Every day of my sixth-grade year, I out ran a bull and jumped a creek to get to my inner-city middle school. I grew up in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, in a world of paradox, or at least strange juxtaposition.
I was raised on the edge of a 200-acre farm a mile from downtown. I’ve spent most of my adult life looking for something comparable — though I am not sure it exists. My parents worked at a children’s home, and we lived on campus — the same campus where my father arrived at age eleven after addiction and violence led to the collapse of his home, and where my mother’s parents came to work shortly before he arrived. She, like me, was a staff kid. They began their romance at age thirteen, and more than sixty years later it remains one of the greatest partnerships I’ve ever witnessed.
My folks went off to nearby colleges, and returned to spend pretty much their entire careers back at the Home. The campus was racially integrated in the year of my birth, and my sister and I were raised on campus in a great social experiment which lacked the arrogance to think of itself as anything other than good folks trying to do what needed to be done.
From The Children’s Home farm, where cattle were still raised (a hangover from the days of campus being a fully self-sustaining community), not only could you see downtown, but you could also see that while the poorest neighborhood and the wealthiest neighborhoods in town were a good fifteen minute drive from each by way of the roads, by way of our pasture, they were within a mile. You could turn one direction and see The Children’s Home, turn the other and see a home for aging adults built in what used to be our campus’ peach orchard. Every aspect of my hometown, rich and poor, black and white, young and old, met at that place where downtown loomed over the pasture.
Schools in North Carolina were also integrated around the time of my birth. The original integration plan had students zigzagging across town, essentially splitting time between historically black and historically white schools every couple of years.
As I entered sixth grade, the system reworked its post-integration plan and I was to attend Paisley Middle School — formerly a black high school in the poorest part of town. The campus roads were narrow, so the buses would not drive to pick us up for school. The home kids had to walk to the front gate which faced the richer part of town. That was almost a mile from my house. The bus then continued on a route to pick up other students, and forty-five minutes later arrived at school.
I could literally see the school from my bedroom window — it was just a few hundred yards away. It seemed ridiculous to me to trek down to catch the bus so I opted for the alternative route. And thus, every day of my sixth-grade year, I out ran a bull and jumped a creek to get to my inner-city middle school.
I’d throw my book bag over the fence, do a bit of a sideways vault, land — hopefully avoiding a pile of dung — then make a break for it. Most days, I was fast enough that by the time the bull saw me and began charging I had a good head start and could leap the creek, leaving him on the other side as I moseyed on across the second half of the pasture, jump the fence by the football field and meet my Children’s Home friends (who’d taken the bus) on the other side before homeroom.
As Stephen King reflected, “I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve. Jesus, did you?” Paisley was a tough school, and in the redistricting I had been separated from my primary band of nerds that I ran with through my primary years. The sixth-grade Children’s Home boys were already survivors of things I could not imagine, and they took me in. I was a boy raised in liminality now navigating the space in-between childhood and adolescence with a target on my back, ripe for bullies. My Children’s home friends knew it, and chose to claim me as one of their own — quite literally a homeboy — and it saved me.
I became one of a pack of five:
Jay, our leader, was short but quick and fearless. He wasn’t afraid to throw a punch, but rarely found the need — his steely gaze was plenty effective.
Peabody, so named because when he had arrived at the home, he was so skinny that he was more a skeletal impression of a boy, was wild-eyed and unpredictable. He was harmless, but those who didn’t know him found his erratic nature unsettling.
Thomas (never Tom) was a sissy like no other — and unlike me, he was the tough kind. He parted his hair down the middle and had wings that would give Farrah Fawcett a run for her money. He carried a comb made to look like a switch-blade in his back pocket, which he used regularly, and with vigor.
Henry rounded out our crew. He was both an early-bloomer and had been held back a year. He looked old enough to drive and was thick and buff. He was the gentlest among us, but had a significant stutter and so rarely spoke except to his closest friends. Life hadn’t given him nearly enough to smile about — thus those not close enough to know better saw him as a stone-faced giant.
We were inseparable, particularly before and after school, at lunch, and at recess — all of the moments when students were least supervised and therefore I was most vulnerable. Once, a teacher, tired of our standing aside at recess, coerced us into playing football against another group of boys. In our first play, Jay passed the ball off to me and the gang encircled me. We walked slowly down the field, as they silently dared the opposing team to come near. It’s the only touchdown I ever scored.
At another lunch period, I’d gone off to the bathroom where I quickly found myself surrounded by taunting eighth grade bullies. They circled round me spitting homophobic slurs and were pushing me towards a stall as I prepared to hold my breath and brace for the humiliation of having my head dunked in the toilet. As if on cue, I heard the sound of the door flung open, and turned to see my boys looking impressively intimidating with Thomas in front, hand on hip, waving his fake switchblade and asking “what’s going on up in here?”
I was released to their loving care.
Those boys changed me. They taught me that a projected air of confidence was usually enough to survive. They claimed their otherness, and found the power in being unabashedly different. We were the misfits — the runt, the freak, the fag, the giant...and the nerd — and were not to be messed with.
Every day of my sixth grade year, I out ran a bull and jumped a creek to get to my inner-city middle school. He chased me most mornings, like a warm up for the bullies I would face the rest of the day.
Sometime late in that spring, crossing the pasture that marked the liminal space between the worlds that made up my universe, there was a morning when I miscalculated my trajectory. As the bull stepped out from the thicket I realized I was far too close to out run him — so I channeled my boys, stood my ground, and looked him straight in the eye.
He snorted,
turned,
and walked away.
Brian Ammons is spiritual director, coach, teacher, and pastor, with a particular interest in the ways we construct stories about ourselves as we negotiate and rework our relationships to larger cultural and societal stories. Brian is the co-convenor of The Porch and the Order of the Rocking Chair.