Dream World

This morning I woke up thinking about the amazing dream I had. To describe my dream to you in one word, I would say “perfect”. My entire family was together, healthy, and gathered around a big round dinner table with too much food for the five of us. After we ate dinner, my mother and father helped us with our homework and when we finished we were allowed to go outside and play with our friends in the green grass and big metal playground with swings and slides. I think if I were to keep dreaming, that day would keep happening over and over. But the saddest part of waking up is realizing that it was just a dream and now I am awake to live my reality in East St. Louis.
I live in the Blows of East St. Louis right between the tracks and the mill. The railroad tracks transport large train cars full of chemicals. One time the truck was over filled and it burst open and spilled into the soil. It’s not like that was the first time we have had chemicals and toxic wastes spilled into the ground and it most certainly will not be the last. The mills sometimes have chemical spills as well and when they do, the law said an alarm has to go off to alert my town. But instead of taking the mill workers to court, they just give whoever is around $400 to compensate. Four hundred dollars for all the problems they cost does not seem like a lot, but it is all we can ask for.
Four hundred dollars for the brain damage done to my buddy Smokey, and to make up for the all the jobs my daddy can’t get. Ya see, my entire town is surrounded with is factories. And big factories like the ones I see everyday need a lot of men inside them to work the machines; so why can’t my daddy get a job? It’s those folks up in the Bluffs. They want to keep this segregation strong and don’t want to help us. The school system is all messed up and with our families struggling to get any work and make money, our town can’t even afford to get the trash picked up anymore.
If I could find a way to get a job I guess maybe I would but I don’t see much point. I’m supposed to be learning all this stuff in school to help me get a job but that doesn’t happen. So many of our teachers leave, my class room time is spent doing nothing. The only class I really enjoy going to is history. I would like to know more about science but because we have thirty kids in my class, the teacher can’t supervise us all so we just read out of the couple text books we have, some of them don’t have all the pages we need but we make do. I know better than to think my dream could one day turn into reality. For now, instead of playing with my siblings in the green grass after dinner, I will walk with them through the toxin socked marsh and try to stay out of trouble.