Sable Monroe

Sometimes people ask how I could have arrived in New York so unprepared for what life there would actually feel like.

How did I not know it would be different from Florida?

How did I not understand that America was not one giant sunny sitcom?

The answer is simple.

I was a child building an entire country out of fragments.

People forget what growing up in Jamaica during the 1980s could look like if you were not wealthy.

I did not grow up endlessly consuming American media.

I did not have cable television.

I did not even really understand what cable was back then.

What I knew about were satellite dishes.

Some of the children at Alvernia Prep School had them at home. Those giant dishes outside people’s houses that quietly announced:
we have access.
We have foreign channels.
We have America inside our living room.

I did not have that.

My grandmother in Montego Bay, the woman who loved me most consistently during my childhood, had a black-and-white television for years. Sometimes the thing barely worked.

Not because she was poor exactly.

She simply did not see the need for a new television.

Eventually my Uncle Kali bought her a color television sometime in the late 1980s, but before that, black-and-white TV was normal in her house.

At my father’s family house in Waterhouse, there was a color television and a VCR.

But even that sounds more luxurious than it actually felt.

We only had one local channel.

JBC.

And I was not allowed to simply sit around watching television whenever I wanted because the adults did not want me “running up the electric bill.”

The television got turned on when they decided it got turned on.

Watching cartoons casually after school was not my reality.

So when people wonder why my imagination of America was so narrow, they have to understand the information environment I was growing up inside.

My America came from:
Florida trips,
VHS tapes,
JBC,
prep-school classmates,
letters from overseas,
and imagination filling in all the gaps.

That was it.

So in my child brain, America became less of a real country and more of an emotional fantasy.

I thought New York would basically be Florida with winter.

That sounds ridiculous now, but I genuinely did not know any better.

People told me it would be cold.

That was the main warning.

Cold.

Not emotionally hard.
Not isolating.
Not chaotic in new ways.
Not dangerous in ways I did not yet understand.

Just cold.

And because I had never seen snow before, even that sounded exciting.

I imagined “junior high school” looking like “Saved by the Bell”.

I imagined pretty suburban homes with sunshine and stability.

I imagined adults behaving better.

I imagined rules protecting women and children.

I imagined America itself functioning almost like a safety mechanism.

Because when you are a child growing up in violence and instability, and your exposure to the outside world is fragmented, hope becomes highly imaginative.

I was not media-saturated.

I was dream-saturated.

And honestly, maybe that was the only reason I survived those years emotionally at all.

“Letters From America”—>