Across the Creek

A lot's changed in Bridgewater since I was a little girl, but a lot hasn't. We still got the same firehouse, post office and swimming pool. Old Man Walter's Five and Dime is gone, replaced with some new fancy clothing store. I hardly go in there. All in all, though, it's not that different. Sometimes at night, if I'm walking down the street with my friend Billy, arm in arm, we might just lose ourselves in the moment and find ourselves back in the summer when I turned ten.

That was the summer we spent all our time at the creek. We being my brother Jericho and I. He was a few years younger, but only a mite shorter. If we weren't down at that creek, pants rolled up, bare toes squishing in the mud, well we figured we weren't really living. We used to play there all day. Sometimes other kids joined us and sometimes they didn't. We didn't care. We had a grand time on our own.

At that time, Bridgewater was more like two towns, separated by the creek. There was the West End, which held black folk and the East End, which was mostly white. Right down the middle was this creek. There was only one bridge where you could cross it, and that was way across town, so most people stayed on their own end. 'Course we didn't know any of this at time. We were just enjoying the water.

One morning, we're playing in the creek as usual, and we see this boy just watchin' us. Not saying nothing, just staring. He's about ten years old and he looks like just about every other ten year old boy I know, in bare feet and overalls. Except he's black.

It scared me a little, all that staring, but Jericho starts waving at the boy like he don't got not sense. I turn around to scold him and when I turn back, the boy's gone.

That might have been the end of it, 'cept this boy kept coming back, day after day. He keeps staying longer and longer. Still not saying nuthin'; still just watching. And I stop thinking of him as a stranger, and start thinking of him as just another part of the river. You know, like the rocks or the grass or something.

But then one day, he takes his shoes off, hikes up his pants and starts wading out into the creek. He walks right over to me and Jericho, smiles and says "Hi, I'm Billy. What's your name?"

Well, you could've knocked me over with a feather! I didn't even think he could talk. Turns out, he was just a boy looking for a few friends. How about that? Well we got to talkin' and pretty soon he's splashing and laughing in the water with both of us.

From then on, me and Jericho took it upon ourselves to teach Billy everything we knew about creek life. We taught him how to catch toads, waiting all patient like and then slapping your hands together at the last minute. We taught him how to walk across the creek, stepping on only the flat, dry rocks. The way Billy did it; you'd think he'd been doing it his whole life.

Billy came back the next day and the next day and the next. Pretty soon, I figure he was about my very best friend, excluding Jericho who didn't really count, being my brother and all. 'Course we didn't see him anywhere 'cept at the creek. In the evenings, he stayed on the West End and we stayed on the East.

And then we had an idea to build ourselves an island. We picked a spot in the middle of the creek and started dropping stones. One stone wouldn't do much, or three or four, but we just kept taking stones and dropping them in the same spot. After a few days, our island was big enough for two of us to stand on, if we hugged each other real tight. And in a few weeks, it was big enough for all three of us to sit comfortably and even have room to build a fire.

And that's when all the trouble started. It began when someone stole licorice from the Five and Dime and someone else told Old Man Walter that they'd seen some boys on the West End eating candy. Old Man Walter had heard enough. The next day he had a sign posted in his window that said, "NO WEST ENDERS ALLOWED."

Of course the people in the West End didn't take too kindly to that, and they all came over to tell Old Man Walter he was being unfair. But he wouldn't budge. Most of them just grumbled and went back to their homes, but Ms. Elvedeen Woods, who ran the best restaurant on the West End, decided she wasn't going to let no East Enders in neither. Pretty soon, merchants on both sides of town had signs refusing to let in one type or the other.

But it didn't stop there.

A couple East End boys snuck over to the school on the West End and spray painted awful words all over the doors. Then an angry West End boy threw a brick at the window in the Five and Dime, shattering the glass. Things got worse and worse. It seemed like every morning you heard about some kind of violence that had happened the night before. Pretty soon, East Enders just stopped going over to the West End and West Enders stopped going over to the East End.

Except for Jericho, Billy and I. We just kept on playing in the creek and catching toads and building our island. Oh, we knew what was happening, because our parents told us about it at night. But it never crossed our minds that it had anything to do with us.

It might never have, if Billy hadn't gotten an idea one afternoon.

"How come," Billy asked as he lounged on our island, "we never go anywhere else?"

