"Near Wild Heaven" excerpt

Below is a chapter excerpt from a draft memoir I've been working on that describes my childhood growing up before and after my hometown of Columbus, Georgia was forcibly desegregated in the early 1970s.

Chapter Five


“Pot Pie and Gatorade at Twilight”


“This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong:
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.”
--Shakespeare, Sonnet 73


By the late 1960s, when I began third grade and my brother Tod second, we were already veterans of Columbus High School football games. The Blue Devils were my parents’ passion. My mother taught history and was cheerleader advisor at CHS, which had also been Carson McCullers’ alma mater, a fact much less important than the team’s record any given year; my father was unofficial team photographer, so we were granted unlimited sideline access. Even with a capacity crowd, our ramshackle municipal stadium still hosted more rats than spectators. A few blocks away sat the city’s desolate public housing projects, home to those African Americans not forced to live in the even bleaker ghetto that most whites called “Niggertown,” a term my parents never tolerated.
We also looked forward to Fridays at the stadium because of another seasonal phenomenon: just before dusk great swarms of chimney swifts would rocket from the vast smokestacks of an abandoned cotton mill nearby. But even more astounding was watching the myriad birds -- one of the world’s fastest species -- wheel and career towards the stadium lights. The air there, fraught with insects, was a chimney swift buffet, and the birds, tiny daredevils on a search and destroy mission, gorged themselves in preparation for their approaching migration south. I wondered what mystical capacity allowed them to race across the violet sky and then abruptly change course without crashing into each other. Later I would learn that scientists still have no idea what that secret power is.
But we learned about more than the avian world at that stadium: we encountered a realm beyond the all-white crowd in the bleachers; we gained a broader grasp of the society into which we’d been born, and began to understand how privileged we were simply to be white. At our ages, Tod and I were bored easily, even by live football, and so we would often mill around, searching for ways to entertain ourselves. Using a wadded Coke cup for a ball, we would play football or improvise a game of baseball, using our hands for bats.
One night, while playing in our favorite spot, an unused, dimly lit area between one of the end zones and the parking lot’s chain-link fence, I was stopped in the middle of my wind-up by a whispered “Hey! White boys! Over here!”
Against the fence stood a group of five or six African American boys, all about our age, waving us towards them. We went over hesitantly.
“You gots to let us in!” one of them implored.
A low concrete wall bordered the fence’s bottom, preventing it from being pulled outwards by would-be interlopers. However, it could be pulled inward, which we did. The boys scurried under, escaping the security guards’ attention. Excited about the break-in, they instantly treated us as though we were old buddies, slapping us on the back, asking us our names. We learned that the ringleaders’ nicknames were Gatorade and Pot Pie. Apparently these distinctive monikers originated in Pot Pie’s great passion for Swanson’s frozen pot pies, while Gatorade was obsessed with his namesake sports drink -- luxuries their parents could rarely afford. My brother and I had spent nights with our maid’s family at her house, but we’d never had African American friends our age. That we now did struck us as cool, but more importantly, here was a group of boys who wanted to play some serious football.
For the next two seasons, we waged epic battles at every CHS home game. Each contest featured a different quarterback, with everyone else playing wide receiver, a recipe for divine madness: we would veer around much like the swifts above us, except for our frequent and spectacular collisions. Often three or four of us would crash into each other, determined to grasp the Coke cup “football” and run for immortal glory. Each play usually ended in a tangled pile of laughing black and white bodies. Once Pot Pie smuggled in a Whiffle ball set he had gotten for his birthday. He couldn’t have been more excited about the inexpensive toys if they had been treasures from the tomb of Tutankhamen. None of us had played Whiffle ball before, and our inexperience was compounded by the dim light of our hideout area. The ball was hollow and perforated with large holes and so bobbled around like a knuckleball from hell. We swung the bat madly at it, like blindfolded, manic kids swinging at a birthday pinata. Because we dared not draw attention to our fence scam, when tired we watched the “real” game -- unlike ours, always played by all-white teams -- from the darkness just above our play area.
Once our friends arrived at our meeting place loaded with the sizeable harvest of a maypop expedition. Maypops, the fruit of the passion flower vines that grow wild across the South, have served as projectiles in pitched battles between boys of all races there from time immemorial. On contact the small pods explode with a gratifying, harmless “pop!” (hence the name), leaving only a stringy web of seeds on the victim. I remember my father’s bewilderment when we returned to the sidelines after an especially heated fracas, our hair and clothes festooned with the slimy seeds.
Now I realize that those nights, a full two years before desegregation, were not just played in the literal dusk of fall evenings, in the shadowy border between the illuminated stadium and the darkness beyond the fence. Our no-man’s land was a figurative one as well, a haven from a larger world in which our friendship was untenable, impossible. We were playing in the twilight of the old segregation, the detestable Jim Crow apartheid that not only condemned our friendship but sent my brother and me home to a comfortable house in a safe neighborhood while our friends returned to the dismal, crime-ridden projects circling the no-man’s land around the stadium.
Yet for two short football seasons, we came near wild heaven, an alternative universe of our own devising.
Like the swifts, our friends would leave us at the end of each autumn and we would be forced to confront the larger world, a world much harsher for them than for us. And one season there was no reunion. We hoped that they would maintain as clear a sense of direction and purpose as those migrating birds, that the world would not strip them of their exuberance, of their accepting natures, nor of the creativity exemplified by their very names.
But we would learn in the coming years just how bad the odds against them were.
Now whenever I see swifts I think not just of determination, of beauty and grace, but of transition, of the passage from one world to another -- and of the dire human costs exacted by that journey.