Boo vs. Jenny

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)