School was integrated, but my childhood neighborhood was not. Stonebridge Estates -- imposing name for a 20-foot-bridge over a trickle of water, though stones indeed had been added at each end; wouldn't want to be caught in a lie -- which the construction company my dad worked for was developing in Dothan, only had about half-a-dozen homes in it, when I started elementary school. It's much larger now, family homes side-by-side, from what Googlemaps shows me.
Back then there were sandlots enough to choose a separate one for every sport in its season. Enough raw wilderness -- stretching pines, plump blackberries, feathery brush-away underbrush and fast-growing head-high (to an above-average height 6-year-old) weeds where the man-made lake had been drained -- to feel like a lost universe, probably dinosaur-laden, rife with buggy jungles, sunlight daggering through needle-green canopies.
One Asian-American family moved in among our early settlers, but that was about it for diversity. Stonebridge was classic suburb: Weekend cookouts rotating from back brick porch to back brick porch; parents shuffle-dancing under paper lanterns to pop-jazz and old Ray Charles and Frank Sinatra, over Schlitz and Falstaff and highballs; kids dashing around for Freeze Tag, daring each other to walk alone in the dark woods, flashlight-free to the spring at the center, and bring back tadpoles in a jar for proof; and telling ghost stories and listening to the older kids, teens already, brag about adventures to come. Skinny-dipping with girls seemed like science-fiction, but according to Robbie, it could happen, and my mind was, possibly not for the first, and definitely not for the last time, blown with images and visions, with the chilling clarity of water on skin, with expectation so lofty my Keds didn't touch the ground on the run back home (all the way across one sandlot).
Ray Bradbury would have loved it. The 'hood, that is. Possibly the skinny-dipping, too.
Dad slaved over a hot calculator in an air-conditioned office, but whenever possible, or if he just needed to stretch his legs, he'd drive out to a construction site and walk around pretending to inspect. Even as a sideways-staring, easily distracted kid, I could tell he was there really to talk to people like folks he grew up with: hard-working class, mostly decent, largely sunburnt, smokers and drinkers -- though only the former was allowed on the job -- wide scraggle-toothed grinners and bad joke-tellers.
I remember life-maps of faces, though I'm worse with names. One of them, the foreman and jack of all, was Joe Ben. Joe Ben what? Still don't know. Maybe just Joe Ben, or Joe Ben Hur (my first grade teacher gave me Lew Wallace's novel to dive into, while the kids who hadn't been so lucky to have an older brother teach them to read studied Dick and Jane.) Most weren't one color or another, though some shaded gray and pink, others dry chocolate. Mostly they were construction-site-palate-hued: mortar spatters and paint drips, resin and sawdust and brick bits and the dusky ash that fell from cigs onto forearms so leather-stringy they wouldn't even bother to brush the fire off. And they'd never admit burning embers hurt. Not in front of me, anyway. Offered to show me, but I wasn't that dumb. Barely.
When brought along to the sites, I mostly ran around jumping in and out of clay-lined pits, through door and window frames on the house-to-be, like an invisible man's bones. But I did pay side-eye attention. It sunk in, without anyone saying it out loud, that everyone was equal to my dad, Mr. Executive, who grew up early and often on a farm, and worked himself to a summa cum laude degree, bills paid also thanks to a Korean mortar round embedding itself in his leg. Just a buncha wrinkled old guys, standing around sawing and slapping cement and slopping paint, and talking.
And I mean telling bad, bad jokes. Aching, awful, dumb puns. Not like anything I tell or write now, at all.
So on the first day of first grade, as I stumbled through morning prep -- never been an early riser; never will be -- combing back non-existent locks, spooning cereal, forcing my feet into stiff school shoes, I remember my folks saying words to this effect: "Now don't treat the black children any differently than anyone else."
To their credit, and to that of the not-so-diverse but mostly cool neighborhood where I grew up, I remember thinking: "Why would I?"
Reach Tusk Editor Mark Hughes Cobb at mark.cobb@tuscaloosanews.com or 205-722-0201.