Peter Forberg

In elementary school, we’d often take field trips to Chicago, the big-city-far-away place that meant stuffing our labeled brown bag lunches into an industrial-sized green plastic bin and splitting into groups to explore places like the Art Institute, Field Museum, or Shedd Aquarium. If you were cool enough by charm or lucky enough by assigned seating, you could end up in the back seat, where an easy way to pass the time involved waving at the cars behind you from the window of the emergency exit door. Here we played rock-paper-scissors with commuters, fired fake guns at drowsy travelers, and begged for truckers to blow their horns. It is with this carelessness, this excitement, and this curiosity that children are allowed to engage the world and its inhabitants, fueled by an unbridled friendliness that can forget about the lack of make-believe in the real world. They’re allowed to be kids.

An especially rewarding moment for me was driving down the Dan Ryan behind a school bus and watching as kids on the bus armed themselves with finger guns, shooting at me as I tailed behind. I feigned death, clutching my chest, and, because buses drive slowly, moved into the next lane. The children, stunned at my participation, ran forward on the bus and reappeared at the side windows, now aiming their pistols into the open air. I played back, taking a few potshots, and then accelerated out of view.

Another day, a few months later, I found myself waiting in the deli line, ticket in hand, at the Jewel Osco in Woodlawn. This time, two kids sat in a shopping cart outfitted to be a racecar, with fake steering wheels mounted to the plastic seats. They swerved, leapt barriers, and avoided traffic. Soon, however, they noticed me, and, as the little boy said, “He’s white! It’s the police. Shoot him!” Again, I found myself in a duel, but, knowing my place, I let them gun me down and collapsed to the floor of the Jewel Osco, their mother appalled at my decision to take part in their game. But they laughed, and the little sister was happy to have been a good getaway driver.

In both cases, the children were black.

Now I find myself in a predominantly black country, knowing for the first time what it means to be stared down as I walk the streets at any time of day. Sometimes in Chicago, especially in places like ALDI or Jewel Osco, I’ll get a few looks, even a few comments, but ultimately, the people there know that they don’t live in a black country. My whiteness might be unwanted, but it isn’t surprising. Here, I am a surprise. In the same way that most of us students are surprises. Asian students are greeted with “Nihao” when entering into marketplaces, while I mostly just get asked for my country of origin. Still, most of the time, nothing is said. Instead, people do double-takes, point and stare, or take photographs. But not children.

Children are amazed by us. Recently, the lot of us (who are mostly not black) were packed into a bus and drove through the city as school was let out. Kids on buses screamed, opened windows, pointed, and laughed. Kids on the street stopped to take pictures. When walking down the street, kids in the backs of cars will follow us for as long as possible, moving in their seats to look out the back window and watch us disappear. At a concert, Nick held his phone out into the air, recording the stage. Little kids pulled at him, and one tried talking to me in French. “People will steal it,” he said. If we talk to them on the streets, as they will sometimes ask us how we are, every response, no matter how mundane, will be met with laughter.

And kids are on the streets. In a forthcoming post, I’ll talk about how this is often not a good thing, but for the kids who can choose to enter and leave the streets as they please, the city of Dakar is their’s for the taking. Growing up in a cul-de-sac, I knew the fun of having a big open space to claim for yourself, but there was a clear line of demarcation that separated the world of children from the world of adults. In Dakar, that line blurs. Children roam around concerts, hang out in stores, build soccer arenas in alleyways, town squares, and streets of sand. They hijack mopeds, heckle tourists, and play on the beach. They are wild, unbound, and hopeful. And so I relish their taunts and sideways glances; I look forward to the dropped jaws. I am amazed with how they are allowed to interact with this world, questioning and pointing and laughing and interrogating the things that pass them by, not allowed to go unnoticed though surely to soon be forgotten when a new mood moves in.