When Grace Bautista was in 10th grade, a classmate called her a dogeater.
The slur was not her first and it stung. He was joking, but it didn’t matter.
“He would never know, he would never understand,” Bautista wrote months later in an assignment for her English teacher, Kirrin Coleman. “And there was no point in letting the anger go in front of the whole class. I accepted his murmured apology.”
Bautista’s essay, “Rebolusyon,” is one of three submissions from Bainbridge High School to win a national Scholastic Arts & Writing Award this year. When she accepts her American Voices medal at Carnegie Hall in June, she’ll join an elite coterie of creatives — including Truman Capote, Lena Dunham and Stephen King — and 1,899 public, private and home-schooled peers in grades seven through 12.
“I logged on and I was like, ‘Oh my God,” Bautista said of finding out “Rebolusyon” had been selected. “I just screeched out and texted all my friends.”
Initially, though, the 11th-grader had been reluctant to share the piece, which was styled after Sherman Alexie’s short story, “An Indian Education.” In a series of anecdotes, Bautista, who was born in Germany but is also half-Filipino, probed her biracial identity.
“The broad theme is not really feeling like I fit in, in any culture,” she said.
Anneke Karreman, who won a Gold Medal for her acrylic painting “Precious Culture,” made a subject out of a stranger. She couldn’t shake the image of a young woman she found on the internet.
“She had this crown of flowers and face paint, a very specific pattern; that struck me as unusual because here on Bainbridge Island you don’t see stuff like that,” Karreman said. “As I worked I wondered, what is her life like? What do these symbols mean? What drives her to celebrate her own culture?”
Winning the medal was, “pretty surreal, but I don’t know what it means, really,” Karreman said.
Alongside 22 other BHS students, the senior also received kudos on the regional level.
“This summer, I was working with a lot of different materials and trying to build up my portfolio because I intend to go to art school,” she said.
It was hard, spending Friday nights alone working while her friends were out spending time together, Karreman added.
But her efforts didn’t go unnoticed. She produced five award-winning works: three sculptures, a drawing and a mixed media piece.
The third student to receive a national medal was Julia Bernard, a sophomore who attended BHS last fall. Her poetic essay, “First encounter with sharks,” is full of vivid imagery:
“Manatee. The word bounces throughout the boat and excitedly peers over the bow rail. Splashes disrupt the hysteria of the idea of a manatee. One is in. Eager to be second, eager to be brave, eager to see, the blue stirs with the warm bodies plunging into the cold sea.”
She deliberately broke the rules, she said, as she prepared the snapshot memoir for Kim Kooistra’s English class.
Praise-nabbing prose
Excerpts from “Rebolusyon” by Grace Bautista, which received an American Voices Medal in the 2016 Scholastic Art & Writing Awards:
FIRST GRADE
My lola and I picked oranges in her backyard under a hot California sky while my parents and my lolo waited inside the same small house they’d lived in since before I was born. We ate heaping plates of homemade fried rice and lumpia and pancit, one spoonful of culture after another. Mouthfuls of heritage burned my tongue, the lumpia still hot from the fryer. But we ate it anyway, savoring the taste of a home I’d never been to, a motherland I knew nothing about, ancestors whose names I could not pronounce. I wondered if my white cousins from my mother’s side would turn their noses up at the unfamiliar words and flavors. I wondered if by eating the food I would become more of an anomaly at those reunions; the only dark-haired, brown-skinned one there among my blonde and blue-eyed family.
But I ate it anyway.
FIFTH GRADE
I jotted down notes as my lola told me the story of how she hid in the rainforest to escape persecution over the crackling speakerphone. She described to me how they would steal rice from the occupying soldiers and sing songs with the other families in hiding. How eventually, my lolo joined the U.S. military, packed up, and came to the United States with my lola, father, and uncle.
My hands and voice shook with the weight of each word when I spoke her story aloud in front of my school, on the biggest stage I had ever been on. People will tell me later how they cried, how great my grandparents’ sacrifice was. I collect one more fragile piece of identity that becomes solidified in the form of blossoming pride for my people, who survived and kept on singing through bombings and starvation and the utter reversal of everything they had once known.
TENTH GRADE
He called me a dogeater as a joke.
He didn’t mean it. I forgave. I understood the intent. But the anger I felt in that moment grew and grew until suddenly I was a wildfire, consuming and exhaling and altogether an unpredictable force of nature. My head spun with white hot fury. Dogeater, dogeater, dogeater. The word kept pace with the beat of my heart, pounding quickly in my chest.
“What did you just say to me?” I said. I struggled to keep my voice low. But he laughed it off, and my rage imploded. Everything about to come out in an angry stream of words and hot tears snapped back and condensed. He would never know, he would never understand, and there was no point in letting the anger go in front of the whole class.
I accepted his murmured apology. Sometimes you need to save the fire in you and let it build you back up, piece by piece, instead of letting it devour you whole.
— Grace Bautista
