Chapter 1
Much of what I was taught as a child was false.
The adults meant well. They wanted me to believe the lies and half-truths they believed. The realities they omitted were mostly ones they did not know or did not want to know. And as a child I missed things I did not want to see or hear. 
They were white. So was I, categorically but blindly so, growing up in a suburb where everybody was white except for the garbage men. 
The suburb was Arlington, Virginia – home of the Pentagon and rows of white tombstones, across the Potomac River from Washington D C. 
Jim Crow law was rigidly enforced on the Virginia side of the river. This was the decade before the U S  Supreme Court's 1954 decision declaring racially segregated schools unconstitutional. I attended segregated schools for all twelve grades. Negro kids had their own school somewhere, I didn't know where, and the not knowing where was part of my blindness.
I rarely saw Negros on our side of the Potomac. Jim Crow law kept them from entering any place likely to be used by white people – eating establishments, stores, public libraries, amusement parks, swimming pools, barbershops, beauty parlors, hospitals, churches. 
Today it seems bizarre. Yet it was the law of the land, and as a kid I barely noticed the strangeness of it. Even more bizarre is the determination of today's U S  Supreme Court to take us back to those times. 
Arlington's Jim Crow was different from the heavier-handed variety farther south in rural Virginia, and farther yet in the Deep South, where it was more overt and violent. Our suburban Jim Crow was also less conspicuous than in cities like Detroit and New York, where the color-line was drawn by neighborhoods. 
Arlington's Jim Crows was in some ways more insidious – this making Negros disappear from white view – like a magician pulling a tablecloth out from under glasses of wine. Segregation was imposed in Washington D C as well, but ‘Chocolate City' had too many Negros to make them disappear – although an attempt was made, after the Civil War. 
Segregation in my Arlington worked exactly the way Arlington officials wanted it to – invisibly. The signs saying COLORED ONLY and WHITE ONLY had pretty much disappeared by 1950, but they were imprinted in people's minds, and the lack of signs only added to the seeming obviousness of the inequality. The few contacts I had with Negros were  carefully proscribed by custom, to avoid any suggestion of equality. 
Outdoors, for instance, at a public park you might look over and see a Negro family eating at a picnic table fifty yards away, at the edge understood to be for colored people, shunned. And on the rare occasions when you did meet a Negro at a bus stop or walking the sidewalk, they always dropped their gaze. I grew up thinking this was just the way of the world. I supposed colored people felt inferior, and maybe were inferior. It was just the way things were.
What other conclusion could I have drawn, without some special adult who could step forward and explain how that submissive lowered gaze was a learned reflex, drilled into Negro children by their parents, for the sake of their survival? 
 No such adult existed in my childhood. No Negro adult, period. Let alone one so extraordinarily patient and candid as to take a white boy like me aside in that fashion. It almost required a time traveler – a W E B  Du Bois, to step forward from the past, or a Henry Louis Gates Jr.  to step back from the future – someone, black or white, with a special gift of empathy and patience who could explain to me the cruelty of slavery, and the cruelty around me still, that beyond what I could see with my own eyes and know in my own heart. 
I had no such a person in my life. Not then, in that world scrubbed of color, bleached by law. 
My parents were not able to step into that role. I'm grateful for what they did give me. They gave my sister and me love, a stable home, economic security, imaginative parenting. They are long gone, but I live with those gifts today. It's from that starting-point that I can see now, what was missing or distorted in our lives under the Jim Crow that existed in Arlington and, across the river, in the nation's capital. 
Politically, my mother and father described themselves as ‘liberal'. Whatever that label suggests today, it was constrained by the thinking then, and by what they'd grown up with as farm kids in Oklahoma in the early 1920s. My father was part Cherokee, from his maternal grandmother's lineage, but otherwise my parents identified as white liberals from European stock. They evolved politically during my childhood and after. They would join in the huge march on Washington in 1963, when Martin Luther King Jr, would deliver his "I have a dream" speech from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. But during my growing up, in the 1940s and fifties, they were younger, focused on adapting to suburban life, and did not have the capacity to step forward in that truth-telling role – a role that is more common, I think in black families, where the cruelty is felt in the bones and told as a warning, and blindness is not an option. 
Truth was out there: books by black authors, few in number, but powerful. Richard Wright. Laurence Dunbar. Langston Hughes. Music too, if you lived in New York City, where the young Billie Holiday was singing "Strange Fruit." 
I doubt my parents had heard of any of them. Mom was reading Elizabeth Barret Browning; Dad had memorized some tendentious lines from "Thanatopsis." They'd adapted some lines from Kahlil Gibran for their wedding vows. But mostly they looked to literature and the arts for affirmation, not challenge.
I'm pretty sure they knew nothing about the demand for change that was rising among black soldiers returning from World War Two, who having fought for freedom abroad, were confronting its absence at home, and whose voices were resonating in the black churches of the South. I know now that in Arlington, when my family arrived in 1946, the rumblings of change had already started – in the churches and barbershops hidden away in the parts of Arlington we couldn't see. 
In short, I spent my childhood inside a white cocoon. 
It was two cocoons, actually: the large cocoon of American mainstream whiteness, and the smaller personal cocoon of obliviousness I was learning to spin around myself to stay innocent of the larger cocoon that enwrapped us all.
My parents did the best they could within their own limitations. The first in their respective families to go to college, they were aware of global affairs. My mother deeply lamented the suffering in war-torn Europe, Japan, and Ethiopia. My dad had traveled to Europe and Asia on government business. But I don't think Mom or Dad either one realized the weight of the indignities and hardships that bore down on our unseen neighbors. 

A new Section.

If you've ever tried to pull apart the fibrous cocoon of a Luna or some other large moth, or the chrysalis of a butterfly, you know how tough that encasement they can be. The membrane surrounding me stayed intact for all my twelve grades in the segregated schools of Arlington, in the 1940s and fifties. 
That span of twelve years is the focus of this memoir. 
But it lasted for years beyond, enough to squelch right off any involvement l might have had in the Civil Rights movement, when it surfaced on the University of Iowa campus in the early 1960s. I remained a bystander, whatever the cautious admiration I felt for my white classmates who joined sit-ins at the local Woolworth's lunch counter. I remained stupefied well into adulthood. For decades I supposed the struggle for Civil Rights was led by white people. That's how stubbornly resistant the walls of my individual cocoon remained.
And the larger, societal cocoon conveyed an aggressive white male conquistadorial worldview that assumed Europeans were bringing ‘civilization' to indigenous peoples everywhere, that guns were a measure of cultural superiority and conferred the right to plunder Africa and the New World. The same assumption of white male dominance permeated art, literature, philosophy, and economics. 
The result of all this was that in 1964 I emerged from the University of Iowa with an MAT, glowing recommendations, my pick of schools to begin my teaching career, and utterly unprepared to teach. 
Then something happened to slash my white cocoon wide open. 

A new Section.

	This took place when I was teaching English in the small industrial city of Norwich, in rural eastern Connecticut, a town had outlived its glory days, when the textile mills and factories were humming. 
Norwich was overwhelmingly white, its working-class population descended from European and French-Canadian immigrants who'd come to work in the mills. Local Indian tribes made up a minority, many living on the Mohegan or Pequot reservations to the immediate south. African Americans made up a smaller minority. Norwich had not gained population in a hundred years.
Norwich Free Academy, where I taught, was an artifact of those halcyon times. The gift of a wealthy nineteenth-century mill-owner, NFA continued functioning as the town's public high school. NFA had been my first choice in starting my teaching career. I was drawn by a good salary, but even more by the beauty of the campus and the charm of New England, with its quaint old architecture, its ancient slate tombstones with winged skulls – death's head reminders of the Puritan past – so different, in its reserve, from the glad-handing South.
New England seemed a fit place for me, as a young husband and father, to start anew. So this was my second year. I'd discovered I that I loved teaching. Never mind the veteran teachers got the college-bound kids, in the tracked system. I liked my ‘general' kids, tracked for the blue-collar tor pink-collar trades. 
On this particular afternoon I was standing just outside my classroom, the heavy oak door with its small leaded-pane window propped open. The bell had just rung to signal the change in classes. I remember my eleventh graders were brushing past in both directions. 
A student from a morning class came up to me unexpectedly – a quiet boy, unremarkable, with a slight build and sandy brown hair; a boy not given to bravado or calling attention to himself. I was surprised to see him show up like that unannounced. 
He was holding something, which he presented to me somberly. It was a black-and-white photographic postcard. 
"Have you ever seen anything like this, Mr. Morse?" 
	I looked. My breath caught in my throat. I held the card in both hands and stared. The image was too grotesquely real to have been faked. 
"No." Shaking my head.
	The photo I'm seeing is of three black men hanging by their necks from a big tree branch, their hands tied, one of their necks distorted horribly. White people are looking on, many with picnic hampers and blankets spread on a lawn. A young blond woman has her head tipped back in laughter.  
	"No," I say again, my shock mounting to outrage. The lynching appears to have just happened. The photographer must have positioned himself, waiting. The three dark bodies are probably still warm, a heart perhaps still beating. The picnickers on their spread blankets are still laughing. 
	My emotions gather high in my stomach. My eyes keep going to the man whose neck is distorted past the separation of vertebrae, hanging by flesh alone. I think of the pain that must be spreading through families; news spreading over fences and back porches and telephones, like ripples widening in a pond. 
The young blond woman with her head tipped back. What in God's name can she be thinking? I hear the cascading laughter. 
Nothing had prepared me for this. 
I had scarcely heard the word ‘lynching' in genteel Arlington. 
In the moment, my scalp tightens with the memory of my old classroom at Stonewall Jack
son Elementary School, its portraits of George Washington at the left end of the blackboard and Stonewall Jackson at the right end; the morning pledge of allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, the Bible reading; the iron rows of desks. I feel exposed. Exposed in ways I am too naked at this moment to comprehend.
	The boy is waiting. 
Waiting for something I can't give. 
I hand the postcard back to him with a muttered thanks. No words beyond my racing heart. I meet his eyes with only a glance, turn away. He means no harm, I know. He wanted to share his own –- his own what? Dismay? Anger? Confusion? I will never know. This is a teaching moment. But I am not the teacher. He is the teacher. I am the child, alone at the blackboard, my face burning with shame.
	What happened the rest of the afternoon is telescoped into vagueness. I must have handed back student papers, answered questions, led discussion of whatever book we were reading. The truth is, I have no actual memory: only that postcard floating to the surface again and again, and my pushing it back. 
I don't remember how much I communicated to my wife, Ginny. 
My anger, surely. My anguish was unspeakable, along with the slowly mounting outrage I felt at being so betrayed by my twelve years of public schooling Arlington – by Washington-Lee High School, with its National Merit scholars and rows of trophies glittering in the foyer.
The question that banged around in my head for days afterward:
If this was missing from my education – the picnic baskets and laughter at the death of those three men; the viciousness I never suspected from within my carefully constructed innocence – what else was missing?
Now, at the other end of my life, as I go through a process of inquiry that I've chosen, and which has chosen me, I pursue these questions and more. 
What price did I pay, or ask others to pay, for my innocence? 
Nothing approaching the terrible price paid by those three men. And their families. And the community beyond, forced to suffer terrorism. But segregation had a cost to me and other whites that we are taught to overlook – whether back then, under Jim Crow, or today in a white-dominated society – a price we think we can avoid paying because no one is chasing us out the door of a fashionable shop waving a cash register receipt. 
I struggle now to understand the cost of my innocence, as I peel back the layers surrounding me, that reached all the way forward in time to what happened in 2020 in Minneapolis, when police murdered George Floyd outside a convenience store. The cellphone video of that murder took me back decades to that moment when as a young teacher I stood at my classroom door, and, in the days that followed, did not know what to do with my fury. After several days, it sank into the busyness of my life, my new adult role as provider, husband, father of two young sons. It was lost in the demands of teaching, my ambitions for the future, my innocence. 
For that brief interval, the cocoon had been torn open. But I was not ready to emerge. The breach was repaired, stitched closed again, from within. I was a pupa gone back to dormancy, a chrysalis not ready to split open and become whatever it was supposed to become.
Now I can tell the story of my discoveries, on the way to breaking free and emerging whole. 


Chapter 2

For all my twelve years of school in Arlington, and well beyond, I had no grasp of Arlington's political and social topography.
I knew the hills physically, the way a kid knows them, bicycling up and down the residential streets – back when kids played outside, exploring the creeks, damming them with stones, looking for crawdads. The housing developments were all built on hills, bounded by small creeks. I bicycled on my fat-tired one-speed 24-inch bicycle all around Dominion Hills, our first neighborhood; then on my four-speed English bike with thin tires, before our family moved to Stratford Hills. 
But Arlington had a larger topography I could not comprehend – not because it was hidden from me, like so much else was hidden, but because it was so obvious. You either got it or you didn't. Colored kids got it, of necessity. White native Virginians got it in their own way. But newcomers like us were slow to get that particular lay of the land:
Arlington straddled an ideological fault-line. 
You had Abraham Lincoln seated in marble on the Washington D C side of the Potomac, looking harried and profoundly human, and maybe bayonets bristling somewhere beyond. And on the Virginia side, you had the invisible presence of General Robert E  Lee with his clipped white beard and brass-buttoned uniform sitting astride his invisible white horse, forever ready to protect his native Virginia and the Confederate cause. 
Militarily, Arlington occupied a strategic position. The Potomac protected the capital from a rapid strike. And even while I was growing up in pre-Beltway Arlington, our stretch of the Potomac – from Great Falls and Chain Bridge, downstream past Francis Scott Key Bridge and Georgetown, past Memorial Bridge, the Tidal Basin, and Arlington National Cemetery and the Pentagon – all  remained a silent battleground. 
What I did feel, even without benefit of the more sweeping view that time accords me now, was the ubiquitous presence of the Civil War in my boyhood. Now I realize too, the Civil War was still within living memory – remembered by the oldest Americans around the country. I knew vaguely that my maternal and paternal great-grandfathers had fought in it, but I didn't know on which side. 
Realer for me were the acres of identical white marble tombstones spread across our own Arlington National Cemetery. Those too had their origins in the Civil War.
You couldn't grow up in Arlington without feeling a certain proprietorship over the cemetery. I don't think I even knew it was created to bury the Civil War dead. What I recall is the swell of vague pride I felt whenever we took my aunts and uncles and cousins visiting from Oklahoma to see those rows of tombstones.
Overlooking the grave markers was Lee's Mansion, the stately white-columned house that guidebooks were careful to identify as the Nellie Custis-Lee Mansion. We all shortened it to Lee's Mansion. It was easier to say, and to be honest, it conjured old Robert E  himself up there strolling among the painted wooden columns. Lee had married into the Custis family, which was related to George Washington, and wealthy enough to own 200 slaves and the sprawling tract of tobacco plantation along the Potomac that included the land on which the Pentagon was built eighty-some years later. So even the Pentagon – the largest office-building in the world, as we reminded our visitors, also with pride – was bundled in with the Civil War. 
All that helped illuminate the war. But for kids like me, pedaling and roller-skating around our neighborhoods, the specter of the Civil War arose not so much from those tourist sites as from the voices of our teachers and our friends. 
My eleventh-grade American History teacher at Washington-Lee High School was Miss Sally Lovings. She was short and chunky with gray curls and a strong jaw, and a proud spirit – with a dramatic flair for teaching. She brought bushels of delicious ripe peaches from her trips back home, to Georgia, to share with her students. 
What I remember most vividly, though, was how transformed she was by her emotions when she described General Tecumseh Sherman's march through Georgia. Her normally sunny face darkened, her brow deepened, her whole body swiveled about, as she described the swath of ruin Sherman left, after he burned Atlanta and marched his 50,000 troops the whole 285 miles all the way to Savannah. Never in my life had I seen anyone vent such fury. And for an event so long ago! She described a trail of destruction far worse than the normal pillaging and theft of livestock to feed troops. Sherman ordered his men to burn farmhouses and barns and crops, to throw dead animals into wells. Atlanta was the industrial hub of the South, with rail-lines in several directions. Sherman did not just cut the rail-lines; he ordered the crossties ripped up and burned, and the steel rails bent into loops known afterwards as "Sherman's neckties," all of it aimed at breaking the industrial backbone of the South.  

