Mahalia Savage ’28

The Power of Writing: “Swings”

For as long as I can remember, words in the world just kind of jumped out at me. I don’t mean physical words that you can see, like the twenty-four-hour deli sign that reads “24-Hour Deli.” I mean words we can’t see, like the word “bright” when looking at the sun without proper eye protection. It seems that words surround us every day and occupy our thoughts whether we like them or not. It was this phenomenon that ultimately  kickstarted my writing journey and became the fuel for my writing.

Now, I grew up in Bushwick, NY, and over there we have this park called “Tiger Park.” It was painted with splashes of red and blue and silver and fitted with all the playground attractions like four baby swings, stairs, a sliding pole, baby slides, and plenty of places to climb, play tic tac toe, run through a sprinkler. Now these baby swings were closed off in their own little section by black bars the same color as the swings themselves. Except, only the swings shone when the light hit them, almost as if to signal they loved the light, which is why they attracted so much of it in the summertime. If you came in the summer to use those swings and saw them shining, you’d be wise to take that as a warning not to take chances and let any bare skin touch them.

One afternoon, when I was in fourth or fifth grade, I went to Tiger Park with my mother and felt an urge to write something. I was wearing my navy uniform pants – so I was safe from the swing’s heat –with my white uniform blouse tucked into it, red uniform cross tie under my collar, and a pair of sneakers hidden under my pants. I was a bony child, but still too big for my legs to fit through the holes in the baby swing, so I sat on top of it.

Each swing held onto the bar above it with four chains each. One for each struggle the average person in Bushwick would have to face. The struggles labeled by food stamps, welfare, out of control children, and gang violence. These were topics and concepts too complicated for my young mind to handle, but I was not too young to feel their effects. I didn’t respond to these the same way my peers did, and I didn’t understand that. Instead of becoming rambunctious, I sought wisdom from the adults in my life. I couldn’t follow the expected norm of destructiveness and that made me feel isolated amongst my peers. I seemed to escape from that feeling through words and music; so as I swung, I hummed and noticed everything around me—especially the words.

I noticed the moving patterns the trees made on the ground with their shadows, and the light shining through their leaves. I realized that the park was always beautifully lit with warm hues by the sun. I heard children screaming, laughing, and full of joy. It was at that moment that a feeling of joy came to me. There was joy in the children, joy in the light, and even joy in the shadows, which ignited the joy in me. My humming started to turn into words inspired by that joy to capture what I felt.

“Write a song, write a song to your universe,” I sang to myself.

I sang that line to myself over and over as I continued to swing; one might’ve thought that I was chanting some ritual. Consumed in joy and beauty, I found what I wanted to write. I wanted to write to my universe, my hood, my slums, and tell it how I felt about it. Though many disregard the slums and the people who are products of it, both have their beauty. It was difficult to talk to anyone about it because they couldn’t see it—to see the beauty in the ugly is another act that can cause isolation. Your paper can see it though, and absorb all of it. I wrote so that I could feel understood and heard, even if I was the only one reading it.

In the end, “Write a song, write a song to your universe” was the first original line I had ever written. I don’t think I knew then what inspired it, but looking back, it’s apparent why I wrote down those words. It was my surroundings, my wants, and my feelings. The pressure I felt from being from the slums, the isolation I felt for not “acting” from the slums, the beauty I saw in the slums, and the need to express that beauty in words. In all these things, I saw invisible words that I then formed into a sentence to represent that moment for me.

I feel that in a lot of writing the goal is to find those invisible words that make the world in which only the writer can see visible to the reader. To encapsulate the subject’s surroundings, wants, and feelings so that the reader can see it and feel it too. This was my inspiration to write and a skill that was very important for me on my writing journey.