MY “OTHERS”

3 1 R M Y ‘‘O T H E R S’’ R O B E R T B O Y E R S In 1954 I met ‘‘the other.’’ Like me, he was then twelve years old, a student at John Marshall Junior High School in the BedfordStuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn. Like me – this I learned some months after our initial encounter – he was exceptionally good at hitting and fielding baseballs. The first time he approached me he announced his name and commanded me to take o√ my shoes. When I hesitated and backed a few steps away, he rushed forward and smacked me hard on the cheek, then smacked me again when I tried to get up o√ the playground asphalt. Though I was stunned, it occurred to me to be grateful that this Negro boy had hit me with an open hand, had not used a fist or a weapon. It also occurred to me that the expression on his face did not betray anger. If I was not mistaken, he was but barely suppressing a smile, and I imagined that he would like nothing better than for me to get up so that he might smack me again. Would he be satisfied with the money my mother had deposited in my right shoe so that no bully would take it from me? I resolved, with not a little fear and misgiving, to test him, and reached, without saying a word, to pull o√ my shoe. Punk, was what he said. You’re a punk. And with that he himself stepped back and ordered me to stand up. Now run to 3 2 B O Y E R S Y your mother, punk, he further commanded, and get the fuck out of my sight. I didn’t know what to make of this boy, no bigger than I was, but I thought him no doubt finished with me. When I pictured him, as I did often in that year, I tried to reconcile that incipient smile with the sense of something implacable in his demeanor. Might I have found words to please him? I didn’t think so. He was as little interested in my thirty-five cents as in the leather baseball glove strapped to my book bag. He was interested in me, a wellbehaved white boy enrolled in a ghetto school, segregated in a ‘‘special’’ class of students doing three junior high school years in two. Smug, he would have thought me. Intolerably secure in my whiteness, my thin long nostrils, and my elite academic status. Interested in me the way you might be interested in someone you know to be irrevocably alien to what you are and hope to become. Wanting only to confirm, so that neither of us might have any doubt on this score at least, that nothing could conceivably be done to close the gap between us. I suppose I have always felt that we live, all of us, among ‘‘others’’ who do not wish to join hands and dance with us in a circle, who have no desire to make nice. Often we are told to mistrust the evidence of our senses and to think more optimistically , even about those who clearly have no use for us. But I have found infinitely more compelling the testimony of those who see little reason for a comprehensive optimism, who can accept that often the other is, in every important respect, beyond us. Consider, as but one brief example, this passage from Ryzsard Kapuscinski’s Travels with Herodotus: ‘‘I am witness in Tehran,’’ Kapuscinski begins, ‘‘to the last weeks of the Shah’s regime . . . tra≈c is paralyzed by endless daily demonstrations . . . every now and then armored trucks dive into the streets and squares and fire at the demonstrators . . . sometimes, white clad girls and boys march at the front of the columns, their foreheads encircled by white headbands . They are martyrs – ready to meet their deaths. It is so written on their headbands. On occasion, before the procession starts to move, I walk up to them, trying to understand what their faces express. Nothing – in any event, nothing that I would...