The Colored Kid

Danny and Will run into each other at the local gin mill one night by chance. They haven’t seen one another for almost twenty-five years, since their days as high school classmates. They have a couple beers together, reminisce.

Danny tells Will he has some excellent weed back at his place, would Will like to go get high? Will hesitates, but accepts the invitation.

They drive together to a large MacMansion at the end of a long dark driveway. Danny gives Will a tour. And in one of the upstairs bedrooms, Danny shoves Will into a walk-in closet, slams the door, and throws a pair of dead bolts.

So begins The Colored Kid, an allegory for four hundred years of racial tension between the Europeans who settled in North America and the Africans they dragged here in chains.

Will’s a privileged white kid from the burbs. Danny’s a biracial kid (white mother, black father) who moves to town in the sixth grade. Tension exists between the boys from the get-go. Danny is an excellent athlete and soon steals some of Will’s thunder.

A series of events over the next four years exacerbates their growing hostility for one another. And then one late autumn night Danny’s parents’ house burns to the ground. Arson or an accident?

Danny eventually takes the blame, serves time in reform school for the blaze. But Danny insists he’s innocent. He thinks Will set the house on fire. And now, twenty-five years later, he intends to extract a confession from his old nemesis.

The truth is a hard case. A tough nut to crack. Especially when history, ego, machismo, and most of all race are all at work inside that walk-in closet.

Race relations—easily America’s thorniest, and most violent, social dilemma. The Colored Kid, using a very unique narrative construct, confronts it head on.