At the end of her rant, Miss Lovings clenched her jaw and shook her head fiercely. "Georgia will never forget. Never forget." 
Her anger was a gift. It helped me understand what divided the nation, and what divided me.
 
A new Section.

I hear those voices now, and they still resonate within me enough that I realize I felt an answering chord. I'm tempted to call it borrowed loyalty, a kind of contact high, and count it one of the threads woven around me. The passion of southerners was sometimes enviable. It was part of theilaments that bound me.
I hear my friend Barry's voice that way. I don't even remember Barry's last name. I just knew him through Explorers. Born in Virginia – as I imagine his parents were too – Barry was a skinny kid with an angular face, dark hair, slightly bucked teeth, and a highly opinionated intelligence that set him apart from those of us who were less formed. He wore black-framed glasses and a knowing sneer, when he called us newcomers ‘Yankee carpet baggers' He said it jovially, but you could hear the grit behind it, the challenge – maybe from his own family, but his face has become for me the face of generations beyond.
 Whenever our Explorer post camped in the woods by the battlefield at Manassas, Barry was usually the first one to dash out in search of Civil War artifacts. The bullets turned up sometimes in the plowed fields that agonhat remained of the old trenches and earthworks – exposed by a plowing or by a drenching rain; those chalky-gray oxidized lead bullets the size of your thumb. Or they showed up glittering under the current of Bull Run, the nearby stream where a lot of the fighting took place – so much exchange of gunfire in and around that stream, as to give the Manassas battlefield its alternative names – the First and the Second Battles of Bull Run.
Barry was after more than bullets. Bull Run creek was only knee-deep across its whole width, so Barry would wade, methodically zigzagging, feeling his way upstream with hands and feet. One time he discovered the iron hub of an old wooden-spoked wheel lodged in a cleft between rocks. He was exuberant lugging that treasure back to camp.
"It's a caisson wheel, I'm pretty sure!" He showed me the thick water-blackened stubs that remained of the old spokes. 
"What's a caisson?" I wanted to know.
Barry explained it was used for carrying heavy ammunition, how this one must have gotten mired in a retreat. But after turning the iron hub every which way for inspection, he concluded "There's no way of telling whose it is."
I saw the hint of disappointment in his slump. Which retreat? The First Battle of Bull Run, when Robert E  Lee was forced to retreat, or the Second, when it was the Union army's turn? Somehow Barry needed to know.
I envied his intensity. I didn't ask myself the question I pose now, looking back: Why were Virginians so attached to the Confederate cause? We, especially in northern Virginia, were not Deep South, like Georgia or Alabama. And why did Barry insist on calling it the War Between the States, rather than the Civil War? 
Those are the sort of questions I pursue now – questions I either didn't think to ask at that age or chose not to ask – that I can ask only now, which lead me from one discovery to another. I found out only recently, from reading, that more major battles were fought in our little corner of northern Virginia than anywhere else in the entire Civil War.

A new Section.

As a boy, I subscribed unconsciously to the prevailing Hollywood myth, that the heart of the Confederacy lay in the Deep South. 
I pictured rows of cotton, not rows of tombstones; scenes from Gone With the Wind; Brer Rabbit hopping down an idyllic roseate dirt road past split-rail fences and kindly old Uncle Remus. I loved the lush Disney animation, the richly painted backgrounds, the scheming of Brer Fox.
Recently, however, I've gotten past that particular veil, enough to better understand Virginia's claim to the heart of the Confederate cause. Most of the Virginians I knew carried a touch of intellectual pride and class, distinct from the blunt pride I heard from Georgians. They were literate, proud that Virginia was the birthplace of five Presidents; proud of the University of Virginia, with its beautiful rotunda designed by Thomas Jefferson. 
Jefferson, I discovered only recently, had to be dragooned into writing the Declaration of Independence – which someone with an eloquent pen was going to have to write, after the Continental Congress decided in 1776 on the need to break with the mother country. Benjamin Franklin was the obvious choice, but he was back from an exhausting council of the Iroquois Federation and suffering from acute gout. The next obvious choice was John Adams. 
Adams refused, demurring in favor of the younger Jefferson. 
"Why will you not?" Jefferson asked Adams. Jefferson was only 33, anxious to return to Williamsburg to help write the Virginia Constitution, 
"First," said Adams, "you are a Virginian, and a Virginian ought to appear at the head of this business. Second: I am obnoxious, suspected and unpopular. You are very much otherwise. Third: you can write ten times better than I can."
 Another moment of state pride came nearly a century later, just ahead of the Civil War, when President Abraham Lincoln approached Robert E  Lee to offer him command of the Union army, and Lee chose to lead the Confederate army instead. If the South did secede from the Union, Lee declared he would fight for Virginia. 
Virginians extolled Lee as an aristocrat – educated at West Point, well-married, and a consummate tactician, who out-generaled his Yankee counterpart, the uncouth Ulysses S  Grant, at the at the head of  the North's superior forces. 
Virginia, having contributed its finest to the War of Independence, contributed its finest as well to the Confederacy – Lee at the head of the troops, Jefferson Davis as its president, Richmond its capital. 
Here is the distinction I'll make in these pages, which I've not seen drawn elsewhere:
I have never heard anyone take pride in that more distant past, when in 1619, a hundred miles south of Arlington down the lacy-fingered shore of the Chesapeake to James Bay, the first human cargo of kidnapped Africans was unloaded in chains. My teachers glided over that event, as if it were simply one of the many ‘firsts' at Jamestown – among which were the first blast furnace for ironmaking built in the western hemisphere, and the first plantation to grow tobacco for export.
But the arrival of that captured slave-ship could hardy stand up as a source of pride for Virginians. It was only by a severely twisted logic of convenience that the Jamestown colonists sought to capitalize on the windfall that had dropped anchor with its human cargo. That logic came straight from the perverse hodgepodge of magical thinking that roiled around the throne of King James I, for whom the river and bay and settlement of Jamestown were named. 
James was an ardent believer in witchcraft. He liked imagining that certain women opened their loins to the devil, kissed his anus, took in his evil, conducted black sabbaths in the forest where they drank the blood of sacrificed infants. Witches were to be burned at the stake, whatever their protestations of innocence. 
The same magical thinking turned Elizabeth I's virginity into a political instrument. Virginia was so named. The virgin Queen had dominion over unicorns as well as the British isles, and God-ordained victory over the Spanish armada, destroyed in a storm. 
The same convenient magic trumpeted tobacco as healthy for the lungs, which justified the Virginia colony's new and lucrative export. The colonists had learned about tobacco from the Indians, who smoked it ceremonially, ‘remaking' the tobacco for peacemaking and other rites. The Virginia colonists used their white magic to turn tobacco to addiction and cash.
In short, this was the quality of thinking that the Jamestown colonists used to justify putting a price tag on the enslaved Africans – to convert them from human beings into chattel, like the ivory and gold already being pillaged from the west coast of Africa. Unlike the slavery of ancient Greece and Rome, where enslavement was a temporary condition, brought about by war and economic circumstances, where slaves could rise into the upper ranks of society, the Jamestown colonists promulgated the concept of permanent slavery based on color. 
It was not a proud moment in human history. It was a shameful moment: the creation, out of magical thinking, of the racism in America that haunts us today. 
I wonder, too, if the shame of that moment helps further explain the pride Virginians take in the Civil War, two and a half centuries later, and could stand in the spotlight of erudite discourse concerning this tactic and that, and the heroism or villainy of generals. I think of Barry crouching over that water-logged caisson wheel-hub, turning it every which way in search of clues to its origin. The Civil War could be discussed rationally, across differences – discussed even elegantly, in the spirit of Thomas Jefferson's classical rotunda – discussed passionately, as Sally Lovings raged over Sherman's march through Georgia. 
Compared to the origins of racism in the era of King James, the Civil War was safer. I wonder if it was even an avoidance.

A new Section.

We were all avoiding, I think now, in different ways.
As teenagers, my outlander friends and I used to joke at how the locals were always refighting the Civil War. We snickered at their arguments, their determined advocacy of ‘States' Rights', their declarations of "The South will rise again!" 
Why did we newcomers dismiss such fervid attachment to a war that had taken place more than eighty years earlier? Their fervor should have been a warning. Instead, we turned it into a joke. That was our avoidance. I don't know how we could have done it any better. We were teenagers. We had to be cool. And we couldn't see into the future: the resurrection of American racism that surrounds us today.
In any case, the joke was on us. The war was not over – not the way our textbooks said. Yes, Lincoln had issued his Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, but only as a ‘fit and necessary war measure'. It freed only the slaves in the Confederate states. Slave-holders in the Union states were allowed to keep their slaves.  I must have known this simple fact, growing up in Virginia. I am shocked now by its cynicism. 
And yes, in 1865 General Lee surrendered his sword to Union General Grant at the Appomattox courthouse, ending the war where it had begun, in Virginia.  
But the war was not over. Not for those kids. Not for Sally Lovings. The war was just simmering. 
In the meantime, our segregated schools were teaching us all white supremacy. 
Today I recognize essentially the same fault-line that ran along the Potomac, zigzagging now across the whole landscape of our nation; across regions and cities; and across the dangerously volatile digital terrain of social media – a division that crackles with new force, amidst the political instability of the present.
W E B Du Bois, in The Souls of Black Folk, declared in 1904 that "the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line." He was taking aim rhetorically at the then-popular phrase, ‘the Negro problem', and his being asked in various ways, ‘How does it feel to be a problem?'
 I, as a white male, might well be asked the same question today – since, to judge from the mass killings that have become a regular occurrence, it appears that the problem of the twenty-first century is white males. Those Americans willing to look beyond their country's borders can observe that the United States is the only industrially advanced society in the world that has never elected a female head of state. It is only from within a narrow white male perspective that we can lay any claim to being a democracy. 
The biases are losing force among the young. But for now, the reins of power remain in the hands of white males.
As an old white man, I watch on my television screen all the old white men parading their preternaturally silver haircuts around the floor of the Senate for the cameras like prize sheep at a 4-H Fair. I know, as most of us do, that many are fronting for unseen moneyed interests and powerful lobbies and are blocking legislation on such crucial issues as climate change, gun control, immigration policy, voting rights, and women's reproductive rights – all of which they understand in only the rankest political terms, which is to say not at all.
 I detest them. I want to run amuck in their flock, knocking their expensively coiffed heads together – take off one of my shoes and use it to whack their butts and listen to them baaaaing as they scatter for safety. 
But I understand them. I recognize myself in them. I know their obliviousness and their fear. I know their blindness, from having grown up in my part of the South, which anticipated some of the blindness today. 
James Baldwin understood them devastatingly: "Ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can face."
When I hear the voices baaaaing ‘Make American Great Again', I hear chosen ignorance, and under the ignorance, the white male fear of vulnerability in the face of a changing America. 
The fear rises most stridently from whites in the Deep South, within the geographic footprint of the former Confederacy, the region historically dependent on the permanently enslaved to work their tobacco and cotton, their sugar cane and citrus groves – where whites have always trembled in fear of unleashed black manhood and democracy. 
My tenth-grade American History teacher, Miss Sally Lovings came to mind recently, during the 2022 special election in Georgia, when control of the U S  Senate hinged on the run-off vote, and the black pastor, Raphael Warnock, won by a hair's breadth. What would she have thought?
Sally Lovings declared her belief that the Ku Klux Klan had "served a useful purpose" at the end of the Civil War, and after Reconstruction, by way of "keeping Negros in their place." She had a way of pronouncing the word ‘Negro" as Nigra, and sometimes directed that pronunciation with the suggestion of a wink toward two or three boys who sat languidly in the row of desks by the door – ‘greasers', more interested in building hotrods than studying American History. 
I know now from my own teaching that she was trying to engage those two or three boys. And she was, I continue to believe, an inspired teacher. But at the time her attention to them came across as a sort of racist flirtation. She concluded and got them to agree – that the KKK had "once had its place," but was "no longer helpful" – which I'm sure was intended to coax them, and perhaps herself, into accepting the changes that lay ahead. This was in 1955, two years after the U S  Supreme Court decision that declared segregated schools like ours unconstitutional. So, we were all at the threshold of change.
Whatever my judgements at the time, I have to credit Sally Lovings. She'd touched a chord with those greasers, gotten them to agree the KKK was "no longer helpful." And her discussion of the KKK came as close as any to approaching the issues of race and racism that my other teachers all avoided. 
Her outburst over Sherman's march to the sea touched a chord with me; gave the war substance. Neither the anger nor the fear and bitter retribution that fairly sang in the blood of the defeated South was a subject for discussion in any of my classes – certainly not in my Civics class, taught dispassionately by a liberal teacher who was active in local politics and, for that reason I'm sure, refrained in class from venturing into current affairs or disclosing his true feelings. 
That teacher's delivery was occasionally droll and ironic, but almost wholly canned. He diagrammed the system of checks and balances, and separation of powers that made our federal system work, with little attention to current affairs. About all I remember outside that airless presentation was his sarcastic grandiloquence in referencing ‘the sovereign state of Rhode Island'. I remember no discussion of the 1954 Supreme Court desegregation ruling that was beginning to resonate elsewhere, prompting resistance in southern states including of course Virginia. Surely it was a monumental opportunity to explore the tension between states' rights and the central government. This may be a failure of memory on my part, but it seems to me the 1954 desegregation order was generally avoided, like the stillness before a storm.   
My teachers, including Miss Sally Lovings, avoided any direct discussion of race. They did not discuss ‘race' as a social construct. Not ‘race' as a factor in history. Not ‘race' from the perspective of literature or language or science. 
There we were, living in the compartmentalized society created under Jim Crow, bound by race, our prejudices deepened by segregation, and yet race per se was never discussed. No teacher ever invited us to try stepping outside our white identities long enough to consider our whiteness a subject for discussion. No one raised the possibility that the concept of ‘race' as something intrinsic and permanent, and based on color, might be peculiar to the United States.  
Stranger yet, considering all the visual evidence to the contrary, I heard no challenge in school to the assumption that people were either white or black, with nothing in between. Nothing to refute the legacy of the ‘one drop of Negro blood' that prevailed in the South. Families that identified as black knew of the mixing in their family histories, even if they could not document its source – usually a white slave-owner. Families that identified as white, and could carry it off, looked the other way.
I will say this. Whatever the denial surrounding me, and my own denial, the recognition now of how much was hidden below the surface, helps me see how the color-line operates commonly below the surface elsewhere today. And I, as an old white man, am freer than some to call out those of my fellow old white men who are fearful of losing power, and ask: What is the cost to us all of your avoidance?
I've come to believe the answer lies substantially in our unwillingness to acknowledge the dark magical thinking of Jamestown that continues to sustain white supremacy.
In avoiding acknowledgment, we avoid healing. 


Chapter 3

This is my own story. It includes my own early avoidances while growing up cocooned in white Arlington County, and what I'm learning now as I tease apart the silken threads woven around me, to make good my escape from their confines.
I have more questions than answers. Which is just as well. The questions lead me forward. This story is not fixed, not a butterfly pinned to a wax-coated mounting-board for display, but a living, emergent quest that began in 2020, and continues to this day. 
If these pages have the feel sometimes of a journal, it's that I'm transported by my discoveries. Some spring from events in my childhood reconsidered in a new light. Some arise from historic facts newly revealed, or from ones I've denied or overlooked and am free to absorb now. Other are gifts from black lives told over two centuries, from David Walker's Appeal to contemporary memoirs and the poetry and song of today's young black artists and scholars. 
The process has been and continues to be transformative. Discoveries come along that awaken the chrysalis of my thinking in yet another way, inspire me to unfold my wings from dampness and spread them to dry, and to take flight. I am reclaiming the wholeness denied me in the compartmentalization enforced under Jim Crow.
What stirred me to action? 
I wish I could say it came from some nobler impulse, like an epiphany to some prophet wandering alone in the desert. 
But no. It was another murder of a black man. I won't dwell on the particulars, so I can get my own story underway. I will say for now: it was the killing of George Floyd by police officers, recorded by a steady-nerved teenage girl with her cell phone camera, that once again slashed open my cocoon, six and a half decades after that first time, when as a young teacher I stood at my classroom door and held that postcard in my two hands. This time, as an old man, I did not retreat. I rose in a deliberate way to the challenge. 
Hence this memoir.

