Christmas City, U.S.A
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Christmas City, U.S.A.
by Michael McColly
In 1966 my family moved from the little farm town where I was born to Marion, Indiana where my father took a job as a high school teacher and basketball and baseball coach. Marion was a factory town that manufactured TV tubes, automobile frames, glass jars, and plastic Christmas decorations. In fact, Marion churned out more plastic Santas and reindeer than any other town in the world. Christmas City, U.S.A., a sign boasted outside of town, dwarfed the other two markers that announced its other two claims of notoriety: the birthplace of James Dean and home to the State Basketball Champs of 1926. Unwritten on the water towers and welcome signs on the highways, however, was any mention of the August night in 1930 when a mob stormed Marion’s jail, dragged two black teenagers accused of murdering a white man out to the courthouse square, strung them up in a tree, and tried to burn their bodies, giving Marion the infamous distinction of being the site of the last known lynching above the Mason-Dixon line.
We lived in an old farmhouse on the south side of town in a working class neighborhood populated by both blacks and whites who’d moved up from the South for factory work. There wasn’t much on our side of town except the VA Hospital, the town dump, 38th Street Park, and the Christian College, where Methodist missionaries taught Christian mathematics and Christian biology to their converts from poor countries I’d never heard of — like Ghana and Honduras. Walking home from school I passed by the campus and gawked at these foreign students, innocent smiles locked onto their faces, dressed in ill-fitting second-hand clothes. To me they looked like someone’s prized doll collection come to life. But when they looked back at me, and the broken, queer sounding words came out from their lips, I felt like mountains or giant trees from a jungle had popped up out of the monotonous middle-American landscape.
Summer evenings, coming back from the grocery store, my father would drive slowly by the park to keep tabs on his black players at 38th Street Park, which was where they all hung out. He pulled up to the curb, leaned his head out the window and studied their play. Sometimes, if he was in a good mood, he might holler out something to one of his guys, more for his sake than theirs, forcing my sister and me in the back seat to duck for fear of being seen: “Hey Pettiford! You got any feet? Use ‘em!” Thank God he never got out. I watched him watching them, his face softening from its usual hardened stare, as these black young men ran the court like they were some part of his youth that he could never have back. For my father, too, had played basketball in college and baseball in the minor leagues until he had to quit when age caught up with him.
The year Bobby Kennedy campaigned in Marion for president I made the fifth grade basketball team. We had uniforms, an electric scoreboard, referees with striped shirts, cheerleaders, and everything. Our team was half black and half white. I played forward, two other white kids played at guard, and two black guys who were cousins played center and forward, James and Clayton Stanton. Often my mom took some of my teammates home from the away games, and since James and Clayton lived down the street, they came with us. I don’t remember getting a ride with their parents, not that they didn’t come; they did. Sometimes I could see James’ mother sitting in a big old coat off by herself in the corner of the gym with his little sister. James lived across the street from the RCA plant where his mother worked. I often wondered, since she worked there, if they had TVs in every room of their house. If he had a lot of TVs, I never found out because he never invited me inside. But I did discover that in James’ house, as it was in my dad’s, there was no father.
My friendship with James began after that first season, and when winter turned to spring, he and his friends started coming to shoot hoops. My house became the place to play outside of 38th Street Park because my father had paved our driveway, found an old goal at the high school, and made an official backboard with a black square above the rim to guide our bank shots. From here, it wasn’t too long until I was allowed to follow James and his friends to the park. It was different at the park, however. I was usually the only white kid playing. So I got kneed or pushed around more than most, sometimes because I was white and sometimes because I played like a coach’s son — calling fouls or traveling until I learned to keep my mouth shut. But if things got too rough, James, and then some of his friends, came to my defense: “Just play ball and leaved that boy alone.” This was a risk for James. Even though he was respected, his respect came from his athletic abilities and not from bravado. He held a quiet presence among his peers. And they often made fun of him for being a momma’s boy, going to church, and baby-sitting too much for his little sister.
