Growing up Colored

Chapter 2 ? It Takes A Village

?Are they my pants?? Frank Banks was pulling on my trouser leg as he turned to Buster for verification ?Hey Buster, ain?t these my pants??. We were standing in the cloak room of the one-room schoolhouse and as happened on many a day, Frankie had cornered me to taunt me in some form or another. Only this day it was he who was in for a shock. ?Yeah, I guess they are?, Buster said it nonchalantly. He didn?t care one way or the other, but Frankie did. Frankie opened the door of the boy?s room, grabbed me by my belt and hoisted me up on my tip toes so everyone could get a good look at me and yelled, ?Hey y?all, FatMan is wearing my pants! Take ?em off!? this was the exact same way he grabbed me up to show me off to the school when he found out I was wearing long-Johns under my pants one winter day.  I stood there in shock and dismay as everybody started laughing at me. I couldn?t take off my pants in front of the whole school, I looked over at Buster. ?Naw man, don?t make him take ?em off?. Frank let me go and Buster saved me from humiliation this time. Buster and Frankie were at least three years ahead of me in school and I learned early on to respect the older boys or be prepared to get a sharp punch in the chest or stomach for not showing the proper respect. Getting punched in the chest was a right of passage that all kids had to endure from the older boys in school. There was a leadership hierarchy in place even in those young years and respecting the bigger kids was mandatory at school and therefore it was automatic that you respected the even bigger adults. I?m not sure that kids in these times are being given the opportunity to learn this valuable lesson.

	Photo/Alonzo Brown "Bajean", "Fats" and "Baby Ray" Brown proudly stand in front of their brand new home in Remington, Virginia . (Photo Circa 1955)

OK, now you can ask, why was I wearing Frank Bank?s pants. Well, it seems that the women in the neighborhood had a pact within the community by-laws which stated that as soon as an older kid out grew his clothes; those old "still good" clothes were ceremoniously handed down to a younger child in the neighborhood. At the time, it seemed I was the only child benefiting from this agreement; I had clothes coming in from almost every household in the surrounding area. ?Mama, these pants are way too long?, I surely didn?t want to be caught dead wearing somebody else?s clothes out in public. ?Just roll up the hems?, my mother would say. ?You?ll grow into them?. That was that, off I?d go to school to be embarrassed once again by the finger pointing and the giggles. But the real humiliation came when I was called into the house to thank the lady who was nice enough to bring my friend?s hand-me-downs over for me to hold up against myself to see if they?d fit. ?Oh yes, they?ll fit him in a couple of years. Say thank you to Mrs. Moore, Stanley?, my mother would smile. ?Thank you Mrs. Moore?, I?d say, (let me out of here) was what I was really thinking.

Let?s go back for a moment; did you hear what Frankie called me? He called me ?FatMan?, I'd been given that nickname back in the second grade and it had stuck like glue. But it was a lot better than my original nickname, ?Crisco?. You can guess why they called me that, although I was always told, ?well you?re not really fat, you?re just stout". I wore boy?s stout clothes up until my late teens when I finally formed some muscle, but the name ?FatMan? stuck and sometimes, I will still be called that today by someone I grew up with.  I had gotten use to being called FatMan after a while, which later transformed into ?Fats? for short. I thought it was kind of cool to have a nickname. All the cool kids at school had nicknames; there was ?Buster?, ?Tiny?, ?Ittle?, ?Bootsie?, ?Booty?, ?Buddy? and ?Tilly?. And ?Smootie?, ?Meecie? and ?Finney? all have nicknames that they still have to this day, but these three weren?t really neighborhood kids, they, along with their youngest brother Terry, grew up in D.C., but their parents owned a second home on the ?Ridge? (our side of the tracks in Remington), as well and only came to Remington during the summer months. Then you had names that kids had been labeled with just because their siblings couldn?t say their real names properly, like my older brother and sister, ?Bay-Ray? (Baby Ray) and ?Bajean? (Barbara Jean) and my younger brother Michael (?Murk?), but he was called ?Michael Murk? growing up. Raymond was known as Bay-Ray by the entire neighborhood, he finally lost his ?baby? label when he entered high school, but I still find myself calling my sister ?Bajean?, it?s just flows better.

Cousins Make Dozens

The Donnie Vs Tilly fight was a monumental occasion during third grade, but there was one other event which dwarfed it by comparison, which happened also in third grade. Here?s how it happened, it was Friday and there was a PTA meeting scheduled for 4 o?clock that day. This was great because it meant that most of the school would be staying afterwards to wait for their parents (mothers) to get out of the meeting. So as soon as school let out, we all hit the playground. The boys got a softball game going and the girls did whatever girls do at recess, hopscotch, jump rope and the ultimate in female pleasures of the day: ?house?. Unfortunately for me, any boy not picked for the ball game was involuntarily drafted by the girls to the play ?house?. I hated having to sit on that rock (their chair) waiting to be served an imaginary meal. I was never cast as the father coming home from a hard day?s work,I always played the child who was perpetually being punished for one thing or another. Luckily, on this day, I had been picked up for the game. I had just hit a double when Frank Banks got a hit that sent me to third base. As I stood there waiting to be knocked home, my cousin Annie Ruth, came from around behind the school and beckoned me to come back there with her. I obediently walked off third base, not giving it another thought that I was in the middle of a pivotal point in the game and followed her behind the school. When we got back there Anna Ruth turned to me and started kissing me square on the lips, oh I remembered this, I thought, we?d played this game a couple of times behind my house next to the chimney. We stood there kissing and hugging for a good ten minutes. When we finally came up for air, I looked deeply (dumbly) at her and said, ?You?re breath smells like tuna fish?. She said, ?Yeah, I had tuna fish for lunch?. We went back to kissing again and after a few minutes it came to my attention that I could hear low giggles coming from beyond my line of sight. I looked up quickly, but there was no one there, then it happened again and I looked up faster this time and saw Anna Ruth?s cousin, Buddy, at the corner of the school giggling and pointing at us, ?I?m gon?na t-e-l-l-l-l-l !!!?, he ran to the other side of the school, I pushed Ruth away from me (?how could she have done this to me?) and ran around the school with her trailing me, but it was too late, by then everyone knew and we were immediate celebrities, but not in a good way. We were teased beyond recognition, by the time I got home I was sobbing and crying and it didn?t stop there, I was tormented even further when my father found out that night at the dinner table, I was expecting him to be upset about it, but instead out came, ?Stanley?s got a girlfriend, Stanley?s got a girlfriend?,  Iran from the room and into the living room crying my eyes out. I swore off girls from that moment on, I didn?t speak to Annie Ruth Parker for a week and we never tried that kissing cousins thing again. But my oath swearing off females would be retracted a short time later.

Chapter 3 - Country living

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