With Frankie gone, I relied more and more on Jonathan.

I’d only known Jonathan since freshman year, and he

was a trip and a half. He was the first Negro kid I’d ever

gotten to know, and we’d become good friends. Now

one very important thing I learned as soon as I got to

know Jonathan was that he hated the terms Negro and

especially colored. He made it clear to me that the proper

term was black. He said black is beautiful and that I better

get with it or I’d be considered an ignorant honky. I didn’t

think honky was a very nice term either but sometimes it

wasn’t worth arguing with Jonathan. No black kids went

to my grammar school, so I never got to meet any until

high school. My town had five grammar schools: three of

them had nothing but white kids; one, Roosevelt School,

had nothing but black kids; and Chestnut School, where

Jonathan went, had a mixture. The kids in my town were

a little worried when we were ready to go to high school

because there would be a lot of black kids there and we

didn’t know what to expect. It was rumored that some

of the kids in my neighborhood actually went to the all white

Catholic school just to avoid going to school with

black kids. Some of us were a little scared, what with some

of the goings-on at Roosevelt School. There were stories

of robberies and some fights in that section of town. Of

course, everybody was just generally uncertain of black

people anyway, so it was quite an experience when we all

made it to high school, and there were all these black kids.

Well, Jonathan was nothing to be scared of, even

though he for darn sure knew there were a lot of white

kids scared of him, and boy, he knew how to get the

most out of that fear. Jonathan was as black as a person

could get, and he could put on the meanest scowl when

he wanted to. But he could also act like a moron just like

any white kid, and he was basically harmless and likeable,

as were most of his friends, who I eventually got to know.

Of course, I couldn’t say the same about some of the kids

from Roosevelt School. Some of those kids were as mean

as could be, and they weren’t acting. Roosevelt School was

situated over in a corner of town where only black people

lived. I had never been there and probably never would

have dared to go there, except that Roosevelt Field was

the JV field, and I would be spending a lot of time there

with the JV team.

Many of the kids who came out of Roosevelt

Elementary School seemed to have had lots of problems,

and some didn’t last long in high school, but a lot of them

were really good athletes. I got to know one guy, Ricky,

in my homeroom. Ricky was a pretty good guy, but he

could never get his mind on his schoolwork. He told me 

his father worked two jobs but his parents were always

fighting over money, which they didn’t have much of in

the first place. He was always getting into fights and then

getting suspended. He had a reputation for being a good

fighter, but when one got to know the guy, he was all right.

I could never figure out why he got into so many fights.

Eventually, he just kind of faded out of my homeroom

class, and that was it. I heard later on from Jonathan

that Ricky had dropped out. I asked why, and Jonathan

sarcastically said, “To pursue a career in street crime.”

Well, street crime was not what Jonathan was interested

in. He once confided in me that he wanted to be the first

black president of the United States. If anybody, black or

white, could become president, it was Jonathan.

Jonathan was really smart, but he was also a real

character. Like I said, he knew the white kids were

generally pretty scared of him, and he knew how to play

that up. He was smart enough to take on the teachers with

his brains and clever enough to take on the tough kids

with his blackness. Jonathan was in a lot of my classes

because we were in the advanced class. There were only

two other black kids in the advanced class, and they were

both very quiet, so Jonathan stuck out. He could outsmart

most of the teachers pretty well. They all thought he was

serious and a hard worker, but behind their backs, he was

the biggest kibitzer in the whole class. He always tried to

sit in the back of the classroom, which was rather easy

because his last name began with a Y, and when a seating

arrangement was made alphabetically, he was always the

last one. Even in the classes where seating wasn’t done

alphabetically, he would go straight for the last seat in

the last row. Once, a teacher who didn’t believe in the

alphabetical system asked Jonathan why he insisted on

sitting in the back. Jonathan said that as a black person,

he was used to sitting in the back behind white people.

Jonathan always liked to refer to himself as black. He

hated being called colored or Negro. Anyway, all his

fellow classmates sure enough knew why Jonathan sat in

the last seat in the last row: so he could crack jokes with

less chance of getting caught.

