Badge of Belonging

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I was six years old when a new boy and his family moved into the neighborhood. His name was Jim, but because he was six years old, the “Y” got added automatically at the end, almost like a badge of belonging: Jimmy.

Jim had an interesting smell; not bad, not unpleasant, just distinctive. His bike was older than mine, with more bumps and scratches, and spots where the shiny factory paint had been covered over with some other paint that obviously didn't belong.

His clothes were a whole different story, especially his shirts. They screamed aloud with bright, vivid color. His closet must have looked like a beautiful abstract painting. And he had his own way of talking - not in the usual way. Each of us had his own distinct talking style, including the new boy, but then his speech added one more step, one extra hint of strangeness, one more measure of distance.

Jimmy's house also had an interesting smell, not bad, not unpleasant, just distinctive. What was that smell? Like a field of barley, or an old woodpile, or the scent that still lingers in a room two hours after somebody was smoking a pipe. That smell was an inconsequential mystery, not even worth noticing, like the other tiny mysteries we came to associate with Jimmy: the way his toys looked, the way his mom was always singing, the taste of the food we ate whenever we were at his house at lunchtime. I think we noticed these things without even knowing we were noticing.

We all played together - in my yard, Sammy's yard, Joey's yard, and Jimmy's yard. We all made fun of our sisters, and they made fun of us. We generally kept our distance, whenever possible, from adults, bullies, and unfriendly dogs. We had fun together like kids are supposed to, with that little hint of nervousness that arises so naturally every now and then just because you're beginning to notice that the world is not entirely safe. We played war, we rode our bikes over to the school and played on the playground, we got forbidden snacks from the kitchen. We got dirty.

We also felt a sense of anticipation about going back to school. We were all very excited about the addition of Jimmy to the classroom. We told Jimmy all about it, as if our school experience was the only one available to anyone in the whole world. We told him about the most icky girls, the most scary teachers, the big plastic jars of white paste that could be used for just about anything, the best playground activities that involved a ball, the way Ronald from another neighborhood would pick his nose and wipe it off under his seat. It was all going to be great fun.

Around the end of July, my mother saw me playing with Jimmy in his front yard. When I came home a few hours later, she was waiting for me, sitting at our picnic table beneath the clothesline recently hung with T-shirts and underwear.

How long have you been playing with those people? How often do you go over there? That's not clean over there. You could get sick because things aren't clean over there. I hope you haven't eaten any food over there. Your father and I don't want you to play over there. Your father and I don't want you to play with that boy.

This was evidently the opinion of the whole neighborhood. By the first day of school, Jimmy and his family were gone completely, and the house was empty. Soon afterward, as always seems to be the case at that age, our memories of Jimmy disappeared, or went away to some mysterious place to be retrieved much later when older versions of neighborhood children begin to ask difficult questions about the universe, and about their own lives.

I had noticed a million things about Jimmy -- the tone of his voice, how it sounded a little older than the rest of us; his hair that was always firm and never got messy; the fact that he could run and ride his bike much faster than the rest of us; the sloppy affection his mother seemed to have for all children; that strange smell...

What I had not noticed about Jimmy was that his skin was considerably darker than mine. I didn't realize that until 46 years later, just a few hours ago, lying in bed half awake and half asleep, that time of day when the box of half remembered, half understood mysteries sometimes opens up a little.

At some point between that summer 46 years ago and this morning, I somehow learned or came to realize that different people have different shades of skin color. What I must have been taught later on, because left to myself I never would have imagined such as strange way of seeing things, is that, of the billions and millions of subtle differences of shade between one person's skin color and another, somebody somewhere had drawn thick boundary lines at certain places on the spectrum. I belonged to this section of the spectrum labeled "white." Others were black, brown, red, freckled, albino, mulatto, white but Hispanic, black but Hispanic, Hispanic looking but not Hispanic white but of African dissent, Moorish color -- which threw a kind of gray into the mix.

The spectrum, wherever it is kept, must be very hard to read. I don't know how many other people have actually seen it, but lots of people -- especially among the folks you see on television -- seem to spend a lot of time thinking about it. The spectrum seems to help them automatically make decisions about all kinds of things. Lots of people are angry about the subject, and I'm sure many of them have good reason to be angry.

But what I know is, for those 2 1/2 months while Jimmy was in the neighborhood, I never even came close to noticing such a thing; and as far as I can tell from the conversations we all had, no one else noticed either. Not even Jimmy.

In remembering all of this, the most important thing seems to me to be that I did notice a lot of other differences between Jimmy and me, as I said before. Am I supposed to feel guilty about noticing those differences? - because I don't. It terrifies me to think that someone somewhere might be drawing more thick boundary lines on other spectrums. Is there a tone of voice spectrum? A sloppiness of mother's affection spectrum? A smell spectrum?

Maybe Jimmy would have a much different viewpoint than I do about these things. After all, it was I, not he, that was forbidden from playing together. It was his family, not mine, that was deemed too dirty to have contact with. And it was his family, not mine, that ended up moving away.

What about it, Jimmy? Are you out there? Can you talk to me? Did you notice any ways in which I was different from you? Did any of those differences matter to you? To your parents? Did I smell different? In the privacy of your own home, do you make fun of me for running and riding my bike so slowly, even when I was trying my hardest? If we saw each other tomorrow, I would notice your skin color, and you would notice mine. Would you be afraid of me? Look down on me? Feel defensive? And would you be justified?

And would you give me a chance to return to the innocence of childhood?



Copyright 2010 Donald L. McIntyre