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You were into comic books at the time-- Superman, Batman, Captain Marvel-- and you always wanted muscles like they had. With muscles like those, you could protect yourself and Janet from Reggie. But you were a skinny kid. You had never as much as seen anyone in real life with muscles like those. Then, in the middle of January, with the temperature hovering right around zero, here they came. They wore jeans and work shirts unbuttoned to the navel. You supposed their shirts were unbuttoned because shirts were not made that were big enough to fit those massive pectorals. The sleeves were short and wrapped tight around huge biceps. You wanted to ask them how they got those beautiful builds. But you dared not. And you didn’t know any other white people well enough to ask instead. You imagined that they were costumed crime fighters trying in vain to walk incognito among us. You wondered what colors their capes were. And You didn’t believe her when Big Ma said they were merely a couple of showoffs trying to catch colds, walking around dressed like that in this weather. It was cold enough that exhaled breath hung in the air like a miniature cloud. You kept their secret, though. You never told her that men like that didn’t catch colds.
One Saturday a month later, your sister, Janet, and you were out playing in the snow. It snowed a lot back then. And Janet and you would throw snowballs with Raymond, the landlady’s son. He was Janet’s age, but as big as you. Because of his size, you always thought he could play hard like the big kids. He couldn’t. He was a crybaby. He and Janet together in a snow fort were no match against you. You learned years later that he died trying to get into the paratroopers. His chute didn’t open. He was an only child, and his mother grieved for years. You remember wondering if he had over extended himself trying to live down a childhood reputation. When you were kids, he couldn’t stand snow in his face. You wanted snow in your face! But he never obliged because he knew you would reciprocate. You needed some competition.
That’s when you saw him. You called him Jake, but you never learned his name. He and two other white boys were throwing snowballs down the block in front of his house. He was smaller than they were, but he was feisty and he had a good aim. They were no competition for him. To your child’s mind, he seemed like the perfect foil. You wanted to take him on.
His was the last white family on the block. The other two boys lived two or three blocks away. You realize now that his father had probably told him not to play with colored kids. "Colored" hadn’t become "black" or "African-American" yet. But you were stunned when you ran down to get into their game, and they all ran away.
You told Big Ma what had happened, and, with a nervousness in her eyes that expressed a mixture of shame and fear and hatred and disgust, she told you the facts of life. Naturally, you made no further attempt to make contact. In fact, you didn’t see him again until the spring.
The first time he saw you, he spat on the ground, then turned and ran. The next time, he threw rocks. His aim wasn’t as good with rocks as with snowballs, but he was annoying. Big Ma told you to come in the house whenever he threw at you or your sister. That only made things worse. When he discovered he could run you in the house at will, you were at his mercy. It wasn’t long before you decided to stop running.
Jake had an older brother, Al, who was about fifteen years old. Because of his age, you knew less about Al than you knew about Jake. Your only impression of him is one of speed-- whizzing by at top speed chasing or being chased by some other older kid at school, or cruising by on his bicycle leaning at a precarious angle, hair blowing in the wind. The rumor was that he wasn’t very bright, and that he had been kept back a semester in school. You can remember folks rolling their eyes in a way that they wouldn’t when discussing the mental skills of one of your friends or their siblings. It was understandable that a black person was having trouble learning. But for a white boy to be doing poorly in school meant that he was especially slow. "Ain’t nothin’ like a dumb white boy."
News of what went on in the upper grades rarely filtered down to the fifth and sixth grades. But this particular week, it did. Al had been suspended-- again. For fighting-- again. But for some reason, it was especially serious this time. The father was up at school; the mother was crying. Rumor had it that Al was being kicked out for good. Jake was there crying with his mother. Out of earshot, some of the older black kids were saying that being kicked out wasn’t that big a deal for a white boy. After all, he was white. He would get by.
Al apparently didn’t know that. The following Saturday, you saw him riding his bicycle in the direction of school. He rode with, you thought, an uncustomary heaviness. His pedal strokes were slow and measured. It was spring, and Fat Boy, a new kid your age who had just moved in down the street, and you were playing strike out. He always pitched; you always caught. Roy Campanella was your hero. Fat Boy wanted to be the first black pitcher in the majors. You saw Al ride by behind Fat Boy, who was winding up preparatory to delivering his fast ball. About an hour later, Al streaked by again. You almost missed him because you were basking in the cheers the crowd heaped on you for having just thrown out at second the fastest man in baseball. Al was pumping as hard and fast as he could. You remember wondering what his hurry was.
Fifteen minutes later, you heard the fire trucks. It took about five minutes to douse the flames. In fact, the fire was out and the trucks were gone before you even knew for sure that there was a fire nearby, that the fire was at the school, in the office, started by some skinny kid on a bicycle.
