Doc said "make be'taint! make be'taint" twice. He was mocking my nasal accent and mixing it low with his Alabama drawl. I'd said "make pretend" and I still don't understand the shift nor do I understand how fire crackers became "fino clacknums" but we played a lot with words and accents and it was fun to make up our own secret sounds that meant something only we understood.
Doc was a smart kid – as were Linell & John Lee. And these three sons of a sharecropper named Jonesy, wife Pearl Bridges, nickname "Coon" for raccoon because she was wily and smart, all showed up in a bunch in what we called one side of then two "Front Houses." Those young boys were my age & Black, and for two or three years or maybe my whole life they were my best friends until unseen forces tore us apart or maybe we just got separated by Race.
