Knots in My Yo-Yo String (11 page)

There were signs everywhere. I saw, I heard, but that was all. I did not much think. I did not question.

Crayola crayons came in small and large boxes. The large box contained a pale pink-orange color called flesh. I did not often use it. After all, the pages of the coloring book were white, so it was easier to simply leave faces untouched. I never asked, “
Whose
flesh?”

The most popular private trash collector in town was a black man. He worked hard. In the summer especially he became thirsty. Sometimes he would ask a business client if he could get a drink of water from their faucet, and he would show the glass that he always carried with him. He was widely commended for this. I never asked him, “What do you think would happen if you didn’t bring your own glass?”

I once attended a picnic of mixed races. Things were going along normally when, with the picnic only half over, I suddenly noticed that all the black people were gone. I did not run after them and call out, “Wait! Why are you leaving early?”

When my father took me to high school basketball games, I noticed that most of the black people sat in one section of the bleachers. I never asked, “Why do they always sit together?” Or, “Why do
we
always sit together?”

I saw these little separations in a hundred places and a hundred ways, and never once did I say, “Why?”

Though I had neither wit nor grit to ask such questions, sometime in grade school my point of view began to change. It happened when I gave up cowboys and soldiers and turned to sports.

Sports, especially Little League baseball and Biddy basketball, brought me into a new kind of contact with African-American kids. Within the structure of organized games they ceased to be black and I ceased to be white. Instead we were teammates or opponents, identified by the color of our uniforms, not of our skin. The Red Sox. The Green Sox. The Colts. The Wolves. The fear in the streets did not follow me onto sandlots and hardwood courts.

On summer mornings we came from the East End and the West End to play on the Little League field by Stony Creek. In the afternoon the scene switched to the park basketball court. It was during those long hot days that I began to question everything I’d been taught by the countless separations between black and white in Norristown. And I came to see that color was the only difference, as people, between us. And that’s all it was: merely a difference, not an exclusion.

One of my best friends was Louis Darden, who was black. At one time or another Louis and I played on football, basketball, and track teams for Hartranft Elementary and Stewart Junior High. Louis was a happy-go-lucky guy. He was truly a player, not a worker, of games.

As the fastest boy at Hartranft, Louis was entered in the hundred-yard dash at the Norristown grade-school track-and-field meet. Something happened in that race which, even more than my own winning of the fifty-yard dash, remains as my most vivid memory of that day. The starter’s gun went off and the six runners bolted down the cinder track. At the halfway mark it was clear that Louis was not going to win. The runner from Gotwals, Robert Lee, was well ahead of the pack. But Louis was still in the hunt for a second- or third-place medal, and in the grandstand I stood and cheered him on. About twenty yards from the tape, Louis looked to his left and right at his cinder-churning competitors, and suddenly he eased up, he slowed to a kind of whimsical prance, he threw his arms into the air and as the others raced over the finish line, he laughed.

I was stunned. I was outraged. Not that he lost, not even that he gave up. It was his attitude that bothered me most, lah-di-dahing twenty yards from the finish line. How dare he race and not care! How dare he lose and laugh! Didn’t he know this was serious business? The championships of all the grade schools in Norristown, Pennsylvania! I—who took my sports, my baseball cards, my spelling, my life so seriously—could neither understand nor swallow it. Before all the world Louis Darden had disgraced himself. And what was he doing about it? He was laughing.

Two years later it was I who backed off and Louis who cared.

After school one day a group of us were playing basketball under a telephone-pole hoop outside Roger Adelman’s backyard. In addition to Roger and me, Louis Darden, Joe Portano, and a few others were there. It fell to Joe Portano to guard me, and that was a mismatch, for Joe was not much of a basketball player. Big and burly, he was more at home in the trenches of a football game. A mouse by comparison, I scooted around him and scored at will. I didn’t much note his increasing frustration until suddenly he kicked the ball into the weeds and came after me. He shoved me in the chest with the open palms of both hands. I went reeling backward. I regained my balance, and he slammed into me again, growling and scowling. And then Louis was between us, shoving Joe Portano in the chest, sending him backward, sending him away. There was no laughing this time, no lah-di-dahing, no messing around. For once Louis Darden was all business. Louis Darden, who hadn’t cared about winning for himself, made sure that I didn’t lose.

The boy who beat Louis in that hundred-yard dash, Robert Lee, was the same boy who’d clipped me on the chin when I was nine. I’m sure he had forgotten the incident long before we met in high school and became friends. By then my views were quite different. I was beginning to ask questions, though not yet out loud. And as was my habit, I fantasized.

I imagined Robert Lee and me back on that playground, and I imagined him again coming up to me and socking me. Only this time I don’t turn away. This time I do not fear his color. This time I know that we are the same, and fear is replaced by respect, and because I respect him as I respect myself, I sock him back. And the two of us stare wide-eyed at each other, and then we nod and shake hands and go off together to shoot some marbles.

Louis Darden, 1954.

In 1994 I received a letter from an elementary school reader that ended with this:

“I got my whole life planned out. First I’m gonna grow up. Then I’m going to college. Then off to the air force we go. Then I retire to Hawaii. Then I die. Does that sound good to you?”

What it sounded like was something I myself might have written once upon a time. Except that I would probably have closed with “And then I go to heaven.”

Heaven as I saw it would be the logical extension of my perfect attendance in Sunday school. As a military career can be deciphered from parade ribbons on a uniform, so my attendance record could be read on the lapel of my best sport coat. It started with a round blue pin, my reward for attending Sunday school thirteen weeks in a row—one fourth of a year. After twenty-six Sundays in a row, I turned in the blue pin for a red one. Another pin change occurred at week thirty-nine, and then after fifty-two straight Sundays—one year—I received a white pin, mine to keep forever.

