2. Intuition Of A Nomad
Trust Your Instincts
I always say, “Never forget the child you were or you will never understand the adult you become.”
Our coping mechanisms, relationship, communication and compromising skills are developed between birth and 5 or 6 years old. While the brain is developing, our cognitive ability is robust and perceptive and we understand much more than we are given credit for.
My daily walk to school and home was now becoming a ritual. Not long after the first journey I was joined by Alan and Keith. We looked like a very young bad ass miniature version of Mod Squad. Alan was Jewish, Keith black and myself, a Heinz 47, not 57, missed out on a couple ethnicities.
A few weeks ago, when I was brainstorming my bioblog, the universe had my back once again. I was thinking of Keith, wondering where he was, how life unfolded and could not think of his last name. It was a mere few hours later I hear the messenger ‘ting’ and lo and behold it was Keith. It had been 57 years since we had last seen or talked with each other but it was like it had only been yesterday.
Keith wrote the following essay about our childhood friendship. I don’t remember this day and I shudder reading it. It’s interesting that he thought I was Jewish. My dad was Jewish, my mother a gentile. To be fair, it was a comfortably uncomfortable era. The neighborhood knew who was black and who was Jewish and behind closed doors didn't hold their bigotries back. Money doesn't make for manners or morality. My dad couldn’t join any of the city’s country clubs and Keith just wanted to go to school. And here we are in 2021, where Jewish people are being harassed, black boys are executed on the street by those whom are to serve and protect and women of any color deprived of basic human rights over her own body. These groups are not isolated cases. They've drawn a wide brush to include all vulnerable groups, trans kids, LGBTQ, American voters, anyone who doesn't look like them or think like them are whom they're targeting the constitutional rights of.
That First Crush (and then came life)
The last time I attended a school where Black kids were in the majority was in kindergarten. And the first little girl I ever had a crush on was a white, Jewish girl named Shelley whose family literally lived in a mansion overlooking a large park. There were other large homes also facing out onto that park, but there was no competition when it came to which one was the grandest of them all.
This story isn’t going to turn out how you think…
As I mentioned in last week’s post, the first six years of my life we lived in a small house on Milwaukee Street in the Black neighborhood on Denver’s northeast side of town. Where I went to kindergarten was only walking distance away, but it was starting to have some problems that my parents weren’t too crazy about so by first grade I was attending another public school on the other side of town. But it wasn’t the other side of town for too long because within a year we had moved from Milwaukee to Dahlia in the city’s Hilltop neighborhood where we were the only Black folks for miles around.
The good thing about Steck at that time was that it wasn’t experiencing the same sort of overcrowding and other issues that Columbine was going through. I knew why my parents made the move, which was basically because they knew white folks would make sure their schools were being taken care of, and there was a better chance I’d get a good education.
The downside of going to Steck was, as I mentioned last week, that I was one of two Black kids in the whole school and we were both in the first grade. Which meant we didn’t only get picked on by some of the kids in our class, we got hassled by the older – and much bigger – kids. Plus not all the teachers were that thrilled to have me there, including my first grade teacher, Ms. Birkey. This woman’s behavior eventually required my mother to come to school and sit in the classroom every day for quite awhile to make sure that woman didn’t pull another stunt like the time when she demanded I come to the front of the class where she forcefully demonstrated the proper way to tuck one’s shirt in as she yanked my shirt out of my pants, shoved it back in so tight I could barely breathe, and then instructed the class to laugh at me for being too stupid to know how to tuck in my own shirt. The kids who didn’t want to laugh were chastised.
Some things you just don’t forget. For me, one of those things was the anguished look on Shelley’s face. It was the kind of pained look that you almost could never imagine seeing on a child that young. She knew what she was watching – and being required to participate in – was horribly wrong. And yet she was so young she probably didn’t even know how to process it. And the pain of her struggle was all over that pretty face. This happened just a few years shy of six decades ago, but I can still see it happening as if it were playing on a looped reel in my mind.
I already had a crush on Shelley before being called to the front of the classroom, so being forced to endure this humiliation in front of the few friends I had in the class plus a little girl I really liked was pretty painful. Although perhaps not quite so painful as the hell my mother rained down on Ms. Birkey when she found out about it.
Anyway, Shelley didn’t return to Steck after the first grade, and I haven’t seen her since. But before that year was through, Shelley invited me to her 6th birthday party at that huge house. I was the only Black kid there, but unlike at Steck I was treated considerably better. Her parents and her sisters were as warm and friendly as they could be. So when I had my 6th birthday party at our house on Milwaukee, I made sure to invite her. And she came with her father, who I remember chatted amiably with my dad throughout the party.
Since then, I have occasionally thought about Shelley off and on, wondering how she was doing. Then, in high school, I heard from a friend of mine that she just happened to be attending the same high school as he was in Denver. I was in prep school back east and was home on school break. I told him to ask her if she remembered me. He told me she did, and there was a party coming up and I was looking forward to reconnecting with her, but something happened and either I didn’t make the party or she couldn’t make it. It’s kinda hazy to be honest.
After that, the last I heard was that (I believe) she was an artist living somewhere in Europe, but that was decades ago.
Then came today. May 15, 2021, ITAOFB (In The Age Of Facebook).
So if you’re a user of Facebook at all, you know about the friend requests, and then below that where it suggests People You May Know. So the very first person Facebook says I might know is a woman named Shelley Knight. I look at the name, and then I look at her photo, and then I look at the folks we know in common. Has to be her. Even without seeing the friends in common I could still see a similarity to the little girl I remembered in the eyes. So I decided to reach out.
Are you that same Shelley?
That picture of me at her 6th birthday party was my answer.
-By Keith A. Owens
Writer, Musician, Co-Founder Detroit Stories Quarterly
Turns out Keith and I ran in the same crowds up and through uni but never crossed paths.
I guess timing is everything but the real relief came when Keith said my dad had brought me to his house for his birthday party and stayed and hung out with Keith’s dad talking.
It’s hard to describe my relief because for the majority of my adult life I truly was troubled my dad might have been a racist from what my siblings said without directly saying it. It wasn’t the first time I was relieved to find out many stories relayed to me by siblings was a complete fabrication of their rewriting our family history for their own benefit.
Being the youngest has its advantages and disadvantages but the disadvantages become so much more apparent after the parents who gave us all birth have left the world they brought us into.
Isn’t easy to trust when your own siblings lie. I always wished I'd had nicer siblings.
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