Editor’s Note: Dave Larsen’s autobiographical novel Green Street in Black and White was released by Reformed Journal Books last week. Fellow RJ writer Marilyn McEntyre says that Dave’s book first appears to be a nostalgic tale but winds up challenging polite fictions we still live by. Dave Larsen simply says, “Get the book before it is banned.” You can learn more about the book and order it here. We’re delighted to provide the first chapter.

“I think I’m going to burst!”

Frank Bertolli looked back and grimaced as he hustled across the street towards Old Man Finnegan’s front porch.

Frank, aka Catholic Frank, aka Francis A. Sissy, was mercilessly picked on by the other members of the Green Street Boys. His crime was simple: he was an idolatrous papist. If pressed, none of the Green Street Boys could actually define that term, but it didn’t matter. They’d heard their parents whisper those words and knew they made Frank different. Plus, Frank had thick black glasses and a squeaky voice. Worse yet, he was in love with Annette Funicello.

All the Green Street Boys admired Annette’s perky breasts, but what chance did Frank have with her? He had the good looks of Alfred E. Neuman.

Still, he was a Green Street Boy, and initiation into the Green Street Boys was renewed annually. Today was Frank’s turn. An hour earlier, he’d drunk a quart of Pepsi. Now, as the overhead roar of a plane approaching Midway Airport provided cover, he pulled aside the loose lattice work beneath Old Man Finnegan’s front porch and quietly squeezed under, being careful not to bump his head on the wood above. Taking a long leak under Old Man Finnegan’s porch was the first step in the initiation process.

Erik, Eddie, and Pete, the other Green Street Boys, hid behind parked cars in front of the Clements’ house, across the street from Old Man Finnegan’s, keeping watch.

Old Man Finnegan was the neighborhood grouch, a widower with all the charm of a soiled sock. Rumor had it he parked a shotgun just inside his front door and wouldn’t hesitate to use it on trespassers caught desecrating his property. Taking a long leak under his porch was akin to tango dancing through a minefield, and each of the Green Street Boys had imagined emerging from under the porch to find Old Man Finnegan in his flannel shirt, greasy jeans, and dirty red suspenders aiming that shotgun directly at him.

After a minute, Frank rolled out from under the porch grinning and ran toward the others. They ran back across the street and climbed onto the Pedersens’ porch, where the Green Street Boys hung out on summer days.

“I feel ten thousand times better,” Frank said.

Everybody had a front porch, a place to escape the summer heat. Nobody had air conditioning—unless you were some hoity-toity on the Magnificent Mile or in a mansion on the North Shore. Green Street had front porches, God’s air conditioning, and though adults ruled their porches after supper, the Pedersen porch belonged to the Green Street Boys during summer days.

The Green Street Boys didn’t have a hierarchy, but by virtue of meeting on his front porch, the club belonged to Erik Pedersen. Erik split summer vacation between the front porch and the treehouse his father Magnus had built in the three-pronged fork of a backyard maple. Magnus had secured a section of discarded plywood from the alley behind the house to serve as a platform and had nailed steps cut from a two-by-four to the side of the tree. A pail on a pulley held whatever Erik was reading at the time—biographies of heroic figures like Daniel Boone or Robin Hood, a Sherlock Holmes mystery from the local public library, the latest edition of Marvel comics, or a smuggled Mad magazine. The treehouse was for reading and spying, and on his plywood perch, leaning against the thick branch of the maple and devoted to whatever the pail held, Erik visited other worlds. On most summer days he would ascend and wait for his father to come home from work—unless the porch called to him for a Green Street Boys adventure. The Pedersen porch was not very big, just large enough for hanging out and observing. This afternoon it was full of the Green Street Boys.

After they’d caught their breath, Pete said, “You know what comes next, Francis.”

Frank squirmed as Pete pulled a jackknife out of his pants pocket. They all held out their middle fingers. Pete pricked Erik and Eddie’s fingers, and Frank stuck his middle finger up, flipping the others off.

“I don’t wanna,” he said.

“You’re such a little girl,” Pete said.

“I am not,” Frank said.

“C’mon, Frank, we’re bleeding here.”

“Stand still,” Pete said as he grabbed Frank’s hand and cut his finger. Frank almost started to cry, but held it together as Pete then cut open his own finger. The Green Street Boys stuck their fingers together. They were blood brothers for another summer.

