Someone hollered after Reggie but he was burning sneaker-rubber all the way down Virginia Park, towards Woodward. The underarms of his green shirt were damp with sweat. In his peripheral vision: houses, tall trees, and cars parked in driveways and at curbside blurred into abstraction as the backdrop of a film starring himself: a 16-year-old track star from Detroit, Michigan.
His body and brain pulsating with youthful enthusiasm, Reggie was full of electricity and music, cheeseburgers, and newly sprung ideals. Something inside of him awoke as he watched the Games of the XIX Olympiad on television. When the throngs of young athletes entered the coliseum in Mexico City, brandishing their bright flags from countries such as France, Australia, Brazil, Kenya, Japan, the Soviet Union, and Greece, that energy ripped a tear in the fabric of his life. He felt pride and physical power. It seemed he could smell possibility in the air. He felt he could burst through the gate of his solitude, grab the gaggle of alphabets and streams of words floating around in his mind, and, running, form a banner of syntax that waved in the wind behind him, there, for anyone to see: I AM REGGIE DOMINICS: AFRO-AMERICAN HERO. RIGHT-ON!
He would, from here-on-out, become VISIBLE. Unlike the young people who sat-in at Woolworth counters in North Carolina; or those who braved the walk through crowds of hateful whites who shouted nigger! at them in Alabama and Mississippi; and unlike the children whose parents prayed hard to Jesus for their protection while they were herded into paddy wagons and locked in jails. Reggie was not one of the young men and women who mobilized themselves to study, to strategize, to push forward into the wilderness of their righteous imaginations; known popularly by their signature black leather revolutionary gear and defiant sunglasses, the prospect of destabilizing the current political system brick by brick filling them with purpose and zeal. They were the ones inspired by a dream of planting new gardens full of the ripening flowers and foods to feed a nation the blossoms of justice, dignity, and hope. They were the ones who would yank their bodies from the long lineage of oppression, a-righting themselves and their families to a place of power and love.
No, Reggie was not one of these. He was a regular boy just trying to grow up. A regular, good-natured boy who was reasonably smart and rather silly. A medium brown boy who wore a reddish natural that he spent twenty minutes each day picking-out to perfection. A boy with a cleft in his chin. A boy with slightly protruding front teeth. A boy with one married sister and another determinedly putting herself through studies at Wayne State University. A boy whose Life-LOOK-and-Ebony-magazines-reading mother was thoughtful and pretty. A boy whose father was mostly quiet. Reggie Dominics was a boy who liked the movie “The Day The Earth Stood Still”, and occasionally, he would knock on the door to visit Mr. Nicolas “Saint” Sams, who collected Marvel comics and spent time archiving articles of note from magazines and the Detroit News and Detroit Free Press.
