My mystical civil religious instruction was complemented and reinforced by my love of magical fairy tales and the stories of comic book superheroes. I lived in those worlds and in my own imaginary land because the outside world was full of violence, sudden dislocations, and monsters, like my father, and the other kids, many of them bullies, at the (military) base schools. I understand now that my father was just trying to toughen me up to survive in an uncertain world and life among the other children of the warriors, and for that, he thought, my sensitivity and dislike of sports, and fighting, would have to change. As he saw it, the best way to change his son was by the use of fear or force, the latter of which involved beating, verbal abuse, slapping, and an array of techniques he’d probably been subjected to when he grew up on the farm in Oklahoma or during his years in the Air Force. It was, alas, a losing strategy.
On the other hand, my mother was moved by my sensitivity, creative hunger, and curiosity, so she encouraged me to follow my passions, and she was always eager to hear and read the stories and little books I wrote. She was an eternal child, playful, with an insatiable curiosity, a passion for learning, and a rebellious nature that even more than fifty years of marriage to my father never managed to destroy.
We lived a fairly settled life on bases in Germany and then in the “Economy” on a farm near Alconbury, England. It was at this latter base where Master Sergeant Ross was prematurely delivered from his life as a jet engine mechanics instructor by a heart attack at the ripe old age of thirty-four. Certainly the fact that he was NCOIC (Non-Commissioned Officer In Charge) with a great amount of responsibility and therefore pressure, and that he was drinking and smoking too much, and eating a very poor diet, all contributed to the condition. But the heart attack itself had been precipitated on Christmas Eve by his commanding officer who had, six months before, ordered him to work out a lesson plan on his office blackboard. As Santa Claus was preparing to deliver presents to all the good little boys and girls (and, no doubt, lumps of coal to the communist children), my father’s commanding officer came into the office as Master Sergeant Ross put the period on the final sentence. He looked it over silently, nodded, and then said, “Sergeant Ross, erase the board.” Incredulous, my father began to reply, “but sir, this is six months…” but the officer cut him off. “Sergeant Ross, I think you know what an order is.”
As my father erased the board, he felt his left arm go numb.
We arrived back in the US from England the year before England, in the form of the Beatles, arrived in the US It was the year before the US jumped, with both boots, into Vietnam with the infamous Gulf of Tonkin incident, and the year before the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was signed by President Lyndon Johnson. All those factors would come to bear on my life in some way or another, and to a greater or lesser degree.
I wasn’t prepared for the racism in South Carolina. The military bases had long before been integrated, and until my first year in public schools off base all my classrooms had been integrated. School integration in South Carolina didn’t take place for two more school years when, suddenly, the African-American students entered to take seats in the back of the classrooms. I remember trying to make friends with one black student named Calhoun, only to find to my disappointment he refused to speak to me or acknowledge me.
My father was a conservative and I remember him calling Martin Luther King a “communist,” but my mother was anti-racist and wouldn’t allow the “N” word to be spoken in our house. When African-Americans attempted to enter the white Presbyterian Church in Sumter and were blocked at the doors, the story made big news in The Sumter Daily Item. I asked my mother why white people wouldn’t let black people into their churches, and, with a disgusted look on her face, she said, “because they’re ignorant.”
No such attempts were made by blacks to enter the Hickory Road Baptist Church in Cherryvale, the little community across from Shaw Air Force Base, where we lived. The church was white and strictly Evangelical, and its members were probably more racist than Sumter’s Presbyterians. Cherryvale itself was white from the center to its margins. But just outside the margins were the cotton fields that ran to the edges of swampy forests and there, down winding, sandy dirt roads, were the tin-roofed, bleached-wood shacks of the black families. They would come through Cherryvale, but rarely would stop unless it was the vegetable vendor, the old man who rode around the neighborhood with his horse-drawn cart, brimming with fruits and vegetables he had for sale. But mostly I was oblivious to the racism, and eventually accepted it as given, because I was white and it didn’t concern me—or so I thought in those days.
Already in the fourth grade I noticed that my teachers were more interested in the “correct” answers than they were in the true answers. I’d learned that the hard way in my final exam in history, science, and social studies when I missed only two questions. To the question “Who discovered America?” I wrote, “Leif Erikson.” As to the shape of the earth, I had written “egg-shaped.” Despite my arguments, my teacher insisted that my answers were “not the right answers.” This was the real beginning of my education about education.
Then in sixth grade a scrawny bald kid wearing a strange double-breasted grey shirt was introduced into the classroom as the new student. His name was Michael Duffy, and we would soon become best friends.
For the first few weeks Michael kept to himself. He claimed to be in communication with Martians, and I would often find him on the playground looking off into the sky, obviously in the midst of sending them telepathic messages. He said he was requesting that they pick him up. That it was time for him to “go home.” I wondered if there was something to this, and I hoped they might take me along with them when they came to pick him up, so I often stood nearby when he was “in communication.”
Eventually Michael was able to let go of his identity as a Martian to become just another boy on the playground, and that was when we really became friends. For the rest of the year we spent most of our free time together writing a book about two young boys who were inseparable friends and had all sorts of adventures together. Michael and I, by contrast with the heroes of our stories, had very few big adventures, but we had lots of fun imagining them.
Eventually we decided to serialize the book and publish it in the form of comics that we duplicated with carbon paper, and eventually with a mimeograph Michael’s father had in his antiques and junk store. We started selling the comics for the price of lunch, since we knew every student arrived at school with at least a quarter in his or her pocket.
Michael’s memory of this incident is far sharper than mine. Years later he told me that we were called into the principal’s office one day after lunch and had our money, and comics, confiscated. It was becoming clear to me that I lived in a world of total coercion: from home, to school, to life around the military base. This awareness conflicted with the world my parents told me I lived in. They had instilled other values in me, among them, perhaps the highest among them, being “freedom, democracy, and independence.” But where was the freedom? And what democracy? Certainly not at home, nor, as I had discovered, at school. I began to suspect it was a total lie. It wouldn’t be long before I would have that suspicion confirmed, and by none other than my father.
One older friend, my next-door neighbor, Buddy Dorsey, eventually left school after passing two years through nearly every grade, that is, advancing by “social promotion” all the way to the eighth grade. There, however, the “Peter Principle” kicked in and he hit the glass ceiling of junior high, since social promotion didn’t apply beyond the eighth grade. At first he tried to make a living selling rose trellises and doing odd jobs that didn’t seem to suit him, and so he joined the Marines and shipped off to Vietnam. Not long after, he was hit by a friendly mortar, which took out part of his skull and left him with a metal plate in his head and partially paralyzed. He returned home a quieter person, a good part of his life gone missing with fragments of his skull.
That was when I began to wonder why we were in Vietnam, so one evening I asked my father. My father was a conservative,