Synapse from the sixties:
These are your earliest memories. A kitten crushed by a car. A dying goldfish. A little boy, your age, saluting a casket.
They are snapshots, indelible on your inner eye. There's another that marked you more deeply, banishing you from the garden of childhood. Initiating you into duality.
You're at the Alabama Fairgrounds on a warm sunny day. You've never seen so many people. Big kids! Little kids! This is how you see the world. Big. Little. Your mom holds your hand because you want to fly in all directions. Looking up, you see the hump of the roller coaster. Cars rattle to the top and, as they come down, screams whip past like balloons you've blown up and let go.
On the midway, smells of hot dogs and grease hurt your nose, but your eyes eat everything. Pink cotton candy and rainbow snow cones. Shiny red bumper cars. A big brown horse. You like horses so you like the man in blue riding him. "A policeman," your mama says. "If you ever need help, find a policeman." With so many people and horses and happy colors around, you feel nothing bad could happen.
Too little for the big rides, you go to a quieter place. Kiddyland. The rides here are just your size. You see a merry-go-round with pink and white ponies. A man lifts you onto a saddle. You kick. Giddyup! Your feet can't touch the ground. It's only you and another little girl, like you. She wears a white dress with polka-dots of red, blue and yellow. It reminds you of Wonder Bread and clowns. She has red shoes. You look at each other and giggle.
Around you go. Squeezing the wooden knobs by the pony's ears, kicking your legs, squealing. And then, just like that, you stop. The man lifts the girl. She curls like a kitten lifted by the nape. This you remember clearly. Her body stiff and submissive like a kitten's, until red shoes touch the ground and she runs away. The ride starts again and you go round and round for a long time. You love your mama so much for buying another ticket.
When it's over, you run to her and take her hand, so happy you could float. As you walk, she says, "That man put that little girl off and gave you another ride." You skip. The man liked you more. You don't know the word for special, but you feel it. Your mama's hand is tight, her shoes sound mad at the concrete. "He did that because she's colored," she says. You stop skipping. You weren't liked after all. The man was just mean. Your mama says, "How do you think that little girl felt?" You hurt in a way you haven't before. You don't know the word for shame, but you feel it.
Years later, when looking back on this day, you wonder why you hadn't noticed the child's color. Maybe you did, and it didn't matter any more than shoes being red. Still, something was taken from you that day, something the other child had taken too, in ways you cannot know. You wish you could know again what it's like to see a person before you see a color. But whenever you're with a black woman your age, you wonder, "Was that you?" Somehow you know it was.
Tay Berryhill attends Spalding University's MFA in Writing Program. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama with her husband and five spoiled dogs.