A Right to be Different

Canicas or marbles.

Children’s Games and times of innocence.
Image thanks to www.yayyan.com

As smaller children in our part of town we, the youngsters of Westindian parentage, would experience first hand in our daily childish games some of the hurdles to becoming totally integrated into the Panamanian social and cultural milieu. The days and evenings were filled with an operetta of activities for small children and adolescents accompanied by every imaginable type of game and invention kids are prone to come up with.

On streets such as ours kids from the small and larger families blended and color- skin color- was usually not an issue. It was a veritable stage where scores of playmates would seem, at times, like hordes of aborigines hunting and learning from each other in the days before the white man encroached upon their rights to be what they always were.

However, the day came to the neighborhood when some adolescents would point out the physical differences between us little kids with harsh words we’d never once heard before. It happened one day when we were picking pairs to play some silly game, as we had done many times before. “Not him, you can’t pair off with him. He is ugly!” they said to one little girl. They didn’t realize that they had just marred the innocence of a little Spanish girl who we were growing up with. We were the only pair of black kids and whom she had known since her family moved from the hinterlands of the interior.

She and I looked at each other with sadness in our innocent eyes as the older children decided upon a more fitting partner for our little Spanish neighbor, a kid full of sores from his head down to his feet saying, “Now that’s better!” leaving me feeling worse than a leper suddenly ostracised from my usual clutch of neighborhood friends. The games continued without me as my obvious difference emerged to sadden and forever change the simple and uncomplicated days of childhood. After that day an emotionally shaken black youngster of all of five years old would find ways of avoiding even his new playmates.

Becoming a loner required skill, however, in such a kid populated place. It also required that you be busy all of the time to become less visible even for my dear Spanish playmates. It seemed as if Providence was guiding somebody like me to become my own teacher and I figure that was when I began scrounging around for old newsprint from the neighborhood trash cans.

So, more and more, way in the back of our complex of rooms and living quarters, you would find me where no one would have imagined I would be. I even began hunting for things to use to build my “library” and to seek out words and materials to use as copying instruments. The times called for me not to be visible especially since my sister and I were the only small Westindian children left on the block without a school to go to in that small world of one room rentals.

This story continues.