once been drawn to a man, nor have I ever had sex with a man. I am only attracted to women. At 17 I had intercourse for the first time. What I recall most was the feeling of intimacy-the kissing, the caressing, the closeness. The only part I didn't enjoy was the penetration. When I was still living in a man's body a girlfriend once told me, "Making love to you is like making love to a woman."

And yet I did everything possible I could to seem as manly as possible. After graduating from high school in 1977, I joined the Marines and moved to South Carolina. Within months, I had worked my way up to the head of uniform inspections. I still felt a compulsion to cross-dress sometimes, but I'd sneak off the base to do it. Then in 1980, when I was 20, the military relocated me to Los Angeles. There for the first time I met other cross-dressers like me. And I met transsexuals-those who'd had sex-change surgery. Though we all fell under the acronym LGBT(lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender), I discovered that even in this group I was atypical, in that most male cross-dressers are attracted to other men. Still for the first time in my life I felt understood. It was such a relief to know I wasn't alone.

In Los Angeles I also met the woman I would marry. I saw her sitting with her sisters at a military social and asked her to dance. She turned me down, but her sisters, both military wives, urged her to give me a chance. I must have seemed perfectly respectable with my short Marine Corps fade. We exchanged phone numbers, and soon I was seeing this woman with the unforgettable smile every weekend. Eventually moved in together on the military base. That's when she found my women's clothing.

"Whose are these?" she asked me. Nervously I told her the truth-that I liked to dress up as a woman. The obvious questions followed: "What do you get out of it?" "Are you gay?" I tried to reassure her that I simply felt most comfortable when I cross-dressed, and that I'd never had sex with a man or been unfaithful to our relationship. She was confused and disturbed by my desire, but our relationship was so good in every other way that she stayed, and in 1982 we got married. We had a son soon after, and two years later a daughter.

I would sneak off to Hollywood at least one weekend each month dressed as a woman. In the first few years of our marriage, my wife stumbled across more and more of my women's clothes, and with each discovery, the strife between us intensified. "Just don't bring your life into our house," she'd tell me. I began keeping my wigs, heels, purses, earrings, nail polish and lipstick in the garage. I understood why she and almost every other person in the world would never get it, but I felt so compelled to cross-dress that I couldn't give it up. The most I could do was promise my wife that I wasn't sleeping around. Even with my secret hovering over us, we enjoyed a fulfilling sex life. So we each did what we had learned how to do: live in the space of denial.

DON'T ASK, DON'T TELL

Then came the night that my 11-year old daughter saw me dressed up as a woman. I'd come home late to find the garage door locked, so I'd gone to another door. When I passed my daughter's bedroom, she woke just in time to glimpse her father in a skirt, wig and red lipstick. The next day she said, "You we're dressed as a woman last night." She didn't seem upset, but I insisted she was mistaken. I felt so guilty about lying to my child, but I was convinced she would find my behavior confusing. I told myself I was protecting her.

In the months that followed, I escaped to Hollywood with increasing frequency. Somehow I felt more myself with my transgender friends than I did anywhere else. One Sunday, sitting in church with my family, listening to the minister preach about living an authentic life, I felt as if my heart would shatter from the pain of living such a lie. I knew then that I would never be happy as a man. That was the day I began to think about becoming a woman.

Though I still loved my my wife deeply, our marriage, undermined for so many years by my secret excursions, finally collapsed under the weight of them. I'll never forget the night we told our children we were separating. "Does this have anything to do with that night I saw you dressed up?" my daughter, then 12, asked me. I confessed that it did. My son, who was 14, looked at me in stunned silence. I can only imagine how difficult it must have been for him to grasp that I didn't want to be a man. Even now, though we have a pleasant relationship, he won't discuss it.
I wish I knew how to explain it to him.

By the time we got divorced, I had started taking hormones (progesterone and estrogen pills) to grow breasts. The hormones also made my voice higher, and I underwent electrolysis to remove my facial hair. After four months, my C-cup breasts were definitely noticeable. Since I was still in the military, I wore a sports bra to flatten my chest and used a stall when forced to change clothes at the base. But the strain of hiding was getting to me, so after 15 years of active service, I joined the reserves and applied for a job as a police officer with the LAPD. During my required physical I had to take off my shirt for an EKG. The technician was shocked to see my full breasts! But after an awkward moment she never said a word.
I still don't know why she never told my supervisor. After that, I wore bulletproof vests on duty, so my secret remained safe.

MY NEW BODY

I decided to go ahead with a sex change in 2001. I told my wife ex-wife and my children first. At the time my son was 19 and living with his mother, and my daughter was 17 and living with me. Maybe because she'd seen me all those years ago, she supported my choice to have a sex change. My ex-wife and son were a little more distant, but they, too, promised to be there for me.

Next I wrote a letter to my parents explaining what I'm sure they had expected: I was living as a woman everywhere, except at work. After my marriage ended, all my relationships had been with lesbian or bisexual women. I was so exhausted with my double life. I wanted to align my exterior with who I'd always been inside. The news must have roked my parents to the core, but when I telephoned them later, my mother simply said "I always knew," while my father was characteristically silent. I didn't expect either of them to understand or accept my choice. I'm just grateful that they heard me.

I know there are many who would call my lifestyle a moral abomination. But at my church, Unity Fellowship, I've been taught that we're each here for a unique purpose. God could have created me as a woman, but for some reason didn't. That's why I'm so sure I was put on Earth to take this journey. It's not as if I heard God speak through parted clouds, but in my heart I just knew a sex change was the right path for me.

My surgery lasted five hours and cost $5,000. I chose to have it done in Bangkok, Thailand, because one of the pioneers of transgender surgery operates there, and his price is half of what I thought I would pay in the United States. My friend Stephanie came with me. Together we boarded a plane and landed halfway around the world so that I could become a woman. If this isn't the journey you want me to take, I whispered to God during the 26-hour flight, then please just let me die on the operating table.

The doctor explained the procedure. They would remove my testicles, scrotum and half my penis using a laser, then invert the remaining skin to create a vaginal cavity. I signed the waiver and checked into the hospital early the next day. Five hours later, I awakened on a gurney with a row of bandages across my pelvic area and no pain. I stayed in the hospital a week, marveling at the possibilities of my new life. The afternoon I was released, Stephanie and I went shopping. I know it's hard to believe, but the only soreness I experienced was when the doctor pulled off the bandages. What I saw in the mirror amazed me, a vagina so perfect it looked like I'd been born with it.

I've since retired from the LAPD and now work as a security guard. I date women exclusively, and I alwys tell them about my surgery. Sensation has returned to the tissue used to create my vagina, and sex with my new body is exponentially more satisfying. I feel blessed because I have the most any transsexual can hope for: a family that stands by me. When people see me in my uniform now, I let them refer to me as whatever gender they believe I am. Most suspect that I used to be a man, but how they see me doesn't really matter. What matters is that at last I am a woman at home in her body.


D. Cookie Fields lives in Los Angeles. She told her story to Michelle Burford, a writer who lives in New York