Push

Acclaim for SAPPHIRE’s

PUSH

A stunningly frank effort that marks the emergence of an immensely promising writer.

—Los Angeles Times Book Review

"Thrilling….[Push’s] affecting combination of child-like tenderness and adult rage leaves little doubt that Sapphire’s talents as a poet translate artfully into her fiction."

—Entertainment Weekly

[Sapphire] writes with a poet’s ear for rhythms, in a voice that pushes her story relentlessly into your mind.

—Interview

Sapphire is aptly named, for this powerful, poetic work is a small gem.

—Mademoiselle

The beauty (and the risk) of this book is in its vivid, imperfect harnessing of issues and acts of huge social and moral consequences.

—Newsday

"Push…develops so richly and fearlessly that one cannot resist its power."

—Elle

[Precious’s] voice is blunt and unadorned, sorrowful as a foghorn and so wholly engulfing that despite its broken words it generates single-handedly the moving power of this novel.

—The New York Times Book Review

Precious’s story, told through her own unique style and spelling, is a major achievement. It documents a remarkable resilience of spirit.

—The Boston Globe

"The miracle of Push is that, even at its most devastating, it is also a story about faith and possibility."

—Chicago Tribune

To read the story [is] magic….[It is] paint-peelingly profane and thoroughly real.

—The Washington Post

SAPPHIRE

PUSH

Sapphire is the author of two books of poetry, American Dreams and Black Wings & Blind Angels, and the New York Times bestselling novel The Kid. She lives and works in New York City.

also by sapphire

Fiction

The Kid

Poetry

American Dreams

Black Wings & Blind Angels

SECOND VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES EDITION, JUNE 2021

Copyright © 1996 by Sapphire/Ramona Lofton

Preface copyright © 2021 by Tayari Jones

Afterword copyright © 2021 by Sapphire/Ramona Lofton

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, in 1996.

Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage Contemporaries and colophon are trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:

Names: Sapphire, author.

Title: Push : a novel / by Sapphire.

Description: First edition. | New York : Alfred A. Knopf : Distributed by Random House, 1996.

Identifiers: lccn 96016516

Subjects: lcsh: African Americans—Fiction. | Teenage mothers—Fiction. | African American girls—Fiction. | Child abuse—Fiction. | Literacy—Fiction. | Incest—Fiction. | Harlem (New York, N.Y.)—Fiction. | gsafd: Domestic fiction. | Bildungsroman.

Classification: lcc ps3569.a63 p87 1996 | ddc 813/.54—dc20

lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​96016516

Vintage Contemporaries Trade Paperback ISBN 9780593314609

Ebook ISBN 9780593466759

Cover design by Archie Ferguson

www.vintagebooks.com

ep_prh_5.7.0_c0_r0

Contents

Cover

About the Author

Also by Sapphire

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Preface to the Vintage Contemporaries Edition (2021) by Tayari Jones

Chapter I

Chapter II

Chapter III

Chapter IV

Life Stories

Afterword

Notes

For children everywhere.

And for my teachers Eavan Boland,

James D. Merritt,

and most especially

Susan Fromberg Schaeffer.

If thou be one whose heart the holy forms

Of young imagination have kept pure,

Stranger! henceforth be warned; and know, that pride,

Howe’er disguised in its own majesty,

Is littleness; that he who feels contempt

For any living thing, hath faculties

Which he has never used; that thought with him

Is in its infancy. The man, whose eye

is ever on himself, doth look on one,

The least of nature’s works, one who might move

The wise man to that scorn which wisdom holds

Unlawful, ever. O, be wiser thou!

