“Is Jimifin’s friend brown?”

“Is Jimifin’s friend brown?”

I was in the middle of telling the boys a story before bed last night. The Chronicles of Jimifin have been around since I was bedding down my daughters in the early 2000’s. His younger sister is Jennifin, for obvious reasons.  His deceased grandpa, Pappy Johnifin…and so on.  When creating a make-believe world, you get to name everything…Whatever. You. Want. 

Brucccccce (with a whistle every time my teeth come together to pronounce the ‘c’ in his name) is Jimifin’s best friend who lives down the road in a single-wide trailer with his single mom.  His dad is someone in the area, but he hasn’t seen him for a while.  Sometimes he shows up for one of his little league games or makes an appearance at a birthday party, but there’s no telling when he’ll drop in.  Bruce is fighting up stream, but you wouldn’t know it to look at him.  He’s more emotionally adjusted and mature than Jimifin in many ways, despite Jimifin’s loving family, probably because he’s been forced to grow up faster.  But that’s another story for another day.

As I was talking about how Jimifin and Bru‘c’e were engaged in another one of their adventures (I think they were both trying to dig a groundhog out of his hole with a spade shovel so they could kill it with their jackknives), Caleb stopped me mid-sentence and said, “Dad, is Jimifin’s friend brown?”

I was somewhat stunned, because in my mind, he wasn’t. He looked like my childhood friend Art, slender with thick dirty brown hair from Horseheads, N.Y. who was independent and confident due to raising himself for the most part.  He was free-spirited and good at about anything he tried.  But he was not black.  He was not even brown.  He was whiter than Jimifin actually, cause Jimifin was tan with a Spanish heritage, like me.

“Yep, how did you know?” I was talking without thinking at this point. When you’re making something up in the first place, can you lie about a fantasy?

“Well, that’s just how I picture him in my mind.  I though he was probably black.” He reclined back against his pillow and gestured for me to keep going with the story.

I had a hard time picking back up where I left off.

Everything in my brain had to change Bru‘c’e from the character that was branded into my brain from the years of telling Jimifin stories to my ‘white’ girls, to rebooting the character into a 10-year old African-American boy living with his single mom as an only child.  This will change things.  But I’m not sure they don’t need to change, not just in this bedtime story, but in my inner story.  I have shift my mindset with my boys.  I can’t just reheat leftovers from my daughter’s upbringing.  I am, of course, raising boys this go around, not girls, who are very clearly brown and not white.  There are other distinctions, but these have clearly surfaced early in the Chronicles of Jimifin to be game-changing considerations as I use my imagination to form storylines that connect to their storyline, teaching them life principles and awakening their little souls to dream.

So as hard as it is to “change my mind” about Jimifin’s best friend, Bru‘c’e, I have to for their sake and for mine.  It isn’t the first thing I’ve had to re-think, and Lord knows, it won’t be the last.