Exonerating Jadesy Horn

In CHURCH SCHOOL BLUES, a character I named Jadesy Horn tries to befriend me and I am unable to respond to her overtures because by that time I have been bullied into a chain link fence of silence that I can't break out of.  About a month later, I decide that Jadesy wasn't sincere about wanting to be friends because she invited everyone in our class to her birthday party except me.  In the narrative I describe how each desk, save one, had a crisp white invitation envelope placed upon it.  It is a classic episode in the life of a kid who doesn't fit in.

Through the next six school years, I viewed Jadesy Horn skeptically because I believed that she had excluded me, and only me, from her birthday party in the 7th grade.  And we never became friends.

But while writing the story all these years later, something occurred to me for the first time.  I realized that I had blamed Jadesy Horn for something she may not have done.  For one thing, such a mean act didn't fit into the rest of Jadesy's personality in all the time I knew her.  This isn't something that I could have rationalized at the age of 11.  Such is the luxury of time passing.

Now I wondered, how do I know that Jadesy didn't place an invitation on my desk?  How do I know that it wasn't snatched away by one of the other kids whose personalities did fit the crime?  I don't know it.  I assumed, and it was a reasonable assumption at the time because so many people in my world at the time were cruel.  But I may have been wrong about Jadesy Horn.

I almost feel as though I owe her an apology for sticking with the perspective that I had at the time.  But CHURCH SCHOOL BLUES isn't Jadesy's story.  It is mine, with the feelings and perceptions that I had then.  Right or wrong.

It is moments like this that make writing from real life a unique experience.  The author must constantly decide whether to write the story as it was lived or to adjust it in light of future perspective.  In order to maintain the integrity of the story, I believe that the author who writes from life should avoid as much as possible the intrusion of the older, wiser self.

But I still feel a twinge of guilt about Jadesy Horn.