A new Section.

As a boy recently arrived in Arlington, I wondered where the garbagemen lived. 
Not in Arlington, surely. 
From the way the dogs barked at them, from their pale gray uniforms with thin stripes, maybe even from their no-nonsense teamwork in banging the metal cans around and trotting alongside the truck, I thought of them as outsiders. Hip outsiders, I would add now. At the time, I assumed they must live somewhere else, maybe across the river in Washington. 
By the time I reached junior high school I was hearing rumors that Arlington did indeed have a separate neighborhood, this one also on a hill – Halls Hill – where colored people lived. But I assumed, with my typical avoidance, that if such a place did exist, then it must be in some distant corner of Arlington. For me, Halls Hill was shrouded in myth, like the unexplored regions of old nautical maps where cartographers penned elaborate cartouches or sea serpents looping dangerously off unknown shores.
Middle school was a gathering-place for such stuff, after the relative innocence of grade school. Our bodies were changing, and in the midst of hormonal upheavals we were encountering decrees of racism and gender biases, styles of self-presentation. We were sorting each other out variously by class, stages of pubescence, and prospects for popularity; taking each other's measure by our clothing and hair and our all-important shoes. My memories of middle school are a sort of coloring-book descent into hell. 
One sunny morning in eighth grade, I was hanging out with other kids outside Stratford Junior High School, on the broad sidewalk where the school busses let us out. 
I was hoping someone would notice my new DayGlo tie. Neckties were not part of our normal attire, but I was pushing the fashion envelope in a kind of nerdish way. I just couldn't wait for a school dance to show off this baby – a narrow knit tie that I'd purchased in D C at a store on Ninth Street a couple of doors from Waxie Maxie's Quality Music. It was DayGlo chartreuse with a single orange DayGlo horizontal stripe. 
A kid I barely knew greeted me with a friendly smirk:
"How far did you have to chase the nigger to get that thing? All the way to Halls Hill?"
	I recoiled. The kid's condemnation was clear, but it seemed aimed less at me than at colored people. It was an invitation to share a joke, probably even an weird try at friendship. I wasn't accepting either. The N-word took care of that. But as an eighth grader I didn't know quite how to respond in a way that was cool. 
I didn't even know whether Halls Hill was an actual place, or just some kind of insult, and was way too cool to ask. I think I responded with a careless shrug and went my own way.  I wore the tie again, I'm sure, but my ardor for it had cooled.

A new Section.

Not long ago, I e-mailed an old high school friend of my interest in learning more about Halls Hill. Kitty Sherwood Richmond e-mailed back, directing me to a recent memoir entitled My Halls Hill Family, by someone named Wilma Jones, a fourth-generation resident of Halls Hill.
Written primarily for her own extended family, and self-published in 2018, Jones's memoir opened my eyes to the black Arlington that existed all along, invisibly, behind the white membrane that surrounded us all in that strangely compartmentalized world.
	Jones describes a neighborhood without paved streets or curbing; just gravel; houses dependent on wells and outhouses because Halls Hill was denied access to the public water supply and sewage system used by the rest of Arlington. The houses were well-kept, their steps and walkways swept clean. Some homes had wrap-around porches and were situated on deep where residents could tend fruit trees, grape arbors, and berry bushes, keep rabbit-hutches and chickens and pigs and cows. They had large gardens where they grew vegetables like corn, okra, beans, collards, and other greens. They could hunt squirrels and other small game in the adjoining woodland.
She recounts her own parents' struggle, working two and three low-paying jobs, to send Wilma and her four siblings to college; also, their legal efforts along with other parents   to get their children admitted to Arlington's acclaimed public schools. Most residents of Halls Hill had more than one job outside in the white community, across the river in government cafeterias or as drivers, janitors, and cleaning ladies. Many had a side-hustles within Halls Hill doing things like car-repair, butchering, hair-styling, carpentry, canning, making pies, brewing herbal tonics, or distilling moonshine. 
All this made for a close-knit community, where neighbors gathered for barbeques, ballgames, and church suppers, where adults kept an eye on all children, where a vibrant social life centered around church, rent parties, child-care, the volunteer fire department, and the informal swapping of goods and services. 
Jones describes a hostility Negros faced in white Arlington that was far more virulent than anything I'd imagined. 
"Jim Crow laws were thriving," Jones writes. "It was difficult for black people to purchase goods or receive services from white businesses in Arlington. If you did try to make a purchase, you risked being called ‘boy' or ‘nigger' and most certainly received poor treatment." Some white establishments required black people to use a rear door or transact business through a window in the alley. 
That level of insult, along with the outright legal restrictions of Jim Crow, intensified black entrepreneurism within the Halls Hill community. Businesses included a funeral parlor, doctor, a maker of cough syrup, a general store, candy store, and two filling stations. The volunteer fire company had been organized in 1918, because the county's paid fire companies would not serve Halls Hill.
I find it staggering now to realize so late in my own life, how it was not just public facilities like schools and libraries that denied Negros access, but basic tax-supported public services essential to health and safety. I still struggle to wrap my mind around the inhumanity and really the insanity imposed by my own democratically elected local government. Arlington Hospital, where we all went, stood right next to Halls Hill, and had even encroached a bit into the one corner using eminent domain, yet would not accept Negros. People died because of this lunacy.
The volunteer fire company, Engine Company Number Eight, was a gathering-place for discussing political issues and voting, and also a source of pride – not only for the way its second-hand trucks were painstakingly maintained, but for the volunteer firemen's efficiency and their readiness to respond to fires in the surrounding white communities, where they often arrived ahead of the professional companies – despite taunts.
"In plenty of situations," Jones writes, "they endured racism from white citizens whose homes they were attempting to save."
Wilma Jones confirmed something I had read elsewhere and found hard to believe but was irrefutable. Halls Hill – already walled off by Jim Crow segregation, by biased local government and news reportage that turned a deaf ear to events in the black community – was separated from its nearest white neighbors by an actual physical wall.
The wall was six feet high. Built variously of wood and steel and concrete, it had been erected by abutting white homeowners in the 1930s with the permission of Arlington County authorities. That wall remained standing into the 1970s. It was there all the time I lived in Arlington. 
Somehow that physical wall makes the irony even starker:
There they were on their side of the wall, those Halls Hill kids and their parents exploring legal avenues for gaining access to our schools so they could get a decent education that was unavailable in in their woefully impoverished, overcrowded school – advanced math and science and languages and secretarial skills – so they could get into college or otherwise make their way in the world. And there we were, on our side of the wall, in our well-funded schools, learning all those subjects and more, and deprived of precisely that strand of American history that had built the American economy from the beginning – which is to say, black history and the realities of slavery.  
We learned nothing of black courage and black intellect and black struggle; nothing of the many rebellions. We learned nothing of Halls Hill's own unique history and its present realities; nothing of black celebration and joy, the role of the black church; nothing of the chains that remained in force not just in the tobacco and cotton fields of southside Virginia, but among our invisible neighbors on the other side of the wall.
Did l ever see the actual wall?
I'm not sure. 
But I suspect I did. 
Whatever glimpse I might have caught are fragmented and blurred. Maybe it happened after I'd learned to drive, when I was at the wheel of the family car prowling around looking for roads without streetlights where my high school girlfriend, Sally Lynn, and I could park and make out, where it's possible that a time or two my headlight beams exposed a glimpse of gray wall at the end of a dead-end street. 
I could be making this up, but that patch of wall sticks in my mind.

A new Section.

In Arlington, the more blatant markers of Jim Crow were hidden. 
Farther south in Virginia, at Greyhound and Trailways bus stations in Richmond, you saw signs posted over the separate entrances that said WHITE ONLY and COLORED ONLY. 
Arlington had no actual bus station. The closest thing we had was Roslyn Circle, where the busses from either direction stopped at the Virginia end of Key Bridge. 
Roslyn Circle was not the major subway station it has become now. Back in pre-subway, pre-Beltway, pre-Internet Arlington, Roslyn Circle was a little roundabout lined with seedy storefronts that included the three dusty brass balls of a pawnshop, a small four-story brick hotel with a newsstand below, and next to it a jewelry store with a common hallway that led upstairs to where a watch repairman and a shoe-cobbler plied their trades. Half a block away was the shoe store where my mother took me to be fitted for corrective shoes when I was seven or eight.
Roslyn Circle began to figure in my life when I was twelve, old enough to take the bus by myself into Washington for Saturday art lessons at Cornelia Yuditski's Creative Art Studio for Children and Young Adults. To get home, after standing at an easel applying of tempera to newsprint, I caught the bus home from K Steet that would take me either all the way into Arlington or, depending on its number, as far as Roslyn Circle, where I could transfer. There, I'd climb aboard a Virginia bus, hand the driver my pink transfer ticket with its time punched and sit down usually about halfway back. 
The driver cranked a new destination into the sign-window. Then, because we were in Virginia, he'd issue an order for Negro passengers to move to the back of the bus. I don't remember the exact words he used, even whether he said ‘Negro' or ‘colored'. The order didn't affect me, and now I realize I didn't want to hear, or even see the blur of legs and feet going past my downward gaze. I do remember looking up to see the driver's blue eyes in the inside rearview mirror making sure that everyone had complied, because that was his job.  
Once I recall a disturbance when a Negro man remained sprawled in deep sleep across the aisle from me. He looked utterly exhausted, or drunk, or both, with his head lolling on the seat-back, his mouth open and drooling. The bus driver came back and tried to nudge him awake. I think it was at the next stop that a policeman came aboard and managed to escort the man off the bus. That too is a blur. What I more keenly remember is the embarrassment I felt – partly on that poor man's behalf, but also for the rest of us who were witnessing this abrogation of the natural order. 
I cringe now to recall that feeling. It was so white and remains so indelible. 
The man looked helpless, exhausted. For all I know, he might have had a seizure or a minor stroke. But my response was part of the personal enclosure I was learning to spin around myself, so I could pretend the movement of feet past my seat was as natural as water running downhill, and now can't recall the bus driver's words. I remember only my wonder and revulsion for that man sprawled with his mouth open. 
Just as vague is my memory of two separate drinking fountains. I think they were located in the common hallway next to the jewelry shop at Roslyn Circle. Above a grimy fountain was a sign that said COLORED; above the clean one, a sign that said WHITE ONLY. The message was clear. Anyone forced by their color to drink from the filthy one was humiliated; anyone drinking from the clean one was having their white superiority affirmed. 
I don't recall seeing those starkly paired drinking fountains elsewhere else in Arlington. They weren't needed where Negros were made to mostly disappear. 
People liked to say Arlington was "not really Virginia" because of all the government workers who'd flocked in from elsewhere. But under Arlington's surface modernity were the bones and sinews of the Old South. 

A new Section.-

Yes, this process of discovery I've described here is humbling. Yes, it brings pain. But it brings surprising joy.
To free myself of the cloying fabrications that surrounded me is cleansing. The discoveries beckon me forward – I was going to say ‘to the next clear pool, waiting for me to dive in' – but metaphor aside, an actual pool comes to mind; one so vivid in memory that I want to carry you ahead several years beyond the main timeframe of my story, to something that happened in the summer of 1972. 
I was 31. I'd dropped out of teaching to devote myself to protesting the war in Vietnam. I'd left my marriage. My wife, Ginny, couldn't understand my fury at the various pretexts for increasing the number of American troops and widening the conflict; my rage at the Gulf of Tonkin resolution; at Defense Secretary Melvin Laird's doublespeak in describing the carpet-bombing at the Cambodian border as ‘offensive strikes of a defensive nature'.
I was suffering from burnout – despondent that Richard Nixon was still President, that the Vietnam war was still grinding on in the former rubber plantations and rice paddies of French colonial Indochina. My own efforts to end the war and bring American troops home by then seemed dogged and futile. 
I wanted to escape. I continued to see my two young sons, but otherwise wanted to drop out completely from middle class respectability. 
So I hopped freights. 
The idea seemed original enough. Never mind it was planted somewhere by Jack Kerouac. John Steinbeck, Woody Guthrie. A uniquely American enterprise. And I was going to meet my new girlfriend, Annie Shapiro, in Santa Rosa. So, it had that touch of romance. More than a touch. We'd sewed down-filled sleeping bags from a kit. They zipped together. I was left zip; she was right zip. She would drive west from New Rochelle with a girlfriend, while I made the trip by freights.
I hopped west through the July oven-heat of New Mexico and Arizona and ended up in a big freight yard at the northern outskirts of LA, looking for northbound. I met another man searching, as I was, for a fast freight we'd heard of called the Gray Ghost. Such a train is rumored around freight yards a lot, the stuff of tramp myth. Maybe a tease by brakemen in switchyards who are full of such lore. But we'd both heard of the Gray Ghost, this other guy and I, and we were both headed north up California's Central Valley, to see our respective girlfriends – mine in Santa Rosa, his in Oakland. He was a black man, about my age and build, and he called himself Chicago Lite.
At one point in our travels, Chicago Lite and I ended up at the edge of the Mojave desert, stranded, between freights. We'd abandoned the freight we were on, when its two engine-units were insufficient to make the grade up into the small brown mountains. We'd stood near the front engine and overheard the engineer on his phone trying to get another unit sent. He turned to his fireman with a chuckle and quoted the dispatcher saying everything was tied up ‘tighter than a bull's ass in fly season'. 
So we left that train and set off in search of water. Our supply of drinking water was meager. And the stink of our clothing was foul – not just the layers of dried sweat and smears of black grease you got from climbing over couplings, but the clinging miasma of diesel smoke particulates and rotten produce that is the price of riding for free in boxcars. 
We walked toward a distant fringe of trees, which as we got closer turned out to be a cottonwood and some willows and sumac that overarched a gulch. At the bottom of the gulch was, sure enough, the trickle of a creek threading among the rocks. We followed that tiny creek, hoping to find a pool where we could jump in and swim or even enough to kneel and wash out our clothes. 
The creek never amounted to more than a trickle. The closest we came to a pool was a place where the water deepened no more than the span of your hand. We stood looking at it. 
 "Too bad," I muttered bleakly. 
Despair had become a habit for me – as if it were somehow the portion I deserved, for all my efforts struggling against the war. Despair served to amplify so much gone wrong in the world, and my teaching career and marriage come to naught.
Then I turned and looked down, and was surprised to see Lite had lain down among the rocks, fully clothed, the water seeping up through his clothes; eyes shut, a big grin spreading across his face. 
Comprehension descended through me like water itself. I lay down nearby. I felt the coolness of actual water soak around the back of my head as far as my ears, felt it soak cool little fingers upward through my clothes. Felt a grin stretch across my own face.
No swim has ever felt so fine. 
That's the nature of truth. You find it where you can, when you can. 
The quest I've embarked on has such discoveries. Truth comes in trickles at times, other times in a torrent of whatever wild beauty or pain I can allow myself to feel in the moment. 
You just have to be ready.


