If You Come Softly

At basketball practice, Jeremiah observes the dynamics of the white and Black boys on Percy Academy’s team. While he has befriended by the two other Black boys on the team, Rayshon and Kennedy—”the three black musketeers”—Jeremiah still misses his old friends from Brooklyn Tech. He feels a tension with a white boy on the team, Peter, who “tried to sound black” and boasted about his father securing Rayshon a part-time job while Peter himself doesn’t work (62). As practice ends and Jeremiah showers, he wonders why he is with all these white boys. Yet, he remembers that girl in the hallway was also white, and as that information sinks in, he feels like he can hear the world “pointing at him […] and laughing” (66).

Ellie stands in the kitchen each morning with her hand on the phone, hoping for Anne to call and “say the right thing” (68). She thinks of Jeremiah, whom she has still only seen once, and she tries to imagine them next to each other. On Seventy-Second Street, Ellie bumps into another Black man who reminds her of Jeremiah. She wonders if there’s something in the stars that makes her “always bump into black guys,” before remembering a time when she was younger with Anne in the park (69). A Black man had started running toward them in Central Park, and Anne had screamed and grabbed Ellie before embarrassedly realizing he was only jogging. Ellie thinks about how naive she used to be when thinking about race because her family didn’t say a hateful word. Marion would only say, “All people have suffered,” and Ellie had thought the only thing each person needed was “some kind of chance” (69, 70). Now Ellie wonders: If Black people are really treated equally, why didn’t she often see Black people in her community; “Why weren’t they in our world, around us, a part of us?” (70).