The beginning of the end of my neighborhood

The firecrackers were the beginning of the end. I was standing in my seventy year old house with the hardwood floors and fireplace, going through the mail on the dining room table when I heard them. It was spring, about supper time, not when you expect to hear firecrackers, so I looked out my lace curtained window. I saw five little black kids on bicycles crowding around a car driven by a white man. Momentarily. Then the car with the white man burst out from the knot and tore down the street with the boys on bikes in pursuit. Wrongo, I thought. Something up. I ran outside and met Terry, my white neighbor with the black son, in the middle of the street.

“Did you see them kids?” asked Terry. She was pale and sweaty and carried a child from her daycare. “One of them kids fired a gun at the guy in the car.”

“Those weren’t firecrackers?” I asked.

"Them little guns sound like firecrackers,” answered Terry. She would know, I thought. Her son and his friends worried us. Ron, the white guy who lived next to me, arrived. He had called the police. Then four white boys arrived on foot. Yeah, they knew those kids, they said. Those kids stole a bike from that guy so he’d been going after them to get it back. A car turned from 34th street onto Thomas avenue. Terry and Ron and I moved onto the sidewalk; the kids stared at the car without moving.

“Get out of the street!” shouted Ron. A white woman drove the car slowly toward the kids.

“Get you outa the street!” shouted Terry. Two of the kids ambled over to the curb, making room for the car to squeeze between the other kids.

“I ain’t afraid of those kids on the bikes,” bragged one of the kids who had remained in the street. “I’ve got a gun too.” I looked at him. Skinny kid wearing baggy shorts and a tee shirt. Not likely to have a gun. But I would have said the same about the kids on the bicycles.