Like a river at night, her hair— the sky starless, streetlights glossing the full dark of it: Was she Jewish? I was seventeen, an “Afro-American” senior transferred to a suburban school that held just a few of us. And she had light-brown eyes and tight tube tops and skin white enough to read by in a dim room. It was impossible not to be curious. Me and my boy, Terry, talked about “pink babes” sometimes: we watched I Dream of Jeannie and could see Barbara Eden—in her skimpy finery—lounging on our very own lonely sofas. We wondered what white girls were really like, as if they’d been raised by the freckled light of the moon. I can’t remember Allison’s voice but the loud tap of her strapless heels clacking down the halls is still clear. Autumn, 1972: Race was the elephant sitting on everybody. Even as a teenager, I took the weight as part of the weather, a sort of heavy humidity felt inside and in the streets. One day, once upon a time, she laughed with me in the cafeteria—something about the Tater Tots, I guess, or the electric-blue Jell-O. Usually, it was just some of us displaced brothers talkin’ noise, actin’ crazy, so she caught all of us way off-guard. Then, after school, I waved and she smiled and the sun was out—that 3 o’clock, after-school sun rubbing the sidewalk with the shadows of trees— and while the wind pitched the last of September, we started talking and the dry leaves shook and sizzled. In so many ways, I was still a child, though I wore my seventeen years like a matador’s cape. The monsters that murdered Emmett Till—were they everywhere? I didn’t know. I didn’t know enough to worry enough about the story white people kept trying to tell. And, given the thing that America is, maybe sometimes such stupidity works for the good. Occasionally, History offers a reprieve, everything leading up to a particular moment suddenly declared a mistrial: so I’m a black boy suddenly walking the Jenkintown streets with a white girl—so ridiculously conspicuous we must’ve been invisible. I remember her mother not being home and cold Coca Cola in plastic cups and the delicious length of Allison’s tongue and we knew, without saying anything, we were kissing the color line goodbye and on and on for an hour we kissed, hardly breathing, the light almost blinding whenever we unclosed our eyes— as if we had discovered the dreaming door to a different country and were walking out as if we could actually walk the glare we’d been born into: as if my hand on her knee, her hand on my hand, my hand in her hair, her mouth on my mouth opened and opened and opened -- 英语文工作室 http://www.wretch.cc/blog/jsengstudio/ 个板 defenestrate --

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