and this girl I was with went up to the car and then she got
real frightened and wouldn’t say what the man said to her and
said we had to go home right away and was really scared and
since it was right next to the convent I knew it was something
really bad so we went right home and she talked to her mother
who talked to my mother and I kept asking what had happened
and what the man had done to her. Finally my mother said he
18
asked her to get in the car with him. It was very terrible and
ominous to get into the car. The air was heavy with warning
and fear and my own inestimable incomprehension. There was
this edging of my fear away from the convent to the man in
the car and to getting into a car. I thought he must be Catholic.
The girl would never speak of it or answer anything I asked.
My mother said never to say anything about it. I asked if he
had hurt her. My mother said: he didn’t get the chance.
There were Jewish blocks and Catholic blocks and black
blocks. We were supposed to stay off the black blocks, though
it was never put that way. We were always just showed how
to walk, down which streets, and told where not to go, which
streets. The streets we weren’t supposed to go on just had that
in common: black faces, black children. The Catholic streets
and the Jewish streets were all inside the same area, alternating,
no mixing. But I liked to go where I wasn’t supposed to, and I
often walked home alone down the Catholic streets, because
no one could tell by just looking at me exactly. I would make
new routes for myself down streets my friends didn’t go on.
Sometimes I went down black streets, because I wanted to.
Then, getting closer to the one central elementary school,
where all kinds of children converged from every direction,
there were blocks that we all had to walk down because we
were all going to the same place and it was just a fact that no
matter who lived there we all had to walk by or through,
however timidly.
Our street was bounded on one end, the one going to school,
by a busy street with lots of cars and across that street was a
Catholic block, Polish. We were supposed to walk up half a
block before crossing that busy street and continue going
toward school on a Jewish block, and usually I did. But coming
home I would want to walk down the Catholic block because
it was different and it seemed more direct. I knew I shouldn’t
but I didn’t exactly know why I shouldn’t except that it did
seep in that they were different from us and we weren’t
supposed to marry them. I wasn’t even ten yet because I was
ten when we moved away.
I had a friend on that block, Joe, and we would say hello
and talk and say shy things to each other. Their houses were