“What are we going to do now?” Frank asked, sucking the blood off his finger.

“Game of war,” Pete said. A Dutch immigrant who looked old beyond his years, Pete Koning was the biggest and strongest of the bunch. “Followed by knucks. How ‘bout it?”

Their games were often brought to a manly conclusion by knucks. Losers made a fist, extended their arm, and the winner got to whack the others’ knuckles with the edge of a full deck of cards, as hard as the winner could muster. The first to bleed was the Big-Time All-Star Girlie Loser. Frank hated knucks.

“I don’t wanna play knucks,” Frank said.

“Well I do, Francis A. Sissy,” Pete said.

“Not today,” Erik said. “It’s already amazing we got this far without Frank crying. Knucks would be too much. My mom’s inside and she’d hear him and then I’d have too much explaining to do.”

“I don’t cry,” Frank said. “Quit making things up.”

“You do too!” Eddie Medema said. A slim kid who knew how to leverage his stroke, Eddie was the most forceful knucker among the Green Street Boys. “You cry more than Annette ever has. You almost cried just now when Pete cut your finger. I saw your lip quivering.”

“It was not!” Frank said.

“It’s a miracle you didn’t wet your pants at Finnegan’s,” Eddie said.

“It’s a miracle he went to Finnegan’s,” Pete said. Pete rose, looked at Eddie and Erik and said, “Maybe we should just take turns punching Frank.”

“Stop picking on me.” Frank screwed up his face, tightened his lips, clenched his fists, searched for just the right words, and raised his whiny voice. “Shut up, N—–.” he shouted.

Erik looked at Pete. Pete looked at Eddie. All three then stared at Frank with open mouths, stunned.

“What did you say?”

“You heard me.”

Cursing was one thing, reserved for special occasions far from parental earshot, but a word like this crossed the boundaries of swearing, the norms that governed what did or did not give offense. This was a weapon. Most of the swearwords in the Boys’ vocabulary brought them together. They were words friends said for a thrill, for laughter, or daring. This was different.

The n-word had never been spoken by any of the Green Street Boys—although all the boys heard it from adults when they weren’t supposed to be listening. They knew the word was demeaning and belittling, yet they never threw it at each other. They had other words that did the job. This one carried power way beyond the normal names they called each other: Erik was “Bones” because he was skinny, “Schnozz” stuck to Pete because of his bent, large nose, and Eddie was “Bucky” because of his teeth. But this word stunned. It was meant to mark someone as less than human. They felt it.

“Got your attention, didn’t I?” Frank said. “I’m sick of being the big joke all the time. Sick of it. Enough’s enough.” He stomped his foot, sniveled, hitched up his sagging jeans, and marched down the stairs, heading home. He didn’t look back.

A stronger word didn’t exist in their neighborhood. It was part of the glossary of the neighborhood, a tool of division, an emblem of hate, and one of their own had introduced it among the Green Street Boys.

***

Most people in Englewood, as in many Chicago neighborhoods, sought refuge on their porches at night because it brought a sense of calm to the surroundings, a still, enduring center for an increasingly confusing and tense world. The neighborhood noise of the day quieted and gathering in view of your neighbors seemed the most natural thing to do. It was a place and time to check in with each other to see what the day had delivered.

You could almost predict what would be said, and by whom, on the front porches of Englewood. A few years earlier, during the summer of 1959, when the White Sox took the pennant and Nellie Fox and Luis Aparicio were instant celebrities, housewives ventured their opinions about the chances for a World Series without regard to their husbands’ heavily researched predictions. The night the Hitless Wonders beat Cleveland to reach the World Series everyone on Green Street sat on their front porches with their radios tuned in and turned up in unison. Anyone standing in the middle of the street could have clearly heard the play-by-play. Between innings, Green Street echoed with the familiar drumbeat of the Hamm’s Beer commercial: “From the land of sky blue waters.” When the last batter hit a ground ball to Aparicio, who then stepped on second and started a double play, there was cheering and shouting, followed by the noise of the fire sirens Commissioner Quinn had ordered alive. That summer, the summer of 1959, the White Sox were the talk of every porch on Chicago’s South Side.

This summer, the summer of 1962, was different. This was the summer of the n-word. It was spoken often, not only on Green Street, but throughout Englewood, and not just by Frank Bertolli.