Street Games of Childhood and their Aftermath
All the kids on the block came together at the end of long summer days
to join in games. As it was still the
vacation, as the evenings stretched on until nearly ten o’clock at night, and
as it was a time in history when, at least in Boro Park, Brooklyn in the late
1940s there was peace on the streets, parents didn’t mind—in fact, they
enjoyed—letting all the children play these enormous games. Enormous in the sense, let me tell you, of
often a hundred and more players, boys and girls, teenagers and toddlers, but
mostly the kids between ten and thirteen years old. They came from many blocks around, too,
making this into a festival of childhood activity and noise.
So that’s the setting. Every joke
needs a scene of activity where the actions take place and the speech of the
characters can resonate between private memories, collective experiences, and
something much deeper that the structure of the narrative releases at its
climax. it is then not so much the little
details—the colors of the atmosphere, the textures of physical things, the
relationship of person to person as they dance out the ritual being performed
in this festival of laughter—as it is something deeply embedded in the sound of
the words spoken. The description of the
scene, the narration of the plotted action, the choreography of tones as the
teller-of-tales speaks directly to and responds in turn to the breathing,
laughing and murmuring of the listeners.
Thus we see on this one particular late summer afternoon, as the normal
daytime activities of the community shift into the evening, with mothers
announcing that supper is ready, fathers washing their hands after a hot day’s
work downtown, children reluctantly coming in from their sunlight games in
yards, at parks or wherever they have been since lunch or even since breakfast. The meal is a respite between what is profane
and regular, the day-lit hours, and what is special, sacred, and somewhat
mysterious, as the sun takes so long to set and the in betwixt and between liminality
when evening stretches out and out—as though time itself was suspended and the
normal distinction between night and day were broken. A period outside of nature and history. The playtime of games.
The meal over, from every apartment building, from each one or
two-family home on the block, few as they are, and most of all from around one
corner and the other and from across the big avenues, the hordes of children
pour in to fill this magical liminal zone.
There has been no need to make telephone calls or send runners: everyone
just knows. In the same way, there is no
requirement for a leader to decide what game will be played on this night,
whether Ring-a-leave-eo or Three steps to Germany or King. The consolidation of the festive crowd is
enough: on this day it will be hang-o,
in some exotic countries known as hide-and-go-seek.
Somehow spontaneously out of the gathering as a process itself, as the
proportion of male to female is measured, the balance of young and old becomes
evident, and the level of traffic likely to interrupt movements back and forth
across the roadway itself is felt, the decision is taken. Everyone knows and says: Hang-o! Similarly an it appears and starts to count, while
everyone else disperses to find a hiding place.
The it stands motionless with
his head resting on a tree or telephone pole, eyes tightly shut, and the game
has begun.
Loudly, deliberately it shouts
out “One, two, three…” until he or she reaches the proper conclusion:
“ninety-eight, ninety-nine, one hundred.
Anyone around my base is it.”
Though cars and trucks may pass down the street, they are really neither
seen nor heard. The playtime and playground
overtake reality. Grown-ups walking on
the sidewalk realize what is happening, smile and keep moving, careful not to
point out hiding places, smiling to show they understand because once, long ago
in their own magical childhoods, they too were part of this game. Parents occasionally look out the windows to
check up on their offspring. Those who sit
on stoops or porches, chatting, reading the newspaper, listening to the radio,
or engaged in their own pastimes pretend the children do not exist for the
moment.
After it has reached the number 100, he or she opens his or her eyes,
turns around and looks up and down the street, the play space, what is kosher, consisting of all sidewalks,
bushes, trees, fences, doorways and behind or between parked cars; however,
whatever else belongs to the street itself and not to enclosed building areas
is forbidden, trayf, out of
bounds. As the evening slowly drags on
and shadows begin to fall, more and more hiding spaces become available. To begin with, everyone, except new comers
from other streets, sometimes visitors from other parts of Brooklyn or the City
or rarely other towns or countries, has a favourite first hiding space. With up to a hundred or more players, as I
said, this can be a wild, noisy and exuberant event. A regular carnival. But also a ritual because one plays not only
for the fun of it or for the glory of being it
and finding the person whose hiding spot is the most ingenious. There is something transformative about the
game.
By the second stage, when a new it
has been tapped and starts counting, the discovery of new secret spots becomes more
and more creative. While young children
tend to go back to the same old spots again and again, if they are not the one
caught to become it, older kids try out
new and experimental hiding places.
Someone tries to fit between two ash cans, another lies down under a
hedge, another climbs a tree, everybody using as much ingenuity as they
can. Sometimes, though, a teenage boy or
girl decides the hiding is too boring and lets himself or herself be caught so
they can play at it for a while. There is just as much fun, if not more, in
discovering where other people are lurking.
These voluntary players do not go after the first person they see. That would be too easy. They search for people who have found exciting
new places or ways to hide. So they
start off, making a lot of noise; and so the younger or less intelligent
participants can run away squealing and not be tapped. it is not just a matter of seeing someone and
calling out: “See you. You’re it.”
You have to run up to them and tap them on the shoulder and say: “See
you. Tap tap tap. You’re it.”
