THE PILGRIM GIRL

It's Thanksgiving Day 1970 in Roselle, NJ. Our family just moved here from Brooklyn, NY a few months ago. I look out the second floor window - and gasp in a combination of disbelief and - horror!

"Ma...Ma! C'mere for a minute! Just a minute...ya GOTTA see this..."

She comes over as we both stare out the window. The girl across the street...she's dressed as a Pilgrim. Yeah -  a PILGRIM. Swear to God! Not only is she dressed as a Pilgrim - she's carrying a wicker basket full of corn and pumpkin gourds - and is making her rounds to the neighbors!

"What the hell?!"

 I mean, I have no frame of reference for this kind of behavior...no context. And I'm only barely 10 years old. Even my mother is kind of flabbergasted, although she tries to look for the silver lining in the situation.

I mean - this is 1970, for crissakes! The Vietnam War is still raging! Protesters are still marching! American flags are still being burned! There's still hippies - and maybe most important - the seething racial tensions that have erupted into riots pretty much all over the country. They were particularly rough in Brooklyn the last couple of years. That's one of the reasons we left our Italian neighborhood there, and moved out here. My aunt and uncle and cousins came here the year before - and we followed - right over the Verrazano Bridge.

Roselle is only like 19 or 20 miles from our Brooklyn neighborhood, but it might as well be another civilization, y'know? It's like the 1940's here, or something...I don't know how that could even possibly be since we're surrounded by ghetto towns. Newark, Elizabeth, Rahway...the Negro lawn jockey in front of this house on the drive over here from Brooklyn...man, that's the first thing that freaks me out - now a Pilgrim girl?!

Her name is Prudence Fink, she lives right next door to my cousins across the street, she's got this bright red hair and two inch thick glasses - and apparently, she's been doing this for years! I am speechless...it's beyond my ability to understand.

Now, fast forward to Thanksgiving Day 1972 - Prudence is outside her house once again dressed in her Pilgrim finery, ready to make her appointed rounds...suddenly a group of black girls surround her from out of nowhere.

"Shit bitch - you ain't even no mo'fucking Pilgrim!"

With that, they begin jostling her between them, finally pushing her down on the lawn - and her face in the semi-mud. Change was coming to Roselle, New Jersey