Problematic Childhood Games part 4: Hobos

(alternate title: At Least We Played White People This Time)

I’m not sure exactly where this game originated, but as kids we really enjoyed pretending to be homeless.

We never actually played this game outside of a home, of course – being outside at night is scary and dangerous, even in a town like Franklin where no one locks their doors and the biggest crime is some local teens trying (unsuccessfully) to hold up the old woman running the pizza place next to the convenience store. Oh, what sheltered lives we led as children.

Attire was “Hobo Chic”; layers upon layers of the clothes in my dress-up box. A mixture of old Halloween costumes, vintage squaredancing skirts and petticoats given to me by my grandmother (which I definitely should’ve taken better care of, I’m sure they’d be worth something now), and outfits from my many years of membership to a competitive dance team. Our food was the plastic hamburgers and hotdogs from my younger brother’s Fisher-Price My First Grill Set.

Armed with plastic food and ridiculous outfits, we would spend the night huddled together in a tiny Barbie popup tent on the floor of my unfinished basement. Since we’d spent so much of our lives sleeping underneath bridges and traveling by boxcar, we couldn’t read or write, and spoke with exaggerated southern accents.

One Hobos storyline I remember quite clearly is that of my friend from across the street in my neighborhood, Marie*. I was friendly with Marie and enjoyed spending time with her when my regular group wasn’t around, but she became a nuisance when she was invited to one of our sleepovers. She wasn’t part of the sacred inner circle.

I couldn’t not invite her to my sleepovers – she lived across the street! She might notice all the cars pulling up to my house and realize she was left out, and get mad at me and stop inviting me over to play computer games! Or worse…she might tell her mom, and then her mom would call my mom, and then I would be in trouble!

This is all to say that I had to invite Marie to my parties, even though none of us really wanted her there, and since we weren’t going to just abandon our games, we had to work her in as a character in a way that wouldn’t disrupt the storyline we’d so carefully outlined. She needed to be easily written out, but still add something to the plot of the game to maintain its quality.

So it was decided that Marie would play a kindhearted rich girl who discovered us Hobos living in the woods behind her family’s estate. She took it upon herself to teach us the ways of haute society, bringing us food, toys, and books that she took from her own collection. Marie was a proponent of the American Dream, assuring us that if we’d just pick ourselves up by our bootstraps, we could learn to read and write and eventually enroll in school.

But, of course, we wouldn’t have it.

Well, most of us wouldn’t. At a certain point, my friend Mary* was so inspired by Marie’s teachings that she decided to be adopted by her rich family.

(I should mention that this development was probably, in reality, made because Mary was tired and wanted to go to sleep, and this would make it easier to write her out of this part of the game. Mary was always the first to fall asleep at sleepovers. Like, she’d go to bed before 5 in the morning. Lame.)

The rest of us vehemently denied any luxuries presented to us by Marie, choosing instead to adhere to our Hobo roots and stay homeless and stupid. There’s a certain nobility in poverty. Especially when you’re just pretending to have no money and no education, and know that there’s no real threat to your own socioeconomic status in the real world.

I don’t have a desperate plea for forgiveness from judgment for this game. I’m guessing there aren’t any hobos reading this right now, since it’s not the Dust Bowl.

If you are a hobo and you’re reading this, first of all, congratulations on finding your way to my little corner of the Internet! I sincerely apologize for appropriating your culture as a child. Also, great job on the time-traveling from 1925 thing. Now, go ride those rails to a better life!

 
*names have been changed for privacy, yadda yadda yadda.

Problematic Childhood Games Part 3: Native Americans

Personally, I remember playing this game more often with the kids that lived in my neighborhood than I did with my core group of girlfriends back in the day, but it bears mentioning in the ongoing Problematic Childhood Games series. Here we go.

As members of the First Peoples, we would spend most of our time gathering branches, leaves, rocks, acorns, and dandelions from our backyards. Mud pies were our main source of sustenance. Well, that, and Goldfish crackers.

Not much play-hunting was done, as we didn’t have any historically accurate weapons (Nerf guns were not acceptable. The Native Americans didn’t receive ammunition until after the white settlers arrived on their land, and our game was pre-settlement), and there wasn’t much wildlife that we could go after.

Slight digression: I did spend a lot of time with my friend Beth, running around in my front yard, trying to grab robins, but we were never successful. Which was probably fortunate. What would we have done if we caught one?

Anyhow, the one form of hunting we could simulate to a certain degree was fishing. We’d stand on the cinderblock fence that overlooked the wooded area behind our neighborhood and use sticks to pierce through dead leaves on the ground beneath us.