My relationship with James was a risk, too. But not as far as my parents were concerned; they were “good” liberals and relished their progressive tendencies in our small town made up mostly of republicans and redneck democrats. No, it was my relatives and neighbor men who often went out of their way to offer their so-called wisdom: “I seen some white boys down at the park. I don’t know if I would go there if I was them? Niggers you can’t trust with tour breath, you know? They’ll steal ya blind or knife ya, they will.” I just shrugged my shoulders and acted like I didn’t hear them. But I heard everything they said, and the words echoed in my head every time James and his friends took me down to the park.
That March, Marion lost in the state finals to an all-black team from Indianapolis. Then Martin Luther King got shot in April and Bobby Kennedy in June, and suddenly people seemed to say and do things I’d never seen before. Fights broke out at school. Fires were set for no reason. Streetlights got shot out and yahoos raced around in pickups stirring up old black people who were afraid to leave their houses. Night after night my parents sat in silence and watched the sad faces of Huntley and Brinkley as they described a world that seemed to be falling apart. But I was obsessed with basketball and didn’t care or know any better.
I would hang out at the park by the hour, playing, or more often watching from the sidelines the older guys running, waiting for that rare chance to get in. Fights, shouting matches, and dramatic debates broke out over who fouled whom with endless reenactments of rule interpretations. In fact, their whole way of playing began to fascinate me as it seemed not at all like the rational and orderly form taught by my father. I knew I wasn’t supposed to be there, but somehow I felt drawn to the distance they created between themselves and the white world just off court. It was like I had traveled to some distant country, when all I did was walk three blocks from home. Watching these black men and boys, I realized they were completely different here than they were around white people. They spoke in a language that was both English and yet not English. I could never figure it out. Sometimes it seemed like when they talked they were playing a game, turning words and sentences inside out, making jokes and coining new phrases, more like singing than speaking. Their cryptic jokes, especially those of the older guys, depended on secret meaning and signals I knew nothing about. Even their laughter seemed to originate from some unknown organ in their bodies. I’d never seen any white guy laugh like they did. Grown men, too, doubling over and falling on the ground, like people in seizures who needed wallets or spoons stuck in their mouths to keep them from swallowing their tongues. Sometimes it was funny to watch them and other times I found myself becoming nervous. Life was supposed to be more serious, I thought. What could they be seeing that I couldn’t that made everything so funny?
The big games were played on Saturday afternoon and almost every night during the summer. Men drove over from nearby Muncie or Kokomo. A crowd would form and guys would have to wait sometimes for hours to have the chance to knock off the team holding court. They came in long, low-riding, dark Oldsmobiles and Pontiacs, never station wagons or trucks or convertibles like white men drove. When someone new arrived, the men hanging around for the next game turned to see who had arrived. Slowly the car door opened and two or three pairs of long legs came out as they sat changing their shoes. Stepping out dramatically, the music of Curtis Mayfield and James Brown floated them onto the court. These weren’t the happy, snappy songs my sister and her friends listened to, jumping around in our yard; these were moody songs of love, with emotions that sank down the spine, into the groin, and then out through the shoes, inspiring images in my mind never before dreamed of.
Then they took off their shirts, revealing upper bodies that projected masculinity and majesty that magnified their true size. And by the time they’d run up and down the court, their skin took on a sheen that made them look the color of oiled guns.