I looked up. I was on the bank drawing my name in the mud. "Just where exactly would you like to be going?" I asked with a smile.

"We could go to the movies," he said. "Ice cream afterward. How does that sound?"

Well it sounded pretty good to me and Jericho and we asked Mama about it that night. I had some birthday money left. She said she didn't see why not. I told her we'd be going with my friend Billy. For some reason, I didn't mention he was black.

That morning, Jericho and I ran down to the creek, my birthday nickels clinking together in my back pocket. Billy was already waiting. We headed on down to the East End movie theater, laughing and talking like we always do. And then we started to notice the stares. People I'd known my whole life were just kind of staring at us, like we had purple spots or something. We tried to ignore them.

Then at the movie theater they wouldn't let Billy in. We'd figured if he came in with us, they'd have to let us in, but the man behind the counter was not smiling. "You'd better get on home, boy," they told him. Two boys I went to school with gave Billy the meanest look I've ever seen. Then one of them spit on him. Well Billy got out of there real quick and we followed.

Back at the creek, I apologized to Billy. I told him I didn't care what other people thought of him, he was my friend. I splashed him a little and he splashed back. In a matter of minutes, he was his old self again. "Let's go get some ice cream," he said.

We got just as many stares in the West End ice cream shop as Billy had gotten at the movie theater. And then when I ordered (chocolate for me and strawberry for Jericho) the man behind the counter told Billy he wouldn't serve us.

Billy was flabbergasted. "Mr. Thomas, these are my friends. You know me and you know my father. And if I say they're my friends, why won't you believe me?"

Mr. Thomas looked at his shoes. "You're father's a good man Billy. But I don't serve their kind in here. And if I were you, I'd leave real quickly, before something ugly happens."

When we got back to the creek we decided then and there, that if Billy couldn't go to the East End and we couldn't go to the West End, well we would just stay on our island thank you very much. In fact, we'd stay there the whole night if we felt like it. Billy went back home to get some sandwiches for all of us and we gathered firewood for the night. We met back at the island just as the sun was going down.

Well, it's not like my brother and me to miss a meal, so come dinner time my mom starts worrying. She starts asking around, and finds that there was a little black boy and girl walking around the West End. Now she's really worried and she gets a whole group of East Enders to go looking for us. And they're all thinking the same thing, that it's the East Enders fault.

On the other side of town, Billy's mother is finding out that his son was seen on the East End. Billy's father, and a number of West Enders, are starting to think that the East Enders are up to no good.

Well these two groups of people all meet right at the bridge and start hollering and yelling at one another. Neither side wants to listen to what the other has to say. Then one little girl speaks up, and somehow they hear her over all the noise. She says she saw all three of us at the creek not too long ago.

They all run down to the creek, and sure enough, there we are, fire blazing, laughing and carrying on like we didn't have a care in the world. And the grownups start talking all at once. Billy's father is telling him to leave this instant and my mother is telling me that I better come with him...and West Enders are hollerin' at the East Enders and the East Enders are hollerin' right back.

I'd had just about enough. I turned to my mother and said, "If I can't play with Billy on the East End and he can't play with us on the West End, well then we're staying right here in the middle, sho' 'nuff."

And then I here Billy say, "That's right, we're staying, right in the middle. And you know what? We might stay here all night."

"So get goin'," I said. "All of you. Just git on out of here. All of us were having a grand time, and you grownups just gone and messed it up. Y'all ought to be ashamed of yourselves"

Now I ain't never talked to a grownup like that before and I ain't never done it since. And as sure as I'm standing here, I expected to be yanked out of that water by my Mama and whipped till kingdom come.

But something about what we were saying and what we were doing made sense to those folks that night on the creek. Everything got real quiet all of a sudden. I looked around and all their heads were bowed. Not a one could even look us in the eye. One by one they started to walk away, even my Mama and Billy's mama and daddy.

'Till we were all alone.

And we just stayed there all night, fire blazing, laughing and carrying on like we didn't have a care in the world.

That was the summer I turned ten, and like I said, a lot's changed since then. We don't have a creek no more. A long time ago the town paid to have it dried up and they turned it into a road. And we don't need two of everything anymore. We got one school, one movie theater and one ice cream shop. Most folks don't even remember where West End stops and East End begins. And sometimes me and Billy walk down the streets arm in arm, eating ice cream and laughing about those same jokes we used to laugh at on the river.