Instructed that true knowledge leads to love…

william wordsworth

Every blade of grass has its Angel that bends over it and whispers, Grow, grow.

the talmud

Preface to the Vintage

Contemporaries Edition (2021)

Tayari Jones

In the Reagan years, I was a teenager, more reader than writer, when I discovered the work of Sapphire. As a college student, I hung out with a cluster of intense artsy types, sharing battered copies of chapbooks, zines, and small-press volumes. My good friend Angela passed me a sheaf of xeroxed pages by an author who called herself Sapphire. What I remember most clearly was a persona poem from the point of view of Celestine Tate Harrington, the quadriplegic boardwalk singer who fought the city for custody of her child. The poem was defiant as the speaker focused less on the joys of motherhood and more on ownership of her sexuality. Angela speculated that Sapphire would likely never receive her due in the world of letters, because she had chosen as her subject the people whose bodies are stigmatized, whose families are pathologized, and whose very lives are held up as everything America rejects. She is a hero, Angela declared, and I nodded in solemn agreement.

Imagine our shock and delight in 1996 when the entire literary world was on fire with the publication of Push—the author had been given a major advance, the first chapter would appear in The New Yorker, and there would be a serious book tour. I called Angela, as we were now living on opposite sides of the country, trying to figure out adult life. "Is that our Sapphire?" This was pre-internet, so I ran to the bookstore. The slick packaging was a far cry from the tattered pages we’d passed back and forth, and the woman in the author photo wore a close crop instead of long thick dreadlocks, but the fingerprint of an author is her words.

Push is told in the extraordinary voice of Claireece Precious Jones, who introduces her story with an agonizing declaration: I was left back when I was twelve because I had a baby for my fahver. From there unspools a novel that is a merciless indictment of a society that abandons its most vulnerable citizens.

Without a doubt, Precious has trouble a-plenty. In addition to being impregnated by her father twice, she is also raped and beaten by her mother. She is functionally illiterate, obese, and destitute. She lives at the intersection of racism, sexism, classism, colorism, and more. Yet while her life is certainly shaped by these forces, they do not compromise her vibrant humanity.

Push the novel is much like Precious herself. Some critics were appalled by the very idea of this story, with this heroine, being held up as an important work of literature—just as Precious herself, walking down the streets of Harlem, endures stares and sneers from people who resent the very fact of her existence. The response to this work was similar to that of The Color Purple, with some of the same critics bitterly complaining that the novel failed to present Black men in a positive light. But this novel, like Precious herself, finds its people.

Precious’s people are Ms. Rain, the teacher from Each One Teach One, the alternative school where Precious learns to read and, just as important, to write. There, she meets an unforgettable cadre of young women who create a community that heals their trauma and empowers them, both on the pages of their journals as well as in their day-to-day lives. Push is a heartbreaker and a heart mender in one.

Push’s people are those who know firsthand the trouble Sapphire has seen. They are the survivors, the first responders, the essential workers, and the school teachers. They are also those who have never known the pain of homelessness, AIDS, or incest but who desire a world without these scourges.

A novel is a work of art, and Push is no exception. The miracle of Sapphire’s gift is that she weaves her sharp social commentary and critique into the fabric of this story without shredding its fibers. This is a novel about people and their problems, not problems and their people. Sapphire the poet begat Precious, a poet in her own right. This book is like a crown of sonnets, each movement lending an image to the next, building upon itself, growing in beauty and intensity.

This is no easy read. It is accessible, but no, never easy. The experience of reading this novel is best captured in the scene when Precious gives birth on the kitchen floor, the scene from which the novel takes its name. As she is racked with labor pains, the EMT coaches, "When that shit hit you again, go with it and push, Preshecita. Push."

Sapphire wants us not to push past the pain, injustice, and trauma. Instead, we must push through it. We must feel it to be changed by it. By the last page, we don’t have the type of happy ending that Precious would call a "Color Purple." Yet we have the gift of a new day and a mandate to act.

When I finished Push in 1996, I immediately called my college friend, breathless and clutching the slim book to my breast. It’s the same Sapphire. I can tell.

Yeah, Angela sighed. It’s her. Always a hero.

I

I was left back when I was twelve because I had a baby for my fahver. That was in 1983. I was out of school for a year. This gonna be my second baby. My daughter got Down Sinder. She’s retarded. I had got left back in the second grade too, when I was seven, ’cause I couldn’t read (and I still peed on myself). I should be in the eleventh grade, getting ready to go into the twelf’ grade so I can gone ’n graduate. But I’m not. I’m in the ninfe grade.

