When we last left our heroes, terrorized by the sharp blast of the teacher’s whistle, Raymond and I were summoned before the judge and, in our case, the executioners. The teacher chose the firing squad as our punishment. She ordered us down to the lower level and stood us against the retaining wall. Then she scratched a jagged line in the snow with her rubber-booted foot and told all those who had suffered under our assault to assemble behind it. In her rush to judgment, she did not specify the real targets of our revenge, and consequently, more kids confessed to being victims than was the actual number. Mob mentality starts at an early age.
The teacher announced that upon her whistle, the mob was free to rain down snowball vengeance. Surely she had seen too many movies with tin-pot dictators using such tactics to dispatch their enemies. While the kids dug their hands into the snow and began shaping the white powder into a small cannonballs, I was praying for a Russian bomb to fall from the sky. Raymond had a different idea.
“We don’t have to take this,” he said, his face calm and smiling. If he was planning on running then his swiftness could outrun the velocity of any snowball. If Raymond’s blood cells failed to kick in, my only hope was to get caught up in his draft as I followed behind him. But this was not his course of action. “We’re fighting back.”
Raymond did not ask for my opinion. We were blood brothers, and his call was my call. Fight back no matter the odds. Before the teacher blew her whistle, Raymond and I started scooping up snow, compressing the powder in our hands, and firing at will. We rushed our executioners like Newman and Redford at the end of “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.” I never felt more alive facing the bullies, the mob, and yes, the teacher.
When Raymond and I mixed our blood I was not thinking about Civil Rights or unity of the races. MLK’s “I Have a Dream” speech was still two years off. I just wanted to be fast like Raymond, and should science and biology be in my favor, Raymond’s DNA flowing into my veins would give me Mercury’s winged feet. It was not to be.
Raymond Brown gave me more than an infusion of his precious blood. That day on the playground his true character stood for something, but more than that, he did not stand still. In the face of superior odds, he dashed forward braving the onslaught. Until that day, all my enemies were imaginary, played in childish games of battle. That day my foes were real and Raymond inspired my heart with courage. I followed him and I was proud to do so.