At the end of the “day” (whenever we got tired of moving around) we’d retire to the top of a swingset or underneath someone’s deck, which served as our longhouse.

Yes, longhouse, not teepee. Any John F. Kennedy Elementary School graduate worth their salt knows that teepees were mainly used by the nomadic tribes of the midwest and southeast, whereas those from the northeast lived in longhouses. They offered more warmth in winter. Sure, it was all fun and games, running through backyards gathering weeds and throwing them at each other, but the heart of all our games was fact. Historical accuracy was of utmost importance to us when playing as a race to which we did not belong.

Again, I must stress the regret and embarrassment I feel looking back on games such as this. It trivializes the lives of millions of people whose land was stolen from them by, realistically, more than a few of the ancestors of my friends.

Not mine, though – it’s my understanding that my people, at least on my dad’s side, immigrated to the US from Italy in the 1930s. You’d have to ask my mom about her heritage; I know we’re Portuguese and Polish, but I’m not certain when exactly we became Americans. I should ask her myself.

But I will also stress that we were children. We meant this game in the most innocent way possible. We were young and uninformed, and it seemed cool to live in the wilderness.

Final remarks: we did participate in a school play about Native Americans in second grade, where we all dressed up in Pocahontas-style outfits (if I remember correctly, my mother made my dress, hat, and poncho from scratch. Emphasis on the scratch – I’m pretty sure the poncho was made from a potato sack dragged through poison ivy) and sang Colors of the Wind while acting out various whitewashed, watered-down scenes in which the natives taught the European settlers how to plant corn and skin rabbits and no one got smallpox. This was a school-sanctioned event, and looking back, it was not okay. We were 8 years old, we didn’t really know it was racist, but surely someone did! A bunch of white children wearing headdresses and singing songs from a historically-inaccurate Disney movie? That shouldn’t fly, and I’m sure it wouldn’t today.

I wonder what play the second-graders at JFK put on these days….

 

Problematic Childhood Games Part 2: Underground Railroad

In school we learned about slavery, as most youngsters do, in a completely watered-down way. Our unit on slavery mostly ignored the unsavory fact that Americans brought and sold other human beings to do hard labor for no pay. Instead, our (white) teachers focused on teaching their (white) students about the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation by Abraham Lincoln, and the courageous acts of antislavery activists like Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman.

Unsurprisingly, the story that was most fascinating to my group of friends was that of Harriet Tubman. She was a woman, which we liked, and a badass woman to boot – she risked her life to help slaves flee from the South to the North. And she made this trip, like, thirteen times. The story of this woman running by nightfall through forests and fields, and hiding by day in basements, sheds, and attics, is still inspiring today. But as kids, given our penchant for dramatic games hinged on suffering, this tale of adventure and danger was ideal for us to adapt into a fictional world to live in.

The structure of Underground Railroad was similar to Holocaust, except that it was played mostly outdoors. There was a large open space behind Kelsey’s house, a place we called The Field. It was sparsely populated with grass and plants, and surrounded by a wooded area with walking trails.

The Field was the perfect environment for pretending to cross state lines, evading our evil owners. We’d wander around in the grass and walk along the trails, singing “Follow the Drinking Gourd” and other slave songs we’d learned in music class.

DISCUSSION QUESTION: Was it appropriate for a white music teacher to teach 20 white children songs that originated from enslaved African Americans? I say nay. But it was the early 2000s. Cultural appropriation was, apparently, still okay if it was “educational”. 

When we decided it was “day”, we’d hide either in Kelsey’s basement or in The Hut, a small shed that our friend Elizabeth’s* parents had built for her older brothers to hang out in. I can only imagine what went on when they were there. Wouldn’t want to take a blacklight to that room, if you’re hip to the groove I’m slicing. But the boys were almost never home during the day, so The Hut, complete with a bare mattress and an old couch, worked perfectly well as a hideout spot to wait out the day until we could return to the Railroad once night fell.

AUTHOR’S NOTE: I fully, completely acknowledge that this game was particularly culturally insensitive. We didn’t know any better as eight-year-olds; this isn’t an excuse, but it’s the truth. We were just processing history the best way we knew how: by inhabiting it. Admittedly we weren’t exactly taught the whole story, so we ran with what we had. We were, literally, minimizing the plight and suffering of black slaves in this country’s early history, suffering that our ancestors may have caused. It’s super embarrassing for me to think about now that I’m an adult with, like, knowledge of the world. But this is intended as a comedic story about my weird childhood, so I implore you to take it as such.

*I changed some of the names here because I don’t talk to most of my old friends from elementary/middle school anymore so I don’t want to use their real names without their explicit permission.

