Free My Great-grandfather Turns 12 Today by BILL DODDS Page B

kid.
     
    When we were all too tired to stay in the water anymore we climbed up to a warm spot by the bushes and let the sun dry us off. I noticed that the skin on my shoulders was starting to turn pink.
     
    “I think I’m getting sunburned,” I said and Richard looked at his shoulders and said, “Oh, no, me, too” and everybody laughed.
     
    “How did you guys meet?” I asked. “You go to the same school?”
     
    They all laughed at that, too.
     
    “Michael,” Richard said, sounding very serious, “I don’t know how to tell you this, but I’m a Negro.”
     
    “You are?” Charlie said, sounding shocked.
     
    “Him and Bucky and Martin . . .” That was the third white kid. “ . . .all go to the white school,” Richard said. “Nate and I go to the colored school. Or we did. I went up through fourth grade. Nate’s still going. He just got done with fifth.”
     
    “You quit school after the fourth grade?” I asked, shocked.
     
    “I didn’t just quit,” he said, sounding a little offended. “I had to go to work.”
     
    “You work? I mean full time?”
     
    “Well, yeah,” Richard said. “Lots of boys do. Girls, too.”
     
    “And they don’t go to school?” I asked.
     
    “Yeah, where you been?” he asked. “Kids work in mines and in factories and on farms and anywhere else they can make fifteen or twenty cents.”
     
    “An hour!” Again, I was shocked.
     
    “An hour,” Richard said, imitating me.  “Listen to him. Twenty cents in a day.”
     
    “Eight hours to . . .”
     
    “Eight?” Richard said. “No. Ten. Twelve. Sometimes fourteen. I’m lucky. I get off some Saturday afternoons and all day Sunday. I got a good job.”
     
    “What’s your job?” I asked.
     
    “In town. At the colored blacksmith’s shop.”
     
    “What do you do?”
     
    “Whatever he tells me.”
     
    “Richard’s going to be a blacksmith when he grows up,” Charlie said.
     
    “I sure hope so,” Richard said. “Every town’s always going to need a good blacksmith or two.”
     
    “You sure got the arm for it,” Charlie said, pointing at his own head. The other boys laughed. It was obvious I didn’t get the joke.
     
    “Richard can throw a rock a lot farther than I can,” Charlie said. “Show him.”
     
    Richard easily hopped up and then loped down to the river’s edge. He found a rock about the size of a pool ball and climbed back up.
     
    “What you want me to hit?” he asked me. I pointed at a tree that was maybe twenty feet away.
     
    “Pshaw,” he said. “See that stump?” He pointed across the river to a spot that was maybe a hundred feet from us.
     
    “Uh huh,” I said as he cocked his arm and let the rock fly. It slammed into the rotting piece of wood and chunks of stump went everywhere.
     
    I had never seen any kid throw anything that far or that fast with such accuracy. “You should play baseball,” I said.
     
    “I do,” he answered. “Sunday afternoons. The Culver City colored boys team.”
     
    “You keep at it,” I said, “and you could play professionally. No kidding. In the major league.”
     
    Suddenly it was deathly quiet.
     
    “That’s not funny,” Charlie said.
     
    “What?” I asked.
     
    “You know a Negro can’t play in the major leagues.”
     
    How was I supposed to know that? This was a whole different world.
     
    “But you swim together,” I protested, trying to defend myself.
     
    “Here,” Charlie said. “Not in town. Not even near town.”
     
    “Coloreds got separate everything,” Bucky said.
     
    “But you guys are friends,” I said. “I know you are.”
     
    “That’s a fact,” Richard said. “But last summer when Charlie and Bucky and Martin here found our swimming hole we didn’t give it up without a fight.”
     
    “The rocks were flying,” Charlie agreed, rubbing his head. “Richard and Nate were up in the bushes over there on the other side. We couldn’t even see who was throwing