Watermelon (Florida, Age 8)

It didn’t take long for Regina to take my shy, redheaded, scrawny, 8-year-old self under her wing. My mama, always following the winds where they took her, had whisked us away from our icy warehouse in upstate New York and into Regina’s black, suburban neighborhood in the warmth of Saint Petersburg, Florida.

            At barely 11years old, Regina was thick and strong; already with a substantial bosom and swing in her hips. Her hair stretched tight from round cheeks, across her temples, where beads of sweat glistened in the sun, and then met in a large puff on the back of her head. But more than my mama hen, Regina was my beckoning gatekeeper into a community of children that rivaled even my bohemian wild-streak.

            She’d strut down the middle of the street by my house each afternoon calling me out to make the rounds. Together we’d roam the neighborhood until dusk; socializing, rope-jumping, beat-boxing, break dancing, making sidewalk art with broken chunks of charcoal and drywall.

            It was after-school on a warm day in September and Regina and I were just setting out for the daily rounds. We ran into a small band of children that I barely knew and that Regina had known her whole life. We joined up and began parading down the street together, sometimes a carnival, sometimes marching soldiers, sometimes protesters; a migrating medley of games and chatter. As we approached our little neighborhood lake with increasing velocity, a little boy with a shaved head and runny nose drew a sharp, quick breath.

            “There’s a ‘gator who lives here!” he announced, eyes wide. The procession stumbled to halt.

            “Duh. Everyone knows that,” said Tyrone, the boy who was in my class at school, who made me feel more shy than usual, and who, until today, hadn’t seemed to notice I existed. “I been swimming in there,” he added with satisfaction.

            “We go swimming in there, too.” Regina said, grinning from ear to ear, gesturing with her eyes and chin in my direction.

            I looked down the slope to the lake, then across the water to the little island thick with tall grasses and shrubs: the rumored lair of the alligator.  “Yeah,” I said slowly, “We’ve seen his eyes looking at us. And then he pops back into the water!” Now all eyes were on me: the younger ones captivated, the older ones sizing me up, taking me in. Eyes that energized me, yet frightened me. Fresh memories of Smalltown, New York stirred in me, where, though the children looked and spoke more like I did, I had been utterly outcast and alone.

            We spent the next part of the hour recounting our many harrowing tales of narrow escape from the jaws of the alligator, but as we began to move warily towards the water, one boy hung back. “Let’s go to the railroad tracks. I want some watermelon,” he said.

            With an uptick in excitement and tension, we changed our trajectory, one-by-one. I wasn’t sure what was in store but I was pretty sure that I wanted to be in the middle of it.

            Regina stopped when we reached the bottom of the steep embankment that skirted the railroad tracks, while the other kids scurried to the top. I stopped too, eyeing Regina expectantly. “I don’t go up there,” she explained, “I’m too big, and my parents would whoop my ass. I’m lookout.” 

I climbed the slope onto the tracks and was greeted by an ocean of great green orbs and vines that stretched to a distant row of tattered, pastel-colored homes, porches the size of tic-tacs in the distance. Children and insects buzzed with excitement, grinning at me.

“Want some watermelon?” asked an older girl with two braided pig-tails and a bright, sweet face.

            “Yeah,” I responded.

            “Go on, then.” She smiled wryly, “Climb down and get one!” I stood frozen as my heart slid down the inside of my body, and into the toes of my shoes. All eyes were, again, on me, silently sizing me up. Is this why I am here? To do the dirty work?

            “Why don’t you go with her,” Regina bellowed from her lookout post below.

“I’ll go,” Tyrone called back. I silently thanked Regina as Tyrone led me down the slope. He selected a plump melon, straddled it, and strained to pull it from its thick, rough stem.

“Here, you take this one. I’m getting another!” he said when it finally broke free. I took the melon and began to make my way back, very slowly, until he finally appeared next to me. We climbed up the embankment, and not a moment later my watermelon was smashed onto the railroad tracks. A flurry of little hands plunged deep into the soft, fleshy, redness within the fragmented rind, Regina joining in moments later despite her former reservations.

            Next we smashed Tyrone’s melon, even though he had said that he was going to take his home. That’s when I noticed that some of the children’s heads kept popping up, looking around again and again at the houses across the field. A girl with big-eyes, noticing me notice, wiped the pink wetness from her face with her sleeve and said, “There’s a farmer over there that doesn’t like kids in his watermelon patch.”

            “Really?”  There were so many melons it seemed rather absurd that anyone would get upset about children eating a couple of them. I was sure the farmer couldn’t even know how many were in the field.

            She nodded, “Yep. And he’s got a shotgun!”

            The other kids nodded their heads in wide-eyed consensus.

            “It’s good that you’re with us, ‘cause he won’t shoot a white kid.”

            “He ain’t even shot a black kid, but I think he really ain’t gonna shoot a white kid.”

            “He just shoots in the air to scare us.”

            “He shot at me!” piped Tyrone.

            “He usually just shoots in the air.”

            We returned to our foraged feast in thoughtful quiet, listening to the cicadas embark on their raucous dinnertime chorus; our sticky hands and bodies, happy and lazy, basking in the golden light of the sun as it drooped towards the horizon. Regina’s big leg, damp with sweat and humidity, pressed against the pallid scrawniness protruding from my blue, high-water corduroys.

Abruptly, the big-eyed girl jumped to her feet. “There he is!”

            We all slid down the embankment in a flash. Bang, bang! The sound of the shotgun reverberated through our bodies as we sprinted for the street, towards the lake and the alligator, looking back to those behind us to be sure we were all accounted for. I wondered if the crazy farmer had seen me, a single marshmallow swimming in a mug of hot coco. A smile spread across my face. Unable to control the giggles that bubbled from deep inside me as I ran, they soon infected the entire group. We tumbled onto the lakeside grass, laughing uncontrollably, adrenaline prickling our skin. I peered into each beautiful, smiling, laughing face, one after the other. I belonged here, with them; even though, and perhaps because, I may not have “fit in.” And no one expected me to.