Erma Bombeck Writing Competition - Winners
2007
Erma Bombeck Writing Competition
Honorable Mention
Human Interest - Dayton
Nelson Lackings
Dayton, Ohio
"I Never Even Got His Name"
| In 1970 I was a persuadable eight year old whose entire frame of mind was no more than a weak echo of the Black Pride movement. Black was good and white was evil. My teacher, Mrs. Petrosky was the only white person I thought about after school because she didn't fit the descriptive mold of the white boogeyman. One day, a bunch of us eight-year-old boys were hanging out in the vicinity of grown unemployed men. That day was no more significant than any other until a Caucasian fellow came from a westerly direction walking right down the center of our neighborhood. There was only silence and shock. The man actually had a bit of bounce in his step. Not an urgent bounce necessitated by the peril of that hour. But a jubilant bounce as though he was bathing in simple-mindedness. One of the men was so startled he accidentally dropped his sandwich. The silence gave us little boys an opportunity to show off in front of our mentors. We ran up to him and surrounded him like lions, shouting misspelled words. Our anger was intensified by his refusal to acknowledge us. His bounce never changed. Soon, he was disappearing into the eastern horizon, but a false sense of manhood had never the less engulfed us. I couldn't wait for my mother to come home that night. I wanted to tell her about the white man and how we put him in his place. I stuck out my chest when I tried my new word on her: "Honkey!" I said with pride and teeth a glowin. Without hesitation, she knocked my pearly whites and me across the room. I had no idea what my mother did for a living but she told me that I was going to work with her the next day. She took me to an old white man's house she home cared for. She made me change his bedpan, and she made me talk to him all day. She made me endure the inhumanity of bland body odor. But worst, she made me tell him about my hopes and dreams. When she would leave the room, he would give me quarters to save towards my dreams, and occasionally he would make me laugh. In no time at all, he was a black eight year old, and I was ashamed that I ever hated his kind. The next summer, I wanted to go back to visit the old white man who made me his equal. My mother said, "O honey, he died the week you were there." I cried and said, "But I never even got his name." |