What was happening in the Black community was a world apart from our white neighborhood. School went on as planned. We went to church on Sunday mornings, a ritual enacted every week the same way. My dad went to work every day before we woke and made ready for school. He came home every night to the excitement of the children. We mobbed him as he came in the door and he always said something to the tune of, “All right. All right. Let me get in the house.”
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The kid in the Javelin was more circumspect than many of the other students I knew that the school. He doubted the existence of a loving God, for instance, and eschewed membership in any of the rigid cliques among the students. I looked up to him, as he seemed so free compared to me and many of my classmates.
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Having been a sensitive, empathetic boy, I was prone to all sorts of daydreams and flights of mind and spirit. At grade school and high school, I was clumsy, half-hearted in athletic pursuit, and didn’t have a great deal of rapport with the other kids in my neighborhood, who could be cruel and vindictive.
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Around the time of the Cub Scout incident in Blenheim Park, a boy by the name of Raymond began to attend my grade school. As I remember him, Raymond was a tall, stout kid whose bubbly personality endeared him to teachers and students alike. He carried an afro pick in his back pocket.
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As I deliver mail day to day, I think about American active and structural racism. It’s hard not to, given my past in the soup pot. My route runs through a suburban neighborhood activated and motivated by race. Except for one Black American woman and an African immigrant married to a white man, there are no Blacks or Black Americans on my daily rounds.
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