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scalp to scalp. Across the city, bald children proliferated. At Draycott, alongside a dozen others, I had my hair shorn down to the roots. I was sent home with two brown bottlefuls of lotion and a razored skull that made me look like the lost child of Yul Brynner. Horrified, Oliver called the headmaster for an explanation and was told that I was shaved as a precautionary delousing measure. Apparently my hair’s “natural flamboyance” had prevented a proper check.
    Now no one had any idea how much hair I had or what kind of hair it was—springy, wispy, stick straight, kinky.
    ¿Hablas español?
    Bisakah anda berbicara dalam bahasa Indonesia?
    Nagsasalita ba kayo ng Tagalog?
    I was tired of being a beige person. I wished I had been born in a peaceful, boring country like Greenland, where people never died in wars or earthquakes. A place with exact measurements and a precise population. I longed to be able to say,
“I was born on an island, 150 miles long and 50 miles wide …”
    The breaking point came one Monday morning as the class filed into school.
    “Keep moving, Malay,” hissed a boy named Henry behind me.
    “Shut up.”
    “What’s that you said, Malay?” another boy said, flicking a pebble at me.
    I swivelled around. “I
said
quit shoving me and SHUT UP! I’m not your stinking Malay, Barbuda, Mau Mau, Cherokee. Is that clear? I AM ENGLISH so you better shut your trap!”
    The boys closest to me mumbled and stepped back. The ones farther away kept their distance, exchanging glances.
    It could have been the wild look in my eye—the look of a boy pushed to the edge. Maybe they wondered how crazy I could get. No one seemed anxious to find out. As for me, still shaking with fear and woozy with the vertigo of holding my ground, I went to the washroom and vomited into the toilet. Then I climbed up onto the washroom’s recessed windowsill and curled up.
    I must have fallen asleep because the next thing I heard was the caretaker knocking gently against the pine sill with the end of a broom.
    Unazungumza kiswahili?
    In the chilly days that followed, I began drawing my first caricatures. I ignored my lessons and focused on my notebook.As soon as my pencil touched the page, I felt my heart slow down. I could have been Hogarth’s apprentice, for all the gnarly noses and fanged teeth I drew. The tip of my pencil kept snapping, I kept sharpening it. I depicted blood, brains exploding from split heads, hearts ripped open by medieval daggers and crossbows. The teacher, upon discovering my drawings, saw a dangerous revenge fantasy, a sign of violent tendencies. Again, Oliver was advised.
    “Some of the children are apparently afraid of you,” he said that night.
    Scared? Of me?
As bizarre as it sounded, it left me with a new perception of myself.
Was this who I was? A threat?
And why wasn’t Oliver defending me? Why wasn’t he asking,
What have they been doing to you?
Surely he had some sense of what a boy like me might experience among a class of white children.
    I didn’t think Oliver would ever withdraw me from Draycott, but one afternoon, just after class photo day, the headmaster entered my classroom.
    “Marcel Lawrence?”
    “Yes, sir.”
    “Your father is coming to pick you up. He’ll be here in ten minutes. Please prepare your things.”
    “To leave, sir?”
    “Yes, Marcel.
To leave.”
    There was a ripple in the classroom.
    Oliver had discovered that I was being transferred to a class for the educationally challenged, a remedial stream. He was outraged. My time at Draycott was mercifully over.
    I still have my notebook from those wretched days, page after page with drawings that lend some insight into my state ofmind at the time. The titles include:
Self-Portrait with Two Axes, Trap Door for a Laughing Audience, The Truth about Horrid-Awful Madness,
and
Picture from the Gutter of the World.
It’s not all feverish. There are a few pictures of boats, planes and buildings. Still, there is enough to make