The Blue Ball

Nora was in Tiny Grandma’s backyard playing in the old tractor tire sandbox when a little boy her age strolled down the alley, a small blue rubber ball in his hand. Nora said hello and invited him to join her in the sandbox. Smiling, he obliged. He had short dark curly hair but was dirtiest little boy she had ever seen. Nora asked if he ever bathed, and he said his mama made him take a bath “’most every night”. Nora was somewhat dubious – how could he be so dirty if he washed so often? She queried him on the proper use of soap and a washcloth, and he insisted that he used them every time. Nora showed him her white skin and told him that he must be doing it wrong, because if he had been doing it correctly, his skin would come clean and be just as fresh and white as hers. Roddy told her he would scrub and scrub, and that he would come back tomorrow.

The next day Roddy came back with a sad expression- he had scrubbed until his skin ached, but it was just the same dirty brown. Nora said it didn’t matter – at least he had tried. She did compliment him on the soles of his feet and the palms of his hands; it was obvious his scrubbing was more successful there, since his skin was definitely lighter. They spent that day playing together and before Roddy went home, he gave her his blue ball to keep overnight as a sign of friendship and said they would see each other the next day.

What they did not see was Tiny Grandma standing at the kitchen window watching Nora play with her new friend. A hard line replaced her usually smiling lips and a chill frosted her cornflower blue eyes. She told Nora’s mama that no granddaughter of hers was going to play with a Negro boy.     

And so the rest of the week was spent in a carousel of activities. Nora and her family swam at the lake, hiked through the state park and sat on a blanket under the stars for the evening band concert in the new bandstand gazebo. They shopped for postcards to say what a fine time they were having, having explored Uncle Ole’s huge garden and ate his fine homemade BBQ chicken with its sweet flame-licked secret sauce. They rode in a speedboat across the lake, and even stopped at the little amusement park to ride a few rides. They walked over the footbridge that had been used in a Hollywood movie, stopped by Aunt Susan’s to see her collection of hand painted porcelain figurines and then picked dark purple grapes for Ole to use in his homebrew. In short, they did everything they could to keep Nora out of the backyard where she might meet Roddy again. Nora did not guess what the adults were doing, but each time they went in or out of the grey little house she kept looking for a glimpse of Roddy so that she could return his beloved blue ball.

Days passed, and all too quickly the end of the week had come with still no sign of Roddy. After all the farewell hugs and kisses had been passed around all the relatives at least twice, Nora’s family all piled into the family station wagon with Nora in her usual seat in the “way-back” where the seat faced out the back window. Just as they waved a final goodbye to Tiny Grandma and pulled away from the curb, Nora saw Roddy run into the street to catch up with their car. She had been holding his blue ball, hoping for one last chance to return it to him. She cried to her father to stop and open the back window so that she could throw the ball to Roddy, but as fathers are sometimes wont to do, he didn’t understand and just kept driving. Roddy got smaller and smaller as his young legs could no longer keep up with the station wagon. Nora looked out the back window and tearfully held up the blue ball to show him she had tried. Roddy shrugged and motioned for her to just keep it and looked at her in the window as the car drove out of sight. Nora buried her face in her hands, and her mama thought it was so sweet that Nora had had such a good time with Tiny Grandma that Nora was sorry to leave.

Nora kept the blue ball and played with it sometimes, but it always made her so sad to think of Roddy that she put it away somewhere and never found it again. Years later she found out how many different colors of skin there were in the world, and her easily-burned-to-a-cancerous-crisp complexion was just what had been most common in her neck of the woods.

NOTE: Coming out of my NANOWRIMO experience last year, I wrote this account of vacationing at my grandmother’s in northern Iowa. My grandmother’s brother, Uncle Charlie, had actually fought for the Union army as a young boy at the very end of the Civil War. My mother used to tell about sitting on the back porch stoop with Uncle Charlie as he taught her “Tenting Tonight” and other songs the soldiers had sung at the campfires at night. My grandmother, nicknamed “Tiny Grandma” because she was several inches short of 5 feet, was one of the most gracious women I have ever known, and it is continues to be difficult for me to reconcile her actions regarding Roddy with the sweet Christian woman I knew her to be. 

Lord, please help me to see everyone with Your eyes and heart and respond accordingly.