we’d fish and swim and explore. But he couldn’t go to my school because of segregation.”
I nodded. I knew what segregation was, even though it was easy not to think about it in Westfield, since every single person I knew there was white.
“His school was far inferior to mine,” Grandpop said. “Willie was just as smart as me—smarter in some things —but he didn’t have a chance. And here’s the worst thing.” He shook his head and I leaned closer to his chair, wanting to catch every word of the “worst thing.”
“One time he and I went into the town near our houses. We were only eight or nine and we decided we wanted to buy some candy. But coloreds weren’t allowed in the store.”
“That doesn’t seem fair,” I said.
“Of course it’s not fair,” Grandpop agreed. “So I went in the store—it was a general store, I guess you’d call it. And I bought a bag of candy for a few cents and took it outside and Willie and I sat on the curb and ate it. Then he had to go to the bathroom really bad. The store had a privy behind it. An outhouse. But there was a sign on it that said No Coloreds, so Willie couldn’t use it. So, I went into the store and asked the lady at the counter if she would make an exception, since he was just a kid and had to go real bad, but she wouldn’t allow it. We went to another store, and they wouldn’t let him use their privy either. He ended up wetting his pants.”
“Oh,” I said, feeling sorry for Grandpop’s little friend.
“And then a man came and started smacking Willie around, calling him names, saying that’s why…” Grandpop hesitated a moment and I had the feeling he was going to clean up the man’s language for my ears. “He said that’s why Negroes weren’t allowed in nice places, because they soiled themselves and such.You can just imagine how humiliating that experience was for Willie.”
It was an awful tale. I thought about how it would feel to be prohibited from entering the little corner store where I rode my bike to buy penny candy. I imagined a sign on the door that read No White Children Allowed. I imagined feeling desperate to pee and not being allowed in.
But I felt uncomfortable about the conversation, because Grandpop was telling me—not straight out, but he was telling me just the same—that my father was wrong. That he was prejudiced. My father was such a good and admirable person. It was hard for me to reconcile the man I loved and respected with a bigot.
“Dad wouldn’t ever…you know, tell a little boy who needed to use the bathroom that he couldn’t,” I said, desperately wanting my grandfather to agree with me.
Grandpop smiled at me. “You’re right about that,” he said. “Your daddy’s a fair man. But he’s really had no experience with colored people, so he just doesn’t know any better than to say what he said. People are prejudiced mostly because they don’t know any better.”
I felt relieved. For a minute, I’d been afraid that Grandpop didn’t like my father.
“Do you know that a lot of people thought your grandmother wasn’t as good as they were when she was growing up here in New Jersey?” he asked. “They thought she was stupid.”
“Why?” I asked, perplexed. “She’s not colored.”
“She’s Italian. She didn’t speak perfect English. To some people, that’s considered even worse than being colored.”
I thought I was lucky to have an Italian grandmother. She was sweet to my friends and she cooked fantastic lasagna and made cookies at Christmastime with almond flavoring or rose water. It was hard to imagine anyone not loving her.
I suddenly got another tug on my line, this one nearly pulling the pole out of my hands. Grandpop tucked his pole beneath his chair to hold it in place and came over to help me.
“You’ve got a good one this time, Julie,” he said.
He held the pole as steady as he could while I reeled in the biggest fluke I had ever seen come out of the canal. I was whooping and hollering, jumping up and down as the fish sprang out of the water and we pulled it over the fence and onto the sand. It flopped from its flat, brown, two-eyed side to its white side and back again, and Grandma and Mom came out of the house to see what the fuss was all about. Lucy came out, too, but hung back near the porch door, afraid of the fish or the hook or the water. It was anyone’s guess.
Mom and Grandma watched as Grandpop held the fluke and I carefully extracted the hook.
“He’s a beaut,” my mother said.
“You win, Julie,” Grandpop said, as I dropped the fish into our bucket. It was nearly too big to fit. “I’m going to go clean it right this minute.” That was the loser’s task, to clean the catch.
I felt satisfied with myself as I watched my grandparents and mother walk back toward the house, but all of a sudden, I sensed a presence behind me. I turned and there stood Ethan, just a few feet away from me.
“That’s the most gargantuan fluke I’ve ever seen,” he said. “Can I have its guts?”
The next morning, I was sitting on the bulkhead, using binoculars to watch the boats bobbing and weaving in the rough water beneath the Lovelandtown Bridge. Grandpop had not only cleaned what he continually referred to as the “biggest fluke ever caught in the Intercoastal Waterway,” but he gave me a pair of binoculars, as well.
“I’ve been saving them to give you for a special occasion,” he said. “But I think catching that fish was pretty special.”
I guessed it was my conversation with Grandpop that made me turn the binoculars on the colored fishermen across the canal. That’s when I saw the girl. She was standing close to the dock that separated the fishing area from the Rooster Man’s shack, and she was bending over, doing something with her pole, baiting the hook, perhaps. How old was she? I studied her hard, turning the little dial on the binoculars to try to bring her into better focus. I couldn’t see what she looked like very well, but she was my age, I felt sure of it.
I went into the garage and grabbed my fishing pole and bait knife, took one of the boxes of squid out of the refrigerator, hopped in the runabout and motored across the canal before I had a chance to think about what I was doing. I pulled into the dock near the girl. I felt nervous, but a little excited, too. Maybe she would have a sense of adventure. Maybe she could become my friend, the way Willie had been my grandfather’s friend. I was so tired of being by myself.
I tied the runabout to the ladder at the side of the dock, then climbed up to the bulkhead with my pole and my
