The day I first walked into typing class, Mrs. Connors was standing in the front of the room. It took a few seconds for the light to switch on in my brain. She was teaching the class. Thinking back to my first meeting with her in the office and my telling her that I thought requiring typing was “stupid,” I realized I had really put my foot in shit. I can’t remember ever having been so embarrassed. However, other than gazing at me briefly, she said nothing as I went with my proverbial tail between my legs to an empty typewriter.
Actually, the class turned out to be fun. I suppose I had used my hand-eye coordination so much for playing the piano that it was fairly easy for me. When Mrs. Connors announced a few weeks later that Peter and I had almost identical records for speed and accuracy, Peter turned to look at me. He stared back with what was clearly a challenging look. I gave him the same look back, and ever since then we have been competing—not speaking, just competing.
When, two weeks later, Mr. Lincoln, the history teacher, announced a research assignment to be done in pairs my heart fell into my stomach. I didn’t want to work with anybody else, and I almost raised my hand and told him so, but he moved right on and was clearly not open to objections. It was just my bad luck that I got paired with Peter and that we got assigned the history of the New England Whaling industry. I didn’t even know there was one! Who cared about some dumb whales swimming around in the Atlantic?
When Peter came over to my desk I thought, “Oh no, here we go.”
He said to me something like, “I’m sure you’re as thrilled about this as I am, but if we want to get a decent grade I guess we’re stuck with working together. Where do you want to start?”
We agreed to go to the town library to see what they had, which turned out to be not much. So a few days later we decided we had to go to the main library in the city.
I told my mother on Friday that Peter and I had a research project to do on New England whaling and that we were going in to the Westbridge library by bus on Saturday to do some research.
“How nice. Who is Peter? Is he your friend?”
“Peter is a classmate. He is in no way my friend.” I didn’t tell her that Peter was the first and only kid I had even talked to at school. Besides, that was only because I had to talk to him.
On Saturday morning, I met Peter at the school and we caught the bus into the city. For the first half of the ride, we didn’t say anything. He was by the window and I was on the aisle. I did glance over at him from time to time as he gazed out the window. He was really pretty good looking for a white kid. His face was open and guileless with haunting, light blue eyes. His best feature was his wavy auburn hair, which he wore as long as the school rules allowed. I liked the way he occasionally brushed it back from his eyes. He was somewhat smaller than I but nicely built, neither skinny nor fat. Once I looked over at him and he was grinning! Not at me; more to himself.
“Why are you always smiling?” I growled. “Why are you always so damned happy?”
He stared at me for a minute and then asked, “Why don’t you ever smile? You are the gloomiest person I have ever known. Do you hate the whole world?”
I was stung by that. “Yes, I hate the whole world, and I’ll tell you exactly why.” For the rest of the ride I told him about moving to Meadowbrook, how I hated being in the all-white town, how I hated being the only Negro in the school, how my parents didn’t understand me and how the kids avoided me.
“I’m sure they do avoid you. They’re afraid of having their heads bitten off.”
I didn’t understand that at all. They were afraid of me? What had I ever done to them?
The conversation ended then as we arrived at our bus stop. It was a short walk to the library. We didn’t really need the card catalog because we already knew that the call number for whales was 599.5 and the one for History of the New England Whaling was 639.28. We were really more interested in the history, so we went upstairs to the 639s. We hadn’t bothered to write down the specific names and numbers of books because we thought we would just browse. After all, how many books could there be about whaling? Quite a number in fact. One of the first books we came across was Whaleships of New Bedford, by Clifford Ashley, but it was mostly just drawings of the different ships, although there was an excellent drawing in the front of the book showing a man in a boat trying to harpoon a whale. The whale was enormous, and the man’s boat was very close to the whale, which could have smashed the boat with a flick of its tail. (I didn’t know then that the tail of a whale is called “the flukes.”) The title of the picture was “A Dead Whale or a Stove Boat.” It was then that I realized we were studying a truly dangerous occupation.