Chapter 4

	I was born in Vinita, Oklahoma in 1940, at the start of World War Two. When we moved to Arlington and I entered first grade in 1946, the war had just ended. So I was a war baby, a few years ahead of the Boomers.
	My earliest memories are from the shady sidewalk in front of our rented house in Vinita. From an old black-and-white photograph my mother probably took with her trusty folding-bellows Kodak, I know the house had a front porch with square columns, and I was wearing a little Army helmet, and a toy rifle my father made me from wood. 
I think I remember the rifle and helmet, but I could be confusing the photograph with actual memory. I'm pretty sure the dark parts of the house were brown, which would reach beyond the black-and-white photo. 
What I recall most surely as mine are the feel of those boundaries – how I was allowed as a three-year-old to push my little wooden scooter along the front sidewalk from the driveway to the place where a slab of sidewalk was tipped aslant by the roots of a big tree. I was not to venture past that place unless accompanied by an adult. And I can feel my legs and hands pushing the scooter up that slant of sidewalk and turning back down. Those sensations are mine. I feel them yet.
I know my sister, Susan, older than me by three years, was allowed to help me as far as that tipped-up sidewalk place; I can feel her hand on my shoulder guiding me. I remember studying a bunch of ants crowded around a tiny fragment on the sidewalk, and someone, maybe Susan, explaining "It must be something sweet." I'm not certain those words came from Susan, because I cannot quite hear her voice; only recall the explanation. But I remember studying the ants intently, and I think now, if not then, that it might have been a tiny blip of chocolate. This might be my earliest memory, and the feeling that went with it. 
I felt secure within those boundaries. I felt protected.
	Dad had built the scooter from scraps of wood and a pair of old wheels he found hanging in the garage. 
	"You couldn't buy toys during the war." He said this a few too many times, it seemed to me as I got a little older, as if he felt guilty being home while younger men were off fighting, and while some men older than Dad were fighting as well. My father, Wilbur L  Morse, was born in 1908 – too young to fight in the First World War, he always said; too old to fight in the Second. He said that often too. His own father had been a pacifist and Socialist, but my dad was spared that decision.
	I loved the scooter. Dad had screwed it together and rounded off wooden fenders he'd created to look a little like a motor scooter, and tapered the wooden handlebars to fit my hands. Dad had been a carpenter as a young man, on his way to becoming a lawyer. I loved everything he made. 
My family was relatively untouched by the war. Franklin D  Roosevelt was President. I knew the Germans were the bad guys, even if I got Germans and germs confused. When Susan was in second grade, she announced at the dinner-table, "Germs can't live on soap." She'd learned this in school. She was proud. And I was impressed with her authoritative tone, even if I wondered privately why germs would even want to live on soap.
 
A new Section.

In 1943, we moved from Vinita to the University Heights suburb of St. Louis. That was the first house my folks actually owned. Dad always teased Mom afterward for falling in love with the pink rambler roses in front. We would live there for three years before making the move all the way east, to Arlington, following Dad's career. 
Only now, as I put the jigsaw pieces together, does it occur to me that all three of those neighborhoods were white. It was taken for granted. I don't recall anybody remarking on the fact. It was just the way things were. Now I realize it was an early reflection of Jim Crow.
	For the move from Oklahoma to St. Louis, Dad drove our 1940 Chevy. Sitting in the back seat with Susan, I learned new words as the farms and towns floated by on Route 66. That road trip runs together in my mind with later trips back to Oklahoma to visit relatives. But I think even on that first trip, Dad explained how the black and white cows were Herefords, the brown ones Guernseys, how both breeds were milk cows; and the square-shouldered black ones were Black Angus beef cattle. I had a penny in my mouth, for some reason. A new penny. I remember the taste. Mom made me take it out. She explained how our shiny new 1943 pennies were made of steel, to save copper for the war. 
	Susan, who was in first grade, was sounding out words she saw out the car windows. With some adult help she announced the advertisements painted on old black barns, mostly for Mail Pouch tobacco. I called the windmills windmooies – most of them still turning atop their latticed wooden towers. We drove past the taller oil derricks of similarly crisscrossed steel, at the bottom of which the pumps bobbed up and down like giant birds pecking in slow motion at the ground.
	We sang, as families did in those days, before cell phones and computer games. 
	 Old McDonald had a farm, ee-i-ee-i-oh, and on this far he had a duck…
	and 
	The bear went over the mountain, the bear went over the mountain…
	We didn't listen much to the radio. The stations were staticky AM and faded quickly in and out. Our games of Barnyard Poker were more fun: looking out the car windows, you got a point for all the four-legged animals you saw on your side of the road; ten points for a white horse; and you lost ten points if you passed a graveyard or a lady carrying a black umbrella. 
	I suppose all that sounds sparse, to anyone accustomed to cellphone podcasts and games. But it did keep you attending to the environment around you. 
Over the years to come, while the grandparents were still alive, and we made those trips, I noticed more powerlines, and fewer windmills still turning, many of them derelict, with blades missing, or fallen over. Now I realize my father had facilitated that process, when as a young lawyer working for REA, the Rural Electrification Agency, he had gone around talking farmers into forming electric co-ops, so they could give up their antiquated windmills hooked up to six-volt car batteries that might run a few lightbulbs, and tie into the new electric grid. 
The oil drilling rigs were getting more numerous, as drilling spread farther. Many towers were taken away to drill new wells, leaving the bird-like pumps to bob by themselves under the open sky. My father and grandfather Scott were part of that expansion too, buying mineral rights from farmers in the old Creek Nation and the old Cherokee Nation – which by then were getting chopped up into counties – so they could lease their rights to oil companies for drilling. 
What was happening to the Indians in Oklahoma, I had no idea. My parents were silent on the subject of the Indians. I had no understanding of anything beyond what I could see out the car windows. I knew we were proud of being from Oklahoma, ‘Land of the Red Man', and Susan and I shared Dad's pride in our Indian ancestry. The rest was landscape: cattle and wheatfields and cornfields; the old black Mail Pouch Tobacco barns giving way to modern billboards advertising Camels and Lucky Strikes; gas stations like Flying Horse, and Esso, which changed to Exxon. Only recently have I allowed myself to comprehend how the tribal authority and the territory set aside in perpetuity for the Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Seminole, and smaller tribes like the Osage, had all been dismantled. Only now do I understand the weight of their silence about the Indians. 

A new Section.

	I realize now, too, how those road trips were distinctively white. 
Dad could stop at any restaurant or gas station to eat or use the restrooms. If we'd been an African American family, we'd have needed to pack hampers of food and water and toilet paper to get past all the places where we'd be turned away. We'd probably be consulting the little book called The Green Guide that identified places where it was safe to stop. 
	Isabel Wilkerson, in The Warmth of Other Suns, tells of gas pump intimidation experienced in Monroe, Louisiana, by a man whose son recounted the story:
"The owner told him he'd have to wait for the white people to get their gas first." After waiting and waiting, his father finally started to pull off. 
	"The owner came up, put a shotgun to his head, and told him he was not to leave until all the white people had been served.  ‘Boy, don't you ever do what you just started to do'."
	I doubt that my parents had any inkling of such occurrences, or even knew of The Green Guide. They would evolve with the times. Eventually they were proud to join the march on Washington in 1963, when Martin Luther King Jr. made his famous "I have a dream" speech from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. But in my youth, as far as I can tell, which is to say their own middle years, they lived gently at the edge of innocence. 
		
A new Section.

	My glimpses of World War Two were from the low altitude of a four-year-old in downtown St. Louis. I'm walking with Mom, holding her hand and scanning the sidewalk for treasure, having found a dime and a quarter on an earlier occasion. We're standing at a curb waiting to cross an intersection. I look down and see tiny round pieces of colored paper scattered in the gutter. 
	"What are those little round things?" 
	"That's confetti," Mom says. "From the parade to celebrate V-J Day. Victory over Japan." Which would make it August 1945.
 	She warns me then about a terrible thing that happened in New York City at a big parade, when a heavy glass paperweight got tossed amidst a pile of tickertape that was dumped out of a high-up office window, and a woman on the street below was killed.  I don't know whether this was a recent event or just one of Mom's cautions – like not to throw our peach-pits out the open car windows, because a woman had once been blinded. It was usually a woman, hurt by some carelessness. 
	Walking a little farther we encounter a little crowd of people standing in a circle around an organ grinder sitting on a little stool cranking his gaily painted box-organ while a monkey wearing a red jacket with gold braid scampers from one onlooker to another brandishing a tin cup. When the monkey comes our way, Mom's hand is on my forearm warning me. "Monkeys can bite."
	These were reasonable cautions. Mom was not frightened as a matter of temperament. I do know she felt anguish about the dropping of the atom bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Words were spoken, but what I recall is her shuddering in sympathy over newspaper photographs of radiation victims whose flesh was melting from their bones. 
I did not know enough to be grateful that our whole extended family was spared the war – my seven uncles and aunts and I believe all their children except Jack, a much older cousin. 
Jack had served in France and come back wounded. On one of our visits back to Oklahoma, when I was twelve or thirteen, Mom asked Jack to pull up his shirt for me to see the red zigzag of scars across his back. I was embarrassed for Jack. Years later I understood. Mom wanted me to see what war could do.

A new Section.
 
I liked the house with the rambler roses and know now that I was picking up on my folks' enjoyment of owning their first home. Sometimes we all four cuddled on the sofa, and they'd sing their favorite song.
We'll build a little nest, somewhere out in the West,
Out there beneath a kindly sky.
We'll find a perfect peace, where joys will never cease,
and let the rest of the world go by.
	That song always took me back to Oklahoma, or the idea of Oklahoma they created in my head. It filled me with a sense of security. 
For them, I think it spoke to future coziness, as Dad made his way up the career ladder. In an early love letter he wrote to her in the 1930s which she saved, my young father longs for a home of his own, with her – though he says he could be happy with her "even in a tent." He envisions how his beloved would furnish a home with books, pottery, soft rugs, the warmth of a fire, robes, pipe, popcorn, knitting, "thinking, reading, dreaming,,, Loving,,'" Elsewhere he promises a house made of brick.
The rambler rose house in University Heights turned out to be a waystation toward a more permanent home. Toward the end of our stay, Dad took long trips abroad by plane.
He was still working for REA but would soon be starting a new job as general counsel for UNRRA, The United Nations Rehabilitation and Relief Agency. Overseen by the U S  State Department, and under its budget, UNRRA in theory represented 44 nations under the UN umbrella. When the agency was folded into the UN in 1945, Dad drew up the legal paperwork and closed down its New York office – a ‘first', he liked to say, for an international agency to end itself like that. "I was the last one to turn out the lights."

A new Section.

Susan was in school, so Mom and I were at home. I was underfoot, learning the two qualities that would stick for the rest of my life – mischievousness and a love of nature. 
At four, I was allowed to explore the weed-filled vacant lot next to us, where Mom could see me from the kitchen window. Soon I was allowed to take my wooden scooter out on the sidewalk in front of our house and in front of the houses neighboring us on either side. 
One time I came home from the weed-filled vacant lot, my knee bleeding, Mom ran out to get me. I was unaware of the injury. Everyone concluded later I must have fallen or knelt on a piece of broken glass or one of the sharp clinkers left from a coal-burning furnace. Mom took me to the hospital, where I had seven stitches.
	When my wound was healed, the sutures dried crispy brown and were starting to itch. To save the cost of another trip to the doctor, Dad decided to remove the stiches himself. I held still, sitting fearfully on Mom's lap while Dad began snipping the loops with tiny little scissors. 
	I pleaded, "Daddy, be your very most carefullest." Gritting my teeth, I watched while he carefully lifted each of the stitches in turn with a needle and with tweezers delicately pulled each suture through the tiny holes in my skin – which felt weird, but tickled more than hurt.
	"You were very brave," Mom said, when it was over. "A big boy."

A new Section.

	Our family made do with simple pursuits, like the vacant lot for me, and the funnies in the newspaper. Mom engaged Susan and me in cooking and crafts. My cooking consisted mostly of stirring stuff in bowls and licking spoons. But any time Mom made cookie or pie dough, she'd give me a lump that I could pretend to cook over the heat register around the corner from the kitchen, where she was teaching Susan how to measure ingredients and use an eggbeater. War-time rationing was still going on, and she showed me how to paste the ration-stamps into the little ration book, an important job. 
Once, Mom announced we were about to leave for the grocery store. While she was upstairs dressing, I purloined ration-book and burrowed under the sofa with it. I held my breath, listening to her calling my name around the house. When I heard her footsteps getting close, I rolled out from under the sofa holding up the ration book and breaking into peals of laughter. 
	Mom decided I needed a pretend playmate. 
	She helped me assemble a life-size doll: the torso made from a brown paper grocery bag, the head from a smaller bag; legs from a pair of her old nylon stockings; arms from some of my own socks. At her direction I stuffed it with rags while she did housework. Then she safety-pinned it all together. 
	I named the doll Ragsy.
	Christmas was approaching. We had celebrated my birthday December fifteenth, and Dad had taken us out in the woods to cut down a tree. Ragsy and I helped Mom decorate the tree with tinsel. I was starting to ponder those kid questions. How did Santa get down the chimney? 
Something else puzzled me, for several days – Dad's disappearance into the basement as soon as he got home from work. It seemed to me he was down there forever. An acrid smell wafting up the basement steps. Its pungency intrigued me. It tickled my nostrils and almost put my teeth on edge. I pestered Mom.
	"What's Dad doing?"	 
	She smiled mysteriously. "He's working on something. You can't go down there. It's a surprise."
	I sat on the top step with Ragsy slumped beside me. 
	I was bored. Mischief called. I chucked old Ragsy halfway down the stairs and let out a blood-curdling scream as Ragsy tumbled head-over-heels down the steps. 
	Dad rushed from his workbench to the foot of the stairs. Mom, racing from the kitchen, stopped in her tracks behind me. When Dad looked up and saw me sitting safely at the top of the steps, gripping my own knees with fearful delight, and Mom appearing behind me, I saw his shoulders slump with relief. 
	Awed by my success, I knew this time I should not laugh. Their anger must have evaporated upon seeing me safe. I wasn't even scolded.
	Christmas morning finally arrived. Susan and I, waiting in our pajamas, were ushered into the living room. Susan got a doll with lifelike skin, and a little kitchen cupboard. Dad's surprise was waiting for me: winding among the wrapped presents was a marvelous train he had soldered together from tin cans and scraps of wire. 
	The engine was a masterpiece, the boiler a tin can mounted horizontally on which he had soldered a tin smokestack. The wheels were made from can-lids soldered together, the drive-wheels on either side linked to a little piston, so when I pushed it across the floor the piston rocked back and forth like the pistons of a real train. The headlamp was an old red plastic bicycle reflector. The door to the firebox was cut from the flat metal of a gallon-sized Naphtha gas can – you could see the label – ingeniously hinged so the little door could be opened and closed whenever my pretend engineer or fireman needed to shovel coal into the firebox. 
	The caboose was lovingly detailed – with its own little smokestack, a door at each end, and a red bicycle reflector warning-light on the rear platform where you could imagine the brakeman standing and looking back down the track. 
	I understood the train at that first magical moment and ever afterward as Dad's own game of pretend. He'd lost himself in that project, in his own artistry. Much later in his life, when he retired from being a lawyer, he would turn his hand to sculpting in wood and stone. But for now, we were partners in that game of pretend. I understood it then, and I understand it that way now. I prize that toy train today, the tin darkened with age.
	I've described this early period of my life at length. But what I see now, looking back, is a protected middle-class childhood, more inventive than some, and parents who had something not available in households struggling to make ends meet. They were hard-working, but they had the luxury of leisure. 
	I was a lucky child. I felt it, somehow. I did not begin to understand the surrounding social structure that boosted the odds for such luck.

A new Section.

