One Black Runaway and Two White Hippies go Hitchhiking

by Maggi Laureys (September 2017)

Eddie and Dwayne, from the author’s collection

 

Mom once sent my big brother Kenny on a simple errand to get some milk. He came home with the milk and three Hari Krishnas to boot. He had found the trio of bald teenagers dancing around the parking lot, tapping their tambourines and singing, Hare Krishna! Hare Krishna! It was 1975 and the Krishnas, like hippies, were everywhere. Kenny figured they must be hungry.

 

“I don’t want the poor kids to starve,” Mom had said, “But I don’t know what to feed them. They won’t eat any meat. They won’t even drink milk!” They stayed with us for a week, during which my brother Eddie pointed out that when the lone girl was not looking, the two male Krishna’s had devoured our hamburgers. “Well thank goodness,” Mom said.

 

We were a family of ten kids and Kenny and Eddie were the eldest and the first ones to go away to college. They both attended George Washington University in DC. We younger kids always looked forward to seeing what Kenny and Eddie would bring back when they hitchhiked home from DC because they did not bring inanimate gifts wrapped with a bow like ordinary people did. Nope, they brought home people. One time they bought back an affable drunk who’d picked them up hitchhiking somewhere in Delaware. The drunk had nowhere special to go so Kenny invited him home to meet us. But the all-time, hands-down, best Coming Home Gift that they’d ever brought to us was Dwayne.

 

“He told us he was 16,” Ken said, “And that he was alone because he was a Travelling Man”

 

“That boy’s no more than 10 years old,” Mommy said.

 

Dwayne was having a terrific time, especially since the younger half of my family was in his own age range. I was 10 at the time, my brother Christopher was 9, Vincenia 11 and Tommy 12. We were the perfect ages to play with Dwayne. We were also young enough to be gobsmacked impressed that he had run away from home. Tommy was the only one in our family who had ever tried such a thing and, until learning of Dwayne’s escapade, Tommy’s try had always struck we kids as rather daring. Indeed, Tommy would boast about how Mom had once ordered him upstairs to his room, whereupon he got the bright idea to escape by stringing belts together and climbing down from the window. Alas, the belts were not true durable leather but cheap leatherette made of pressed fibers. He had only just crawled out the window and climbed down a foot or two when the belts snapped in two like a strip of crisp bacon. Tommy fell plop down to the ground—and that’s as far as he got from the house.

 

“He broke his arm,” we bragged to Dwayne. “We thought he was still upstairs but then we heard somebody crying outside Help! Help! and Mommy was like, What is that sound?”

 

 

Eddie had had one friend, and only one in his entire life, who did not come via Kenny, and it was similarly odd kid named Roger Gerstenschlager with whom he hung out in the eighth grade. The friendship was not about enjoying each other’s company so much as a shared obsession with model airplanes. Eddie had always been a person of manic obsession and went from building intricate model airplanes in elementary school, to an obsession with wrestling in high school, to running in college (such was his obsession with running that he would run until he split his shins). Through it all, he was most loyal to his obsession with art. He was a cute guy and with his physical activity he had a terrific physique as well. Girls hovered near him but he, a loner, was oblivious to the attention. Given all of Eddie’s singular obsessions and anti-social inclinations, we Little Kids were awed to see him suddenly so taken with funny, feisty little Dwayne. “Oh sure,” Dwayne told me and the other Little Kids, “Me and Eddie’s good friends. Whaddya think?”

 

Indeed, all of the Laureys kids became fast friends with Dwayne. He was with us for the entire two week spring break, most of which I recall in only a general sense. There is one interaction, however, that I remember specifically and in detail. Scientists say that people remember something when they analyze it or surround it with other layers of meaning directly as it’s happening, because then the thought process becomes something laden that will sink more deeply into the brain, as if a needle sinking deeper into vinyl to make permanent grooves in a record (once you make the grooves, they are permanently there and you can always replay your memory). Well, I sure as hell analyzed this one interaction with Dwayne because it was my first personal engagement with the concept of race. In 1975, there were no black people in little, working class, Italian/Irish Netcong. I had only met one other black person in my life, and that was a boy in the second grade with me at St. Michael’s School. He came from a town five miles away that was also predominantly white, and he transferred out after only one year. I knew nothing about him. Dwayne was the first black person I ever really knew, with whom I talked and played and engaged up close. I had so many questions—questions which I knew in a vague way were verboten for white people to ask, but which I had risked anyway because Dwayne was so friendly. It was a warm spring evening a little before dinnertime and Dwayne and I, along with my siblings Tommy, Vincenia and Christopher, were all in the basement where we kept our games and toys. We may have been playing Monopoly, I’m not certain. However, I am absolutely certain of the precise words I had used to ask what to me right then was a perfectly logical question.

