“Ohhh! I got one!” Darin said as he splashed in the creek bed. With both hands he tossed the dripping flat rock he was holding downstream where it was swallowed, gulped, by the chuckling brook. “Look, it’s a big one!”

While looking intently into the water at his feet, Darin suddenly raised an open palm and cried, “Don’t stir it up! We’ll lose it.”

Mik had begun to plod down through the creek but, realizing his mistake, got up on the bank. He crossed to where Darin was standing. “There it is,” Darin said, pointing a dark finger at something under the surface.

It was motionless, but Mik saw it there. “Let’s catch it,” he whispered, like it was some kind of great conspiracy.

“Don’t let it pinch you. That one’s big enough to hurt,” Darin said.

It was a crawfish, a very dark crawfish. “Ha,” Mik laughed, “It’s a nigga crawdad.”

“Hey, ya blue eyed devil, did ya ever see a cracker crawdad?” his friend said. Thus began the routine that had become, in one form or another, almost a ritual between them.

“There ain’t no white crawdads,” Mik said. “Only niggas in this stream it seems.”

Darin frowned with deep wrinkles in his forehead, “You’re not allowed to say that word, whitie. Now I’ve got to kick your ass.”

“Just a minute, partner” Mik said, holding up his hand with the stop motion. “Why can’t I say that word? You say it all the time. Dag, we can go up on the street and in less than five minutes some noisy ass car will go by with the singer singin’. ‘nigga, nigga, nigga!’”

“Doesn’t count,” Darin said, “that’s black music and black people are allowed to say nigga.”

“But what if it’s a white guy driving the car? Is he sayin’ nigga or is it the record artist sayin’ it?”

“Alls I know is that white people aren’t allowed to say ‘nigger,’” Darin retorted with an arch look.

“So I’m not allowed to say nigga because of the color of my skin? I have to be afraid to say something—because of the color of my skin?”

Darin smiled and they both said together, laughing, “. . . Isn’t that just exactly what black folks have been pissing and moaning about for the last couple hundred years?”

Darin and Mik met during a rainy day when they were both about 5 years old; they both lived on the fourth floor in the same building. Their parents weren’t real chummy with each other, sociable but not overly friendly. The two boys, however, found they had plenty to talk about, liked each other’s toys, didn’t mind sharing, and, in general, really hit it off. They’d been fast friends ever since.

“So when do you want to kick my ass?” Mik asked, grinning.

With a lightning move Darin reached down, splashing, and captured the crawdad. He laughed as he stood up, his catch in his hand. He chuckled and shrugged, “I’ll do it tomorrow—besides, we got bigger fish to fry, like what are we gonna do with this here nigga crawdad?”