Saturday morning

14 January 2017

— heavy frost on the lawn and patio bricks

Good Morning All,

My brothers and I grew up in a predominantly Catholic neighborhood in Arlington, MA, mostly Irish and Italian, salt and peppered with Poles. In the dusks of autumn, we played touch football on the street with our across-the-street neighbors Terry Earls and Jacky Carroll, and all their brothers and sisters and uncles. Jackie went to Arlington Catholic High. He told me at lunch a couple of summers ago that we were the only Protestants he knew until after he graduated from Boston College.

In a similar way, I didn’t know any African-Americans until I went down to college in New Jersey. But I'd read some of them, including Langston Hughes, who is the subject of today’s poem, and some of James Baldwin, who is now not much read anymore, and that is a shame, for he is a fine writer.

When I got to my cement-block and corrugated-iron roofed school in the Ntshanini valley in Swaziland, I was, of course, surrounded by African people. It will sound improbable, I know, but being in the midst of brown-skinned people every day made me tend to forget my own skin color. 

I was, though, reminded of it one day while out for a walk in the bush. Coming down a winding path on a homemade scooter with wooden wheels was a boy of possibly six or seven. He was wearing a Chicago Cubs t-shirt, which I presumed had come from a missionary parcel. When he saw me, he stopped and stared. I greeted him in siSwati and after a moment he very softly returned the greeting. The next thing I knew, tears were running down his cheeks.

I have been tossing those tears around in my mind ever since. I am ninety-nine percent certain they were caused by his never having seen a Caucasian person before. But he did not look afraid. He looked—as best as I can describe it—empathetically sad. He was sorry for me for my being a freak. 

Maybe I am wrong. Still, that remains one of the half-dozen most liberating moments of my life.

Go Well and Stay Well,

Bhekaron