when we went home from school. We were small and happy,
carrying our books home, chattering away. A bunch of black
girls approached us, surrounded us. They were twice as tall as
we were, real big, from junior high school. They surrounded
us and began teasing and calling us names. They demanded
Diane’s scarf. We were silent, very afraid. She was beginning
to give them the scarf when I said no, don’t. There was one
minute of stunned silence, then raucous laughter: wha you say
girl? Don’t, don’t give it to them. Now why not girl we gonna
take it anyway. Because stealing is wrong, I said sincerely. They
surrounded me and began beating me, punching me, kicking
me. They kept on punching and kicking. I remember falling
and saliva pouring from my mouth and screaming. They kept
punching me in the stomach until I fell all the way to the
ground then they kicked me in the stomach over and over and
then they ran away. I lay on the ground quite a while. No one
offered to help me up. Everyone just stared at me. I got up but
I couldn’t get all the way up because I couldn’t straighten my
stomach, it hurt too much. I held it with both hands and stood
bent-backed. No one touched me or helped me or spoke to
me. I must have said something like my daddy told me it’s not
right to steal. Then someone said that she knew someone who
said my daddy was a sissy. A what? A sissy. He’s a sissy. What
does that mean, I must have asked. You know, she said, that’s
2 6
what all the boys say, that he’s a sissy. Enraged, I walked
doubled up home, determined to find the girls who had beat
me up. But my parents told me not to because they would just
hurt me more. I wanted to go into every junior high school
class and look for them. But it would just make trouble and
they would hurt me more, I was told. I remembered sissy and I
remembered my girlfriends doing nothing. They were somehow
worse than awful and mean. Doing nothing was worse.
*
When you get beat up you don’t see much, you begin falling,
you begin trying not to fall so you feel yourself falling and you
feel yourself trying to stay straight and the fists come from
every direction, down on your head and in your face and in
your gut most, and you keep not falling until you can’t breathe
anymore and then you fall. You hit the cement and you feel it
hit you and you see the feet coming at you and you keep trying
to protect your face especially and your eyes and your teeth
and if you can move once you’re down you try to kick back,
to use your legs to get them off of you, but if you fall so that
your legs are sort of twisted under you then you can’t do that
and you can feel your back twist away from your stomach and
it’s real hard not to piss and once they’ve stopped it’s real hard
not to vomit. You don’t know anything about other people
except the ones hitting you if there are a mess of them and
they are all punching you at once. You don’t think, oh, my
friends are standing around watching. It’s after, when you are
suddenly alone, when the heat of the hitting bodies is suddenly
cold air on your sweat and you suddenly understand that you
are not being punched anymore, it has stopped, and you are
not being kicked anymore, it has stopped, and you think, oh,
I’m not dead, I can breathe, now let’s see if I can move, and
you try to stand up no matter what it costs because standing is
the best thing, it gives you something back, and it is in the
process of trying to get up that you look around and see your
friends watching, and it is in the process of getting up that you
see you have to do it alone, and it is in the process of getting
up that you realize without even thinking that anyone can see
how much you hurt and your friends are just standing there,
watching, staying away from you. It is the process of getting
up that clarifies for you how afraid they were for themselves,
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not for you, and how chickenshit they are, and even though
you are tiny and they are tiny you know that even tiny little
girls aren’t really that tiny, in fact no one on earth is that tiny,
and then they say sissy and it makes you understand that you
and your daddy are different from them forever and there is
something puny at the heart of them that smells up the sky.
You can be seven or eight and know all that and remember it
forever.
*
Diane was holding her scarf, real pretty with lots of very pretty
colors: and it was Marcy who said, your daddy is a sissy.
*
I got home down long blocks bent over and not crying and
they walked all around me not touching me, staying far away.
My stomach was kicked in but my face wasn’t hurt too bad. I
was bent and there was no way on earth I could straighten out
my back or straighten out my stomach or take my hands away
from my stomach but see I kept walking and they kept walking:
oh, and after that everything was the same, except I never
really liked Marcy again, as long as I live I never wilclass="underline" and I
still would have done anything for Diane: and we played
outside all our games: and I didn’t care whether they lived or
died.
*
Down the far end of our block, not the end going toward
school but the end going somewhere I never saw, there was a
real funny girl, H. She lived almost at the very end of our
block, it was like almost falling off the edge of the world to go
there and you had to pass by so many people you knew to get
there and they expected you not to go that far away from
where you lived, from the center of the block, and they
wondered where you were going and what you were going to
do, and I didn’t know too many people up that end, just some,
not any of my favorites: and also the principal of the Hebrew
School was up that way, and I didn’t like going by his house at
all because in heavy European tones he chastised me for being
alive and skipping about with no apparent purpose. So I
avoided going there at all, and also I was really scared to be so
close to the end of the block, but this girl was really funny and
so sometimes I went there anyway. She had a real nice mother
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and a sort of bratty younger brother. It was the same basic