Just Jerry

Climbing the stairs, I headed to the bedroom in the back of the house that I shared with Eddie and Billy. Even with the door shut, I could hear all the chaos going on below in the kitchen. I sank down on the lower bunk with a sketchpad and flipped through the pages of pictures: Mother’s potted plants, knights in armor, countless fighter planes, and yesterday’s drawing of Joan sleeping on the couch.

“Dag,” I said under my breath, “was she mad!” It was proof that she had been sleeping on the job. Next there were pages and pages of favorite comic book characters: Billy the Kid, Hopalong Cassidy, and the Lone Ranger.

I’d been drawing for as far back as I could remember. My grandfather Charles worked at the Blaisdell pencil factory on the corner of East Earlham and Lena Streets, so there was no shortage of pencils around. Drawing was the only thing I felt I could do right, the one thing people told me I was good at. It was my way of living in my imagination, and breaking free of the constraints I was growing up with. Everything I saw, heard, felt, tasted, and smelled, I’d think of as a picture. When I wasn’t sketching, I was just gathering and storing up experiences into a visual memory bank, ready to be translated to paper. It was as if I had a compartment in my brain that held a sketchbook and my granddad’s pencils.

After grabbing one of the pencils from an empty mayonnaise jar, I added more lines to a cowboy on horseback. They flowed out of my hand without my even trying, carrying me far away to the limitless plains of the West.

At long last, I heard only the comforting scratching of my pencil on paper, everything was quiet in my head. Finally, I was alone, able to be anything and go anywhere.

And in the world  in which I was living, to be anything or go anywhere was not a dream that young Black boys often dared to have.