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When I was seven years old, my mother had been dating her new boyfriend, Abel, for a year
maybe, but at that point I was too young to know who they were to each other. It was just
“Hey, that’s mom’s friend who’s around a lot.” I liked Abel; he was a really nice guy.
As a black person back then, if you wanted to live in the suburbs you’d have to find a
white family renting out their servants’ quarters or sometimes their garage, which was what
Abel had done. He lived in a neighborhood called Orange Grove in a white family’s garage,
which he’d turned into a cottage-type thing with a hot plate and a bed. Sometimes he’d come
and sleep at our house, and sometimes we’d go stay with him. Staying in a garage when we
owned our own house wasn’t ideal, but Orange Grove was close to my school and my mom’s
work so it had its benefits.
This white family also had a black maid who lived in the servants’ quarters in the
backyard, and I’d play with her son whenever we stayed there. At that age my love of fire was
in full bloom. One afternoon everyone was at work—my mom and Abel and both of the white
parents—and the kid and I were playing together while his mom was inside the house
cleaning. One thing I loved doing at the time was using a magnifying glass to burn my name
into pieces of wood. You had to aim the lens and get the focus just right and then you got the
flame and then you moved it slowly and you could burn shapes and letters and patterns. I was
fascinated by it.
That afternoon I was teaching this kid how to do it. We were inside the servants’
quarters, which was really more of a toolshed added on to the back of the house, full of
wooden ladders, buckets of old paint, turpentine. I had a box of matches with me, too—all my
usual fire-making tools. We were sitting on an old mattress that they used to sleep on the
floor, basically a sack stuffed with dried straw. The sun was beaming in through the window,
and I was showing the kid how to burn his name into a piece of plywood.
At one point we took a break to go get a snack. I set the magnifying glass and the
matches on the mattress and we left. When we came back a few minutes later we found the
shed had one of those doors that self-locks from the inside. We couldn’t get back in without
going to get his mother, so we decided to run around and play in the yard. After a while I
noticed smoke coming out of the cracks in the window frame. I ran over and looked inside. A
small fire was burning in the middle of the straw mattress where we’d left the matches and
the magnifying glass. We ran and called the maid. She came, but she didn’t know what to do.
The door was locked, and before we could figure out how to get into the shed the whole thing
caught—the mattress, the ladders, the paint, the turpentine, everything.
The flames moved quickly. Soon the roof was on fire, and from there the blaze spread to
the main house, and the whole thing burned and burned and burned. Smoke was billowing
into the sky. A neighbor had called the fire brigade, and the sirens were on their way. Me and
this kid and the maid, we ran out to the road and watched as the firemen tried to put it out,
but by the time they did, it was too late. There was nothing left but a charred brick-andmortar
shell, roof gone, and gutted from the inside.
The white family came home and stood on the street, staring at the ruins of their house.
They asked the maid what happened and she asked her son and the kid totally snitched.
“Trevor had matches,” he said. The family said nothing to me. I don’t think they knew what to
say. They were completely dumbfounded. They didn’t call the police, didn’t threaten to sue.
What were they going to do, arrest a seven-year-old for arson? And we were so poor you