Story by Dana L. Satterwhite. Illustrations by Rán Flygenring

I've been called a lot of things in my day. Some good. Some not so good. Some with the intent to lift me up. Some with the intent to break me down. Some I let roll off and some I'll remember forever. And for some strange reason most of it, for me, can be tied back to the fourth grade.

My sister (who is thirteen months my senior) and I were enrolled in public school in what, at the time, seemed to me like a small suburban town called Eastchester, which was nestled in the county of Westchester. I live in Texas now. This was back in New York. The “Eastchester: A town in Westchester” thing always struck people who'd never heard of it as funny, as one might easily think they were side-by-side cities or neighboring counties. Logic says, given their names, they should be equals. Actually, one resides within the other. Eastchester (city) is within Westchester (county). Mildly confusing. I’m sure there’s some history to it. I didn’t do the naming. I just grew up there. On a map, it makes sense.

From as early on as I can remember, my best friend was black. His name was Ralph. His sister Andrea (pronounced “On-dray-uh”) and my sister, Kelli, were best friends too. The four of us were tight and there were others in our adjacent apartment complex crew. There was John and his slightly older sister Betsy. Two towhead blonde kids who lived about four apartment buildings over. Their age difference was about the same as the rest of ours. Thirteen months between them, give or take. Make it easy and call it a school grade. The boys were mainly in fourth grade and their older sisters in fifth. Danny was from Guatemala. He was a class clown. Heidi was from Holland. She was sweet and cute, but I remember kids teasing her because she had warts on her fingers. Still, I crushed on her and crushed on her pretty hard.

We were a mixed up motley bunch, burning up the cement with one-speed bikes decked to the nines with rainbow spokes, banana seats, and bright orange triangle banners bending in an arc as we pedaled our faces off, pliable plastic popping and crackling in the wind. If you ever watched The Little Rascals or Our Gang as a kid, in our minds or mine anyway, that was us. A ragtag hodgepodge of ages, heights, weights, skin tones, and countries with hella squeaky voices, wreaking havoc on this otherwise charming and eclectic red brick mid-rise neighborhood we knew as Garth Road. We were busy and full of energy but we were rarely getting up to no good. In fact, with The Little Rascals thing, my mother even went so far as to take me in to audition for the part of Buckwheat on a remaking of the original series. I was all at once honored, excited, petrified, and mortified. I mean, I liked Buckwheat and all, but something about the idea of playing the role felt really, really wrong. Maybe it was the part about that being the sum total of my contribution to blackness, playing Buckwheat in the remake of The Little Rascals…not that there’s anything wrong with that. I felt then as I feel now—that that role may have been fine for someone but it wasn't right for me. I don’t think I made callbacks and I certainly didn’t get the part. There was another kid personality named Rodney Allen Rippy who, throughout my childhood, my mother was constantly referencing and with whom passing strangers would often draw comparisons as they admired my neatly coiffed fro, ample cheeks, and wide-lapeled denim jacket—things that were somehow reminiscent of him. I, myself, never really knew him. I just knew that some people, even my own family, saw something similar in the two of us.

At school, I had Asian friends. There was Masato and Masashi whose collections of impossibly small rubber cars and airplanes were fascinating and filled me with jealousy. They were the coolest things I'd ever seen. Some opaque. Some translucent. Lotuses. Maseratis. Ferraris. Lamborghinis. Miniature primary colored luxury sports cars, all finely-detailed to resemble the real thing but at 1:100,000th scale, each one about the size of a sewing thimble. Little glimmers of Japan, they brought me great joy and sparked my desire to amass a collection of my own. Some of them were actually pencil erasers. Others were hard, barely bendable plastic not intended to erase anything. You would try and they would just smear the #2 pencil graphite around the page, get it all over your fingers, and leave your desk a smudged-up mess. Our babysitters Mariko and Misa were also from Japan. They were sisters. They lived in the same building a few floors above or below us. I can’t remember. I think we were on four and they were on seven. It’s been a long time since I’ve deeply considered any of it. Misa, if memory serves, was the older of the two. Her hair was long, straight, and black. Her face was a little rounder and doughier. She was pure sunshine. Mariko's hair was short and a warm red-brown. She had freckles and, for whatever reason, it just made me happy that they were there on her cheeks. The two sisters were lovely, doting on me and my own sister, and I crushed on them too. I think that’s just what young boys do.

