BY KRISTA RAMSEY The Cincinnati Enquirer Nakeem Williams and Paul Cocco should not, by the world's rules, ever have become friends. For one thing, Nakeem likes Nintendo and plays football, and Paul likes Star Wars and plays soccer. For 8-year-olds, these are very divisive things. There are other matters that would separate the boys. Things like race and neighborhood and income, issues that take them into the big people's world and put them face to face with how life really works in America. Nakeem is black and lives in the West End. Paul is white and lives in Sharonville. The twain do not meet. Hardly ever. So when you hear about Nakeem and Paul's best-friendship, it will be easy to dismiss it as a simple, sweet story about brotherhood and cute kid stuff. Actually, there is nothing very simple about this story. And forget the brotherhood thing. Paul and Nakeem get along a whole lot better than most brothers. But the sweet part we'll let stand.
Fast friendsIt all started in kindergarten. Nakeem and Paul entered Sharonville Elementary School, two very smart boys from two very different backgrounds. Nakeem was living with his aunt, his own family forced apart by difficult circumstances. Paul comes from a family so nuclear it looks like a Crest ad.Nakeem remembers the early days. ''Every day when we played at recess - inside or outside - Paul would ask me if I wanted to play, and I'd say yes.'' From such dialogue, things were bound to progress quickly. The boys started building things. Houses, bridges, and soon a relationship. By first grade, they were inseparable. ''In my room, they do festival seating - you sit where you want. They would always sit together, and it was clear on the playground that they would be together,'' says their teacher, Louise Lawrence. It sounds so easy. Yet Mrs. Lawrence, a veteran teacher, knows that interracial friendships don't always take hold. ''Sharonville School still has so few blacks - to have these two children bond like that was wonderful,'' she says. ''I've been there so many years, and I've watched children dealing with ingrained prejudice. To watch it all come to this kind of friendship was incredible.'' And then one day Nakeem had news. He was moving to the West End, happy to be with his mother, but very sad to be leaving Paul. ''When I told Paul, he looked like he was about to cry,'' Nakeem remembers. ''He gave me the biggest hug he ever gave me.''
Bridging barriersAt seven, the boys were about to learn a disappointing little lesson: Real life doesn't have festival seating. You can't always sit with whom you'd like.So it could have been the end. Two buddies, once inseparable, now parted by lines that never show up on a map. Then one night, Nakeem woke up with a phone number flashing through his head. Paul's number. He called the next day. From that point, Carla Cocco took over. Paul's mother was not about to see her son lose a great friend. So she started her own shuttle, a Sharonville to West End express. Pick Nakeem up for play, dinner, an overnight. Drop him back to his mother Bridgette Williams, who encouraged the friendship as well. It has gone on for months now, capped off earlier this month by a birthday party for Nakeem. The Coccos' gift was a desk that had been in Carla's family for three generations. Nakeem knows what it means: He is part of the family as well. So maybe the story is about brotherhood after all. And maybe these things are simpler than we think. Paul Cocco thinks so. In first grade, he wrote this birthday card for the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.: Dear Dr. King, Good thing you wer a sivol rights ledrer because my friend Nakeem is black and I am white so we wouldn't go to school together if you wern't born. And your dream is still working! Ispsholy in our school!'' Krista Ramsey's column appears on Saturdays. Write her at the Enquirer, 312 Elm St. Cincinnati 45202.
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