Surprisingly enough, when most of the whites had moved and we were left to ourselves I often heard many of my elders, who were the first of our kind in the neighborhood, speaking against them, who had come afterward. For some reason, they were not as good as us. And it was because of them that the whites had moved. Although as the whites had said before: it was nothing personal.

As I got older my facility in using we, us, they, and them, as well as ours and theirs, improved to the point where if there was a person or an idea that I didn’t want to deal with, I could dispel it with a pronoun. The effect was similar to tear gas in that any disturbances mobbing my mind were quickly dispersed.

I still like to speculate about why most of the whites moved out of the neighborhood. The way they hatted up, you’d have thought we were the second coming of the Moors. Maybe it was the Long Island Sound beckoning them toward Nassau County. It could be that the restless spirit of Columbus, in order to redeem his pitiful sense of direction, was urging whites to complete his journey to the East in search of spices and fabric. Quiet as it’s kept, that could be the reason why so many blacks follow whites wherever they move. It’s a well-known fact that we have a heavy jones for highly seasoned foods and fine threads.

I really want to give white folks the benefit of the doubt on the reasons for their vanishing act because it would be a drag if they split just to get away from, as the song goes, we people who are darker than blue. It’s too bad about them, if that’s why they moved. And shame on black folks, too, if all the migrating we’ve done in this world was just to break into the ranks of somebody else’s parade. If this is true, we have all become words used in place of ourselves. But I keep forgetting. If in each other’s eyes we are simply pronouns, it’s nothing personal, since we can never know them.