Jonathan had our English teacher bamboozled. She

was old and grouchy, and nobody really liked her except

the brownnosers. Well, Jonathan had a different technique

for his brownnosing. He called it blacknosing. Old Miss

Stewart didn’t really know how to handle adolescents.

Somehow, she always managed to get the advanced

English classes, such as ours, so she had it a little easier

than teachers in some of the other classes, who mostly

practiced crowd control. Miss Stewart was lucky because

she escaped the rigors of crowd control by getting to teach

so-called good students. The good students consisted of

about ten kids who were genuinely smart, about fifteen

of us who were smart enough to know how to get good

marks on the stupid tests, a handful of brownnosers, and

one blacknoser: Jonathan. Now, Jonathan wasn’t dumb.

He was real smart. However, he admitted that he rarely

had to use his intelligence because he said it was easier

to use his blacknosing technique, which he had down

to a science in Miss Stewart’s advanced English class.

The basics of blacknosing came from the fact that most 

 teachers, especially Miss Stewart, really didn’t know how

to handle an intelligent black kid. They seemed more

patient with a black kid who was trying than with a

white kid because they thought all black kids weren’t as

smart as white kids. Miss Stewart was a prime example.

She’d been teaching the advanced English class for a long

time and had had few black kids, so Jonathan knew how

to handle Miss Stewart perfectly with his blacknosing

technique. He would say, “Yes, Miss Stewart,” and “Oh,

I didn’t know that, Miss Stewart,” whenever he spoke.

Jonathan said his secret was to never act too smart, or

else he’d really blow her mind. He knew that all he had

to do was act like he was trying, and Miss Stewart would

be so impressed that he’d get good marks for sure. That

way, Jonathan didn’t have to study too much for exams

because he knew that even if he got lousy marks on a few

tests, when the marking period came around, that old E

for effort would turn into an A for A1 blacknosing.

Miss Stewart was the usual kind of dumb teacher who

would always ask the class if we had any questions after

she explained some boring stuff about how to diagram

sentences or footnote some stupid term paper. Of course,

everybody either wasn’t listening to her or was too bored

with the whole subject to want to ask a question about it,

even the brownnosers—but not our superstar blacknoser.

He’d come up with some ridiculous, insignificant question

that would start Miss Stewart off on some dumb, detailed

explanation more boring than the first explanation.

Jonathan would sit there nodding in fascination. Of

course, Miss Stewart felt great upon seeing that when

she spewed out all that boring information, someone was

actually interested—which, of course, was untrue because

Jonathan couldn’t have cared less. Jonathan had his system

so well refined that he never asked a question that was too

hard for Miss Stewart to answer, because he knew she got

annoyed when someone showed everybody how limited

her knowledge was by asking a difficult question. Some

of the smart kids always fell into that trap. They got really

involved in a subject and then started asking all kinds of

questions, which, according to Jonathan, actually showed

how dumb they were, because if they were really smart

like he was, they would know the limits of Miss Stewart’s

knowledge. Jonathan sure knew Miss Stewart’s limits. She

thought he was a sweet boy. Little did she know that on

Jonathan’s way to becoming the first black president, he

had become the first black Eddie Haskell—like in the old

Leave It to Beaver show.

But Jonathan couldn’t resist the temptation to

occasionally blow Miss Stewart’s mind. Of course, even

though she thought he was sweet, she still would not have

liked to run into Jonathan alone on a dark street, so a few

times, Jonathan had to get his kicks. One time, he did an

unbelievable book report on a book called Native Son by

a black author. Jonathan described in great detail a part of

the book in which a young black guy kills a white girl and

then chops her up into little pieces and throws her into a

potbellied stove. It sounded like a positively wild book,

and we could see that Miss Stewart was really cringing.

But Jonathan read the report in the sweetest blacknoser

voice we’d ever heard, and poor Miss Stewart didn’t know

what to do. This big black guy, who she wanted to believe

was sweet and a hard worker but who terrified her deep

down, was standing in front of the class, talking as sweetly

as could be in disgusting detail about some black guy

chopping up some white girl and burning up the pieces

in a potbellied stove. When we got out of that class that

day, Jonathan and I didn’t stop laughing for two hours.

Oh, and I really had to read that book!