Fat Boy and you ran around to see. By now, the neighborhood was humming with rumors about massive damage to the school. You couldn’t believe your luck, and you wanted to confirm the rumors before Monday rolled around and you got up for nothing.
Approaching the building from a block away, it was not obvious that there had even been a fire. You inspected the front, then walked along the south wall. Nothing. Three-quarters of the way along the back of the building, you saw wet paper lying about on the ground. It seemed too little to be evidence of the massive damage you were hoping for, but it was evidence that maybe there was more to be found. You examined the entire back wall. No charred bricks; no sagging walls. There was one broken window, the window through which this paltry find had been flung. You walked the rest of the way around the building. Nothing.
To say you were disappointed was an understatement. You were crushed. On the way over, you had made plans for Monday. You were going to get up only a little later than you would have had you gone to school. You were going to work on Fat Boy’s fast ball. Then you were going to work on your swings. At lunch you were going to write letters to the Sox and the Cubs to find out about tryouts. Within ten days, you were going to be the only non-adults in all of baseball. And with the money you earned, you were going to buy cars for your mothers. Not Cadillacs, because you wanted to spend the money wisely. You would buy Pontiacs that were weighted low in the back with the spare tires on the back bumper and rear fender skirts and mud flaps studded with red and yellow jewels. You would have two aerials in the back with fox tails. You would take the hood ornament off, fill in the holes and paint it over with the same color as the car, candy apple red.
Then you would buy houses. Yours was going to be big enough for Big Ma and your sister everybody in the family. All the members of both your families were going to be set for life. Except for one thing. The school didn’t burn down. Alas, when Monday rolled around, you would have to study arithmetic and penmanship. Spend the day making circles that stayed between the lines, and ovals that tilted slightly to the right. Dividing numbers that almost never seemed to come out even anymore. What a waste. You could have lived extraordinary lives. Now you would be relegated to the mundane and pedestrian.
With downcast eyes, you began the long walk back. Fat Boy kicked a piece of the debris from the fire. And for the first time since you had gotten there, you saw what it was. It was paper. Apparently, Al had started the fire in the supply cabinet figuring that all that paper was the perfect place to torch the school. Very little of it, however, actually burned, and the firemen threw reams of barely singed paper out the window. Now, there it lay-- some of it wet, most of it not-- in odd shapes and sizes in random piles on the ground.
"Wow," you said, "look at all this paper."
"Damn," Fat Boy said, "this is like a gold mine."
You gathered as much as you could carry that was salvageable.
"They just threw this stuff away!" Fat Boy said.
You looked at all of this paper weighing heavy in your arms, more paper than you had ever seen outside the store. "I’m gon’ write a book," you said.
"I’m gon’ write two books."
You stashed your treasure in a tool cabinet built under the stairs that led from your back porch to the upstairs back porch, because Big Ma wouldn’t let you store it in the house. You hadn’t noticed before then, but the stack reeked of smoke. You didn’t care. Sitting under those stairs staring at those stacks of paper was mesmerizing. You began to imagine yourself writing things, long things that required lots of thought. You wanted to write stuff with big words. You didn’t know what it would be. But you knew it would be important. You lapsed into a trance staring at that paper. You couldn’t wait until Monday rolled around so you could take some of your new-found treasure to school.
You never saw Al again after that day. The rumor was that he had been sent to reform school.
There was a vacant lot around the corner from your house that you liked to play in. Jake liked to play in it, too. It had lots of tall grass and sticks and old tires to play jungle and army just like the house on 35th Street. You were playing, and after about thirty minutes, Jake came up and decided that he wanted to use the lot. He threw a couple of rocks at you. Since he was between you and the house, there was no conscious decision to be made. You ducked once. You ducked again. While you were down, you picked up a nice jagged piece of sidewalk, about three inches across. Peering through the grass, you waited until he dropped down in search of more stones. While he was down, you threw your rock. He raised up right in its path. It struck him dead center on the forehead. He grabbed his face and dropped to the ground. You thought he might be looking for more rocks, so you scrambled around for some, too. He raised up mad and crying. The game was over. "Now look what you did," he said. Blood was streaming down his face. He took off down the alley for home.
You only saw him once again after that day. He never came out. You were hoping he would, so you could tell him you were sorry. And you were. You meant to hit him, but you didn’t mean to hurt him. The last time you saw him, he and his mother and father, a big man with brown hair and blue overalls, came down their front steps and climbed into their Chevy Belair. His father stopped for a long pause staring at you standing in front of your house. He knew you were the one who had hurt his boy. A glance from the boy told you that he had not told his father about all those times he had thrown rocks at you. You could tell that he, too, was sorry for the way things had turned out.
Two weeks later, they moved. Your feelings were mixed. You felt sorry for Al. Being dumb was no reason to have to wind up in a reform school. As for Jake, you would no longer have to worry about him throwing rocks at you. But also the last person who could tell you how to get those muscles was gone.
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