The next book we found was also by Ashley and was titled The Yankee Whaler, published in 1942. As we looked through the contents it was clear that this book might be very helpful. While I leafed through it some more, Peter found a book by Alexander Starbuck titled The History of the American Whale Fishery published in 1878. We took our books to a table, along with a couple of others, and settled down to examine them more carefully.
The Yankee Whaler was actually quite interesting. It told all about the history of whaling, about the tools that were used, about the ports on Cape Cod and in New Bedford and Nantucket, and about the life of the whalemen. After awhile, I discovered that in the back of the book were pages and pages of black and white pictures, some of the tools, many of paintings by Ashford. After turning the pages for a few minutes I stopped dead and stared. In front of me were two pictures. The left one was called, “The First Blanket Piece,” and the other was called “Mincing.” I had no idea yet what those terms meant, but what was clear to me was that the men in the two pictures were clearly Negroes! Like me!
“Look Peter!” I tapped him on the arm.
“What?”
“What do you see in these pictures?”
“Guys working.”
“Yes, but what kind of guys?”
“Oh! I see. Do you think all whalemen were Negroes?”
“I don’t think so, because there are other pictures of men who seem to be white. Do you know what this means?”
After a pause he said, “Not really.”
“It means that white men and Negroes lived on the same ships. It means that they must have gotten along and that they weren’t segregated because there wouldn’t be room on a ship to do that.”
“Wow! That’s amazing! Do you suppose any of them are your ancestors?”
“I doubt it. My parents are very proud of their ancestors and know who they were going way back before the Civil War. I think they would have told me if we were related to any of them. I want to take this book home and read it.”
We each picked three books, took them downstairs, and checked them out. On the way back to the bus we stopped at a little diner and had some lunch.
Again, for the first part of the ride home, we were silent, each with his own thoughts. I know I was thinking about the book and what I might learn.
Finally, Peter said, “You know, Christian, I’ve been thinking.”
“About whaling?”
“No, about you.”
“Oh.” I was silent for a few moments. “Just what have you been thinking?”
“I don’t think you’ve been fair, either to yourself or to the rest of us.”
I didn’t like where this was heading, but finally asked, “What do you mean?”
“Well, first of all, you never gave yourself a chance to like anything about Meadowbrook. You just made up your mind that you didn’t like it. And then you decided that you didn’t like us. You said the other kids didn’t like you, but you never gave us a chance. Ever since the first day of school you’ve been walking around with a huge wall around you and with the gates shut and barred. How could we like you? We didn’t know you. We didn’t know who you were, or what you liked, or what you thought about. You simply shut us all out.”
I thought about that for quite awhile. At first I resisted the idea that I had really done something wrong, but the more I thought, the more I realized that he was right. And what he didn’t say was also true, that I had been unfair to my parents too.
“Maybe you’re right. I suppose I was really an idiot, wasn’t I?”
“No, I don’t think so. You were hurt; you were afraid of being the only one. I get that. I don’t know how I would react if I moved into an all Negro neighborhood. I’d probably be scared to death. But most of us don’t bite, Christian, and we really want to be your friends.”
I sat there, tears in my eyes, feeling very foolish. Finally I tried to wipe the tears away. I looked at Peter and saw tears in his eyes too. We burst out laughing, and we laughed all the way to our bus stop.
Back on the sidewalk I looked at him again. “Thanks, Peter. I needed to hear that and I don’t think it was easy for you to say it.”
“That’s what friends are for. Are we friends?”
“Yes,” I said, ”but I’m still going to beat you in typing.” We both laughed.
“Hey!”
“What?” I asked.
“You’re actually smiling! You have a great smile!”
He put his arm around my shoulder and we went back to the school where Peter got his bike and we went our separate ways.
When I got home, my mother was in the music room, playing the piano. I walked in and she stopped and looked at me.
“Have you been crying? What happened?”
“I have been, but everything is good now.” I told her about our conversations on the bus and how Peter had helped me realize that the problem was really me.
“When do I get to meet this paragon, Peter?” she asked.
“Soon!” I told her how sorry I was that I had treated her and Dad so badly, and then she hugged me and held me close. By then we were both crying, but we knew that a real change was coming.