He gave me a ring. He also punched me in the eye. I learned a lot that summer about how “nice-nasty” the world can be.
This essay is part of a collaborative project with Black History, Continued. We invited readers and renowned writers to respond to the question “What is Black love today?”
Two summers before Mary J. Blige crooned soulfully about searching for a “Real Love,” I found mine. I was 11 years old.
I haven’t seen him since, and I have no idea where he is now, so for our purposes I’ll use his initial: L. In the summer of 1989, my family had moved to South Jamaica, Queens, and a year later L. and his mother moved into a house across the street.
He rode into my life doing tricks on the wheels of a BMX bike accented with a checkerboard frame and handlebar grips. I had a bike, too, but I never tried the tricks that L. did. I was not that kind of boy. I was more apt to read my mother’s romance novels or spend all day during school breaks watching soap operas. I was the kind of boy more likely to fall in love than to fall off a bike.
I was sitting on the porch reading a romance novel when L. turned the corner. He rode his bike over to me, standing on the bike’s pedals, towering over me as I read.
“You want to ride with me?” he asked.
“Uh, OK. Let me put this in the house,” I said, stumbling to my feet.
Minutes later we were riding our bikes side by side.
For boys like us — Black boys whose worlds could at once seem large and daunting and at the same time feel small and constricting — mounting our bikes and going beyond our immediate neighborhood was a freedom ride.
That first ride, taken amid the promise of a New York springtime, turned into dozens of rides.
We began to spend time together outside of bike riding. We pooled our allowances and went to the bodega to fill up brown paper bags with Now & Laters, Lemonheads, Boston Baked Beans and penny candy to share as we played with my Ninja Turtles action figures.
As summer ended and the day when school would begin drew near (a year when I would start the fifth grade and L. would start the sixth) I felt real sadness. My stomach was upset. “Did I eat too many sweets?” I thought. It was then that I remembered other people felt this way: the characters in those romance novels and soaps.
Almost immediately my stomach was set right because I realized the answer was simple. I liked L. every bit as much as my favorite soap heroine, Erica Kane, loved each and every one of her husbands.
“I like you,” I told him.
“I like you, too,” he replied.
“No, I like you, like you,” I said.
“OK fool. I know,” he said.
We stared at each other for a second before going back to playing with our action figures, until my aunt said it was time for dinner.
During the last days of summer, he and I hung out as always. The night before the first day of school, he said, “I want to give you something.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a ring, his mother’s. It was gold with a medium-size amber stone in an oval basket setting. The ring was so tiny that even as a child, though a chubby one, I could fit it only on my pinkie.
The next day he and I walked to school together. Once at school we went to our different classes but I was still wearing the ring. That whole morning I played with it, waiting for lunch and recess. This would be the next time we’d see each other.
I got my lunch tray and sat down to eat, spotting L. in the sixth-grade section. I waved at him from across the room. He smiled widely, just enough to expose a chipped left incisor, and he gave me a soldier’s salute and sat down. I smiled and turned to my lunch.
As I picked up my spork to eat, I looked at the ring on my left pinkie and began to daydream of our beautiful summer together. My daydream was interrupted by the voice of a classmate, the school gossip. She was an adolescent Black Barbara Walters, full of questions. Once she set her sights on you there was no escape.
“Ooooh, that’s so niiiiiice,” she said, pointing to the ring. “Is that your mom’s ring?”
“No.” I said. With her it was best to keep it short.
“Whose is it? Where did you get it from?” she asked.
I told her who had given it to me.
“Oh, in sixth grade? That’s why you waved at him. Is he your boyfriend?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Ooooh, that’s so sweet. Boys liking boys,” she said, rolling her eyes and walking away.
I smirked triumphantly, believing she must be jealous. It never occurred to me that she might roll her eyes for any other reason.
After school, I waited to walk home with him but he never showed. Nor was he on the stoop of his house when I reached our street. I ran in to my house, did my homework lightning fast and changed into my play clothes.
I ran to L.’s house and knocked on the door. No answer. I sat on his steps and waited. About fifteen minutes passed before I heard footsteps from inside the house. I jumped up; it was him. I smiled and said, “Want to ride?” But he did not smile back.
Before I could ask what was wrong, he punched me in the eye.
My head was spinning, but I managed to steady myself and say, “Why’d you?!?” as he ran toward me. I thought, for a moment, that he was coming to help me, but instead he hit me again.
At that point, I did the only thing that made sense to me: I hit him back. Suddenly we were in the street, fighting like strangers.
“Aunt Lorry!” my cousin screamed. “They’re out here fighting!” Within seconds my aunt ran toward us to pull us apart.
“What happened? I thought y’all were friends,” she said as soon as she and I were in the house.
I couldn’t even speak.
“Eric! What happened?”
Still nothing. Then finally, “I thought he liked me,” I said, looking at the ground. “He said he liked me.” I burst into tears, a full-on ugly cry.
“Oh, Eric,” Aunt Lorry said, as she hugged me and let me sob into her chest.
For days, L. and I didn’t see each other. Then another one of my cousins, also in our school’s sixth grade, told us that she had a new boyfriend.
“Who is it?” someone asked.
She said his name. “You know, from across the street.”
I walked off quietly.
Heartbreak, combined with confusion and anger form a very specific pain. Add in guilt and my despair was all consuming. I felt guilty because, as I tried to make sense of everything, I recalled my gossipy classmate’s eyes rolling and her toothless grin as she walked away from our conversation.
I remembered seeing that same grin in other instances. It was not a nice grin at all. It was “nice-nasty,” as my Mama would say. I had given people a way to be “nice nasty” to L., and this must have hurt him.
I sat the rest of the day in my room staring at the ring. That evening, I walked across the street to his house. I dropped the ring through the door’s mail slot. I immediately heard footsteps inside so I ran back to my house, closing my door just as I saw L.’s mother open her door and look around, holding the ring in her hand.
Two months later, in November, I sat on the steps reading a book when a van pulled up in front of L.’s house. Within minutes, his mother was putting boxes in the trunk of the van.
It took a minute to register that L. and his mother were moving. By the time it was clear to me, L. was walking down the stairs. As he went to get into the van, we made eye contact for the first time in what felt like a lifetime. He smiled, wide enough to expose that chipped left incisor, saluted me like a soldier again, got in the van and they drove away.
After everything, L. exited my life as abruptly as he’d entered it. I never saw or spoke with him again.
Because of him, I have come to know that love is never apolitical, even in adolescence. Love only works if all involved are accountable to that proposition. As Black boys we lived in a world that did not let us love ourselves, let alone have space to love each other.
But I still cherish the innocent and honest moments when we were just two boys who like liked each other, before the world came in and pulled us apart.
Black Modern Love
Eric Darnell Pritchard is a scholar, fashion historian, cultural critic and the author of “Fashioning Lives: Black Queers and the Politics of Literacy.”
Modern Love can be reached at modernlove@nytimes.com.
To find previous Modern Love essays, Tiny Love Stories and podcast episodes, visit our archive.
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