Dear Jackie,
(a letter from your first Black Friend)
Dear Jackie,
I pray this message finds you well.
It’s been almost 50 years since we were little girls in Miss Harris’s kindergarten class. That was your local neighborhood school, and at that time, still mostly white. My mother knew I wasn’t zoned for PS 187. But she worked the system to make sure I was fully armed for an educational system that had attempted to destroy her intelligence as a child. Forty-five years later, another Black woman would be sent to prison for the same crime as my mother.
But I digress…
In the Fall of 1971, you and I became fast friends- playing outside, creating paper costumes, and laughing at Stuart’s booger collection. I still remember the first time you asked me to go home with you after school, where, for the first time in my life, I jumped on a couch in full view of an adult. We glided through the space as if we had invented imaginative play.
I was secretly relieved that your father was never there. By then, I was already experiencing frequent nightmares about a White man in a devil costume, hiding in my closet, waiting to poke me with his pitchfork while I knelt to pray for my family’s souls. Since my mother had informed me that the White man was the Devil (and I didn’t know whether she was…