"Wentworth? Oh! ay, - Mr Wentworth, the curate of Monkford. You misled me by the term gentleman. I thought you were speaking of some man of property: Mr Wentworth was nobody, I remember; quite unconnected; nothing to do with the Strafford family. One wonders how the names of many of our nobility become so common." – Sir Walter Elliot in Jane Austen's Persuasion
Me and Sophia just knew, Edward was the one who would go to college. All the things he liked were the ones that didn't belong in our world; even in elementary school, he was the puny, bookish kid who sat by the side studying his spelling words while the rest of us dribbled basketballs on the blacktop. Even though nobody told us to, Sophia and I both worked, letting him focus on studying. And knowing we were making this sacrifice for his sake, Ed did his very best, all the way from getting into the National Spelling Bee, to skipping a grade so he could get himself through school as quickly as possible.
Still, everybody at school teased him mercilessly because he was weird. He liked history, but he didn't care for the history they taught us in school, preferring instead to escape into another world, many centuries and an ocean away.
"Ed, you can't get far enough away from here?" I said. I was fourteen and he'd just turned sixteen, finishing up junior year with an AP class in European history.
"I'm tired of learning about our history," Ed explained. "Like, just 'cause we're black, the only thing that's supposed to matter is the struggle. But this stuff, it tells you, if you go back long enough, those white people in Europe struggled like us too. Humans been poor, they done all kinds of crazy things to each other, and no matter what colour you are, it happened to your people at some time or other. Knowing that, it makes me feel better, gives me hope."
Well, because Ed was into all this stuff, we found out we have the same name as some fancy rich family in England. He brought home his research for his final term project, a stack of printouts from the library with pictures of this enormous house, grander than anything we'd seen even in movies.
"Wentworth Woodhouse," I read, skimming the caption underneath one of the pictures. "Dude, y'know you'll be laughed out of the room when you present that thing, right? I mean, telling everyone a bunch of fancy rich folks got our name? Everyone knows how that happened, you might as well go air a commercial to say our granddaddy's granddaddy was their slave."
"Fred, tell me, who in this city wasn't the descendant of a slave?" he replied nonchalantly. "It'd be the pot calling the kettle black."
When a couple weeks passed, and I didn't need to defend Ed from anyone, I thought maybe they'd forgotten all about it after all. Besides, when he was at the high school and I was still in junior high, there wasn't much I could do anyway if kids roughed him up in school for having airs.
Surprisingly, the reaction Ed's project got was the opposite of what I'd expected. Ever since my fourteenth birthday, I'd started working at McDonald's after school, and while trudging down the street on the way there one day, some bigger boys from the high school called out to me.
"Yo, Wentworth!" one of them said. "Respect, man!"
"Huh?" I was completely puzzled. "For what?"
"We knew your mama was a ho, and your grandmama's grandmama," came the reply. "But they sure knew how to do it right. Who knows they picked one of the richest folks in England to do it with?"
I thought I'd figured out all the possibilities, but this had never occurred to my fourteen-year-old brain. With the heat of shame rising all the way to the tips of my ears, I shuffled on, looking straight ahead of me.
"I gotta work," I said, and got out of there as quickly as possible.