When I am a junior in high school, I take a course called Advanced Acting, held in a dank, basement-level classroom that doubles as our black-box theatre. I love to act. It is my way to travel, to shape-shift, to practice a kind of freedom. When I commit to embodying other characters, I forget that I am hungry, female, black and an immigrant. In the trance of performance, I can make myself and my audiences believe that I am anywhere but here, anyone and anything but me. I can practice being a bolder version of myself. I can practice possible selves. I can embody the oppressed, the oppressor, or someone in between. I can morph into a rock, a river, a tree.

When I am a rock, I am
a silent, sturdy witness.
When I am a river, I am
a wild, unstoppable force.
When I am a tree, I am
flamboyant and proud.

At school, I'm an outspoken leader. An honor student who is passing for middle-class. At home, I'm obedient and stuck. My mother is strict and protective. She has heard too many stories about Haitian teenagers who "forget that they are Haitian," befriend the wrong people and end up pregnant or jailed. She refuses to let me play outdoors with our neighbors in the projects. "We live in the projects but we are not of the projects," is her relentless mantra.

Even if we are an elitist family, at times, we are struggling poor. One harsh, unemployed year, my pregnant mother stands in a line behind City Hall, waiting for volunteers to hand her a bag of free canned or boxed food. I wait for her in the back seat of our blue, two-door Toyota, hiding my face in my lap, petrified that my rich, Cambridge friends might walk by and recognize us. Worse than the secret of our poverty is the fact that my stepfather emotionally and occasionally physically abuses my mother. I ignore and appease them both by burying my nose in books like The House on Mango Street and our secondhand volumes of the Encyclopedia Brittanica. With every page I turn, I think, "I am one step closer to getting the hell out of here." I become a reader and an artist to escape, to persevere.

In acting class, I use my imagination to transcend my damage. Even if the exercise is temporary, it is crucial to my survival. Acting teaches me that identity is sometimes performative. I believe that poverty, blackness and girlhood (and their counterparts) are sometimes performative. If only momentarily, I can leave my physical state and my troubling circumstances. I can behave as if I am carefree, as if I feel entitled to happiness and peace, as if I am always well-fed. When I act, my face distorts in ways that are not familiar to my friends. My gestures emerge from the depths of a history that is not my own. My imagination becomes my history. My imagination possesses me. Onstage, I practice being my best self: open, outspoken, emotional, inquisitive and playful like the child I am not allowed to be at home.

Today, my assignment is to perform a scene from Shakespeare's "Othello." I play the title role. To get into character, I come to school wearing black combat boots, shimmery bronze slacks and a matching wool sweater. I got my combat boots from Payless, but the clothes belong to my stepfather. His waist is wider than mine so I fasten my belt extra tight. His sweater fits perfectly because I shrunk it in the dryer. I pull back my tight braids into a debonair ponytail.

In the black-box, as Othello, my left palm rubs my chin with sensual cruelty. I whisper my commands. My alto drops down to a resonant contralto. I press the skinny white girl who plays Desdemona close to my pelvis. She pants although the scene is not about panting. When I finish, my classmates rise to their feet and roar. I have convinced them that I am powerful, wealthy and male. Even my gay theatre teacher Mike admits that, watching me, he forgot I was just a teen-aged girl.

For weeks after this performance — before anyone else in my apartment is awake — I sneak into my stepfather's closet and swipe his most elegant clothes. The Brooks Brothers khakis, the silk shirt from Ralph Lauren, the professorial tweed blazer from the Salvation Army — I wear them all to school. He complains to my mother who tries to insult me by saying I look like a "mal garcon," a loathsome boy.

"You have to admit," I shrug, rebellious, "I look better in your husband's clothes than he does." She says nothing but cannot help her smile.

When I act, I am convinced, I am a better man than my stepfather could ever dream to be. Pretty girls at school confirm this. "I'm not a lesbian," a good friend confides, "but sometimes I wish you were my boyfriend."

"I know what you mean," I tell her. "I know exactly what you mean."