One Aspect of my Character that Went a long Way with my Mother (to which she was loyal) was that, virtually from the Beginning, I was the Opposite of whatever a Bully is...

She often told me, throughout my later childhood, of an incident which had occurred when I was a two-year-old: when a small mob of coeval tiny tots had selected a victim among us and were clubbing him with wooden alphabet blocks, "with tears in your little eyes,  you snatched the blocks out of their hands and pushed them them far back under the bed out of their reach."  Though my mother often described the scene to me, I don't remember it (though I do distinctly recall those wooden blocks).

But a similar incident in first grade I remember as of it were yesterday.  If I close my eyes, I can still smell the six-year-old Glenn Sky-Eagle:  part wood smoke (from where he lived), part piss, and the part that was just him and was as delicious as the smell of rain or puppies. Glenn should not have been placed in the first grade yet--certainly not in an all-white grade school, where he barely understood the language.  In the context of first grade, he both embarrassed and captivated me, and I would probably, ordinarily, have just left him alone--but I came out at one late morning recess and found Glenn, in tears, surrounded by a bullying mob of my classmates, who were hitting him and viciously taunting him--and furiously I charged them all together, fists and feet flying, even rock-throwing, and utterly routed all of them; leaving Glenn and me at the end alone together on a little hill with our arms around one another, and even, briefly, kissing one another.  Standing there, too, was mean old Mrs. Cooper, our first-grade teacher, whose anger and whose corporal punishment we all feared, and she, of all people, was telling me that I had done well in defending Glenn, and that the children who had been bullying him were "savage little beasts."  The next day I was standing in my mother's post office (she was post master) when Don Sky-Eagle (Glenn's father) came in and stood leaning through the Guichet, and thanked me, thanked my mother, thanked God for my championing his son.  Leaving little to say--but if I could have found the words, they would have been something like, "I love Glenn because he is a beautiful little boy who smells like piss and wood smoke and puppies."

Curiously, one thing that I have the clearest memory of is the expression on the faces of the bulliers when, in smug, mid-perpetration of what they knew to be evil, they confronted, in me, the avenging berserker: anger, then shock, then doubt, then fear.  Over and over again.  And I acknowledge that that, from being in a supposed state of exhalted fury, is an incredible lot to remember--but I do.