Big-Mouth Mitchie by sheena d.
In “Big-Mouth Mitchie,” author sheena d. follows Icon, a young Black girl at an underresourced school in Indiana. Her teacher is absent. Her best friend, Mitchie, spills Icon’s deepest secret to the class—that she’s in love with New York City’s Lady Liberty. The narrator seamlessly reveals the touching (and often) hilarious thoughts of a child. The harshness of the world in this piece is winningly balanced by the humor of the narrator’s voice. This story was once longer, sheena d. writes in her author’s note, but this condensed iteration captures the attention of the reader with the snap of each broken pencil. The world feels so honest—shopping for journals at Staples, drinking orange pop at Mitchie’s house. Each scene carries a lightness, a joy, even with the backdrop of heavier coming-of-age considerations of racial and sexual identity. —CRAFT
Mitchie’s mechanical pencil shatters into a hundred billion trillion pieces.
“Dewanda, behave!” the teacher screams at me.
She don’t know us or our names or remember that Dewanda goes to a new school now. So we don’t call her by her real name either. We just say Ms. Dontmatter—Mitchie’s idea.
“When you destroy personal property,” Ms. Dontmatter scolds, “you reinforce stereotypes about people like you.”
People like me always get in trouble.
Last week, I had to leave class. All because I asked Ms. Dontmatter how we were ever gonna be ready for middle school, if all we did was watch Hidden Figures over and over.
“You need role models—who look like you,” she said.
Don’t nobody in our class look like nobody in that movie, but whatever. She made me sit and write I will respect the authority of my teachers a hundred times.
And now she’s saying, for every minute it takes me to fix the pencil, I gotta stand in the corner for an hour.
It’s not like I pushed Mitchie down the stairs or cut off one of her braids or told everybody she stores her own spit in baby food jars under her bed and made me smell it one time. All I did was break a cheap pencil that everybody knew was gonna break eventually anyway. And even Mitchie know she deserved it.
It’s not even that deep. Especially ’cause Mitchie can have whatever she wants ’cause her mom works at Staples.
At Mitchie’s mom’s Staples, a couple months ago, I saw this planner I had to have. But even with her mom’s discount it was gonna be $20. Mitchie showed me some cheaper ones. But they didn’t have the things I’m planning to have in my future—like taxis, skyscrapers, juicy apples. They didn’t have sketches of the Statue of Liberty.
And I love the Statue of Liberty.
Like…for real.
And I told Mitchie that.
Like…a fool.
“Well, you could save up for it,” Mitchie said.
And I did.
I asked Ms. Yuki, my neighbor, to teach me to make her signature ohniggery, so I could sell some at school. I thought they were called that because they came wrapped in black but she said, “No, it’s O-N-I-G-I-R-I, and it just means rice ball.”
The black stuff is dried seaweed.
Salty usually.
Soggy sometimes.
Snappy others. Like Mitchie.
After I earned enough, I bought the planner and Mitchie gave me some stickers and we took turns decorating it. She wrote Best Friends Forever and signed her name on the back. And now I wanna rip it up. Because today, in front of the whole class, she put me on blast, and said, “Y’all, Icon thinks she gonna marry the Statue of Liberty!”
Then she laughed so loud I seriously didn’t think I’d ever hear anything else ever again.
New York supposed to be so loud that you never have to hear nobody laughing at you.
When I get there, I’m getting a big pretzel and finding the Statue of Liberty. Then I’ll check out all of the places Ms. Yuki says make food you could never find in Indianapolis. Then I’m gonna take the Statue of Liberty some of the most delicious things I find, even though she probably has stuff like that all the time.
I tried to make a list of why I love the Statue of Liberty but the only reason I love her is because I love her. And she got her own island. I wanna know if her copper feels hot in the summer and cool in the winter or always stays the same. They’re thin but her lips are probably bigger than my whole head. Nobody else is like that.
And she’s cool with everybody.
No matter who they are, where they from, what they look like, or what they like—even when it’s her.
Trying to fix this pencil is pointless, so I ask if I can just get Mitchie a new one. Ms. Dontmatter launches into lecture mode, talking about how intent and impact are both our responsibility and blah blah blaaaah. The thin chin hairs she had yesterday have been plucked away. But I bet, if they really focused, they could grow back before she finishes talking.
Mitchie interrupts and breaks one of her own pencils.
“It ain’t her fault.” She points at me.
But Ms. Dontmatter tells her to shut up.
On the bus, Mitchie is all sad.
“I know I was wrong for telling everybody like that. But I felt…kinda left out. I wanna fix it.”
At her place, she pours us some orange pop in plastic cups before running upstairs to her room. Unless she got a time machine to go back and keep that big mouth shut though, I don’t think anything will make up for my best friend telling everybody my one secret.
And making fun of me.
She comes down in a plastic crown, draped in a light blue sheet, holding a homemade torch that looks like an orange washcloth stuffed into a painted ice cream cone.
“Give me your tired, give me your poor,” she says, even though we both know this country don’t want nobody’s poor.
She puts a piece of folded paper in my hand.
Hearts are drawn on the note, in ink, which I have to feel a little bad about because I know Mitchie is a mechanical pencil person only.
It says: Give me your heart, I don’t want much more.
Her plastic crown bops me on the head.
Then her lips are on my lips and then my lips are on the Statue of Liberty and then I find out the Statue of Liberty is so much softer than she looks.
“I’m never telling you diddly-squat again,” I say.
“Fair,” she laughs.
sheena d. is an essayist, humorist, and doodler based in New York City. Her writing has received a Center for Fiction Emerging Writer Fellowship, won the Miriam Chaikin Prose Award, and made the Longreads Best of 2022 list. Sometimes she’s on Instagram at @bookofsheena.
Featured image by zelle duda, courtesy of Unsplash.