	The vacant lot next door, despite its weeds and clinkers, was my first link to nature. Dad captured a snake there which he identified as a blue racer. Turning it into a pet was his idea. (At that age I was led to believe a lot of ideas were mine.) As a farm boy, he had made pets of snakes and baby possums. I'm guessing too that he didn't want me to pick up too many of Mom's womanly fears. 
	That blue racer was a yard long and as thick as my wrist and became quite tame. I could let it wrap around my neck and feel the cool muscular body with its tiny dry scales flowing across my skin with a weird snake urine odor that maybe only a child unconditioned to fear snakes could appreciate. I found hypnotic pleasure in the intimacy of the snake winding slowly around my body, flowing from one arm to the next as I held out one arm and then the other.
	Mom and Susan kept their distance. 
	Susan and I were learning our respective gender roles. I was learning the business of being a boy. My love of nature grew from that encircling snake. My relationship with nature from the beginning has been erotic and intimate: the fragrances of honeysuckle and rotting stumps and wild strawberries; the succulence of clover overlapping my bare feet so I could almost taste it with my toes; my fascination with how another creature could listen to sound vibrations with its glittering black forked tongue: all that sensory joy from befriending a creature as exotic and mysterious as a snake. I don't know how many children today have the opportunity to celebrate the miracle of nature intimately, with their bodies. 
	I kept the snake in a two-gallon jar out in the vacant lot. Dad showed me how to improvise a lid using a pane of glass weighted with a brick, with a little space left for the snake to breathe. 
	I knew my snake had to eat. I tempted it with grasshoppers and worms, but it didn't seem interested. I put a toad in the jar. I wasn't around for the swallowing, which was probably at night, but I monitored the progress of the toad-lump advancing very slowly down the length of the snake's gullet during the next four or five days. 
	The snake grew lethargic. I was afraid I'd poisoned it. "Is he going to die?"
	Dad thought not, but he seemed to harbor some doubt. "The snake might prefer catching mice, on its own."
	I thought about this. But I couldn't quite bear to let my pet go.
	One morning I went out and found the jar empty, the pane of glass pushed aside a couple of inches. The snake was plenty strong enough to have managed the escape on its own. But I suspected Dad, knowing he felt sorry for the snake in its glass prison. We all did. 
	I was sad, but relieved.

A new Section.

	In the back yard, way in the rear, was a tall swing set with three swings, left by the prior owner. 
Once, when I was swinging by myself, an older neighbor kid slipped through the hedge from some other back yard, pushed me off the swing, and took it over. 
	I traipsed to our back door wailing. 
	Dad marched me down into the basement entry and handed me a sturdy stick. He instructed me to go back out there and confront the bully. 
	"You get right back on that swing. It's your swing."
	I walked toward the swing, carrying the stick, filled with dread.
	Dad, I'm sure now in hindsight – and perhaps even caught a glimpse at the time – raised his head high enough above the basement entry-wall for the bully to see him. As I advanced toward the swing, the kid took off.
	So. Mom had her cautionary tales. Monkeys can bite. Dad had his lessons preparing me for manhood. Don't be afraid; stand up to bullies. 
	Only now do I realize how both those admonitions were distinctively white. African American boys faced dangers worse than a monkey's bite. They would have to receive ‘The Talk'. If the bully was white, the instruction was likely the opposite of my father sending me out with that stick.
	Richard Wright in his memoir, Black Boy, describes a terrible thrashing delivered by his mother with a barrel stave to his naked behind, after he confessed that he and his young pals had gotten into a battle with some white kids. They had thrown clinkers at the white kids, who retaliated with milk bottles. Richard was trying to explain to his mother the cut on his forehead and how the quarrel had escalated. 
	Richard's mother was furious. Every fiery whack of the barrel stave delivered a lesson in "Jim Crow wisdom" that he would never to forget: White people have the power. 
	That was the South, in 1910. But African Americans today almost all report some version of  The Talk. Jonathan Scott Holloway in his 2013 memoir, Jim Crow Wisdom, invokes Richard Wright's encounter with the barrel stave, and describes his own father's cautionary advice. 
Holloway, the first black president of Rutgers University in its 253-year history, grew up in an affluent Virginia suburb like mine, but a generation later, when Virginia schools were finally integrated, so he enjoyed a polyglot circle of friends. Even so, his father, the first black man to advance so far up the Air Force ranks, and who kept silent about his own scars, felt a need to caution his son while driving Jonathan to his first day of high school. His warning: Jonathan was tall enough to be mistaken for older, and although light-skinned, he was identifiably black, both of which could tempt some kid "itching to fight." If someone were to take a swing at him, he was not to swing back. "You will be blamed, because of the way things are." 

A new Section.

	As a white boy, I had no need for The Talk. Nor did I have to deliver it as a father to three boys and stepfather to two more. 
	If I caught a glimpse of my father rising up from the basement entry, or even if I simply imagined it, I knew he was there behind me somewhere. Some kind of freedom allowed me to go forward with that stick in hand. 
I was learning that part of white supremacy without knowing it – a surrounding fund of safety, spelled out for the moment in Dad's handing me the stick, that would serve me in future mischief that might involve me with property-owners or police in my boyhood and teens, and would get spelled out for me once in a freight-yard in Albuquerque. My family's safety was anchored as well in class, in our financial security, in education, in owning our own home -- untouched by threats of eviction, or hunger, or unmet medical needs, or paths closed to so many Americans, whatever their color.

For me, it was a time of innocence, purer than the innocence that would settle over me later.
I had experienced no personal losses, except for the snake, and whatever sadness I felt then, I at least knew the snake was out there somewhere, catching mice and other creatures of its own choosing, enjoying its freedom. 
The war had not touched me in any real way: just Mom's mention of my cousin Jack, healing from his wounds in France; the veterans I saw on crutches selling paper poppies; Mom's concern for starving children in Europe. 
	My childhood gaze took in so much, from the edges – observing how that monkey in its red outfit worked the crowd; thinking the monkey was working a lot harder than the organ grinder, but wondering maybe in a later layer of memory whether the organ grinder was perhaps blind, and in much later layers of memory thinking might have been trained and provided by some charitable organization. 
	What I wonder now, as I riffle through more recent layers of memory, is whether I saw a white cane leaned against the organ grinder's knee, or whether that's an embellishment I've added to the original memory. All that layering seems truer of some memories than others, with recognitions at various stages of recall that show the memory is still alive for the rememberer. 


Chapter 5

In the spring of 1946, the day after Dad came back from one of his trips to Washington D C, he and Mom announced that he had a new job in the government, and our family would be moving to the suburbs of Washington D C He and Mom had already discussed   the move. He had been inquiring among his new office colleagues and scouting out school systems, and   that the best schools were in Arlington County. 
	"But I like it here," I protested. "I'm making friends." 
My new friends included the Cooksies, an immensely fat elderly couple who lived across the street and sat outside by their front walk on a bench with their hands cupped over their upright canes and looked themselves like big cookies. By the sidewalk to the right of their bench was a big tree with a cavity that somebody had filled with cement in which a couple of horizontal grooves were inscribed, so it looked for the world like a vertical sidewalk rising under the bark, and I was pretty sure it was a magical sidewalk that might lead eventually up to the beanstalk castle of a giant. 
I spent a lot of time puzzling over whether the giant ducked under the bark or walked over it. Either method was intriguing. Either possibility made sense in my child logic. If I shared my quandary with Mr. and Mrs. Cooksie (and I think I did), I'm sure they were amused, so it's no wonder they befriended me. The Cooksies talked funny. They were from a faraway place called Maine, and their accent was as exotic to my ears as that vertical sidewalk was to my reasoning powers. 
	Next door to the Cooksies a new family had moved in with a little girl named Mimi, a year or so younger than me, but a promising playmate. I think I had a crush on her.
	"You'll find new friends," Mom and Dad assured me. As a further inducement, Dad presented me with the Sunday comics section of The Washington Post. Unlike our newspaper, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, these funnies were in color! 
	I couldn't read the text inside the balloons, but I pored over Hal Clements' Prince Valiant for its elaborate detail. Someone must have helped me with the words. The fierce, blue-painted Picts were swarming over Hadrian's Wall, while Prince Valiant fought them off with his famous singing sword. That particular scene may have come until later, but it's the one I will never forget. Prince Valiant's epic battles spread across a main panel captured my imagination. And Princess Aleta's beauty was not lost on five-year-old me – with her tumbling blond locks and delicate features. I was ready to defend her myself. 
	Alley Oop, Popeye, and Li'l Abner – all with their girlfriends – were among my other favorites. And Krazy Kat loved Ignatz the mouse, who was always throwing bricks at his head. How those cartoonists loved to draw! Even Orphan Annie, with her dog Sandy, drawn so carefully with those weird blank eyes. I could see their love of drawing in those strips.
	"You'll get to read them every Sunday," Dad told me, "after we move."
	"You can bring your favorite toys," Mom added. And you'll get to fly in an airplane, way up above the clouds!"
	I think one of them added, "You'll get to have a dog."
	Yay! 

A new Section.

We moved out on a June morning in 1946. Mom had finished packing the last boxes. We ate breakfast, and the movers arrived to trundle our sofa and other furniture into a big van. 
	Dad had driven ahead in the Chevy a couple of days earlier packed with things we would need before the moving van got to our new house in Arlington. 
We were going to fly! 
Dad had prepped us what to expect. How our ears might pop, and we might feel weightless at moments "like riding in an elevator." The flight might be a little bumpy, he cautioned, "but you'll be safe."
I said goodbye to the Cooksies, took a last look at the giant's beanstalk sidewalk. I said goodbye to Mimi. I picture myself kissing her, but that's probably an added-on fantasy. Suspect, like the organ grinder's white cane. I do know we hugged.
	The three of us rode by taxi to the St. Louis airport, the driver slouched down in his creaking leather seat, smoking cigarettes, his ashtray overflowing with stubs. The cab reeked. Mom cranked our windows open.
	At the airport, we walked up to the big airplane, Susan and I holding Mom's hands on either side; Mom tightening her grip on mine as we passed the propellers, which were starting to rotate as the four engines coughed to life separately. At the top of the moveable stairway-on-wheels, smiling stewardesses ushered us inside. The plane was made of aluminum, the word a little difficult for me to pronounce. Dad has told me how aluminum was a new metal, lighter than steel. It seemed like the metal of the future. 
	The cheerful stewardesses, who wore uniforms and little hats, and all had the same smile, escorted us to our seats. As we passed the open door to the cockpit, we could see the pilot and copilot sitting at their complicated bank of controls. I was invited to step inside, I guess because I was a boy. Susan peeked in over my shoulder. The pilot swiveled in his seat and introduced himself as Captain so-and-so. He showed me the altimeter and a couple of controls along with a small half steering wheel; and how the co-pilot had a similar wheel. Then he presented me with a little metal pin that was a pair of wings for me to pin to my shirt, so I might someday be a pilot.
	Once everyone was buckled in and the No Smoking sign came on, and the stewardesses made another round, checking our seatbelts, the Captain's voice came on, telling us we were waiting for a runway to be clear. A few minutes later he announced our takeoff. 
	The plane taxied for a long time while they tested the ailerons and rudder, as the Captain had explained to me. Then he made a U-turn to taxi into the wind, this time with the engines roaring really loud and shaking, until finally the wheels left the ground – I could feel it happening! – feel the clunk below as the landing gear folded into the underbelly. The plane ascended at a gradual slant through clouds, which were b,uffeting the plane a little as we labored through them, followed by "air pockets," which did make our stomachs queasy and our ears pop. Mom gave us chewing gum. Once we got above those big fluffy clouds, they looked as though you could jump on them and bounce. 
	"Fairy castles," Mom exclaimed. I think this was her first time flying too.
	For dinner, the stewardesses brought us our choice of two hot entrees from the galley at the rear of the plane. I don't remember what I chose, but galley made it sound like a ship. 
	When we landed finally, the propellors went into reverse to bring us to a whooshing stop.
Dad met us at the gate. He loaded our suitcase into the car, and drove us past Arlington Cemetery and the Pentagon, which he said was the biggest office building in the world, and then on to Dominion Hills, our new neighborhood – so new that the road in front of our house hadn't been surfaced yet. Dad drove over round river-rocks laid between the new curbing. Our house was two-story brick, with a red front door and green shutters. Dad pulled into the driveway.
He was like a magician, turning the key in the lock, and opening the door wide and ushering us in.
Everything smelled new. We went from one room to another. Upstairs was my bedroom – the smallest of the three, with a window above the front door, which made it special, they explained. I agreed. We were going to do our own painting. Mom told me I could pick the color for my room.

A new Section.

After the movers arrived with our stuff, Mom set up her old treadle Singer sewing machine in Susan's room to make curtains. I chose blue for my bedroom. It was really Mom's choice. Blue was good for a boy's room. She did the real painting, using the new ‘rubber-based' paint that could be cleaned up with water, and applied it with a roller instead of a brush – her first time using either. I painted some of the trim on my window.
I could decorate my room however I liked. But Mom and Dad supplied the furnishings, which were reminders of our Oklahoma and Indian heritage: a bronzed figurine of Will Rogers, about a foot tall, that I could put on the little table next to my bed. Will Rogers was a ‘favorite son' of Oklahoma, they told me; part Cherokee like Dad, a cowboy movie star who did rope-tricks. The figurine showed him with a wry smile, one hand in his pocket, a coiled lasso hanging from the other. Across the bottom were the words "I never met a man I didn't like." For years it seemed an admirable sentiment.
	 Hanging on the wall over my bed was an old cap-and-ball Colt revolver with a rosewood handle that Dad claimed had belonged to his father, my grandfather Scott Morse. "He swapped it for a heavier .45." 
	On the opposite wall was a pair of rawhide-bound Indian stickball sticks made from hickory, hung crossed over a deer skin. Dad explained how the hickory was steamed and bent into a loop, and webbed with strips of rawhide. He didn't know whether these sticks were Cherokee or Choctaw. He called them ‘Indian golf clubs'; I don't know why. They were basically lacrosse sticks with small heads. The competitions were fierce, according to Dad, the sticks used to deftly capture and hurl a small leather ball, which in the old days would have been a human skull, and the competitions were often between villages located miles apart; sometimes they served instead of war to settle disputes.
I admired the beauty of those sticks, the toughness of the bent hickory. I took them down sometimes to feel them, how the tight-grained wood was polished to glassy smoothness from all that rough play, the original rawhide bindings overwrapped with black tire-tape of the old canvas sort – that suggested to me someone had played with them pretty seriously, and not just in the way-distant past. 
Dad seemed not to have played with them. But somebody sure had!

A new Section.

As I got just a little older, it seemed clear that since I was a boy I was expected to carry the Oklahoma stuff forward, while Susan could do the girly things. 
I was the one Dad told stories about his old Indian grandmother, whom he idolized. She was his mother's mother, so my maternal great grandmother. But Dad always referred to her as ‘my old Indian grandmother" with a special possessiveness, never as "your great-grandmother." That possessiveness strikes me as peculiar – the way he adored her and was almost elbowing me out of the way. I've come to understand it in various lights, as I learn more about Oklahoma – the real Oklahoma, and not the Broadway Oklahoma! that we must have seen three times as a family. I got a few glimpses of their own hard-scrabble early lives, but nothing of what was happening to the Indian tribes struggling to keep their identities within the tribal lands assigned to them that were being taken away, along with their language and tribal culture. 
"Some people will rob you with guns," Woodie Guthrie says in one of his songs. "Others will rob you with fountain pens."
Young Indians attending the government boarding schools who were caught speaking their own language were punished, made to hold their palms up for the teacher to whack hard with a sharp ruler. 
If my parents were conscious of the genocide taking place, they said nothing about it to me. I think they did not want to know. I think Dad's way of honoring his old Indian grandmother and his own Indianness was to keep her locked in the past, in his boyhood, where she was safe – safe from whatever he did know, and did not know, was happening to the Indians. 
Her name was Julia Edwards. She was known to be part Cherokee and probably some Creek. She'd grown up in a Creek household, rode horses with the men. In the two old photographs she stood tall, rooted to the earth in the Indian way: dark, with high cheekbones and dark eyebrows, eyes ‘black as two holes burned in an Army blanket', as family lore had it. 
Julia Edwards refused to sign the Dawes Register, so she never received the 160-acre allotment of land that would have been hers for signing. Dad always blamed her stubbornness and ignorance. She was perhaps one-quarter Cherokee, which would make him one-eighth. Her quotient was uncertain, as with so many Indians, because of the Creek and other tangled lineage. But she was easily eligible. People with quotients as miniscule as point 035 could sign. Now that I've learned a little more about the Dawes register, I understand why.
Some signed with an X. She was illiterate but could have signed her name. Dad as a ten-year-old, had taught her how to write her name, so he was doubly announced that she never signed.  
His blaming her always puzzled me. I can't do that puzzling without experiencing a heaviness in my heart. This has become truer than ever for me. I feel some anger and loss, myself, for the Indianness Dad was forced to leave behind.
From those two surviving photographs of Julie Edwards, and also from family lore, it's clear she was darker than her daughter – Dad's mother, my grandma Morse – who had blue eyes and curly hair and was ashamed of having a mother who was so dark and visibly Indian.  
Dad took after his old Indian grandmother. He was darker than his mother, and had his grandmother's black hair, although not her intense black eyes. He must have identified with her more than with his mother, and bridled at his mother's shame. 
I can't help but wonder whether, if I had looked more Indian, he would have called her ‘your great-grandmother' instead of always ‘my old Indian grandmother' and felt safer passing her on to me. But he could not. It was as though – I'm going out on a limb here, with a thought I've never had before writing those last words – it was as though, in holding onto her legacy for himself, he was raising a hand of goodbye to his Indian lineage. 
My father, as articulate as he was in matters of law, would not have been able to voice such feelings, if he did hold them somewhere in the private space within. This is my belief, now that I am older than he was then, at an age when I can separate myself from him, and can look at him as a younger man, with the foibles that attend one stage of life or another. 
During my own middle adulthood, I thought of my father as a Deist, in the eighteenth-century mode. He placed a high value on rationality; believed in a God of nature, in human progress and the perfectibility of man. But now I also see how he felt obliged to frame everything in the white man's way, and if he did have such feelings as I imagine now, they were not white man's feeling – or in any case, not the sort of knowledge that could be boxed up in the methodical way he'd learned to construct a legal brief, and the way he'd learned to parse everything in his mind, the way we're all taught to do in mainstream industrial society. 
 I think I've learned to do it too well, myself. I escape at times – when I'm immersed in my art or taken up in love or awe or intimacy. Now, at this moment of my life, when suddenly I'm unpacking such a multitude of discoveries, so many bound up ineluctably with others, I let it all tumble forth as it will. Truth comes in breathtaking simultaneity. 
My father would not have found the words because it was not about words. Important as words are in my own life, and however they help me ladder my way through my thinking, words also get in the way of what's swimming around behind my brow and in my belly, and in the muscles that propel me, that exist outside the cerebral layer. Some awarenesses are best allowed to exist beyond words. Dad I think found this true for himself, in the last twenty years of his life, when he gave himself over to sculpting in marble and wood, even if he felt a need to explain it afterwards in a didactic or joking way. Toward the end, there was less to explain, less that could be explained, in the play of light and shadow over life and death. 
But what I remember as a child, seeing that toy train under the Christmas tree, and afterwards studying its intricacies, the hinged door to the firebox snipped from a Naphtha gas can; the knowledge beyond words that he'd followed his tin-snips and soldering iron into a world of make-believe we shared.
That was my first experience of art, I think, looking back on it, my first inkling of how art worked.
My second experience of art that I remember came later, after we moved to Arlington. It was more external, but felt also in my body, looking up at the statue of Abraham Lincoln inside the fluted columns of his memorial.

A new Section.
I know from Dad's stories that Julia Edwards always lived with the family, at least from the time they lived above the general store that Granddad Morse ran in Muskogee, and after Granddad moved the family out to the farm in Okmulgee, at the edge of the Cherokee Nation, when the threat of war loomed on the horizon of Europe in 1916.
Granddad Morse, being a Socialist and a pacifist, avoided conscription by turning to farming. They crowded into a small house, onto which Granddad built a lean-to addition – a family of seven:  Granddad and Grandma Morse, their four children crowded into two  bedrooms; old Julia Edwards, who had a bed in the living room; and Dad's Uncle John, who whenever he showed up after a few nights of drinking, slept on a couch in the unheated porch. 

A new Section.

Photographs of my father as a boy show little Wilbur barefoot in overalls, with dark bangs cut in the mixing-bowl style of farm kids, a hint of mischief playing at the corners of his mouth. Wilbur used to bring his schoolbooks home, and his father would follow along with him. His father had no formal education, but he'd learned how to read and write, after taking out for the Territory as a twelve-year-old on the stolen horse and finding refuge with educated Indian families who had books. But his father had only rudimentary math skills, adding and subtracting. Studying along with Dad, he learned long division and decimal-fractions – skills he would use later to bid on construction projects. 
When Dad was nine, he wanted a pinto pony for Christmas. Wanted it in the worst way. He prayed that he'd find the pony on Christmas morning waiting outside the kitchen door. 
Christmas arrived. No pony. 
"I went to my old Indian grandmother. I asked ‘Why didn't God hear me? Why did He let me down?'"
"She explained ‘That's not the way prayer works. You don't pray to get things like ponies, Wilbur. You pray for things like patience and forgiveness, not for things, like a pony'."
	He portrayed her as a sort of medicine-woman. Ladies from all around came to Julia Edwards for healing; they also came around with willow baskets filled with remnants of cloth, to quilt, sitting around the big square quilting-frame that that got hauled up afterwards with ropes and pulleys to store up against the lean-to ceiling. 
Every spring she stitched up a medicine-bag filled with smelly ingredients like camphor and lard and kerosene that she made Dad wear around his neck during flu season. In the one-room schoolhouse he attended, where kids sat in benches around a woodstove, no one got too close to Wilbur Morse.  
	When Dad and his older brother Alva heard the drumbeat and chanting down at the Old Indian Stomp Grounds at the back of the farm next to the river, they would venture down to watch the Indians perform their seasonal dances – the green corn dance and the yellow ribbon dance, and others. When I picture myself joining those two boys, we are semi-hidden behind a fringe of bushes. That's my fantasy. But for all I know, they sat in plain sight on bench-logs around the perimeter of the circle.
	All those stories helped anchor my own more tenuous Indian heritage. The old six-shooter represented the European side, the invaders. I took it down to feel the rosewood handle and see how the levered tamping-rod would have tamped the charge of powder and wad into each of the six chambers in turn. At some point in my early teens, I identified it as a .32 Navy Colt. But I already had serious doubts as to whether my Granddad ever would have carried such an antique. The only gun I ever saw him carry was a shotgun, whose power he demonstrated once when we visited his farm – the old ‘home place; in Okmulgee – by blasting a little green snake that crossed our path. There wasn't much left of the snake.
I somehow understood the symbolism intended in those three objects: the old six-gun, the hickory ball-sticks, and the statuette (even if I knew it was plaster under the bronze paint, revealed by a chip at the bottom, and even as the words "I never met a man I didn't like," began to sound saccharine). I understood the symbolism, but not the conundrum they have come to represent for me now – the irreconcilable cost of taming the West.
The old Colt shooting-iron was safely never going to shoot. I realize now the stickball sticks must have been carefully restored, so as to bring the polished hickory to that glassy smoothness, the tire-tape kept intact probably as part of the restoration, the heads restrung with soft deerskin too delicate for actual use. They too were sentimental, intended to feed my imagination for an idealized Oklahoma, the Oh What a Beautiful Morning! Oklahoma where the cattle all stood like statues. Mom kind of believed in fairies, and Dad was always a bit of a trickster behind that Indian persona.

	


Chapter 6

I can't put it off any longer.
This is the time, now that I've taken you through my very early childhood to when we arrived in Arlington.
Now, finally, with some dread I have to jump ahead three-quarters of a century into the future, to the murder of George by police on a Minneapolis sidewalk, the afternoon of May 23, 2020. 
	The cell phone video, taken by Darnella Frazier, the teenager who posted it on social media, appeared on the world's television screen again and again. It showed the white police officer, Derek Chauvin, assisted by three other officers, pressing his knee against the back of George Floyd's neck to keep him from breathing, while the big man lay face-down in the gutter, handcuffed, pleading for his life, saying "I can't breathe."
	The process seemed interminable. The slow extinguishing of George Floyd's life continued even after an ambulance arrived with paramedics who attempted to intervene and were waved away by the cops intent on finishing their business. 
	To see any actual murder recorded live would have been horrifying. But to see this one carried out in broad daylight at a busy intersection, with such casual determination, struck me as an assault on humanity. This was underscored all the more by the additional videos shown later at the trial.
Chauvin kept his left hand in his pocket – lackadaisically it seemed, at first viewing. Later I realized the leverage he was using, by doubling that left hand into a fist and leaning into it, so as to bring his upper body weight to bear more fully on his victim, while all the time Chauvin's blue eyes glared defiantly into the lens of Darnella Frazier's cell phone camera.
	The video struck deep. Struck me; struck others. I can only try to imagine the feelings of African American who witnessed it in person or who saw the video later in their own homes. It would be different. I hardly knew what to do with the outrage that flooded through me and fixed at first on Chauvin. But I realized that without the video, this police killing, like others, might be denied or hushed up with testimony by their fellow officers and be forgotten, and I would go on with my life. 
Without the proof of the video, it could be swept under the rug. 
Worse, came a more pointed realization:
It wasn't just humanity that was under attack. It was my own. And it was not just the general rug. If not for Darnella Frazier's video, I knew with dizzying certainty I would have swept it under my own personal rug. The filaments of my old cocoon had returned, soft as cobwebs, but cloying and strong, unrealized by me, clinging to me for what I knew just as suddenly had been years. I had to ask myself: 
	Where was I, for those earlier murders?  
	Later I would go on-line and verify some particulars I'd let slip into the day-to-day of news. Where was I when Eric Garner was murdered in New York City six years earlier? I'd swept that one under the rug, maybe because of all the hoopla. Garner's murder too was captured on a cell phone video. I'd forgotten. Garner was arrested ostensibly for selling loose cigarettes outside a convenience store. I watched on YouTube, how cops used a chokehold to flip him onto the sidewalk, held him face-down while he repeated those same desperate words – "I can't breathe" – eleven times before he died. 
	That earlier murder had propelled Black Lives Matter into high gear. Garner's death inspired community efforts to reform police departments, to acknowledge the challenges faced by urban police officers, but to dial back violence. Reforms would include identifying racist cops, outlawing chokeholds, requiring body cameras, and creating citizen review boards – all aimed at stopping abuses and restoring local policing that respected the community it was serving.
	Where was I, in the effort to address police violence in the inner cities? 
I asked that question later, realizing I had let a lot slide past me. 
But something more immediate was happening for me as I saw George Floyd being murdered – because of a single word I heard a witness use in a sidewalk interview immediately afterward. A young black man called what had happened a lynching.
 I should not have needed the word. 
But I did. I, who rely so much on words – perhaps too much on words – did not make the connection on my own. 
Up till that moment, my idea of lynching was defined by Hollywood; all those old westerns where vigilantes are often just misinformed good guys – about to string up some innocent guy – all of them white, when some hero arrives in the nick of time, like the Lone Ranger firing a silver bullet to sever the rope and riding off with a hearty High Ho Silver! 
I must surely have heard the word ‘lynching', even in polite Arlington County. If I did, it was only a word. It had no roundness. It was part of the flattened-out ‘elsewhere' in the South that I was encouraged to ignore, like Halls Hill.
My resistance came from somewhere deeper than those old Hollywood distractions from reality, I'm sure. But hearing that word from a black onlooker took hold of me, jerked me back long ago to that terrible moment I had managed to forget, and I'm back there. 
I'm that young teacher standing outside my classroom, with the heavy oak door propped open. My eleventh graders are brushing past. The boy appears with his black-and-white photographic postcard and asks, "Have you ever seen anything like this, Mr. Morse?" 
And there I am, holding that damned postcard in both hands. Shaking my head, shaken in my being. The three black men are hanging from the big tree branch, the one young man with his neck horribly distended can't be more than twenty. And the white people with their picnic blankets and woven-wood hampers are eating food and laughing. I see the young blond woman with her head tipped back, showing her teeth, her eyes bright with that God-awful laughter.  My own heart pounding, my own naked innocence exposed.

A new Section.

Now, though the postcard is long gone, I turn it over in my mind and realize I didn't think to check for a date. I picture the photographer's name appearing at the bottom in white script. From what the picnickers were wearing, it might be the 1940s.
I liked Norwich; was well on my way to adopting New England as home. New England greeted newcomers like me coolly, in comparison to the famous southern hospitality. Smiles were not automatic in New England. I'd come to value that reserve. Old-timers told me you could live in Norwich for ten years and still be considered a newcomer. But I liked the bedrock feel of that terrain, the narrow streets, the affection for old houses, an attachment to the Puritan past, starkly rendered by carved slate headstones – compared to the South's attachment to a softly sentimentalized past, rendered with Gone With the Wind nostalgia.
In choosing New England as my new home, I thought what I was rejecting was southern surface charm, the superficiality of my high school years. But the postcard made me realize the rejection was itself superficial. I had no idea a rosayof what lay behind the surface I experienced in Arlington. I was rejecting. The questions raised by that picnic were immense:
Again, if realities like that lynching were missing from my education, then what else was missing? 
And more.
	Recently, reading a biography of Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, I found a description of Marshall's response to such a photograph. Early in his career, working as a civil rights lawyer for the NAACP, Marshall traveled through the South by train, often at night and alone, at some personal risk, sleeping fitfully in the black-only coach. 
One image especially haunted Marshall's sleep while traveling to save four black men falsely accused of rape, in Groveland, Florida. The Sunshine State Florida was the scene of some of the most virulent racism in the South. The photograph troubling his sleep was that of Rubin Stacy, a black man tortured by the KKK and strung up on a Florida pine. Author Gilbert King, in his biographic Devil in the Grove, recounts Marshall's torment: 
	"It wasn't the indentation of the rope that had cut into the flesh below the dead man's chin, or even the bullet holes riddling his body... It was the virtually angelic faces of the white children, all of them dressed in their Sunday clothes, as they posed, grinning and smiling, in a semicircle around Rubin Stacy's dangling corpse... ‘I could see my dead body lying in some place where they let white kids out of Sunday School to come and look at me, and rejoice'." 
Reading of Marshall's torment, I initially felt a sameness in my response to the laughter in that postcard. But the difference sank in immediately. I was not black. My own life was not a risk. 
Now I recall my shame as a new teacher. I never talked again with that boy. I don't remember his name. Can't summon up his face. Have no idea how he came by the postcard. Maybe didn't want to know. 
But that's who I was, at that point in my life. Maybe I was too busy shutting everything out that I couldn't cram into my crowded priorities.
George Floyd's death brought back that forgotten postcard. 
The video and the forgotten postcard set me on this course, of trying to finally understand my whiteness. So now I ask, because it is part of my humanness as well – 
	How did I make that postcard disappear from my consciousness? 
Do outrages simply dissipate like that, into our busy lives? 
I'm sure some do. I think in my case, as a young husband and father new to adult responsibilities, I must have just prioritized it away. I must have told myself, consciously or not, ‘I don't have time for this'. 
Today I have to confess, I do exactly that – say almost those same words, internally, or before I've even shaped the thought with words – do it far more often than I've realized. The decision happens, I'm guessing, often in milliseconds, before it ever fully enters my consciousness – especially if the cause for such feelings is infuriatingly familiar, like the endless suffering of war, in Ukraine and Gaza, the latest mass shooting, the dilemma of a Congress paralyzed by Republicans in the thrall of a racist and ex-President's endless attacks on our democracy; the latest assault on our collective sanity – so that, like a bicycle wheel slipping into an old groove left in hardened mud, my mind slips into that default avoidance. If I'm honest with myself, I'd hazard a guess that those mini decisions could account for a substantial percent of my so-called thinking. 
George Floyd's murder exposed a piled-up backlog of such mini decisions.  
I hate acknowledging what I'm about to say – because after a career as an investigative journalist and decades of activism, it means surrendering some pride. But it also means shedding some arrogance. And that arrogance is tied up with my whiteness, so it has to be part of the process I'm trying to describe here in these pages. 
George Floyd's lynching by police – and lynching, I realize now, refers to any extralegal execution, whether by noose or by gunshot or drowning; whatever the mode – presented me the simple and inescapable truth – that once again I was encapsulated in the obliviousness that minimizes black suffering.
Thank you, George Floyd. 
Thank you Darnella Frazier, for your witness. Girl with a cell phone. I know you wish you could have done more than hold that phone so determinedly steady. But you rose to the occasion, and what you captured of George Floyd's death, forced this old white man to examine his own life. Watching that cop pressing the life out of a handcuffed man calling out for his mother as he died, seeing the killer's gaze of impunity into the eye of your witnessing camera, I had to ask myself – 
What do I share in common with those racist cops?

A new Section.

In the hours that followed, I realized if I was not careful, I could allow my anguish to distract me from what I needed to do.
I needed to change. 
I needed to change the way I meet the world. I need to understand my own whiteness more clearly – how I learned it, how privilege has filtered through my life, and how at its extremes the impunity of whiteness gives some people license to commit murder.
Not all of this could I sort out in those hours. I did know this, for the first time:
I needed to be worthy of my outrage, to get past it and be truer to it now, in a way that my present age allows, and not allow what's just happened, this time on a street in Minneapolis, to dissipate into the dailiness of life, as my younger self had done. 
I had learned something else, too, from the Quakers, and from what Martin Luther King Jr. had brought to the Civil Rights struggle – that my loathing toward those cops could impair my understanding of them. Nothing is gained by dehumanizing the enemy, by refusing to see ourselves in the despised other. So, over time, the question of what I shared in common with racist killers has taken me deeper in this process than I could have guessed; deeper into my own whiteness and a self I'd never really explored.

A new Section.

For more than two years after George Floyd's death brought back the memory of the postcard, whenever I walked past a pawnshop or saw postcards displayed at a local flea market in Connecticut or while traveling elsewhere, I had the impulse to stop and ask discreetly if the seller had such a postcard – hidden away, perhaps, in a drawer, waiting for the right someone to ask. But I couldn't bring myself to do it, out of what I thought was embarrassment.
Finally, not long ago, driving past a local antique place called Trailside Treasures, on my way to a hiking trail, I pulled over. I sat for a moment in my car, before I took a deep breath, and went inside.
"This is a strange question," I began, and managed to get the question out without sounding ghoulish. I tried to sound academic.
To my relief, the answer was no. 
This was New England. 
Walking out of the shop, I realized it wasn't petty embarrassment that had stopped me on those other occasions. It was something larger. I could feel it somehow in my body as I climbed back behind the wheel – what I had learned from overcoming my inhibition and asking the question I was afraid to ask. 
Yes, afraid.
It was fear, not just embarrassment. Fear at the proximity of such deep shame in my own whiteness, for a racism that commodified black suffering. By this time, I had learned it was common practice in some parts of the South for professional photographers to station themselves at lynching picnics with their cameras and sometimes their darkroom tents, for the purpose of selling those souvenir postcards. Some surviving postcards bear light-hearted inscriptions. ‘Wish you could have been here!' 
That degree of commodification has clear roots in slavery and the perverse belief that human beings could own other human beings, that went back to Jamestown. 
The commodification based on color continued brutally under Jim Crow, and beyond, into today's unhealed America, where a lynching can take place on a public sidewalk outside a convenience store in New York or Minneapolis.


Chapter 7

George Floyd's lynching in 2020 set me on this journey. 
Now I look back, through a more critical lens, at my family's journeys: the grandparents' trek from Kansas into what would become Oklahoma, arriving by covered wagons on my mother's side, by stolen horse on my father's side; the Trail of Tears that may have included the great-greats in my Cherokee ancestry. 
	Every family has those mythic journeys, some desperate, some remembered, some forgotten or denied. "Some things ain't meant to be remembered," Kiese Lamon's old grandmama told him, when he asked about slavery.
As I take a harder look at my family's journeys within my own lifetime – hold it up like a patchwork quilt – I notice patches I hadn't seen before that that figure in my whiteness, and how race and gender shaped my father's career.
Dad had opened his private law practice in Vinita, in 1933 – in the depths of the Great Depression. Bank failures and mortgage foreclosures were up to a thousand per week. Clients had little or no money to pay legal fees. A man Dad saved from the electric chair built him a walnut desk in the prison workshop – the desk in the den where Mom used to sit and write letters and type out the text for Pogo's Notebook and where I learned to type. 
That private law practice failed. Dad never used that word, but that was the reality. Fortunately, his law degree qualified him for temporary work overseeing a Works Progress Administration (WPA) program in Oklahoma, under Roosevelt's New Deal program to get people back to work. Dad's law degree I'm sure helped get him elected to the Oklahoma state legislature. During his two terms, he wrote the legislation that authorized construction of a big hydroelectric dam on the Grand River, and he was able to parlay that experience into a job with the Rural Electrification Agency (REA), another New Deal program aimed at extending the electric grid across the rural heartland. Thus began my father's lifelong career in the federal Civil Service that would take our family from St. Louis to Washington D C, where, as General Counsel for M S T S, he would end up practicing admiralty law – the law of the high seas – quite a long jump for a farm boy from Oklahoma. 
Now that I look more closely, I realize his race and gender gave him a boost at every juncture: 
Negro lawyers were few, female lawyers almost nonexistent. The Oklahoma state legislature was solely the province of white males. The REA would never have sent anybody but a white male around to talk farmers into forming electric co-ops. 
Now I realize the federal Civil Service was not an option for an ambitious Negro, since within the federal bureaucracy the most talented and highly educated Negro could not rise above the level of clerk typist. How could I have remained ignorant of this, living in a suburb where nearly everybody worked for the government? 
One answer of course was that we were all white. Our whiteness was written all around us. Segregation fostered the ignorance that was part of our whiteness.
In fairness to Dad, he practiced inclusiveness in whatever hiring he directed within his office staff at M S T S. He added a Jewish lawyer to his legal team, and promoted a Negro secretary to executive secretarial level when that became an option in the 1950s. He enjoyed the interactions with both and learned from them. He was fond of bringing home gefilte fish and kippered herring, or lychee nuts from a Chinese restaurant, as he and the lawyer became friends as well as colleagues.
When the Negro secretary came back to work after a week of vacationing on the Maryland Eastern Shore, she showed everyone where she had applied a Band-Aid on her shoulder to show how much she'd tanned. 
Exotic news for Dad to bring home. "Negro people tan!"
My parents pushed tolerance. Negro dolls were not available in stores, but Mom sewed quite a lovable Negro doll with straight-out pigtails from a pattern she found somewhere. It had a cheerful pancake sort of face, only semi-round, like Raggedy Ann and Raggedy Andy. Susan and I shared it, relishing its uniqueness and maybe the good intentions contained in it. 
I'm sure tolerance guided Mom's choice of a children's book she used to read to me, when I was quite young, sitting on her lap. The book was Little Brown Koko. Its author, Blanche Seale Hunt, was clearly white, her text weirdly adoring in a way that makes me cringe now. Little Brown Koko was ‘the shortest, fattest little Negro you could ever imagine. He had the blackest little wooly head and great big, round eyes, and he was the prettiest brown color, just like a bar of chocolate candy." 
Mom opened the book at intervals to show me a little boy my age, but dark with big round lips. He wears red rompers. (The book, like many children's books published during the war years, was printed in only black and red.) Little Brown Koko was rendered in half-tone gray except for those big round lips and his red rompers. 
Little Brown Koko was always getting into trouble, because he was so greedy and lazy. When his "nice, good, ole, big fat black Mammy" makes a tasty seven-layer chocolate cake for his supper, and puts it aside in the pantry, telling him he must wait, Little Brown Koko can't resist dipping his finger in the icing, and soon the cake is gone, his tummy "pooching way out." His Mama gives hm a switching on the seat of his little red rompers but bakes him another chocolate cake for his supper. He wants another one for his breakfast. You could see how Little Brown Koko was getting spoiled rotten.
Mom was trying to plant the germ of tolerance at a time when books that included Negros scarcely existed. Unitarian Sunday School taught tolerance as well. Tolerance was a marker of educational class, part of our family's journey. But as I approached Middle School I would realize tolerance was not enough. 


A new Section.

I see my family's physical journey with a wider-angle lens now. Our move from Vinita to the University Heights suburb of St. Louis, and my parents' first purchase of a home, were orchestrated by federal government policies that funneled white people into suburbs everywhere around the country. 
Bank failures and foreclosures during the Depression had reduced homeownership so sharply by 1939 as to threaten the stability of the middle class. In response, the Roosevelt administration enacted policies with the dual purpose of promoting home ownership and shielding banks from risk. These included the underwriting of FHA loans, and a mapping of neighborhoods according to risk – effectively echoing the redlining by banks to favor single-race neighborhoods over multi-racial neighborhoods, on the assumption that that single-race neighborhoods were more stable. 
As a consequence, middle class home-ownership skyrocketed, with the massive white migration into the suburbs that began in the 1940s and consigned Negros to the inner cities.
All this figured in my own cocooning and how that cocooning continues to operate today. Now I can better understand tensions that arise between the residents of ghettoized black neighborhoods and a culture of white supremacy among the ranks of police, and the depressive conditions of the inner cities that are partly the consequences of public policy.
The Interstate highway system, established under President Eisenhower in the 1950s similarly reiterated the color-line. The new highways were supposed to connect cities with each other, but the effect was to connect the suburbs with each other, and suburbanites with urban centers. (General Motors in the meantime was buying up thousands of miles of inter-city trolley lines and destroying them so as to increase the demand for cars and new roads. I happen to own an old map of Connecticut that shows the state laced throughout with inter-urban trolley lines.) This would wed American society forever with the autonomy of private cars and truck transport of goods.
The Interstate highways were also used as a tool for further ghettoizing cities like Atlanta and Detroit, where local urban planners used them as cleavers to divide and isolate black neighborhoods.
The cumulative impediments to black homeownership created by government policies enacted during my lifetime alone is almost incalculable. This is not ancient history, too late to redress. This is today. The surface impediments continue, while the deeper monetary cost – the loss of wealth in the form of homeownership to be passed from one generation to the next – remains substantial for most black families today.
At what point do we face up to the moral imperative? Reparations going back to slavery and Reconstruction are daunting. But at what point do we Americans accept responsibility for our government's missteps during our own lifetimes and insist on righting the wrong?

A new Section.

My family's journey east from Oklahoma as dwarfed, I realize now, by a vast movement of people – unsubsidized by government, unremarked in the white press, and unnoticed, as far as I know, by my parents.
This was the massive movement of black people escaping the Jim Crow South. 
I learned about the Great Migration from reading Isabel Wilkerson's account in her 2011 book The Warmth of Other Suns. Wilkerson calls the migration of some six million black people from the South "one of the most underreported major events of the twentieth century," one destined to "transform urban America and recast the social and political order of every city it touched." 
The exodus went unreported partly because it was spread across six decades, starting after World War One, and continuing into the 1970s, and also because of the secrecy surrounding the individual escapes – secrecy necessary because of the debt-bondage that held sharecroppers captive to merchants and landlords, and because of the ubiquitous threat of vigilante violence. 
A Mississippi plantation-owner boasted to Look Magazine in 1964, that if any of his black tenant farmers tried to register to vote, he would "shoot them down like rabbits." Similar attitudes prevailed toward those who prepared to flee their debt captivity. They planned their departures secretively. Items of furniture or cookware too heavy to carry were quietly sold in advance or given to neighbors, or simply abandoned. Departures were often in the dead of night, by cars or trucks, or, if by train, then from stations in other towns. 
Testimony to the transformational impact of the Great Migration is the roster of southern-born African Americans who rose to the top in various fields following their escape from the South. I learned only recently of Althea Gibson – one of the greatest tennis players of all time – born in 1927 to sharecropper parents on a South Carolina cottonfield, who fled to Harlem in 1930 – and who rose through the hitherto segregated ranks of tennis, and amazingly won the Grand Slam in 1956. 
Oher luminaries include Leadbelly, Josh White, Miles Davis, Toni Morrison, and dozens of top athletes, as well as millions of more ordinary African Americans who could flourish as factory workers, skilled tradesmen, physicians and healthcare aides, classroom teachers, and political activists.
Wilkerson took her title from Richard Wright's autobiographic Black Boy, which depicts Wright's own journey north while in his teens, from Natchez, Mississippi to Chicago, in 1927 – out of a desperate need to feel "the warmth of other suns." Wilkerson's epic account of the Great Migration helped me understand the powerful motives that drove it: the new form of enslavement under Jim Crow, whose cruelty I don't think many white people fully understood then or understand now. 

A new Section.

Reading Black Boy, I learned of physical and emotional torments of Jim Crow that were more demeaning and controlling than anything I'd imagined, from within my white isolation.
As a precocious youngster in Mississippi, Wright taught himself to read, while literally starving – so thin he couldn't make the minimum weight requirement to apply for a post office job. After escaping as far as Memphis in his teens, Wright discovered The American Mercury magazine, and the social criticism of H L  Mencken. To gain access to a Memphis library, a privilege denied to Negroes, he borrowed the library card of a white acquaintance and forged a note as follows:
	Would you please let this nigger boy – I used the word nigger to make the librarian feel that I could not possibly be the author of the note – have some books by H L  Mencken?
	Turning pages back in his rented room, Wright was astonished by Mencken's slashing attacks on God and authority, on human weakness in general, and American idiocy in particular. The teenage Wright realized that words could be a weapon, wielded like a club. Books could be his salvation.
	Black Boy took my breath away. For me, reading Wright's words three-quarters of a century later, as an old man, they offered a model for me in taking control of my own education – at an age when most people are inclined to coast on what they already know. I am blessed in countess ways, but one of them is this belated encounter with Richard Wright. Just as Mencken's writing led Wright to other writers – Joseph Conrad, Sinclair Lewis, Dostoevsky, Ibsen, Balzac, Nietzsche – Wright's book propelled me to other writers, black writers I'd put off reading, like Maya Angelou, or ones I'd never heard of, like David Walker, and a host of talented young writers who continue to open my eyes to an America I would not otherwise know.
	Maya Angelou's account of her growing up was particularly compelling. She worked in her grandmother's store in Arkansas, in the heart of the Negro area, where her grandmother sold meat pies to the sawmen in the lumberyard and the seedmen from the cotton gin. The store was stocked with spools of colored thread, mash for hogs, coal oil for lamps, flour, and other staples – the kind of stuff my grandfather Scott Morse sold at his store in Muskogee, Oklahoma, wrapping his customers' produce in his Socialist newspaper. 
As a girl, sweeping, Maya witnessed the morning bravado of pickers setting out with laughter and predictions of conditions in the field, and boasts of how much they'd pick. Then they would return, dirt-disappointed in the dying sunlight, fatigue weighing down their arms and legs, "fingers cut by the mean little cotton bolls," the sound of the empty cotton sacks dragging across the rough lye-washed floorboards. Some pickers would leave their sacks at the store. Others had to take their sack home for mending. She "winced to picture them sewing the coarse material under a coal-oil lamp with fingers stiffening from the day's work."
An old slave lament comes to mind, handed down by W E B  Du Bois in The Souls of Black Folk: "When I Lay This Body Down." 
I'll go to judgment in the evening of the day,
And my soul and thy soul shall meet that day,
When I lay this body down. 
	What Maya Angelou remembers learning, as she swept and washed the floor with lye, was that whatever cotton they picked into those long canvas sacks was never ever enough to escape their bondage. "Their wages wouldn't get them out of debt to my grandmother, not to mention the staggering bill that waited on them at the white commissary downtown."
	Angelou's description helped anchor what I learned from The 1619 Project, when it appeared in 2021, edited by Nikole Hannah-Jones and The New York Times Magazine – the fact that the peonage of tenant farming, enforced by Jim Crow, was in some respects more brutal than chattel slavery. Slave-owners at least had an investment in their human property. Having paid good money for the enslaved, a planter had a stake in their health and continuing ability to work. But under the debt-based servitude of tenant farming, the landlord planters had no such investment. Tenant farmers could be run into the ground and sometimes killed with impunity. 
I'd never realized this.
	Every bale of cotton produced by tenant farmers passed through the hands of the planter, who had the exclusive right to sell it. A black tenant farmer could be whipped or killed for trying to sell crops on his own without the planter's permission. And black people had no legal rights under Jim Crow law. A black man who questioned the planter's accounting or asked for appropriate receipts could be beaten or lynched, and a black person's word could not stand against a white person's word in court; nor could black people serve on juries.
The lower tiers of white oppressors, who saw themselves as its enforcers, could indulge their cruelty more viciously. Among Isabel Wilkerson's subjects was Bill Russell, in Monroe, Louisiana, whose father was the man threatened with a shotgun at the gas pumps. Russell's mother suffered humiliation on the street in Monroe when she was grabbed by a policeman who threatened to arrest her if she "ever dressed like a white woman again." 
The intensity of racism in Monroe launched another family north as part of the exodus from the South: Huey Newton as a toddler was spirited away with his family to Oakland, California. Later, as a young man, he helped found Oakland's radical Black Panther Party, appearing on posters wearing a black beret and carrying a shotgun. 


