Saturdays With the Boys

I was raised in the white suburbs of St. Louis County. I didn't know what it was like to be black in a white society. Then I moved into an integrated mostly poor neighborhood in St. Louis' inner city. I began meeting all the 10-12 year old boys in the neighborhood on Saturdays. We went to the Zoo, a park in the country, and on two overnight camping trips. The boys were all black. I had to learn about them, and they had to learn about me, and we both moved to the middle in the more than three years that we met at the side door of the local Episcopal Church every Saturday. My new neighbors included Black Panthers, Warlords and Black Egyptians. I was a lawyer, and they had needs, and I became a friend and confidant and an interface with the white world I left behind. This is the story of those days.