This is for Life as a Lord . 1. How could you tell who was a noble?
2. Where did most nobles live?
This is for Life as a Peasants
1. When were the Peasants invited to stay stay inside the castle walls?

I brooklyn rain

The rain here is different than the way

it rains in Greenville. No sweet smell of honeysuckle. No soft squish of pine. No slip and slide through grass. Just Mama saying, Stay inside today. It‘s raining,

5 and me at the window. Nothing to do but watch

the gray sidewalk grow darker, watch

the drops slide down the glass pane,

10 watch

people below me move fast, heads bent.

Already there are stories

in my head. Already color and sound and words.

SCAN FOR MULTIMEDIA

NOTES

squish (skwihsh) n. spongy, cushioned feeling when walking on a flexible surface

from Brown Girl Dreaming 13

©Albl .ng Company LLC.

NOTES

humming (HUHM ihng) v. singing with closed lips and without words

15

20

25

Already I’m

drawing circles on the glass, humming myself someplace far away from here.

Down south, there was always someplace else to go you could step out into the rain and

Grandma would let you

lift your head and stick out your tongue

be happy.

Down south already feels like a long time ago

but the stories in my head

take me back there, set me down in Daddy’s garden where the sun is always shining.

* * *

another way

While our friends are watching TV or playing outside, we are in our house, knowing that begging our mother to turn the television on is useless, begging her for

ten minutes outside will only mean her saying,

No. Saying,

You can run wild with your friends anytime. Today I want you to find another way to play.

And then one day my mother

comes home with two shopping bags

filled with board games—Monopoly, checkers, chess, Ants in the Pants, Sorry, Trouble,

just about every game we’ve ever seen

in the commercials between

our Saturday morning cartoons.

So many games, we don’t know

where to begin playing, so we let Roman choose. And he chooses Trouble

because he likes the sound the die makes

when it pops inside

its plastic bubble. And for days and days,

it is Christmas in November,

games to play when our homework is done, Monopoly money to count

and checkers to slam down on boards, ants to flip into blue plastic pants,

chess pieces to practice moving until we understand their power

and when we don’t, Roman and I argue

that there’s another way to play

Explanation: