uninured

"There on the pavement these inexpert children of a pacific age, untrained in arms and uninured to violence, abandoned themselves to amateurish and absurd efforts to hurt and injure one another--of which the most palpable consequences were dusty backs, ruffled hair and torn and twisted collars."

His North American body recalls the degradation of grown white men's spittle aimed for him, and the insulting reach, in the Catholic North Bronx primary school he attended, of first-generation Italian-American children's hands into his hair, to determine if, as so many of them suspected, that hair really did feel "like Brillo," like steel wool: misfortunes--in truth humiliations--with which his Jamaican immigrant parents could little assist him, uninured as they were, unlike more seasoned African Americans, to the capricious landscape.