Free The Last Holiday by Gil Scott Heron Page A

Franklin or DeWitt Clinton. After a year of all-boys education at Creston, I had sort
of figured I’d go to the coed Franklin. I was not aware of any intellectual advantage professed by Clinton. The basketball team there was good, but there were no girls.
    My mother did not weigh all factors, I’m sure. She had heard some derogatory comments about Franklin, and that convinced her that I was not going there. Based on where I was not going, I
ended up enrolled at Clinton, an education factory of eight thousand boys who attended classes in three shifts: 7:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m., 9:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m., and 10:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. My first
semester I drew the middle shift.
    Registration for classes at Clinton brought my greatest fear of New York—being swallowed alive. In my mind I had seen myself as one of thousands of people stampeding down a boulevard like
a human tidal wave, unable even to break stride, running both one step ahead and one step behind the next person. The worst aspect of this was that it wasn’t an emergency, not an escape to
anywhere away from anything. It was just everyday survival.
    I felt as if I was signing up for work on an assembly line. I felt like I had imagined New York would make me feel: a struggle against becoming nobody . That was the difference I should
have been able to express from my first stay in New York. I had been looking for that at Creston, but walking or riding to and from school with other guys from the block had calmed that strangeness
I dreaded. It was back at Clinton. It came back on the registration line; I was an insignificant cipher, a six-digit dimwit with no connection to this concoction, with no place that was mine. In
Jackson I had been somebody, recognized and respected. Maybe my problem was ego. Maybe my problem was being spoiled. But I felt otherwise, I felt that how successful you were depended on how
comfortable you were. Some people were just small town people, and there was nothing wrong with that.
    In the middle of that afternoon’s line of fires I felt completely anonymous, as though I was being erased, as though I was losing contact by making contact, resigning by signing in. By
joining I became disjointed; by taking a number I became one. I was in New York because my mother wanted this. She was here because she wanted it for me.
    I had all kinds of problems at Clinton. It’s no good to point at a general malaise, like a depression, feeling stressed or full-court pressed by a crowd in New York—it’s too
common. So I attributed it to the teachers.
    “It’s the teachers’ fault,” I told my mother. “I can’t relate.”
    She blew up. I could talk about serious things with her for as long as I needed, but Saran Wrap problems, problems she knew I should have seen through did not fly.
    “You don’t like your teachers? Awww, that’s too bad. The teacher isn’t there for you to like her. If you do, that’s all right. But that’s not what she’s
there for. What you need to do is read the books she read. Just ask her about supplements she would recommend, added to her syllabus. And remember to take your weakest courses in the morning and
your strongest classes in the afternoon. That means for you the math and science is in the morning and English and history are late courses. Right? Right.”
    That was an important conference, and the suggestion she made about when I should sign up for which subjects was crucial. The next semester I decided I would sign up for a last period English
class, which was how I met Miss Nettie and got the opportunity to go to Fieldston. And I almost blew that.

 
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    During that first semester of high school, my mother and I headed to Alabama with Aunt Sammy to see the Hamiltons. And we stopped in Jackson, Tennessee, on the way.
    The visit came at a time when I was really desperate, unable to get comfortable in the Bronx. I went through periods of time when it was all right to be in New York, and other times when