If there was a game going on, newcomers stayed in their cars and drank tall bottles of Pepsi. But if all the men were shooting around between games, they ambled up the court, their bodies lanky like spiders, going sideways and circling around, casing the competition, nodding, slapping hands, allowing everyone to notice their presence. A player with a reputation commanded respect and got the ball as soon as he came on court. I remember one of my father’s best players, Avis Stewart, who’d returned from college, showed up. He wore a dark head band to keep back his afro, a ragged, sleeveless sweat shirt, trunks with his college emblem on them, and suede Converse tennis shoes the color of his gold skin. He towered over everyone, proud but cool, like a magnificent hawk that flew down from atop his perch. He took the ball, spun it in the air, and then dribbled around in and out through his legs to get a feel for it, as if it were a religious object that required ritual preparation. Then with a flip of a wrist, he put a little ‘English’ on the ball and made it bounce back to him so he could take a jumper. After he made the first shot, the ball came swiftly back to his waiting hands. Hitting the first shot was a good sign, hitting a third or fourth in a row cut the chatter and the court cleared. All eyes turned to Avis. He held out his hands and waited for the ball, his long gold fingers stiffened as if in some kind of trance, almost like they were separate from his body. From baseline to baseline, ‘round the world,’ we followed each of his shots as they sank with a sweet ring, hitting the bottom of the chain net and plopping out. Each shot propelled him faster and faster, making him even a little impatient for the ball to be back in his hands. Finally he missed. The spell he’d created broke and the court flooded with players again.
After more warming up, a game emerges suddenly out of the chaos. With white players a game came slowly; someone had to always organize it, line players up, five here and a group of five over there, pointing out who was guarding whom, setting up a defense, figuring out who should bring up the ball. But not so with black players; their game just began. Its logic came from within the game itself.
Once play started the game was all that mattered. No one was supposed to leave or concern himself with matters off-court. And the best players seemed oblivious to friends, dogs, kids, and even women. The world outside was forgotten. To be within that rectangular space, inside that timeless dynamic, a part of a rhythm and movement that they had created called them every weekend and every spare summer night. When I think about it now, the basketball court was perhaps the only place black men could be together in public without suspicion outside of their church.
Sometimes a ball would careen wildly off the rim, destroying the rhythm momentarily. But this was my moment — a chance to enter the game and thus their world. I ran to retrieve the ball as it rolled all the way to the swing sets or into the street. As fast as I could, I ran back to within heaving distance, and with all my might flung the ball with as much speed and accuracy as I could to the guy waiting for me off court, who gave me what I wanted most: a nod, a quick jerk of his head, his chin pointing to me in approval, acknowledging my presence.
My father had two lives: basketball season and the rest of the year. He coached baseball too, but there wasn’t as much passion for this in Indiana. But then nothing in our town could match the magic people felt for high school basketball. Nothing.
Not religion, not politics, not music, not the county fair in August, not even the trial of a woman and her lover who supposedly sawed up her husband and threw him in the Mississinewa River. When November rolled around, people talked of nothing else. In the barbershops and beauty salons, in the bars and bowling alleys, at church and even in funeral homes, everyone elsewhere talked basketball.
In Marion, everyone know the names of the 12 players on the high school team, the Sutters, the Prices, the Pettifords; everyone knew their families, the coach’s record, the schedule, the chances for a state championship. A spell came over our town when daylight waned and the darkness of December pulled people indoors. The stores brought out the purple sweaters and sweatshirts, the gold shirts and neck ties, the purple pumps and pant suits — all to match our school colors. The booster club sold stickers and pins and people stuck them onto bumpers and winter jackets. The signs on the stores no longer advertised sales and specials, but changes weekly to cheer on the team. Even the dentist, who my mom always suspected of being a John Bircher, took a break from his battle to get “the U.S. OUT OF THE U.N.” to lend his billboard to the cause. Week by week through the winter, basketball crept into our consciousness, taking over our lives, shutting out the world except for what was known of our rivals in the other factory towns of central Indiana. The War in Vietnam and the civil unrest in cities and on campuses were far away.
