Educating Mississippi Minds

Educating Mississippi Minds
By Cassandra Hawkins-Wilson
April 17, 2009

Transforming minds
motivates me daily. Their minds, in the unique word,
of their own understanding
must be groomed and cultivated.

I cannot remove the pressures
of inferiority, superiority, and minority.
Yet,
in the realm of education
I can belittle the prevalence of
ignorance, while battling the understanding
of the transformation into a
unbelievable society of
race and class discrimination.

Determined to eliminate the
blasphemous stereotypes affiliated
with dirt roads,
paperless schools, and backwards thinking
I cringe to
be invisible as an educator.

A small world of its own,
Mississippi,
doesn’t blow away the minds
of students to pave the long
winding dark dirt roads
made of
scorching hot red clay.

To wake up concerned
about the ever-evolving
but slowly changing
revolution of racial tensions,
I bathe my perceptions
in the understanding of
perseverance, confidence, and determination.

Removing the dead cells of stupidity,
I fill the tiny stomachs and minds
with educational solace,
thrown among the remnants of a
sometimes foreign place
within a familiar home.

Black minds, throw up
white words, white minds
throw up
black words.
Even though I am not dead
the phenomenal beginnings
of a struggling existence
is almost
buried among the solid pine coffin
overfilled with
the historic beliefs, memories
of a struggling state.

I live to educate
I move to educate
I believe to educate
the minds in
the unforgotten world unique to
Mississippi.