truth

When we met, the summer of 1969, I thought you were the most beautiful thing on the planet. Granted, at the time I was only around eleven. How was I to know what beauty really was? I was still in the stage of skinned knees on hot summer days, and butterfly kisses from the lashes of my grandparents. It didn’t know the true meaning of glory. Regardless, I still considered you beautiful. Glorious, even, once I actually got to know who you really were.

It wasn’t even an officially meeting; I spent my summers swinging in my grandparents’ front lawn, feeling the wind rush through my hair; against my face; through my lungs, while you sat on your front porch and reach books. Substantial books, not comics, like the other boys I went to school with. And I thought that made you beautiful.

My grandparents thought differently.

I’d lived with them since the beginning of the summer, when my father was arrested for armed robbery. My mother had long since been gone; she died of cancer because she’d always smoked like a dragon. My grandparents were the only family I had left, so that’s where I was: swinging on their swing and watching as you read your books. Books that had words I imagined only you could read.

The neighborhood where my grandparents lived was mostly white. Over the time I’d spent with them so far, I had the slightest inclination that they wanted little to do with families that weren’t colored. Your family, for example; my mother’s family, as another. They’d always done a good job of treating my mother right when she was around, but as soon as she’d passed, all that came from Nana’s mouth were words that shocked me every time they hit my ears. I didn’t want to know what they thought of my mother’s family, because then, what did that mean that they thought of me? My mother was white, while dad was African American. That made me… white? Black? How was I supposed to know?

I was never treated any differently by anyone. I didn’t look black, after all. Not really anyway. My skin was butterscotch, rather that anything else, and my hair was long and fell in waves. I was an anomaly of a African American girl.

My grandparents didn’t approve of you. After all, you were white. But they never told me their real feelings of you, or your family, when I was around. Whenever I talked to my grandmother about “the nice boy next door,” she would control her face, and send me a fake smile without a word.

But she didn’t know the real you, did she? She didn’t know that you were nice, and funny, and that you were just as nice as the colored people on the block that I’d met.

It was summer time, like I said, and I spent my time in the front yard. Grandpa had set up a tire swing on one of the trees, and I swung on it everyday for as long as I wished. Back and forth, back and forth I went, while you sat on the other side of the fence with your books, turning page after page, studying the lines. I always wished that I could be on one of those pages. I wished I could be a line in the book, so you could read and study me with the same intense concentration.

I remember that I introduced myself to you one day as I was coming home from the library. My eleven year old vocabulary was trying to impress you with big words and a sharp mind that I was only pretending to possess. I knew that you could tell, because the books I’d come home with were not in the same league as yours. You had mysteries: Sherlock Holmes and others, while I had books about teenage romance.

But you saw my effort, didn’t you, because you put down your book and took the time to talk to me. You smiled, you spoke, you seemed to like me. You were my age, I learned, eleven, going on twelve years old, and interested in being a writer already. And I admired you and your grown up decisions of already knowing what you wanted to do with the rest of your life.

My future? It was all over the place in my mind. I wanted to be a nurse. No, I wanted to be an actress! But you were set in stone, and you were willing to do whatever it took to get what you wanted.

When the year started, we didn’t talk much in school, if at all. We were in the same school, in the same grade, but we hung out with different crowds entirely. There was no legal set rooms or area’s to separate blacks and whites anymore, but still there was some controversy amongst the students: you ate lunch with the kids who glared when I walked by; the kids who picked on the people who weren’t as nice looking, or pale as they were. And I was just… there. I didn’t fit into any crowd because of my attitude, or my looks, or anything else superficial about me; certainly, I didn’t fit in with the table of people who you sat with, and I didn’t really feel welcome at the table with the African American kids, because I was paler than any girl they’d seen in a long time.

I talked to you on the weekends, however; when I was finished with my homework and chores, I would go outside and sit with you on your porch. You’d set down your book, and we’d talk about things; anything that we could think of other than school. School was something that we didn’t have in common, though we both attended. Our school experiences were so different from one another’s that first day I sat there with you, we decided to just not include it in our discussions from then on.

Your mother was nice. She’d often poke her head out of the screen door and offer to make lemonade; so we sipped through stripped straws and laughed at nothing in particular.

Until that one day when you stopped talking to me. I’d just turned thirteen, and we’d been planning to go out for ice cream at the local parlor around the corner for my birthday. But you weren’t on your porch when I came out to meet you, and when I skipped up your front steps, two at a time, your father opened the door, and told me I should get going, advising me not to speak to his son again.

And so it passed like that. We didn’t speak in, or outside of school for the next few years. High school started, both of us at different schools, but I still saw you everyday when I sat on the lawn working on my English paper, or science notes. Every now and then I saw your mother walking up the steps to your house, and she’d turn, and give me a sad smile and wave before disappearing inside.

We were no longer the same, I figured. I guessed your father had told you that it was disgraceful to his name to be spending time with the “black girl next door.” I figured that his colleagues at work were hearing all sorts of rumors about how I spent time on the porch of his house. Your father didn’t approve, so he’d made you stop talking to me.

And I stopped caring. I stopped wishing that one day, you’d forget what your father told you and come come to me, sweeping me away to talk about out your books, and our futures like we used to. I ignored you, like you ignored me, and I went about my business like you never even existed in my world.

On my eighteenth birthday, you came to my house. Grandma answered the door, with me close behind her. I followed you outside, and you had your hands hidden in the pockets of your jeans, your head facing down while I waited for an explanation… something from your mouth that would make up for the years of pretending I no longer existed. Instead, you took me out for ice cream, and your eyes said you were sorry, even though you never spoke a word about it.