Basketball somehow kept our town together. It removed barriers and eclipsed the mundane circumstances of our lives, allowing us to celebrate the energy of youth — the beauty and innocence of young men who didn’t have much future off court, but who had promise and passion and a jump shot. Ironically, in these winter rituals the most feared and mistrusted members of our community, the black male teenager, often took center court. And they became my secret icons — heroes who couldn’t be heroes for white boys growing up in Indiana in the sixties. I idolized the players on my father’s team, black and white. I sat with them on the team bus, shot with them after practice, ate with them at restaurants before the game. I was privy to a world that boys and even adults in my town envied. I witnessed the pre-game pep talks, the half-time strategy sessions, the post-game celebrations. In awe I watched them shower, their long, lean, Herculean bodies, ageless and true. I watched my father whispering in their ears, his arms around their backs, yelling at them from courtside, talking quietly to them in the dressing room after they lost a game. I lived every moment of every game with them. With each shot, each defensive move, each pass, I followed the ball from player to player as if I were out there with them. I knew their nicknames and moves, and practiced with them in my driveway, muttering to myself the play-by-play, switching roles as I became each player. And as it was in my fantasies, it was the black players in real life who secretly captured the imaginations of the throngs of white people jammed into gymnasiums all over Indiana.
At that time there were maybe four or five black players on Marion’s team. Industrial cities like Fort Wayne, Anderson and Muncie also had black players, (and of course there were all black teams in Indianapolis and Gary), but by and large there was a clear taboo against blacks dominating any team of influencing the style of good old Hoosier high school basketball. Even for those teams which had several black players, five blacks were never allowed on court together. No one ever said exactly why. But everyone knew. They wouldn’t be able to do the set plays, chaos would break out. They needed a little smart white point guard to direct traffic. Once when several of the white players had fouled out, I remember that four black players and a Chinese American guy were sent to the floor to finish the game. Of course we won. But if we had lost the blacks would have been blamed, not the whites for fouling out. Yet everyone could see the dynamic of the game change with each black player added to the court. The pace of the game quickened and the fans got more excited as the style changed from the white game of defense and passing inside to the big man, to the black game of finesse, speed, shooting, and blocking shots.
From the bleachers I watched as did all the people in town lucky enough to have a ticket. Seven thousand people clung to their prized season tickets which people won in a lottery at the beginning of the seasons, while others procured them through clout or via family inheritance. The ticketless and the night shift huddled around radios. And the streets emptied from seven to nine o’clock. Everyone kept the players in the center of their mind, whispering prayers for each free throw. But when these heroes of Friday and Saturday night slipped out of their uniforms and walked out of the gym, those who had the wrong skin color became “colored boys” again who live on the wrong side of town.
I could never understand the hypocrisy that warped the people on my hometown, who otherwise seemed to see life so clearly and simply. When you’re 13, you don’t know how things get twisted like this, and it bothers you because in school and in life you’re trying hard to fit all the pieces together. It didn’t make sense why people distrusted one another because of the color of their skin. The riots and burning down of the cities, the KKK marches, the murders of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy seemed like scenes from folktales or stories in the Bible. Surely the good would win out in the end over evil. Yet distance always creates the illusion of righteousness: racism wasn’t our problem; what we saw on the nightly news had nothing to do with us, the good people in Marion, Indiana. Besides history told us that slavery and all the terrible things white peoples did to black people happened a long time ago. All that was fixed and forgotten. Yet, now that I look back, it never occurred to me to question why there were no black people at my church or at the Elk’s Club swimming pool or teaching at the high school or working anywhere but in the factories.
Then one day I was looking at an old scrapbook at my grandmother’s house. My cousins were showing me the obituaries of my grandfather, proving to me what I refused to believe when they showed me the rafter in the garage. I kept staring at my grandfather’s picture and rereading the newspaper clippings, wondering why what my cousin’s had told me had been omitted: that my grandfather had not simply died in the early morning hours, but had been found hanging from a rafter by my 10-year-old father when he went to the garage to look for his basketball. I flipped through the pages looking for him, but my grandmother had apparently unconsciously left him out and instead I could find only page after page of my ancestors, the poor Celtic-American farmers with stern faces and stiff bodies, who stared back at me as if judging me for my grandfather’s unforgivable act. And then, more horrible still: in a fold of a page I came across a yellowed newspaper article, unfolded it, and read the headline: “Mob Storms Jail in Marion,” Below the headline was a photograph of those two young black men hanging from trees on Marion’s courthouse lawn. With the image of my grandfather still trying to find its place in my mind, I stared at their heads drooping like puppets, their feet hanging off the ground, their bodies thin and long-stretched out of proportion, tongues hanging out of the corner of their gaping mouths. Below, looking up at them, glassy-eyed and giddy, some with remnants in their hands of the boys clothing as souvenirs, were the citizens of my home town — men and women, teenagers, relatives, uncles and aunts, perhaps even my grandfather there somewhere in the crowd.