Problematic Childhood Games Part 1: Holocaust

No, I’m not clickbaiting you. My friends and I literally played Holocaust as kids. I know. I fully know. I took a class on Holocaust literature last year. I completely understand the offensive nature of this. But we meant no harm by it – it was our way of processing history.

We didn’t, like, pretend to systematically imprison and murder six million people. But it still wasn’t all that fantastic of a premise for a game that a group of eight-year-olds would play. I’m actually kind of surprised that our parents let us do this. Maybe they weren’t aware of what exactly this game was based on? I don’t think we ever came out and said it, we just agreed that the universe was 1940s Germany and the game was Holocaust Children.

Holocaust was mostly played in my friend Kelsey’s basement, because until we were in middle school it was unfinished and, quite frankly, contained all the amenities of a basement where Jewish families would hide from the Gestapo. The only light came from bare bulbs hanging from the ceiling, and the room was freezing cold no matter what the season. The floor was concrete and there were exposed wooden beams on the walls and ceiling. It wasn’t uncommon to find a stray nail or tack on the floor.

(I remember my friend Michelle* stepped on a tack while barefoot one time. We all freaked out and she cried. Kelsey’s mother just pulled the tack out of Michelle’s heel without missing a beat. Moms truly have nerves of steel.)

Other notable features of Kelsey’s basement included:

• A child-sized metal bedframe with only a boxspring on top of it.
• An old wooden desk with drawers full of broken crayons, old pencil nubs, and other odds and ends.
• A small, unlit cupboard under the stairs that was used to store sleeping bags and blankets.

You can see how this served as the perfect environment to simulate the harsh living conditions of Jews in fear of being taken to death camps by Nazis. We’d spend afternoons whispering to each other about how we might get caught, pretending to teach each other how to write and do math using the aforementioned broken crayons and pencil nubs. Our self-schooling was, of course, periodically interrupted by searches, during which we’d huddle in the understairs cupboard. We never actually got caught – pretending to be shipped on trains to Auschwitz was too depressing a concept even for us.

As the representative half-Jew in the group, I feel I should have objected to this game in the name of the Torah or something. But it was fun to pretend, and I think in our weird, creepy, not-politically-correct childhood way, we played Holocaust to teach ourselves about the history of World War II as we understood it. We didn’t understand military tactics or know the timeline of Hitler’s rise to power, but we did feel empathy for the kids who had to suffer through this horrible tragedy. So we processed this empathy the only way we knew how: by dramatically reenacting it during after-school playdates.

And anyway, the Jews are on my dad’s half of the family, and although I inherited the ridiculous curly hair and the stereotypical last name, I’m not technically authorized to come to the defense of the chosen people as a member of their club.

*Names have been changed because, yanno, privacy.

Playing Pretend

I owe a lot of my creative abilities to playing pretend as a kid with my friends. And I don’t just mean princess tea parties and acting out family drama with Barbie dolls, although we certainly did those things.

Some of the games we played were based on actual historical events (I’ll get to that later), but many of them were completely original, invented by our collective minds. We called them “games”, but they were fully fleshed out alternate universes, where we all played very specific characters with roles in the world’s vast backstory.

It sounds like I’m giving a lot more credit than should be due to a group of ten-year-old girls pretending to be slightly different ten-year-old girls, but we were intensely serious about games. Like, way more than we should have been. Sleepovers and playdates weren’t just for gossip and hair-braiding, they were workshops in improv acting, storytelling, and character building. We’d decide from our wide variety of games which one to play, and then spend hours living in that reality. Every word and action adhered as steadfastly as possible to the story we’d laid out.

There were, of course, always breaks in the fourth wall during a game. In the event of a necessary venture back into reality, the three magic words must be uttered in order to pause pretend time and return to Earth:

“CUT THE GAME!”

If anyone cut the game for any reason, be it a sibling or neighbor wanting to join, a parent calling us inside for pizza, someone’s mom arriving to pick her up, or just a general snag in the storyline that needed ironing out, we all stopped what we were doing and came together as friends to resolve the issue.

If you forgot to officially cut the game before suggesting a new character or asking where the bathroom is, you might face the arduous task of talking to someone who didn’t understand what you were saying, because you were speaking English, and, duh, no one speaks English in the land of Roath.

So starts the first entry of my “Playing Pretend” series. I’ll explain the games we played regularly, right up until the group broke up after we started high school. Some of them, as you’ll see, have not aged well in terms of what’s acceptable by today’s societal and cultural standards; for example, one of our favorite games involved pretending to be children orphaned by the Holocaust. But I’ll do my best to explain their innocent nature without sounding like I’m trying to make excuses for our ignorance. But, yanno, we were just kids, so try not to judge too harshly.