I got suspended from school ’cause I’m pregnant which I don’t think is fair. I ain’ did nothin’!

My name is Claireece Precious Jones. I don’t know why I’m telling you that. Guess ’cause I don’t know how far I’m gonna go with this story, or whether it’s even a story or why I’m talkin’; whether I’m gonna start from the beginning or right from here or two weeks from now. Two weeks from now? Sure you can do anything when you talking or writing, it’s not like living when you can only do what you doing. Some people tell a story ’n it don’t make no sense or be true. But I’m gonna try to make sense and tell the truth, else what’s the fucking use? Ain’ enough lies and shit out there already?

So, OK, it’s Thursday, September twenty-four 1987 and I’m walking down the hall. I look good, smell good—fresh, clean. It’s hot but I do not take off my leather jacket even though it’s hot, it might get stolen or lost. Indian summer, Mr Wicher say. I don’t know why he call it that. What he mean is, it’s hot, 90 degrees, like summer days. And there is no, none, I mean none, air conditioning in this mutherfucking building. The building I’m talking about is, of course, I.S. 146 on 134th Street between Lenox Avenue and Adam Clayton Powell Jr Blvd. I am walking down the hall from homeroom to first period maff. Why they put some shit like maff first period I do not know. Maybe to gone ’n git it over with. I actually don’t mind maff as much as I had thought I would. I jus’ fall in Mr Wicher’s class sit down. We don’t have assigned seats in Mr Wicher’s class, we can sit anywhere we want. I sit in the same seat everyday, in the back, last row, next to the door. Even though I know that back door be locked. I don’t say nuffin’ to him. He don’t say nuffin’ to me, now. First day he say, Class turn the book pages to page 122 please. I don’t move. He say, "Miss Jones, I said turn the book pages to page 122. I say, Mutherfucker I ain’t deaf! The whole class laugh. He turn red. He slam his han’ down on the book and say, Try to have some discipline. He a skinny little white man about five feets four inches. A peckerwood as my mother would say. I look at him ’n say, I can slam too. You wanna slam? ’N I pick up my book ’n slam it down on the desk hard. The class laugh some more. He say, Miss Jones I would appreciate it if you would leave the room right NOW. I say, I ain’ going nowhere mutherfucker till the bell ring. I came here to learn maff and you gon’ teach me. He look like a bitch just got a train pult on her. He don’t know what to do. He try to recoup, be cool, say, Well, if you want to learn, calm down— I’m calm, I tell him. He say, If you want to learn, shut up and open your book." His face is red, he is shaking. I back off. I have won. I guess.

I didn’t want to hurt him or embarrass him like that you know. But I couldn’t let him, anybody, know, page 122 look like page 152, 22, 3, 6, 5—all the pages look alike to me. ’N I really do want to learn. Everyday I tell myself something gonna happen, some shit like on TV. I’m gonna break through or somebody gonna break through to me—I’m gonna learn, catch up, be normal, change my seat to the front of the class. But again, it has not been that day.

But thas the first day I’m telling you about. Today is not the first day and like I said I was on my way to maff class when Mrs Lichenstein snatch me out the hall to her office. I’m really mad ’cause actually I like maff even though I don’t do nuffin’, don’t open my book even. I jus’ sit there for fifty minutes. I don’t cause trouble. In fac’ some of the other natives get restless I break on ’em. I say, Shut up mutherfuckers I’m tryin’ to learn something. First they laugh like trying to pull me into fuckin’ with Mr Wicher and disrupting the class. Then I get up ’n say, Shut up mutherfuckers I’m tryin’ to learn something. The coons clowning look confuse, Mr Wicher look confuse. But I’m big, five feet nine-ten, I weigh over two hundred pounds. Kids is scared of me. Coon fool, I tell one kid done jumped up.