After seeing that picture in my grandmother’s photo album, I would stare at those terrible trees on the courthouse lawn that I recognized from the photograph. And at Christmas when the town square was bedecked in holiday lights to proclaim our town’s status as “Christmas City, U.S.A.” I couldn’t help seeing the shadows of those teenagers hanging from the same trees gaily strewn with wreaths and reindeer.
When James and I reached 14, he looked almost like a man. He’d grown tall and the muscles in his arms and legs had grown thick and pressed out his skin. He became the star athlete in junior high. He was the team — the halfback, the pitcher, the 100-yard-dash-man. He hit all the home runs, blocked the shots, ran for the touchdowns, and captured the ribbons for the longest jumps. And when he pitched all you remembered seeing was not the white of the ball but the white of his clenched teeth as he struck you out. One Saturday, playing football in our yard, James ran so hard for a touchdown that he bulldozed an evergreen bush and it snapped off at the base. Confessing to my parents, he cried, promising my mother he would give her the money to buy a new one. But it didn’t matter. My mother worked at the urban League and slipped political pamphlets into people’s doors of McGovern. She liked that I had black friends playing in our side yard and spending the night. James could have burned our garage down, and she wouldn’t have cared. My father liked him too and would stand and watch us playing in the driveway, coaching James on how to flip his wrist for his jump shot: “Son, you’re gonna hit a lot more of those shots now if you follow through like I showed ya.”
James spent hours at our house, coming over when I wasn’t even there to practice and shoot around. When we went on vacations, he came over and mowed our yard and checked around to make sure the papers weren’t piling up on our porch. Sometimes, too, he spent the night. Lying there next to him in the dark, I thought about what would happen if some of my relatives would come over and see him next to me in my bed. Feeling him there breathing next to me, his eyes staring wide open into the dark, it felt like the Earth might crack open and swallow us down into that molten ball of fire at its core. Or, I thought, lightning might strike our house, like in a Frankenstein movie, and transform us. Him into me and me into him. When he went home after breakfast, I felt a sense of relief. My two worlds collapsed back into one. And I would go back into my room and quickly brush off his hairs left on the bed sheets, the little o’s that looked like they had spilled from out of a book.
It seemed like sometimes he never wanted to go home, and would stay past dinner, refusing my parents’ invitations to eat with us because he felt like he was imposing. So as we ate, we could hear the ball bouncing on the driveway and the goal shake when he missed a shot. At the time, I never understood why he didn’t want to go home, but now that I think about it, who ever wanted to be home at 14? My house was a refuge for James. His black friends made him uncomfortable, and at times teased him for being square and a mama’s boy. One day after losing yet another game to him at 21 and a little annoyed that he had been at my house nearly all day and showed no sign of wanting to go, I made up my mind to ask him a question that I knew he didn’t want to talk about — his father. I figured maybe he would just leave rather than talk to me about it. I knew the subject upset him because once he and his cousin Clayton fought over something about his father. James and I were resting between games, sitting against the giant ash tree that shadowed the court and hung over our garage. When I mentioned his father, he didn’t say anything, which was what I expected. James spoke only when spoken to, and then not always. So I asked him again, “How come you don’t have a dad, James?” He fidgeted, began itching his back, pulled up on his socks, then tried to spin the ball on his index finger but couldn’t. I pressed for an answer, ignoring his discomfort. “Everybody has a dad. How come you don’t?”