Chapter 8

Our house at 6031 N  Ninth Street, was surrounded by other similar three-bedroom single-bathroom brick homes – small by today's perceived need for one bathroom per person in professional-class homes, but suitable in the 1940s and fifties for upper-level bureaucrats and senior military officers. 
Construction was going on all around us, with the growl of bulldozers and backhoes scooping for foundations and laying new streets with sewer-lines and sidewalks. We watched our street get finished, with pea stone laid over the river-rock and rolled flat by several passes of a steamroller, then the asphalt, and it was rolled too. 
From everywhere came the sounds of hammers and saws – mostly handsaws – and the fragrances of new lumber and fresh asphalt, and concrete curing. You'd see flatbed trucks arrive with lawns in the form of oversized rolls of sod six or eight feet in diameter, which men pushed down a ramp and unrolled across the red Virginia clay. 
Dad's new job was across the Potomac as a civilian lawyer within the Navy bureaucracy in the Navy ‘temporaries' located on Wisconsin Avenue near Ward Circle. His title was General Counsel for Military Sea Transportation Service. M S T S managed the chartering of oil tankers and other noncombat vessels for the Navy. He commuted across Key Bridge or, if traffic was bad, then further up the Potomac across Chain Bridge. 
I didn't know at the time that Civil Service level jobs above GS-4 were not available to Negros. What l did know was that our new neighborhood was a kid paradise for my sister and me. Kids our age zoomed around on fat-tired bicycles and roller skates. Susan played sidewalk games with the other girls – hopscotch and jacks and double-Dutch jump-rope – made tea parties for dolls and exchanged trading cards – while I played nearby with my, and sat on the curb with my pals shaping pieces of slate into arrowheads, and smacking pieces of flint together to get the smell. I'd given up my wooden scooter for a refurbished American Flyer wagon, and was soon learning to roller-skate on the new sidewalk. Even now I can feel the buzz of those clamp-on skates vibrating up my calves. 
My friends and I made small parachutes from old handkerchiefs weighted with rocks tied to the corners that we could throw into the air and watch float to earth. We got help constructing kites from crossed balsawood sticks and tissue paper, to which we tied rag tails, and ran up the street to launch them or took them to one of the nearby open fields. My pals and I played on the dirt piles and road-cuts left by the steam-shovels and bulldozers. We had mudball fights and tunneled into embankments. I have fragrant memories of pressing my cheeks against the cool clay. We played cowboys and Indians, king of the mountain, and explored the woods and unbroken pastures of the old Saegmuller estate at the edge of Dominion Hills. 
Sometimes I ventured onto the Saegmuller property by myself, playing Indian. I was Gray Wolf. I'd hide inside the clumps of tall grass in the pasture, pick wild strawberries, explore a little meander of creek where an old rusty car, probably a Model T, had been abandoned and was causing the water downstream to seep the color of rust. That was a special place for me, hidden behind a sprawl of sumac and inkberry wildness. I'd check the mud for the tracks of raccoons, whose footprints look so much like little human hands, and the funny little mud-scratchings of crawdads. Or I'd visit another favorite place – a honeysuckle tangle that fringed the pine woods – and crawl on my belly through the vine-tunnels made by rabbits and other creatures, or just hang out sucking drops of nectar from the blossoms. Sometimes, picking blackberries or strawberries, I'd encounter a red-eyed terrapin, with ruby-bright eyes, and play with it; watch it close up tight in its shell. I'd turn it on its back, then observe its struggle to right itself and take off with surprisingly strong strides. The shell was a masterpiece of design, the work of the great unseen artist I still believe is God.
Kids today I'm sure find beauty in their electronics, and freedom exploring the Internet and social media. But these were beauties beheld in the body. 
What strikes me now about my own childhood is the freedom we had to explore – build tree houses, bicycle everywhere. Dogs ran free too, as long as they had their tags. 
Some of the freedom had to do with the times, a country that was not armed to the teeth with assault weapons. Hallowe'en trick-or-treaters could traipse around the neighborhood in costumes we made ourselves – with burnt cork and rags and cardboard and mother's lipstick homemade costumes – traipsing in little groups without adults having to hover over us for fear of some actual monster. 
Much of our freedom had to do with being white. My pals and I were free to build our treehouses in a big oak by the creek behind someone's yard, nailing together oddments of lumber scrounged from construction-sites after the workers had gone home, or pilfered from the long gray wooden construction sheds that were guarded by an old man named Pop O'Day who was a watchman and carried a shotgun. If Pop O'Day was nowhere in sight and we spotted a shed door ajar, we'd sneak in, look around for an open keg of nails, fill our pockets, and sneak back out, usually with a few asphalt shingles tucked under our arms. 
We knew. We knew. We knew we were stealing. And my father, the lawyer and former carpenter, surely knew. Those shingles and nails had to be coming from somewhere. My friends' fathers knew too. Everyone figured boys would be boys. 
White boys, that is. 

A new Section.

	Living in Arlington was special. We felt famous. We were always showing off the sights to family visiting from Oklahoma. We picked them up at Union Station, and in later years National Airport. On the way to our house, Dad would drive past the Pentagon and Arlington National Cemetery. The first or second night Mom would demonstrate her new sophistication by serving baked Alaska.
The tour of Washington started often at the columned porch of the Supreme Court, and next to it, the National Archives, to view the original Declaration of Independence enshrined behind special glass and inert gas to protect it forever, so you could see with your own eyes the signatures of Thomas Jefferson and the other founding fathers, and how John Hancock's signature stood out so clearly. 
If we were doing the complete tour, we'd go inside the Capitol, beyond the rotunda, where a young blue-uniformed Congressional page could usher us up to the visitors gallery, to observe Congress at work. Mom always warned everybody it would look like nothing was happening: a lot of empty seats; a few Congressmen or their aides shuffling papers, and the teenage pages delivering telephones and packets of paper. If we had time, we'd go down to the basement to ride the little train that connected the buildings.
Next usually came the walk down the National Mall alongside the Reflection Pool, that ended at the Washington Monument, and my cousins and I would climb all those steps inside or take the elevator up as far as it went, and then take the steps up to the very top, where it smelled funky and we could look out the little windows, the big kids lifting the little ones to see. 
After that came the Lincoln Memorial. I loved the statue of the seated Lincoln. Sometimes we'd include the bland Jefferson Memorial. Finally, Dad drove us across Memorial Bridge to visit the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Mom, who had an infallible internal clock, tried to make sure we arrived at the Tomb of the Unknown in time for the hourly changing of the guard. 
Driving to the Tomb, Dad would play his special joke on first-time Oklahomans. Having made sure that somebody vulnerable was sitting in the passenger seat – like my nineteen-year-old cousin Don, who was studying to be a minister – Dad would speed up as if to crash straight into the white marble wall at the foot of the tomb, only to swerve away at the last minute. Country-boy humor. Don was terrified.
	 The ritual changing of the guard always held me rapt. The symbolism was simple enough for a kid my age to understand. I enjoyed the windup-doll precision of the soldiers, the whap! of white gloved hands smacking rifle-stocks smartly as they presented arms and spun the rifles around in deft half-circles. What else I was learning, God only knows. Patriotism. Awe. Heroism bestowed on the war dead. Mostly I savored the ritual precision, feeling excitement somewhere above my belly button.

A new Section.

	I looked forward also to the trips across the Potomac into Washington D C with just our family. That first spring, and for many springs after, we drove across Memorial Bridge to join the tourists ooohing and ahhing at the pink cherry blossoms bursting forth all around the Tidal Basin. Mom loved it. A few of those visitors were people of color, Washington being home to embassies and a tourist Mecca. Mom liked to remind us that the cherry trees were a gift from the Japanese. 
Mom was always speculating as to when the cherry blossoms would peak or had already peaked. One spring – maybe three years after our arrival – Mom she broke off a small bough of blossoms and smuggled it home under her Easter coat. 
The word ‘sheepish' was not yet in my vocabulary, but I could tell how Mom felt, sneaking those blossoms home. She put the bough in a vase on the piano, an old upright at one end of the living room, where it would not be seen from the front door.

A new Section.

Winters were cold enough to freeze the Reflection Pool for ice skaters. And if we were lucky, the snow would sometimes be deep enough at home for sledding and making snowmen. My toys included a wooden Flexible Flyer sled with steel runners for when we got snow. A couple of years after our arrival in Arlington, we got nearly a foot of snow. Dad used a snow shovel to cut blocks of snow and build us an igloo for Susan and me. We could climb inside. I don't think Arlington ever had a snow like that again. 
	I liked the daytime excursions across the river with just one parent too. Sometimes Mom took me with her on shopping trips into downtown Washington. We drove across Key Bridge into funky old Georgetown, with its cobblestone streets and trolley cars on M Street, past the old yellow house where, according to local gossip, George Washington had quartered his mistress, and on into Northwest Washington D C, the city's commercial hub. Unlike the Federal Triangle that began at Lafayette Park and included those landmark emblems of democracy, downtown D C had the grainy feel of a regular city, with brick and brownstone and painted row-houses with front steps and railings, stop-and-go automobile traffic and busses. 
	I especially relished the cavernous old brick market on K Street, when I accompanied Mom past the outdoor wooden counters laden with produce, and into the tall-ceilinged interior, past myriad aromas, all the way to the big green roasting-drum where Mom asked the man for two pounds of coffee beans and then took the beans to a red grinding-machine that loomed twice the size of our refrigerator, presided over by another man, who wore a white apron and a faded billed cap, and who from his special perch adjusted a big fat round dial for the grinding, and, when the grinding was finished, tipped open a little nickel-plated gate to release the redolent cascade into a waiting paper bag. 
	Too young to drink coffee, I was hooked nevertheless on that fragrant ritual.

A new Section.

	Downtown D C held another wonder for me as a six-year-old.
Negros. 
I stared, I'm sure. 
Negro people were walking around like anybody else, crossing streets, catching buses, loading boxes onto delivery trucks, or otherwise going about their business. 
‘Negro' was the more respectful word my parents used, to be preferred over ‘colored', which most of my friends used. Later, once I got to middle school, I heard a few kids say ‘nigger', but I knew that was a bad name, like ‘Jap'. Nobody said it in my circle of friends.
	The first time we drove to Union Station to pick up Aunt Odie or someone else arriving from Oklahoma, the afternoon was sweltering hot. Dad drove around the little traffic circle in front of the train station, around a big stone fountain with a broad stone basin, where a bunch of glistening black kids were splashing around and scrambling all over the wet granite and bronze statuary, the youngest of them naked, whooping and laughing, black as licorice it seemed to me, and obviously having the time of their lives. I craned my neck out the open car window and wanted to laugh with them. They were having such a good time! I longed to join them. But I knew without being told, this was impossible. 
"How come they get to do that?" I asked.
	I don't remember the answer. Maybe it was inexact, or got blurred in memory. I understood by then, if only barely, that my parents didn't know everything. But I gathered this was a special privilege those kids had – maybe even deserved, what with all that heat. Their joy was tolerated. That's the word I would learn later in Unitarian Sunday School. We learned tolerance. That's the word that occurs to me now in hindsight, that even today describes a lot of white people's attitude toward any display of African American exuberance. It is tolerated. That's probably generational, truer for us old fogies. 
The wistfulness I felt then as a six-year-old watching those shiny black kids splashing and whooping at the feet of the stone angels contained some inkling, I think, of my own as-yet unrecognized white privilege, or at least a divide between us that was invisible, but which I could feel somewhere inside me – almost like the decisive dull clank of an iron garden gate latching shut. 
None of this could I put into words. One thing was clear: kids like that were nowhere to be seen in Arlington. 

A new Section.

	After that first visit to Union Station, on any occasion when we drove to meet a visiting relative or drop someone off, I hoped to see those kids playing in the fountain. I was always disappointed when they were not there, when Dad drove around that little circle and the fountain was empty. And finally came a time, after a couple of years, when those kids seemed to be gone forever. I don't know why they disappeared. Something had changed. Laws or enforcement. Maybe the fountain was even drained. Whatever the reason, those kids disappeared. And I missed them. Eventually that big fountain was taken away too.
	When I was ten or eleven and old enough to ride the bus into Washington D C by myself, I learned from my mother – not in words I remember, but somehow – that it was not safe for us to venture past Union Station into Southeast Washington or into Anacostia, beyond the web of train tracks that spread behind the station. 
Northwest Washington was safe. You could tell by the fancy lampposts and brass fire hydrants outside big department stores like Macys and Woodward & Lothrop, with fancy show-windows of svelte mannikins displaying the latest fashions, the same windows that got decorated before Christmas with mechanical elves stitching and hammering in Santa's workshop, or wrapping presents – while inside the store, a man wearing a padded red suit and a white beard took children onto his lap, and we told him what we wanted for Christmas and put letters in his North Pole mailbox. I went along with this for a couple of years.
The store windows and polished brass were all cues that a neighborhood was safe. And if you got close to the edges, you looked around to make sure most people were white.

A new Section.

	Now I picture Union Station through strata of time, including glimpses out the car window as we drove beyond the station through Southeast Washington toward Baltimore and the beaches at Ocean City or Rehoboth, which had waves as tall as a house sometimes. Today I realize all those public beaches on the Atlantic shore were whites-only. Black people could swim and picnic only at Sparrow's Beach, at the estuary near Annapolis, or other weedy stretches of sand, with no big breakers for bodysurfing; no saltwater taffy or penny arcades with bumper-cars; no strolling with cotton candy past the mechanical fortune teller cackling behind glass.
Now, too, my composite picture of Union Station includes the riots that broke out in 1967 and 1968 in Southeast Washington, as well as in Detroit and Newark and other majority-black cities and neighborhoods around the country. I see the station through those layers now. Some black people were already calling it Chocolate City. What I felt at the time was a glimmering sense of Union Station as an outpost at the edge of an impoverished and restless black presence. The kids splashing around in the fountain fit somewhere into that puzzle.
	The interior of the station was immense, its overwhelming cacophony of sounds rising like a flood, bouncing from one hard surface to another. Holding some adult hand, I halted just long enough to take in the immensity, the lobby echoing with train announcements on loudspeakers and with men at the various gates barking out names and numbers and holding up placards for people trying to make connections. High above, where the carved stone bas-relief was darkened with decades of soot, big clocks presided over the row of brass-and-marble ticket-windows below, the bustle of passengers and baggage-carts attended by Negro porters wearing red caps, trundling suitcases and trunks to yellow taxis lined up outside. 
	Venturing out on the platform with Mom or Dad to meet our visitors, I peered through billows of steam, through the pungent scalded exhalations of locomotives hissing and sighing like powerful beasts, back to where the red-capped porters were loading suitcases and helping passengers into the seats of carts towed in a string behind the little rubber-tired puffer-billies weaving their way back and forth along the platform, between one end of the train and the other – and high above, the pigeon-swooped sunlight filtering through overhangs of grimy glass and open sky and piercing the steam with shafts of Sunday School light. 
	I felt small, awed and elated with the too-muchness of it, standing at the edge of such a very big world.