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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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."
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.
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.
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."
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.