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When I was young, I didn't know I was white.

My Mom was a single mother in the south in the early 70's. We didn't have any place to live for awhile so my Aunt took us in. They were poor and the neighborhood they lived in had been a lower class white area but it was rapidly becoming a lower class black area. So it was filled with racial tension. Except I didn't know any of this, because I was 3 years old and didn't know there was a difference between white people and black people. I mean, I could see that they had different skin color from me, but I thought it was just superficial. Like I had brown hair and my mother had blonde hair. I just thought being black was like that.

I only knew one black person. That was my best friend and neighbor, Cupcake. I was 3 and he was 5 and he was my hero. He pushed me in the swing and played with army men with me. When the mean neighbor girl from across the street stole my tricycle and made me cry he went across the street, pushed her down and brought my tricycle back to me.

The neighbors though...some of them couldn't stand to see a little white boy following around a little black boy. One day one of them called me over. He was an old man and he was always sitting out on his front porch, just watching things. He said to me, "Why you wasting your time with that colored boy?" I didn't even know what he meant. When he said "colored" I was thinking of crayons....and Cupcake certainly wasn't colored with those. I would have noticed that.

I don't remember his exact words, but the old man told me that Cupcake and his mother were black. And that meant they were no good. That I shouldn't have anything to do with him because of it.

It really confused me. I saw cupcake right after that. He wanted to play, but I didn't. I went in the house early, before it was dark. I didn't know what to think about the whole thing.

It seems to me that racists cause other racists. I didn't even know there was a difference. I had to be told.

What if I had never been told? What if none of us were exposed to that kind of talk? Racism would be dead in a generation. Just don't poison the kids and most problems would be gone.
I got over what the old man said in a day or so. I asked my mother and she told me he was a mean old man. That was good enough for me. I knew about mean people, like the mean little white girl across the street. I knew you couldn't listen to them.

Once my mother asked him what his real name was, since everyone always called him Cupcake. "Jus' Cupcake, Ma'am." She kept asking and trying to find out and it turned out that his name really was Cupcake.
I think he moved before we did. Later I went to a different area, a different school. I later heard he got a scholarship to Auburn for playing basketball. But that could have been some other Cupcake.

Learn more about this author, Maxwell Hammer.
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