The new girl

Translation into present time

It is a hot, bright day. Everything is burning – the roofs, the shrubs, the asphalt, our bike seats, our skin and our hair. Allisons father is watering the lawn, and Allison and I are riding our bikes over the soggy grass and through the whirling water that jets out of the sprinkler. I am living on Prospect Street. I am eight years old, and Allison is ten. We are the only kids on the block, so we are best friends by default. I look up to Allison, even though I don’t share her interests in Barbies and Hall and Oates.

Continuing the story: The New Girl

“Niggers are stupid. Maybe they’ll move”. I didn’t think any further about what I just said. Not until I came home, and started to wonder, why I said it. I almost never saw niggers, and I had definitely never talked to one, not until today. So how could I say that they were stupid. I guess, I said it because there wasn’t anything else to say. I looked up to Allison, and wanted her the like me, and to think that I was cool. And in our town, colored people weren’t welcome. A lot of people saw them as animals, and they saw us white persons, as the dominating race, which were worth way more than any other race. My parents and Allisons parents had that opinion, just as their parents, and their parents parents. So it was part of our upbringing, and the culture of our city. But I couldn’t see why we were hating them, and I couldn’t see any reason not to see all of us, white, colored and so on, as equals. No colored person had ever done any harm to me, so I didn’t really had any reason to hate them, had I?

A week later I meet the nigger girl again. The sun was shining, and she was sitting outside her house playing with her doll. I stood on the other side of the street, watching her for a while, before I finally talked to her. That decision changed my life. And now fifteen years later, we are married. I don’t regret that I talked to her that sunny day fifteen years ago. But I’m not sure, whether marrying her was a good idea. I lost the connection to my parents, my grandparents and my baby brother. When I was walking on the street, I saw people looking down on me, and I heard them whispering behind my back. Even though it made me feel uncomfortable, I could live with it. But what I couldn’t live with, where Allisons reaction to my marriage. From I was fourteen, till I turned eighteen,  she was my girlfriend. Even after that we used to talk together every day. And I couldn’t imagine a life without her. But from the day I got married to a nigger, she immediately stopped talking to me, and I didn’t  hear a single word from her the next two years. I saw her every day though. But she wouldn’t talk to me. I missed her. I loved her. Even though she terrorized my wife. It had developed since our wedding. But the last few months, it had turned into become terrible. And in the end, my wife where afraid of going outside, because of the threats from Allison.

It all developed an afternoon. There must had been a painful discussion between Allison and my wife. Which in the end became too much for my wife. Because when I came home, I found Allison lying in my garden. Dead. Shot. The gun was lying next to her. I immediately knew what has happened, picked up the gun, and filled with anger, I walked into our kitchen where I knew my wife were…