 

“Do black people get tan?”

 

“Sure we do,” Dwayne said, enjoying a highly authoritative tone. “Whaddya think?”

 

“What happens?”

 

“We get more black! What about you? I heard that the sun hurts white folks’ skin.”

 

“Only if we get a sunburn.”

 

 

The gates were open to racial comparison, such that Dwayne could approach the ultimate taboo difference between whites and blacks—which is not, as we assume, pigmentation, but hair texture. Even at 10, I knew the topic was taboo and this, of course, is the reason I remember so distinctly that Dwayne had extended his hand toward my hair, which was long, wavy and a golden kind of blonde, and asked if he could touch it. “It’s soft,” he said. Then he touched Vincenia’s hair, which was dark and super curly, so much so that when she cut it a couple of years later it sprang into a full afro. “Yours is like black folks’ hair,” he said to Vincenia. “See?” he said while patting his own hair. Yours is curly like mine.” Then he asked us to do that which I’d never again done for the rest of my life, despite having had a number of black boyfriends. “Wanna touch my hair?” he asked while patting his head. We touched it.

 

 

“Lemme see yours,” he said. He was sitting closer to Christopher and looked at his hands, which Christopher lifted for him, palms up. “What about your feet? Lemme see the bottom of your feet too.” I not only recall showing my feet, but the sandals I wore as well. Dwayne inspected our body parts and concluded that the insides of white folks’ hands and feet were pretty much the same color as the rest of their bodies. “Huh,” he said as if it were a rather peculiar thing, and left it at that.

 

Dwayne had one more question: “How come your brother Brian doesn’t talk? And how come he sits on the floor all the time? I never saw a white person act like that.”

 

One of us—either Tommy, Vincenia or Christopher, I cannot recall who—explained to Dwayne that Brian was not odd because he was white. “It’s because he’s autistic.” We were accustomed to having to explain autism to people in the early seventies, well before autism became a household word. It was so unknown that Brian was not diagnosed with it until the age of 13, before which he’s been misdiagnosed as mentally retarded and then as deaf and dumb since he never spoke a word in his life. I’m certain Dwayne had seen Down Syndrome kids before, but never anyone like Brian, who sat on the floor Indian style, rocked to music all day, never spoke and instead made a braying kind of noise, “Eeeh, eeeh, eeeh.”

 

Once we had settled that black people and white people looked different on the outside we got down to far more important business—which is to say, we went outside to play.

 

“Man,” Eddie said after bringing Dwayne back to Maryland. “You should’ve seen his dad. The Grandmother was this sweet old religious lady. But that father scared the shit out of us.”

 

“Christ,” Eddie had said to us, “Can you imagine the beating Dwayne got from the old man after we left?”

 

Dwayne told Eddie and Kenny that he had run away because his dad was going to give him a whooping—that’s the precise term he used: a whooping. If he already had a whooping coming to him for a past infraction, well, Eddie explained, just imagine what’ll he get for running away on top of it. Running away with two white, pot-smoking, long-haired hippie freaks from NJ!

 

“Poor kid,” Ken said.

 

Dwayne begged his grandmother to go visit his new pals Kenny and Eddie, who were only a half hour away from Maryland in Washington, DC, but phone calls appeared to be the best it would get. His grandmother did, however, invite our whole family to dinner at her house. We were going to visit our brothers in Washington that summer, as we often did, and thus we arranged to stop off at Dwayne’s house for dinner on the way.

 

Whenever we visited Washington, we would look out the car windows and observe how so many residents were black, especially in my brothers’ neighborhood—where Eddie and Kenny were actually the only white people at all. Daddy would roll his eyes and ask what they were trying to prove by living in the ghetto, to which Eddie and Kenny would reply, quite simply, “That we have no money.” We slept in sleeping bags on the floor of their apartment but, other than their own apartment building, we saw nothing of their neighborhood. All our time was spent sightseeing in white touristy areas and thusly we did not think much more about how racial demographics differed from our town to DC. However, we did think about it when we went to Dwayne’s house.

