Shoop, shoop.

From 1966-1968 (give or take), I attended Bramlett Elementary School in Oxford, MS.  Oxford is only about an hour or so from Memphis, TN.  We day-tripped there frequently.  One time, my parents took my sister and I to have our waist-length hair snipped into pixies.  My mother had our cropped locks crafted into switches, hair pieces. We had thick blonde hair.  They would have made mean weaves.

In the 2nd grade, one of my best friends at school was an African-American boy named Curtis. He was tall, chubby, and had beautiful brown skin.  I remember that I liked to pat his soft arm.  He liked my coloring book interpretations (I used olive green to shade in a raincoat, which was somehow controversial) and that I could shake a mean hula hoop. Shoop, shoop. This made the teacher nervous.  This made the school nurse nervous.  Fortunately, despite several phone calls from school to home, this did not make my mother nervous.

On April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in a Memphis hotel. I don't remember where I was or the specifics of the next several days.  I remember the zeitgeist though.  Foggy, hushed, tense.  Not shoop, shoop.  I became nervous.  I dreamed of executions.  I dreamed of being chased. 

In the summer of 1968, we moved to Athens, GA.  Integration was a buzzword.  Its energy, though, was not soft and brown like Curtis's skin. No, it buzzed hot. During the months before school started, my parents drove us past the playground of West Broad Elementary School.  It was situated across the street from a housing project.  The school playground was broken, battered, gray, dangerous.  I was nervous.  My mother assured me that by September, the school and playground would look quite different. 

 By September, the playground glistened with new equipment painted in bright primary colors.  I was alarmed that the color of my skin had the power to change a school's landscape. That spring all the kids danced around a maypole. 

The Vietnam War raged on.  I remember seeing body counts on the nightly news.  I remember the disquietude of protest. I remember staging my own protest against an unpopular babysitter, Ms. Thurman.  Ms. Thurman with her red chipped nail polish. I remember trying to memorize the Gettysburg Address because I wanted a voice, but at ten years old, I wasn't sure of my own. 

I remember wanting secret places, darkness, and the clean vapor of night turning into day.  At 50, sometimes, I still do.  Shoop, shoop.