Anthony.
Like it was yesterday, I vividly recall the outrage I felt when this Black kid knocked me to the ground. I was backing up to catch a ball and the next thing I knew I was flat on my back with everyone laughing at me. My fee-fees and my butt were hurt. I got up swinging at the culprit. Black and white fists intermingled and pounded on flesh as the crowd roared and cheered. I can recall the sounds of the grunts more than I can the pain of the blows. I was knocked back on my butt a second time, and this time my head hit the boiling hot and rock hard asphalt. Yet again I got up swinging. It was a desperate struggle on both our parts. When the authorities finally forced us apart I was relieved, but still enraged. I couldn't win, but I didn't want to lose in front of everyone.
A group of us a decade later. I'm tipping my cap in the lower left corner. Anthony is the one playfully dodging "Black on Black violence" in the form of a finger thump to the head (Thanks to navajo for uploading it for me).
By the time I got to the principal's office all my rage was gone. It was the first day of first grade at school and I was in some deep doo-doo. I looked up at the face of the Black kid that attacked me and he was wearing a deep mask of pure fear. Oh-oh, that really scared me. If he was afraid of what was coming it had to be bad I thought. I asked him, "What's going to happen?" "I think she's got a paddle in there with holes in it," he replied as if he were referring to capitol punishment. If out on the schoolyard was the first time I'd experienced rage, then waiting in that outer office of doom was the first time I'd ever experienced that sinking feeling of having betrayed myself into the hands of a merciless authority.
I was the aggressor
With his head hung low, he asked me why I had jumped him. I jumped him? That was news to me. Then he told me he also had been backing up to catch a ball when I knocked him to the ground. We both had experienced the same thing, except as it turns out I was the aggressor. I was the one who had come out swinging.
"I'm sorry", I said.
"Me too."
"What's your name?" I asked him.
"Anthony Woods."
Anthony became my first best friend (and we remained friends up through high school). Mrs Arroyd (the principal) turned out to be a master of child psychology (by design or luck) and kept us in that room alone for what seemed an hour before calling us in. We bonded in that hour as two lost souls who had no one else to depend on but ourselves. By the time we walked into her office he was no longer the "other." Neither one of us got into any fights again at least up to Jr. High (and I never-ever heard of Anthony getting into another one).
Mr. and Mrs. Woods.
Anthony was a soft-spoken kid, but his dad was extroverted with a very deep voice. "How you doing son, I'm glad to meet you" he boomed out the first time I met him. Must've been the first time anyone other than my parents called me "son." My face lit up in a shi*-eating grin of innocent pride that stretched from ear-to-ear and pulled tightly on the muscles in my face. I've seen that grin in other kids' faces when I've caught them unawares with a compliment, and felt it myself as an adult the first time I saw my own son's face. Mrs Woods, on the other hand, was as soft-spoken as her son. I probably had the equivalent of a youthful crush on her as I remember thinking she seemed as "motherly" and an endless font of wisdom as my own mom. Mr. and Mrs. Woods were the first other set of parents I was ever aware of as a unit apart from my own.
It was 1963 in a still segregated LA, and my mom had just dropped her first-grader off for a playdate at a Black family's house on Crenshaw Blvd. That was my parents' reaction to the interracial fight at school. it was the first playdate at someone else's house I recall ever having. Anthony's house seemed strange of course, because it wasn't my house. It wasn't even on my street. There was a Black family that lived on my street, but the daughter was two years older than me and the son was a huge four years older. He was best friends with my older brother, but gave only short shrift to me.
The trauma of something different
I can still see myself reaching out to shake the giant hand of his father. As I grasped it I felt traumatized to realize he had lost half of one his fingers (turns out from some kind of farm machinery from when he had lived in the South). Worse, there was some stub of a bone that protruded from it. I'd apparently never saw anything like it before as it terrified me. I also recall feeling ashamed because I felt that way. It is the type of thing that could prejudice a child against an adult. Sure enough, everytime I met him Mr. Woods would insist on shaking my hand. He didn't feel ashamed about it. That should have cured my unease, but it never did completely. He was a great and kind man, but all these decades later, when I shake anyone's hands I have the habit of involuntarily stealing a quick look at their fingers instead of into their eyes. Do I count the fingers of Black folks more than others? I don't know that I do, but it is possible. Prejudice, of any kind, is insidious.
Trayvon and the Zimmermans
My experience is both personal and anecdotal. It is what it is. So no, Trayvon didn't throw the first punch. Not in my world. Not figuratively, and not literally. Zimmerman was the aggressor. Zimmerman was in that conflict the adult racist he had learned to be in his own home. He became a murderer also because he had set himself up to be one, and no one had deviated him from that path. Instead of counting fingers, he had learned to discount based on color...and he never stopped.