On this one particular late summer evening, something happened that was
out of the ordinary, not just in the way that play time and play space are
liminal zones of sacred transformation at festival, but something that broke
apart the generic distinctions altogether.
There are at least two traditions that developed about what happened,
one passed down by the children in the game whose participation was forever
marked by the event; there is also another version that the adults began to
tell, especially to the police, ambulance attendants, and newspaper reporters
who later came to find out the story.
There is also another version which I may or may not decide to tell you
later on; it depends on how well you have attending to the story I am telling
you. In other words, it will be up to
you to see if you can see through the first two versions back to the
preparatory comments I have already made and in the details of what I am about
to report. If you don’t see this third
version, well, the joke is on you. If
you do, there is no need for us, is there, to disclose it to the general public.
Now it was said by the children afterwards that as they were running
about, hiding and seeking and having a grand time on the street, an automobile
came racing along. Perhaps the driver
was in a hurry to take his wife to Israel Zion Hospital on Fort Hamilton
Parkway to have her baby; this happened once or twice a month. Perhaps the person in the car was distracted
by the kids playing their game, leaping out of bushes, darting across the road,
waving and taunting at him as he drove by.
Perhaps he was a drunk who shouldn’t have been there at all. There were loads of explanations for what
occurred, and what occurred was that the car smashed into a lamppost and that
made a huge sound, like an explosion, followed by smoke, cries of fear, and
children scattering in all directions to get out of the way—most of the young
children went back to their homes immediately, some of the older boys and girls
followed them, but two disappeared. it
was their disappearance that was the mystery and the fearful memory that
lingered. These two not only were not
seen on that night but never again at all.
You can imagine what everyone on the street and the blocks around was
thinking afterwards. An accident.
But what is an accident. Is it
something that happens unintentionally and unexpectedly, and thus throws
everything out of kilter for some time to come?
After all, after that night of play, the season for games of that sort
was over, and no one dared come together throughout the autumn: school began,
the days grew shorter, and parents forbade their sons and daughters to go into
the street after dinner. Or is an
accident a one-off event, something not shaped by the rules and laws of nature
or history, but almost like a miracle, pierces through all these rational patterns
of cause and effect, and simply, well, simply happens? Since it unrepeatable and no one is really
responsible, once the shock of its occurrence has worn off, everything goes
back to normal. The next summer all the
children were playing their games again, the parents watching out of the
windows or from the stoops and porches, and passers-by nodded with smiles as
they recognized the rituals of their own youth.
Two people disappeared, but there always more than enough others to let
the festival go on.
The adults who spoke to the police, medical people and reporters, and
mostly to one another on that night and for many more through the autumn and
winter that followed, had a different version of what had happened. They conceded that someone had driven down
the street too quickly and for that reason lost control of his vehicle and
smashed into a tree. The victim had been
taken away to hospital and, for all anyone knew, eventually recovered, though
his car was a write-off. Something else
had gone on, though, because two of the older children, a boy and a girl in
their late teens, somewhat older than all the other kids in the game, probably
sixteen or seventeen, disappeared after that night. It was whispered, as rumors tend to be, that
the boy and the girl had used the noise and confusion of the game to have a
tryst in one of the narrow spaces between two garages on the street. People said that they were experimenting with
sex and that the driver had seen them, was fascinated by their brazen openness,
albeit way off the road and in the thick shadows of the late hour, and, when
the smash occurred, the two were so frightened they ran away together, never to
return. Other people modified that set
of details to say that the adolescents who claimed to be in love had planned all along to elope and were waiting
for some small accidental occurrence to provide the opportunity and the cover
for their escape. Other people still
said that when the two foolish youngsters were playing around in the shadows,
one of the parents across the road noticed what was going on, and ran over to
chastise them, and that it was this adult in the middle of the road that
distracted the driver. Meanwhile the
father caught the two offending teenagers, made them get dressed, and hauled
them off to his house, where he called the boy’s parents, and that in a
midnight conference, it was decided the two children had to be separated; and
since neither family could put the blame fully on the other, each took a
decision to move away from the street, with one family going to the Bronx where
they had relatives and the others shifting to a neighborhood near Coney Island,
something they had been intending to do anyway for quite a while. Whatever the decision taken and whatever the
specific outcome, the result was that for most of the inhabitants of the street
and those in which members of the family had been involved in the game, the
disappearance of the two children remained an unsolved mystery.
For the children, as we have seen, the disappearance of the two older players
was the only thing that mattered; for the adults, there was the fact that two
families moved away from the street. In
a close-knit community, such an event is shocking, and the shock transformed
the way in which the game was played and surveyed from then on, though young
boys and girls initiated into the game from then on never noticed anything
different from what they had heard about from their elder siblings and friends.
Coda/Nimshil
So did you catch the third explanation or version of what happened? All
I need to remind you is that what we think of as the id in Freudian theory was what the master called Es, German for it. Unlike the Ich (ego) or the Uber-Ich (superego) which
arise in the individual and from his or her family, the Es comes from a dark, secret place.
No comments:
Post a Comment