 

My knowledge of black people in those days had all come from TV and the movies which back then always portrayed them as poor and living in urban neighborhoods, just like the one where my brothers lived. Even Sesame Street was an urban street. But Dwayne’s family lived in a nice little town exactly like our own town, Netcong. It was a working class suburban terrain where kids were riding bikes down the street and playing ball in the yard just like we did in Netcong. It had the same sort of split level aluminum sided houses all down a row along tree-lined streets just like in Netcong. It was just like Netcong except that everyone in Netcong was white and everyone in Dwayne’s town was black.

 

“Are we the only white people here?” I asked Dwayne. I realized that it was my turn to be the minority now.

 

“Sure,” he said, “Whaddya think?”

 

I recall that the little kids across the street had stopped their bikes and stared at us. I knew it was because we were white. I don’t recall exactly what Dwayne had said to them, but he was a plucky kid so I could see him being proud of the novelty and saying something like, “Look! I got white people at my house!”

 

We spilled into Dwayne’s house as a pack of loud, unruly kids, which must have been at least a little startling to Dwayne’s grandmother, who kept a pristinely clean, orderly house for herself, her son and her grandson. It was just the three of them in a nice, normal little house in a nice, normal little neighborhood. I had never, not once in my life, used the word normal to describe my own family. Dwayne’s grandmother even looked like the stereotypical, normal grandma. She was of average height, a bit plump with age, wore a pressed, checkered housedress and swept her gray-white hair up into a tidy bun at the top of her head. And she was one helluva cook.

 

She had set up a long folding table with a tablecloth in an enclosed front porch and covered every square inch of it with platters—homemade biscuits, macaroni and cheese (with cheddar, not Velveeta as we used up in New Jersey), corn on the cob, collard greens (which I’d never heard of till that day), mashed potatoes and the best fried chicken any of us had ever tasted in our lives. His grandma filled our plates and poured our drinks while chatting with Mom, who knew what it was to run a food assembly line and thus kept saying, “Please, let me help.” But old Grandma wasn’t having it. “Oh no,” she said, “You’re guests in my home. Just you relax.” One of my siblings had observed that she treated us like royalty and this phrase stuck. “Oh my god, Eddie, Kenny, listen,” we exclaimed when we saw them later that night, “You should’ve seen! Dwayne’s grandmother treated us like royalty! Like royalty!”

 

I don’t recall anything else that the grandmother said, and otherwise see her in my mind’s eye continuously bustling about to fill our plates and glasses and expediting courses, including a glorious desert spread that covered the entire surface area of the table just as the dinner spread had. There was homemade apple pie, blueberry pie, cherry pie, pound cake, rice pudding and ice cream. Finally, as we were finishing desert, Dwayne’s father came to meet us. He shook Mommy’s hand and thanked her for taking care of Dwayne. I remember him as rigid, and only staying the perfunctory moment or two that good manners would dictate, before getting the hell out of there. He seemed to regard all we strange kids bouncing around his porch as a jumble of flailing little arms and legs and a chaos of voices and laughter that he wasn’t especially interested in sussing out as individuals. He likely thought it was kooky that our entire family was going to camp out on our brothers’ apartment floor that evening and perhaps even bizarre that my mother had no problem with her sons hitchhiking to and from college. He surely recognized my brothers’ address at M Street NW to be a hardcore ghetto and this was likely one reason why there was no way Dwayne was ever going to go visit his new pals Kenny and Eddie over there. I was certain he appreciated what our family had done for Dwayne, but I was just as certain that he was looking at us thinking, “Man, white folks sure are odd.”

 

Yet the oddness he saw with this particular group of white people had nothing to do with their whiteness and everything to do with being a Laureys. The Laureys family was just plain odd. There were the pot-smoking, long-haired hippie freaks. There was the way dozens of friends freely rolled in and out of the house without knocking. There was the rotating cast of foster kids. A boy with a condition nobody ever heard of who sat on the ground flinging blades of grass all day. A mother who packed her tribe of little ones into a station wagon and drove off to visit the eldest sons who lived in one of the worst ghettos in the city. This was who we were. This was how we were raised.

 

 

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Maggi Laureys studied English, earning degrees from Barnard College and from Columbia University. She has taught English at Seton Hall University and the College of Saint Elizabeth. She recently completed her first novel and is currently at work on a memoir.

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