In my class, there was a girl named Divina whose ethnicity I never knew but whose name made me go weak in the knees and, now that I know its meaning, still has the same effect. There was Claudine who I think may have been Italian and Stephanie who I believe was Irish. Ann was tall. Beth was funny and kind. She had the longest, thickest, ropiest braid I'd ever seen and, as I'm remembering it, a birthmark the size of a pencil eraser on one of her cheeks. She loved my hair, as did John. He used to take both hands, fingers splayed out as wide as could be, hold them above my head, then plunge them quick-fast into my tightly-curled afro, while simultaneously exclaiming “Rainstorm!,” punctuated by a bolt-of-lighting or crack-of-thunder mouth-made sound effect. “Pckkkeeeooowww!!!” This whole ritual, often the way he greeted me when he first saw me, played out as if his fingers were the rain falling from the clouds onto my head. He would do this several times a day, often a few times back-to-back in rapid succession. I have no idea why or how it began. It just came to be. While it bothered me just a little bit, his fascination with the feeling of my dark coarse hair in his hands versus that of his light straight hair in his own hands was endearing to me. So I let him do it as often as he liked. We were tight and it was never something that made me feel excluded or uncomfortable. Quite the opposite. Beth on the other hand would pull out two puffs of hair from my afro and make me look like a teddy bear. She thought it was adorable. I did not. Yet, despite my usual protests, I let her do it anyway as well. All of these things were harmless learning exchanges between friends.

There were other kids I remember as well. As I think back, new names continue popping into my head, as I crack open a little wider this door to the past that has remained dust-covered and shut for a very long time. Adam, Vincent, Mark, Willie, Matt, and Tommy. Jennifer had braces and a last name that was fun to say. Several years later—in college—I found out that she’d had a crush on me in the first or second grade and I’d wished I’d known then so I could’ve done my part and acted awkward and aloof. Kim and Bernie were "a couple" (in air quotes), destined to graduate high school sweethearts and possibly prepared to pair for life. We were all so young. I’m not sure what happened to any of these folks though a quick scouring of Facebook might give me a few clues.

I recognize and make the distinction between ethnicities here, in recounting this one childhood story, but at the time I did not. I didn’t see many or any differences between us. We were all kids and we all loved to play with one another. We were from different places with different stories but none of it seemed to matter and none of us ever called it out, were it not for an occasional twinge of curiosity.

There were plenty of others but, as I attempt to call them all to mind, the folks first listed were the main players in my daily elementary school ecosystem. Maybe more appropriately, it was my elementary solar system, and these kids were the planets scattered throughout and orbiting about my tiny asphalt kickball universe, as it were. At least, those were the good ones—the ones that conjure fond rather than frightful memories.

But two names notably absent until now are John (not Rainstorm John, a different John) and Paul, a set of blonde-haired, blue-eyed fraternal twins separated by about four inches and I'm not sure how many minutes at birth. I think Paul was the eldest, but I don't know and I may make that assumption based on the fact that he was the taller of the two, so don't hold me to it. We never grew close enough that I had an opportunity to ask.

They too lived up the block and, for reasons still unknown, beyond my being brown, took an immediate disliking toward me and my friends, but especially my brown best friend and more especially, me.

There were two incidents in particular that stand out that involved these brothers. I'll detail the first here. Their last name was not Homely but it started with an H and ended with -ly, so I'm just gonna run with that for now since, as it pertained to me, their behavior was inordinately ugly. The first incident was “The Fight.” In the fourth grade—so I had to be all of nine years old—word began to spread like a brush fire across the schoolyard that John Homely wanted to fight me. Fight me?, I thought. Fight me? Nobody on the planet had ever wanted to fight me. At least, to my knowledge they hadn't. But maybe that's where I was wrong. Maybe the whole world had been wanting to fight me but I'd just, to this point, remained blissfully unaware. I think it was Ralph who first told me of this news. So, what do I do? I'd never been challenged before. I needed to plan. Maybe I even needed to train. You know, get in the ring and spar a little. I needed to cut some weight and make sure I could keep my dukes up long enough to fend off any uppercuts or haymakers that came my way. I needed at least a day or two to figure out how to go about this whole thing, but that never happened. That stuff was for the movies. This was fourth grade real life and just like that, before I even had a chance to give my strategy a second thought, we—this angry, unfamiliar white kid and I—were squaring off, nose-to-nose, being pushed insistently to the middle of a circle that had formed. Hands shoved from behind, in the small and middle of our backs, jamming us close, and squawking voices goaded us on.

"A fight. A fight. An N-word and a white," somebody began chanting.  Only they didn't say “N-word.” No. They said the real thing and it stung. And, probably as you'd expect it to, it cut deep. As I understood it, that was the worst thing one person could say to another. It just felt so spiteful and vindictive, simply in the way it hit one's ear or came off their tongue. And I just didn't know why someone might use it, especially now, and at me. To my knowledge, I hadn't done anything. But actually I had. I'd been born a different color (from many of them) and, for this kid, that was justification enough. Fights were not my thing, so all of this was new and, I suppose—reverting back to my 9-year-old self—a little disconcerting. The chants grew louder. Some said “a black and a white.” It all sounded the same.