A second year of perfect attendance (“perfect” in this case meaning at least forty-eight out of fifty-two
Sundays) earned me a gold wreath to go around my white pin. Then came the bars—red, white, blue—one per year, hanging from the wreathed pin like a little ladder. In time the proof of my perfection was nearly as long as my lapel.

Sometime in junior high, probably at a school dance, I became self-conscious of my Sunday school decorations, and from then on they stayed home.

By then, too, my image of God was changing. Earlier I had pictured God as an old fellow, bearded, abiding somewhere beyond the whipped cream fluffiness of that cumulus cloud out over Elmwood Park. Except for God’s magical abilities, I would have been hard put to tell you the difference between him and the last surviving Civil War veteran.

As I got older, that view began to break up, to warp and fuzz over like a TV picture assaulted by interference. I waited and waited for the picture to clear, I fiddled with the dials, but I could not restore God’s image to the clarity of my early years. They had taken God out of the coloring book and told me he was not an old man after all but a spirit, that he was not
there
or
there
but everywhere, not
then
or
then
but beyond all whenevers.

Like most kids, I did not take readily to abstraction. Whether tin cans or gods, I felt most comfortable with presences that I could see, could touch, could kick if need be, could hear skittering along a sidewalk. I still spoke to God every night in my prayers, but my sense
of a listener had dissipated. How do you speak to both the other side of your pillow and the other side of the Milky Way? I blew my prayers like bubbles into the air and trusted them to winds I could not feel. Hiding by the stone piles during the nighttime games of outs, I gazed into the starry sky and searched the constellations for my Sunday school lessons, and perhaps when I was swooning over time and galaxies, I was swooning over God as well.

If I ever came close to meeting God, I think it was not in the stars but in Garfield Shainline.

For a man with such a big name, Garfield Shainline was quite little, not as short as a dwarf, but almost. As a thirteen-year-old, I was already taller than he. It was said that he shopped for clothes in children’s departments. His white hair was crewcut. Tufts of black hair sprouted from his ears and from around a pea-size mole on his chin.

He worked at the YMCA in a wire mesh-enclosed compartment in the locker room. If you were taking a shower, you stopped at the cage and he handed you a small bar of white soap. I’m sure he had other duties, but to most of the boys in town, who never knew his name, that was the sum of who he was: the tiny old man at the Y who hands you soap.

But he was something else, too. When I was a teenager, he was my Sunday school teacher. Every Sunday morning we sat around a heavy round table in the
Christian Education Room of First Presbyterian: Garfield Shainline, Teddy Barrett, David Allen, Jay John, Douglas Nagy, me. We barely listened to him as we snickered and whispered and generally behaved like the immature adolescents that we were. We invented silly questions for him. We dared one another to yank out one of his mole hairs. Our favorite pastime was to pretend to drop something so that we had to bend under the table to retrieve it, there to behold the sight that brought us unending mirth: Garfield’s tiny feet, shod in tiny brown leather hightop shoes, dangling in the air like a five-year-old’s.

Each session concluded with an around-the-table prayer. Sometimes after the usual petitions for world peace and food for the hungry, someone would say, “And God bless Garfield and give him vitamins so he can grow and touch the floor.”

Occasionally Garfield gave us a mild scolding, but mostly he smiled good-naturedly or ignored our nonsense and went on with the important thing, the lesson. No matter how we treated him one Sunday, he was glad to see us the next. Undeserving as we were, we received only the highest recommendations in his prayer.

Upon reaching high school age, we left Garfield behind for another teacher. One day someone told us he was ill and in the hospital and would love to have a visit from his boys, as he called us.

I thought about going to see him, but there were too
many other things to deal with: sports, grades, girls, friends. When I heard that he had died, I did not think much about it. I did not attend his funeral. Nor, I believe, did the others. But deep inside, even as I pretended to ignore my feelings, I sensed that something had changed forever. I pictured him in that hospital bed, waiting day after day for a visit that never came, and I knew—I
knew
—that in his final conscious hours, despite it all, he posted to heaven not a bitter thought about his boys.

Garfield Shainline has been long forgotten by most. Even my mother does not remember him. But I do. Oh, yes, I do. In these many years I have wished many times for him a second death, for myself a second chance. And still today he grows and grows inside of me, Garfield Shainline, the little man who hands you soap, and I have come at last to learn what he never knew he taught, that Garfield Shainline was not the teacher but the lesson.

The instant my mother saw my face, she gasped. It flashed through her mind that I had suddenly contracted measles or scarlet fever or some such red and rashy affliction. She pulled me farther into the light of the living room. It wasn’t a disease—it was lipstick, red lippy patches of it all over my face. I had just come home from a birthday party at Nona Norris’s. I explained that we had played some sort of game—the exact nature of which I don’t recall—that resulted in all the girls mobbing one boy and smooching him dead with their red, oh-so-grownup lipsticky lips. My mother told me to go upstairs and wash it off. She remembers almost wishing it
had
been measles. I was seven years old. And I already had a girlfriend.

Judy Brooks.

Judy Brooks lived in a yellow-brick front-porch twin house half a block up the street, at 718 George. She wore her brown hair in pigtails. She could tie a dress bow behind her back. She jump-roped double Dutch. She could scream high enough to make dogs howl. She played jacks and handclap games. She whispered and giggled a lot.