Michael Arceneaux - I Dont Want to Die Poor: Essays

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To every single customer service rep employed by Discover Student Loans or Navient, this book is not dedicated to you, but I would like to extend a fuck you to each of you for disturbing me with your calls while I was writing this book.

Had you given me a little peace, you wouldve gotten your money sooner.

With that out of the way, this book is dedicated to my mama. Thank you for making my life so.

Its expensive to be me.

Erika Jayne

Throw that money over here, nigga, thats what its for.

Cardi B

O f course it was an attractive light-skinned Black man who led me to ruin.

Men are generally awful, but there is something unique about this particular genre of bae. I cant recall his name, but when your face looks like the reason God created sin, does it matter?

I will never forget spotting him in the cafeteria and immediately wanting to venture over his way to listen to whatever it was he had to say. I may have been unwilling at the time to admit the truth about my same-sex attractions out loud, but when temptation is mere feet in front of you with a smile and overall profile that gives leading man in a 1990s Black romantic comedy or at least an ill-advised reboot of one, you shimmy your gay ass over and try not to stare too hard.

We were both at James Madison Senior High Schools College Fair, which for all intents and purposes, I, as a student at James Madison Senior High School, was not especially excited about attending. He appeared younger than his recruiting counterparts around ushad to have been in his mid to late twenties. God, I wish Instagram had been around in 2001, so that I had photographic evidence of how he looked.

Back then, I used to describe Madison as the local version of Lean on Me, only our Joe Clark liked to wear cowboy boots and somehow came across even surlier and stricter than the Crazy Joe at (Fair) Eastside High that Morgan Freeman played. I remember once showing someone I was communicating with through a message board a picture of my high school.

Nigga, that looks like a prison!

Or if one were to be a bit more generous as a result of high school pride, perhaps it resembled a juvenile detention center whose best days may indeed have been well behind it, but at least the people in charge had gone out and bought some paint to try and spruce the place up. (As much sprucing as you could do to an older building surrounded by fencing and large gates.) The original building has since been demolished and a new structure has opened in its place. I drove by it during a work-related trip back to my hometown of Houston, Texas. It now looks like a much fancier private prison, although whoever picked the colors for it does not watch enough Bravo or HGTV.

In a lot of ways, I felt as if we students were treated like prisoners. We had a magnet program for meteorology, which, with all due respect to Al Roker, icon, never made sense to me given that, at an inner city high school there werent many Black and Latinx teens who thought they could one day tell viewers that Captain Planet was correct and Mother Natures revenge was imminent. I was not in the magnet program, but I did take mostly pre-AP courses, and as a result of that, I did have some teachers who pushed me a little harder as a student. Even so, the overall climate of the school felt far stricter than it needed to be, in an effort to corral the unruly minority population of largely meager means, who most outsiders assumed had very little to hope for when it came to their futures.

My high school made national headlines in spring 2019 when the principal announced a dress code for parents that many rightly regarded as classist. To any Madison alum of a certain age group, the news was unsettling but not at all surprising. I remember the principal who took the place of Joe Clarks Cowboy Cousin (after his promotion) attempting to ban the class ahead of mine from wearing braids and locs at commencement. That was ultimately overturned because of pushback from students, but respectability was, as usual, pushed by the repressive.

No matter, though: Im a proud Marlin. I can be critical because I went there and understand. I can recognize that in the midst of all that, there were good teachers, there were bright minds, and there were plenty of us with loads of potential. More of us just needed convincing of what could be possible, along with access and means to arrive there.

As for the college fair, the obvious colleges were present: the HBCUs Texas Southern University and Prairie View A&M University. Obvious is not used pejoratively. Some of the most brilliant people I have ever met in my life attended or have taught at either school, but in terms of the collective expectations of the student body, they were considered our main, and limited, options.

To be fair, so were some of the other Texas-based schools that seemed to want to court at least two and a half of us to help offset their lily-white campuses. Say, the University of Houston, the University of Texas at Austin, Texas A&M University, and Sam Houston State University. There were people who worked at all these schools actively pushing us to entertain the idea of venturing out, but the army recruiters were getting a big share of the attention all the same.

The very handsome college recruiter I was entranced by was representing Hampton University, a school I had never heard of but had appreciation for based on their blue-and-white aesthetic and choice in spokespeople.

While it was a forgone conclusion at this point that I would be attending college, in hindsight, it was far more of an anomaly for me than I knew at the time. My mom had effectively drilled it into me for as long as I remembered that I was going to college, but this wasnt really the norm for those that grew up around me or shared my bloodline. Still, I knew my ass was going because I was not going to have that woman choke me out with a rosary until I acted like I had some damn sense.

I dreamed of New York University or Columbia University, but who had money for that? My mother made clear that I would go somewhere, but neither she nor I had entertained the idea that I might attend the kind of school that felt like an unattainable fantasy. My assumption was that I was likely to go to University of Houston, though if I lucked up, maybe I could get scholarship money out of UT Austin and go there instead.

After talking to Recruiter Bae, my feelings changed. He convinced me that if I wanted to attend a prestigious collegeprivate, out of state, evenit was possible, no matter what my surroundings or financial circumstances suggested. When he asked what I wanted to do with my life and I mentioned journalism and television, he boasted about Hampton and some of its alum. While I make no apologies for letting hormones steer me in his direction, he was genuinely inspiring to me, and while some of the schools Ive attended were met with jeers from others who were from Houston but came from much nicer backgrounds, its often been in those settings that someone Black has looked me square in the eye and instilled in me the belief that what seems unattainable is entirely possible.