Word: bianca
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Does she believe it? "I don't know," says Bianca shyly. Her mind is stocked with what she has learned from television and movies. Bianca says she wants to go to college because if she does not, she will "end up like that lady in a cartoon" who sings because she didn't finish school. But she will not take science, for fear of burning her hand in a lab, "like that woman on The Young and the Restless." She talks about the bad effects of cocaine and reveals that she learned about the subject from a TV movie called...
...Bianca feels safe when she is at home in front of the television. When Jem, a shapely, superstar rock singer who is the title character of her favorite cartoon show, shakes her radiant pink hair and makes her magical red earrings sparkle, Bianca is transported into another world. Jem embodies what Bianca would like to be as an adult: sexy, a singer and a success. "I don't want to be a maid at hotels when I grow up," says Bianca. "That's what my auntie is. She works for a hotel in the French Quarter. I want...
...other half of the one-story, pale blue home, which they bought when Leonard was eight. The house stands in a neat row of similar dwellings, each with a small square-columned portico and patch of front yard. After a 1960 federal order desegregated William Frantz Public School, which Bianca now attends, the neighborhood changed from all white to nearly all black. Today only 26 of New Orleans' 126 public schools are racially integrated. Bianca's school is virtually all black. When told about the bitter struggles to integrate Frantz, Bianca says, "That's history." She brushes away further discussion...
...Bianca has a lot of her father's features," Sherri says. No photographs of the man are around the house. Sherri never lived with him. Bianca saw him only occasionally before he became ill and died when she was not yet four years old. "You don't miss what you don't know," says Sherri, dismissing any relevance to Bianca's life. Recently, Bianca was asked for her father's name in a school workbook. She wrote in Leonard's name...
...weekends Bianca often visits her grandmother, with whom she was especially close in the pre-Leonard days. Since Bianca and Sherri moved, Bianca's affections have shifted in the direction of her mother. Last November Bianca wrote in her school journal, "I would like to say something nice to a special person, Mom. My mom always stand by my side when I needed her. My mom always love me, took very good care of me. And always teached me wrong to right. I always love my mother." Mother and daughter grew up together. In some respects, they were raised more...