We were living at 32c Navy Homes, the World War II housing project built for enlisted men and their families, now rented as apartments to poor people, sprawled along the railroad tracks out at the edge of Pasco, Washington. Our dad was still with us. It was the late 1940’s. I was four or five and my brother Darrell two and a half years younger, so neither of us had started school.
It was Christmas time. Darrell and I had begun asking for scooters, toy gun sets, I don't know what all. There wasn't money for any of that, so each time we'd pestered Mom she'd tried to trim our expectations. Santa Claus must have been in the discussion somewhere, but that's not what I remember.
I remember one night when Mom was putting us to bed. Again, she was parrying our questions about Christmas. But Christmas was only a couple of days away, and this time I wouldn't let it go. I wailed "Look at our toybox!" Each time she tried to soothe me, I wailed "Look at our toybox!" again, shattering her apologies and her attempts to comfort me in my boy's unhearing rage. She gave up with a sigh heavy with resignation and the deep sadness of poor mothers everywhere.
She turned around to the closet and pulled out our toybox. It was a small cardboard grocery box with two or three old, broken toys in it.
"See, Mom, see?" I accused her.
"I know, son... I know," she said, trying to comfort all three of us, not being able, tucking us in and fleeing the room.
Cartoon
I was in the first or second grade, which would have been in the period 1949‑51. Art was my least favorite class; most of the other kids could make drawings and paintings that even I could see were better than mine.
The assignment was to draw a cartoon. The teacher explained what a cartoon was, and the class turned to. The topic was Communism. If I ever heard the name of Senator Joseph McCarthy, I don't remember it. What I remember is a lot of emphasis in that class, as well as in others (social studies in particular) about Communism, how Communists, also called Reds, were very bad and didn't believe in God and were trying to take over the world and yes, even America.
The teacher approached my island of stillness in the sea of flailing elbows and crayons. She was concerned and helpful. But I just couldn't do it. I couldn't think of anything to draw, or anything that I could draw that would be recognizable.
She asked what was the simplest thing I could think of that I'd learned about Communism. When that turned up nothing I thought I could draw, she asked whether I thought Communism was bad. Oh sure, I nodded. Then she asked, What's the simplest thing you can think of that's bad?
The phrase "snake in the grass" came to mind. I'd heard my parents say it about someone they didn't trust. Good, she said. Can you draw that? Go ahead. Draw that.
I drew a squiggly line to represent a snake, and a few pencil strokes for blades of grass. I lettered COMMUNISM underneath it in my kid's scrawl.
"See?" the teacher said. "I knew you could do it."
Now that is a very interesting story. A few weeks ago my daughter was asked to do a similar exercise. Fast forward to 2011 to a French/American High School student practicing for the national exams (the "Bac"). Her subject was Communism from 1947 to 1991 and she had 2.5 hours to do it justice. During our lunchtime discussion it was clear that I (raised in the US) and my child (raised in France) had two distinctly different interpretations of the same events.
ReplyDeleteThanks for your comment. Thinking in particular of the Vietnam War, several million people were killed needlessly (in my view), in considerable part because of values taught to children in schools. This blog consists of chapters from my memoir. The last chapter is an essay, "The Web," which begins with a story exploring the etymology of "INFANTry." War is our species' systematic method of slaughtering our young.
ReplyDeleteThanks for reading, Dean
I am enjoying your blog very much and am reading a bit every evening. I find myself examining your writing within the context of the experiences passed along by my French family.. My father-in-law (the grand-father of the French/American child I mention in my previous comment) served in what was then called "Indochine." I once asked him what he thought about the U.S. going in and the question seemed to make him very uncomfortable. But he did answer eventually and I felt that his reply was filled with both astonishment and compassion. "They really thought they would do better," he said.
ReplyDeleteWow. I remember becoming acquainted with one particular montagnard soldier at a US Special Forces camp in the Vietnamese highlands, summer 1968. I think his name was Kip (he was Sedang). Somehow, he had managed to survive mercenary soldiering since the days of the French presence there, and remembered the earlier days with a certain fondness. Telling his story, standing there in front of me in the dust of the SF camp (Mangbuk), he came to the position of attention, and said - almost sang - "compagnie... attention!" in what I thought was pretty good French. Suddenly the camp, and the jungle beyond, seemed peopled by different uniforms, worn my men speaking a different language. And I remember a volleyball game in the same camp, with men and boys shouting in 4 languages... I would have loved to hear your father-in-law's stories...
ReplyDelete