Getting a Job from I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings My room had all the gaiety of a dungeon and the allure of a tomb. It would have been impossible to stay there, but leaving didn't appeal to me either... The answer came to me suddenly, as if in a collision. I would go to work. Mom wouldn't have been hard to convince; after all, I was a grade ahead of my grade in school and my mother was a firm believer in self-sufficiency. Indeed, she would be happy to think that I have so much sense, so much of her in my character. (She liked to talk about herself as the original "do-it-yourself girl.") Once I decided to get a job, all that was left was to decide what type of work I was best suited for. My intellectual pride had prevented me from choosing typing, shorthand or filing as subjects in school, so office work was out of the question. War plants and shipyards required birth certificates, and mine revealed that I was fifteen and unfit for work. So even high-paying defense jobs were eliminated. Women had replaced men on streetcars as conductors and stagehands, and the thought of sailing up and down the hills of San Francisco in a dark blue uniform, with a money changer on my belt, caught my fancy. My mother was as nonchalant as I was. he had predicted. The world was moving so fast, so much money was being made, so many people were dying in Guam and Germany, that hordes of strangers became good friends overnight. Life was cheap and death was completely free. How could he have time to think about my academic career? To his question about what I intended to do, I replied that I would find work in trams. She rejected the proposal with: “they don't accept black people on trams”. I would like to claim an immediate furor which was followed by the noble determination to break the restrictive tradition. But the truth is that my first reaction was disappointment. I had imagined myself, dressed in an elegant blue serge suit, with my money changer swinging happily at my waist, and a cheerful smile for the passengers that would make their working day brighter. From disappointment, I gradually climbed the ladder of emotions to haughtiness to indignation, and finally to the state of stubbornness where the mind is stuck like the jaws of an enraged bulldog. I went to work on the trams and wore a blue serge suit. Mom supported me with one of her usual pithy phrases… half a sheet… double when packing double bags. morning, or pick me up when I had my change, just before dawn. Her awareness of the dangers of life convinced her that, although I would be safe on public transport, she was “not about to entrust her child to a taxi driver”. When spring classes began, I reengaged with formal education. I was so much wiser and older, much more independent, with a bank account and clothes I had bought for myself, that I was sure I had learned and earned the magic formula that would make me part of the gay life of my life. led by contemporaries. Not even a little. Within a few weeks, I realized that my classmates and I were on paths that diametrically diverged from each other. They were worried and excited about the approaching soccer games, but in my immediate past I had been racing a car down a dark and foreign Mexican mountain. They focused a great deal of interest on who was worthy of being student body president and when they would get the zip ties off his teeth, while I remembered sleeping in a wrecked car for a month and..