“No, I don’t have no dad,” he finally shot back with unusual emotion.
“Wol’ why not? What happened to him?”
For once I felt like I had ruffled his poise and made him sweat. He looked sick, and his mouth opened but no words came out. Then incredibly I saw tears like steel ball bearings sliding down his cheeks. He tilted his head up toward the branches overhead and blinked and blinked, trying to keep them wide open, hoping to keep gravity from letting them spill out. I was sorry I’d ever asked and wanted to take the ball from his hands and run for a layup, hoping he’d follow and all would be forgotten. Embarrassed for him, I tried to look away, but his Adam’s apple kept lifting and falling down his throat as he tried to swallow down his pride. He clinched his teeth and then burst out his explanation, choking between breaths, his eyes still staring up into the branches, as if I were looking down on him: “My daddy killed himself, put a gun in his mouth behind our house in the alley and blew out…”
I never heard the rest of it. I sat in silence, looking at the grass, afraid to see his face. Then he got up and stumbled around like a newborn colt, took a couple of shots and went home.
As James and I got older, we became absorbed into our separate racial spheres except during basketball season and in the summer when he would drop by my housed for a game. Our games became so intense sometimes I lost my temper and stomped into the house or threw the ball well into the neighbor’s yard. My temper had become a serious problem and often I had to be set down for getting so mad at myself in the middle of our games. It was like some kind of spell came over me and I lost all sense of reality. James, of all my friends and family, never judged me for it. He simply waited until I returned to myself. And then beat my ass one more time. Sometime we nearly fought, pushing and shoving for a rebound, or slamming each other against the telephone polls that held up the backboard. His jaw tightened and his eyes became small. Sweat poured off his forehead even in December. I loved playing this way, pushing out the world, maintaining my focus on his eyes and daring him to come in and try to get around me. We knew each other’s moves so well, we could close our eyes and play.
No longer a kid, James at 15 and about to enter high school had a reputation at the park that got him picked quickly for the big games. I could only play in the games with younger or white guys or when they weren’t enough players to make five on each side. In the big games, I remained a spectator. I could tell James felt uncomfortable when he would be allowed in game after game and I would be ignored or overlooked. He lobbied for me, pointing me out in that awful moment when the team had four players and a guy scanned the court looking for his fifth, taking his time to feel the power he had to make grown men feel their worth. “He’s the best shooter on our team, pick him. You know who his dad is, don’t ya?” James urged an older teammate. But the older black guys usually chose their friends.
Sometimes as I watched him play, I found myself envying James, envying his blackness and the world he lived in. I spent hours surrounded by black guys either at the park or playing sports in school. Unbeknownst to them, and perhaps even myself, I tried to imitate them on and off the court. I longed for a black leather jacket and shiny, exotic-colored three-inch heels, but my parents never allowed them. All I got was a bandana and colored shoestrings for my ugly white high-top Converses. I listened to the Jackson Five, Marvin Gaye, and the Motown sounds. I slipped their expressions subtly into my speech. I fantasized about the black girls they talked about. Alone in my room, I practiced that bounce and drag to their gait before the mirror.
One day, standing around on the sidelines waiting to get into a game, James pulled a muscle and waved me in to take his place. At first, I thought he just wanted my help, but hobbling off he pointed out a guy and said, “You got the guy in the blue sweatshirt.”
None of the older guys said anything as I took his place. I played like it was life or death, running as fast as I could up and down the court, thrilled to be jostled and pushed around for the ball by men twice my age. When I waved James back in, he shook his head. Our team won and won again, and I played three times that day thanks to James’ injury. Later, when we finally lost the court, James and I walked to the drugstore for a Coke. He had stopped limping, making me wonder if he had really been injured at all.
Breaking into the games I learned didn’t necessarily mean I was allowed into the game. I was still white and an outsider. Sometimes it felt like three teams playing at once — the opposing team, my team, and me.
