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Coming from a background of seclusion, it is hard for me to
fathom that I actually was able to have a crush on a boy.
Until I was five years old, I was not let out of my
grandmother??™s sight. To go out unaccompanied meant to sit on
the back porch alone with my dogs. I used to watch the
children play downstairs but I was not allowed to join in.
After five years old, I was allowed in the back yard with
my guardian, Laddie, my dog, or was I permitted to go
downstairs with Johnny, the boy next door.
Johnny
and his sister, Jackie, were twins. They were exactly 1 year
older than me. In the early days, I was much closer to
Johnny. Johnny was warm and playful while Jackie was
independent and aloof. When it was time for me to start
school, Johnny would walk me to school and then pick me up
everyday after school. He had to pass my school on his way
to and from his own. I don??™t think it was much of a bother
for him, because he got the chance to play ???big brother???
since, in his own home, the twins were the babies of the
family.
Johnny
and I would play together constantly and my grandmother
never understood why we were the closer ones rather than
Jackie and me. After all, she was a girl. My grandmother
always viewed Jackie to be too sophisticated for me. She was
much of a worldly girl, hanging out with older kids and, in
a way, my grandmother felt that it was a blessing in
disguise that I should be closer to the innocent twin
brother.
Well
this innocent twin brother was not that innocent at all. As
we grew, we had our share of childhood sexual exploration.
We played doctor in the back shed. I have to admit that I
was the instigator, but it never amounted to anything really
serious. Claire, who was Johnny and Jackie??™s niece (a
daughter of a much older sister) and the same age as the
twins, played doctor as well, with her boyfriends. Their??™s
was not so innocent a game, for at the age of 14, Claire
became pregnant. At the insistence of my grandmother, the
sheds were boarded up after that. I was so shocked by this
pregnancy that I never wanted to play doctor again. In
fact, I was tormented by my guilt of being a bad girl for
many years to come. Yet at that age, I still did not have a
clue about what sex was all about. The only thing that
Johnny and I had done was visually explore each other??™s
anatomy with brief periods of touching. Yet I still carried
that sin around with me for years.
You
would think that I??™d have had a crush on Johnny, but I never
did. In my mind, we played doctor and that was it. It was a
game of sexual exploration, not love. My first love was
Brian Nichols. He and I were in the second grade together.
He was the smartest kid in the class and in the whole school
for that matter - well I thought so anyway. Brian had red
hair, blue eyes, and freckles. Not only did he stand out
from the rest of the kids in the school who were primarily
black (Afro-Canadian) or white, none of which had red hair,
he was also social-economically different. This boy was
cultured. He had definitely come from a middle class
background. He knew more, saw more, and read more than all
of us ghetto kids put together. Lord only knows what
circumstances befell his family that caused him to move down
to our area and to force him to go to our school.
Brian
took it in stride though. If he was aware that he had
descended the socio-economic ladder, he certainly didn??™t
show it. He was the class valedictorian, the ever pleasant,
and ever eager to help out teacher??™s pet! He was also the
boy I was in love with, though I loved him from afar. I
would do my best to be picked for projects that he
spearheaded. Whenever I could, I sat beside him. But Brian
never saw me. I guess I can??™t blame him, for I was invisible
to most girls in the school - let alone the boys. In the
beginning, like any other boy in the second grade, Brian
hated girls. Well you know, they were alright from a
distance, but to have a girl friend? No way! Later, though,
he still was not in the true girl liking stage yet, he did
fancy the prettiest girl in the classroom, Linda Joseph.
Maybe it was because she was as pretty, or maybe it was
because it was obvious that she was different from the rest
of us. She did not have the ghetto mentality. It was
apparent that she too came from a middle class background,
judging by her demeanor.
There
you have it, the two different kids bonding together,
leaving me out and breaking my heart. Brian left the school
at the end of the third grade. All we were told was that the
family had moved and he would not be coming back. I imagine
that the family got back on their feet again and moved back
to where they came from. As for me, I carried this love in
my heart for him all through my elementary school years. I
placed him on a pedestal. He was almost a demi-god to me,
though I did not know it at the time. No other boy could
measure up. I thought it was love making me feel this way.
But what I did not know at the time because of my youth and
innocence, was that I was holding on to an ideal.
I was
holding onto the ideal of being different, but not different
in a bad way as I was used to being. But different in a good
way. I was holding onto the ideal that some day I too could
rise above my circumstances and move out of that ghetto and
I could be somebody. I could live in an environment where
14 year old girls did not get pregnant in back sheds, or
where the only known form of reading was comic books. I
could live in a world where life did not include living in
poverty.
Brian
Nichols wherever you are, I wish you the best. You will
never know how much you impacted upon my life.
?© 2003
by Carol Roach |
