An American Story Read Online Free Page B

He’d fought on Okinawa with her cousin Smitty, whom she pen-palled through the war. Daddy bartered his precious cigarettes for her photo as they steamed toward Okinawa. He vowed to marry the beauty in the picture he carried for the rest of the war when he got home, and that’s exactly what he did.
    Daddy did his best to train us to follow in his gritty footsteps. He taught us the proper way to bayonet an enemy (which was much simpler with the scrawny Japanese than when he’d practiced in boot camp at Parris Island), bragged about how many hours straight he could plow in subzero temperatures, lectured us on how ill prepared we were for the rigors of life and how likely we were to starve to death. He dismissed my mother’s stories as frivolous because unlikely to put food on the table. He always did things the hard way: he refused to see doctors, he acquired everything secondhand, he never conceded a point in an argument no matter how wrong he was. He even refused to cry out when the truck he was working on fell and crushed his leg. He needed to fight; he needed an enemy, something to defeat or at least to resist, so he wouldn’t feel helpless. He also needed an audience to witness his victories—that’s where we came in.
    For all his ferocity, though, he was also the man who fell in love with a photo and made up nonsense songs for his kids. Apropos of nothing, he’d drop to the floor and pump out innumerable push-ups for our amazement. He used to run up and down the block with us dangling from his biceps. He was a shameless poser and show-off and we loved him for it.
    Though both my parents, like millions of black Americans, made a conscious choice to thumb their noses at Jim Crow by migrating, in the end only Mama was able to leave her anger at the Mason-Dixon line. Daddy brought Jim Crow with him. He smuggled it in, a stowaway in his heart, an overstuffed duffel bag about to burst at the seams.
    ZOO - ZOOS AND LOLLIPOPS
    None of us six kids were born down South, but we might as well have been. Beginning in 1948 with JoAnn, followed by Dorothy in 1955, Wina in 1957, me in 1959, Necie in 1960, and ending in 1963 with Bobby, we were Southerners through and through, whatever our Northern address might have told the world about us. We slopped up Karo “serp” with white bread and called it breakfast. We crumbled up cornbread in our buttermilk and called it dessert. We insulted each other’s mothers and called it “playin the dozens” without a clue that we were perpetuating the tradition of slave auctioneers comically wholesaling our least desirable forebears by “the dozens” to the steady beat of their wallet-loosening insults. We were country when country wasn’t cool.
    For all their differences, both parents brought the same country ways from the South, as did everyone else we knew. Most of all, that meant their Southern Baptist fundamentalism. We couldn’t play cards (tools of the devil) or games with dice in them (like Monopoly). Nor, for example, could we accuse anyone of lying; instead, they were “tellin a story.” Anyone born into a generation before yours was “ma’am” or “sir.” If Mama could hear us through the open windows “loud-talkin” (ever the sorceress, she could sort our voices out among all the summer shouting of children), we had to come in from play and sit quietly “like ladies.” If she called to us and we answered “What?” or “Yeah?” instead of “Ma’am?” we were, at a minimum, called to her for a smack. The rod was not spared and the child was not spoiled.
    We were in church each Wednesday night for choir practice, and from 8 A.M. on Sunday until 3:00 in the afternoon, longer if folks got to shouting. Neighbors we knew as taxi drivers and janitors mounted the pulpit on Sunday to lead flocks sometimes numbering in the hundreds. Few of them were ordained, fewer