The way the playground prodders used it though was less to cut me down and more to get the crowd pumped up and worked into a lather. It was a singsongy chant with a jaunty little cadence and rhyme scheme, derived to build anticipation and keep entertainment value high. To that end, it was effective. Schoolyard fights, especially those involving kids of different colors, were by all accounts a rare treat. When one erupted, everyone wanted a front row seat.

On this day, before a single punch was thrown, however, he, the instigator, made a laundry list of rules. Fighting was new to me but I knew the basic protocol. What was really new to me was this idea of making pre-pugilistic guidelines before the engagement had even begun. But, having never actually engaged in a brawl with anyone other than my at-the-time-annoying older sister, I was not really in a position to argue. I could only imagine that things didn’t generally unfold this way. I had actually given a friend (Robert C.) a black eye in the first grade but how and why we ended up there requires some explaining. We’ll save that for another time. 

I'd watched enough boxing in my day to know that you fought fair and square, no hitting below the belt and all that but, when the time came, when the bell rang, you still put up your paws and went at it. As the invitee to this dance, I was especially taken aback at the demure nature of this altercation. Who invites somebody else to throw down then tells them all the stuff they can't do? Probably a coward but I was too slow and shocked in the moment to think it all through. Having had several decades now to replay the unlikely scenario again and again in my head, that sounds about right. Only a chicken would bully someone, call them racially-insensitive names, invite them to fight, then ostensibly run away.

"No punching. No kicking. No pushing. No biting.” he rattled off. That’s where the list started. "No shoving. No tugging," he continued. I was confused. In that case, what kind of fight would this be? What was left? Licking? Hugging? Basically we could glare at or breathe on one another till the other cried mercy and conceded defeat.

"No pinching. No scratching." The litany of pre-grapple ground rules meandered on. Then, just like that, we were shoved into a momentary embrace and the melee got started. "Just fight already," somebody lamented, and we were in it. I tried to grab his wrists and he pulled away. Or maybe he went for mine and it was I who broke free. Those details are a little fuzzy but the event is clear as day. Coming into this thing, I was not the aggressor but the pacifist in me had been momentarily subdued. We sized each other up and stepped sideways in a circle, warning people to “move back” and “give us room.” Those two in-battle directives were the first and only things we would agree on. Finally, sensing the crowd wanting to see some action, knowing as the peace-loving underdog, I had them on my side, I went for it. A la Daniel San in The Karate Kid, I think it was a leg sweep I employed to take him down. He dropped like a sack of dumb rocks and once down on the ground, on his back, I had him right where I wanted. I pinned one shoulder with one knee, then the second one with the other. I pulled back my right arm and cocked it, ready to blast him with a beautiful brown-skinned fist full of fury. He deserved it. He deserved the chocolate knuckle sandwich I was about to feed his fat face. He deserved to be punched and slapped and kicked in the nose and the throat and the gut, this little instigating turd who'd come into the district (my hood with my friends) and begun to spread his hateful insidious ways. But, no. That would be too good for him. That wasn't me. I didn't start fights with people. Though happy to oblige in this case, I didn't end them either, not like that. If I cold-cocked this fool as my rushing adrenaline was egging me on to do, I'd be just as wormy and lowlifey and despicable as he was, and I didn't want that. 

I'd been invited to the throwdown and I'd accepted. We’d tangoed for a minute and that was satisfaction enough. I didn’t need to finish it any more. It was already finished, and I’d emerged unscathed and victorious. I’d proven my point and held my ground. I’d represented. I was small and wiry. Even over the years, that about me hasn’t much changed. But I’d gotten the upper hand and he knew better than to try that again because the next time I might not be so benevolent and I’d probably have back-up. His brother, the less instigative of the two to that point, didn’t quite seem to get the message, and that led to incident number two, aka The Hershey Chronicles.

Then, as now, I wanted everyone to get along and be kind to one another. This altercation had been thrust upon me for no reason at all. But as I think about it now, there's got to be something deeper. John Homely didn't show up on this planet filled with rage, spewing hate toward black people. This behavior was learned. And it's possible that somewhere along the way a black boy like me had solicited him to tussle for no reason and he'd singled me out on this day in this heretofore peaceful arena to exact his vengeance. I didn't know and I didn't ask. We never talked about it and I only saw him once in a blue moon, mainly from a distance, after that. My family uprooted and moved a little over a year later. I never did get closure. But my parents raised me to know good from bad and, even after facing some simplemindedness, to give that person the benefit of the doubt so that maybe someday the cycle would truly no longer continue.

Unbeknownst to me, there remained one more incident on the horizon. It was equally unexpected and the net result just as satisfying.