The Freedom Writers Diary - Erin Gruwell [30]
When I saw her tears, a little voice inside of me whispered very quietly, “Doesn’t she remind you of someone you love more than anyone else in the world?” I tried to ignore the little voice, but then the voice spoke louder. It told me that this woman was my mother, and that little girl was me. I couldn’t help but stare back, imagining how life would be for that little girl without her father. I pictured her waiting for her father to come home, knowing he wasn’t. I pictured her visiting him, and not being able to touch him because of an unbreakable window, and I imagined her wanting to unlock his cage, knowing she couldn’t. The same memories I have of my father in prison. The woman looked at me again, and I could see that she was suffering the same way my mother suffered when my dad and brother went to prison. I wondered how they could be so different. My mother is Mexican and this woman black, yet the emotions that made them cry came from a heart that was tearing apart the same way.
Throughout my life I’ve always heard the same thing: “You can’t go against your own people, your own blood.” It got so engraved in my head that even as I sat on the witness stand, I kept thinking of those same words. “You can’t go against your own…” Yet, my so-called familia, my so-called people, had put me in the worst position of my life. My feelings were starting to change, I began to have second thoughts. I was convinced that I was going to lie before I entered the courtroom, before I saw the woman, before I saw the little girl, but now I wasn’t so sure.
Suddenly, his lawyer interrupted my thoughts by busting out with questions. Who shot the guy? Then I looked at my friend. He was just staring at me with a smug look on his face. He wasn’t worried about anything even though he was guilty, even though he knew I had witnessed everything. When he shot the guy he looked at me and said, “This is for you.” He knew I was going to lie, he knew that I had always had his back before, so I had no reason to turn on him now. I turned to look at him, and my eyes stared getting watery. He was surprised, as if it wasn’t a big deal, but this time it was a big deal.
Then I glanced at my mom, she shook her head, and it was as if she knew that I wanted to say the truth. I never told her what actually happened that night, but she knew my friend had done it. When she had asked me what I was going to say, I told her, “I’m going to protect my own…you know how it is. You have to know, you and every other person in my family taught me about my own.”
“I know how it is, but why does it always have to be that way?” She never spoke that way to me before, after all, my father is in prison and most of my family is in a gang. I always figured that my mom accepted how things were. That’s just the ways things go when you’re in a gang. Then she asked me, “How does it feel to be sending an innocent person to prison? You probably feel like that man that sent your father to prison knowing he was innocent, you know, he was only protecting his own, too.” And for the first time in my life, the image of my mother made me believe that I could change the way things were. Because at that moment I locked eyes with Paco and said, “Paco did it. Paco shot the guy!”
Diary 34
Dear Diary,
You’re going to be so disappointed in me. Actually I’m more disappointed in myself for the way I’m tricking people into believing that I’m something I’m not. Since I’ve been in Ms. Gruwell’s class, everyone thinks I am “Little Miss Goodie Goodie.” It never fails; she always uses me as the “good” example. I’m seen as the kind of student that is quiet, has good grades, and is the teacher’s pet. The strange thing is that while