The
novel To Kill a Mockingbird focuses on Scout Finch and her family, and a large part of the novel is
spent on the fascination that Scout and her brother Jem have for their recluse
neighbor Boo Radley. Growing up, I didn’t have a recluse neighbor, but there
was a woman across the street that I was forbidden from talking to. And just as
Scout had a series of encounters with Boo, I, too, had several with this
neighbor.
Her name was Jenny, and she was mentally disabled.
Back in the early 1970’s, which is the time that I am writing about, she would
have been called moderately retarded. I was five years old at the time I met
her, so I can’t say for sure that my memory is accurate, but she seemed to me
to be an overweight, adult woman in her thirties or forties. And because of her
mental disability, she was fairly unkempt.
But that’s the Bryan Sweasy of 2016 talking. The
Bryan Sweasy of 1973 saw things differently. One day I was outside throwing a
ball in the front yard of our house, and I saw her. She lived across the street
from my house and one house down, and she was staring at me through a closed,
front screen door. She was watching me, pressing her face against the screen so
that all I could really see was her face, and it was a ghostly figure that I
rightly (or wrongly, depending upon how you look at it) took to be the face of
a grown woman. After a moment, though, the screen door flung open, and I
quickly realized that this person was like no woman that I had ever known. It
was how she moved that tipped her off. She skipped across her lawn and stopped
at the edge of her yard, just before the street. She swayed her arms back in
forth in front of her.
“Hey!” she called out to me. “Whatcha doin’?”
“Playing,” I said warily.
She started shifting her weight back and forth and
humming. “Oh.” She looked at the grass near her foot as if it were the most
interesting thing in the world. And then she said, “Can I play, too?”
Looking back, I’m surprised that I said okay, but
as I said above, I didn’t really see her as a grown woman—she struck me as just
a great big kid. After a few moments, I called back to her, “Okay! Sure.” She
quickly bounded across the street and into the yard.
“I’m Jenny!” she proclaimed happily.
“I’m Bryan!” I said in return. And we threw the
ball back and forth for a while. Everything was fine until sometime later
(Again, I was five, so I’m just guessing, but I think it might have been ten
minutes) a very distraught looking woman threw open the same screen door that
Jenny had been pressing her face against. She looked wildly in all directions
before seeing Jenny and me in my yard.
“Uh, oh,” I heard Jenny mutter under her breath.
“Jenny!” the woman shouted at her. “What—what are
you doing? Get away from that boy and get back over here now!”
“I gotta go,” she said to me as she slunk back
toward her house. By now my own mom (who in her defense, was raising six kids
at the time and that’s how she left me outside alone for 15 minutes) had heard
Jenny’s mom, and she pulled me into our house and yelled at me, too.
“Did she hurt you?” my mother asked me insistently.
“No,” I said. “Jenny and me were just playing.”
My mom studied me before saying, “Well, I don’t
want you playing with her any more!”
I didn’t understand. Jenny was just another kid.
Sure, she might have been a really large kid, but she was just a kid to me. And
despite the worry of our parents, Jenny and I became good friends that summer.
I loved it. I’d never had a kid my own age who lived so close to me! We played
together many times over the summer, though always outside (I was never allowed
in Jenny’s house and she was never allowed in mine).
One day, though, we were having foot races up and
down the street, from the front of her driveway to the sidewalk in front of my
house. On the second or third race we hit the sidewalk at practically the same
time.
“I win!” we both shouted in unison.
“Nuh uh!” Jenny said to me as she stuck out her tongue.
“I win!”
“No way,” I argued. “I beat you! You lose!”
The argument continued for a couple of minutes,
until finally, in a fit of anger, I kicked Jenny in the shin and said, “I quit!
I’m going in!” I turned my back on her and started walking toward my house. I
hadn’t taken but five or six steps, though, when my whole world exploded. I was
face first in the grass with Jenny, who outweighed me by 125 pounds, sitting on
top of me and pressing my face into the grass. She pulled my hair as she ground
my nose into the dirt. “You’re a cheater!” she was shouting. “God hates
cheaters!” She grabbed my head by the hair on the back of my head, lifted it
out of the grass, and then starting banging my face into the ground over and
over.
I don’t know if it was Jenny’s mom or my dad who
pulled her off of me. By the time I turned around they were both there, and
Jenny was crying into her mother’s arms. “He kicked me!” she kept wailing. “Ow!
Owwwwww!”
Jenny lived across from me for another 10 years or
so, but I was never allowed to play with her again. Eventually, I was too old
to want to play with her anyway. She died when I was in high school. I remember
that she was somewhere in her fifties, and died from complications from
diabetes. I learned at the time of her death (via the eulogy at the funeral) that she was a sweet, sweet person most of the time, but that she also had a history of becoming violent.
I learned from my time with Jenny, though, a valuable lesson. Pay attention to the emotions of those around you. Even as a five year old, I had picked up on the concern of everyone when they heard that I was playing with Jenny. But I didn't see the danger, and so I ignored everyone's warnings. I learned from this experience that--when that many people are worried about something--I should pay attention to it!
(1,100 words)