I played whole games without once getting passed the ball. I got the ball only through my own rebounding efforts or by stealing a pass. When the ball did come my way, my sole option was to pass it back. But I didn’t care. I concentrated on defense, setting picks, and rebounding. Only toward the end of games, with our team well ahead or if I was wide open, did someone pass me the ball. But then, out of fear, I’d often pass it back, which drove them crazy. “Man, shoot the damn ball!” But if I made it, it was like I had grown six inches and my hair turned from thin blond spikes to a thick Afro. Then I was in rhythm of their world and I didn’t want out.
Most Sundays my family got together after church for dinner with my relatives — either they came for a visit or we drove over to my grandmother’s. One day, I wasn’t sure if they were coming or not, and so when James stopped by to play a few games, I grabbed my ball and slammed the kitchen door behind me, tossing it ahead to James for a lay in.
My relatives lived in a small farm town 20 miles away where no blacks ever lived, or even thought to stop and get gas. My uncles and grandmother weren’t exactly generous in their opinions about the “coloreds.” My grandmother, years ago, had attended Klan rallies with my grandfather. She was bred into a world that feared African-Americans, Jews, Catholics, and foreigners of all kinds. A dyed-in-the-wool Republican, she talked like FDR was the antichrist until the day she died.
As James and I fell into our usual competitive games of one-on-one, I lost all sense of time and concern about my relatives’ visit. But when James pulled up short on a drive to the basket and turned to look up the driveway, I knew instantly that they had arrived. I turned to see my grandmother getting out, followed by my aunt, uncle and two cousins. They waved, expecting me to run up to the car and help them unpack. But seeing James beside me on the court, the older adults walked toward the house without turning back. My cousins lingered longer, pulling picnic baskets from the trunk, looking at me for some sort of reaction. James, paying them little if any attention, continued shooting. Suddenly I felt small and getting smaller. My older cousins, who I revered, seemed to get taller and taller as I feared introducing them to James. Then James seem to become unnaturally prodigious, reaching his hand above the rim to tip in a shot, his body getting wide and thick, his shoes and elbows crowding me. I didn’t know what to do, but had to do something quickly. “Got to go,” I said, turning to James and seeing all of his blackness, his dark face and arms, his pink skin under his fingernails.
As my cousins edged closer, both curious but with little interest in playing, I pleaded to James out of panic. “Maybe you ought to go on home now.”
“I just want to shoot around some,” James said, draining his favorite shot from the corner. “That’s okay with you isn’t it?”
Of course it was. He could have come in and ate with my relatives and no one would have said anything. My uncles might have been nervous and might grandmother might say something stupid like, “I’ll bet you don’t get no pie like this at your house do you?” But I choked. I told him he had to go home and asked if he didn’t mind going the back way — behind our garage, over the back fence and through the field.
“Why through the back yard?” he asked.
“It’s closer,” I whispered. Not true. It was out of his way.
“Closer?” James looked embarrassed, his mouth opened looking for something to say. Then he looked over to my cousins and tossed me the ball. Without looking back at me he walked past our garage to the back fence. He climbed over it and into the empty field that separated our house from the black neighborhood behind it.
“No you can keep the ball until tomorrow,” I said running after him. “Maybe there’s a game at the park?” I was sure I could say the right thing to get him to understand. But as I reached the fence and called out his name his fast walk broke into a run.
The next time he saw me at the park, he acted as if nothing had happened. But the die had been cast. And as we grew older and went to high school, we came together only when we were playing at the park or during basketball season when the world around us, for a brief time, reduced to a colorless blur in the corner of our eyes.
Michael McColly, in 2000, won a creative nonfiction award from the Illinois Arts Council for “Christmas City, U.S.A.” In 2007, his book The After Death Room, a work of journalism and spiritual exploration centered on the AIDS epidemic, won the LAMDA Award. He teaches creative nonfiction, journalism and literature at Columbia College Chicago and Northwestern University.