My father was well dressed and very handsome. He had worked in Chicago's Hyde Park Shopping Center for Cohn & Stern—an upscale men’s clothing store--since about the time I was born. He felt heavily indebted to Cohn and Stern for giving him a steady job and always remarked they were Jewish with a smile on his face, implying that their being Jewish was the reason why they took a chance on him. What I do know is Cohn and Stern were liberal and gave my father ample chances to hang onto his job, which he did until the day he died, and they treated him like family. He even sometimes went to Cohn’s house and gave his children piggyback rides.
But it’s obvious my father didn’t spend days playing with Cohn’s children. His disappearing, coupled with the fact he had such a strong temper, played into my nightmares of him being killed. And the pace and intensity of those dreams stepped up. Since my father didn’t always come home after work, my evening time with him also fizzled. While my father ate his dinner, I usually had a little talk with him and he always played “This Little Piggy” on my fingers. It was while playing with my father I decided I wanted to marry him some day. That was the beginning of a lifelong habit of mine of picking the wrong damn people. If the people I picked weren’t my father, they were my mama “…and this little piggy got none,” my father stopped at my index finger again. My index finger was always the little piggy that got none, and I felt so sorry for it I burst out crying. “Why don’t he ever get nothing. It ain’t right," I finally yelled. As my mother looked on, I tried to explain to my father that the piggy could starve to death if he continued to go unfed. My father’s eyes got really round. He didn’t say nothing, though.
On nights my father was home, he’d read a bedtime story to me and my brother. That may be how I developed an interest in storytelling. It also tells me that even though my father didn’t make it past the sixth grade, he cared about our learning. He couldn’t help us with hardly any of our homework, “Oh! That’s that new math,” but he made us do it and instilled a love of learning in at least one of us.
My father wasn’t home the night of April 4, 1968. I was sitting in front of the TV while Mama was in the kitchen, and there were some news flashes. I noticed the news flashes, but they didn’t mean much to me. After about the third time the news flash came on, Mama came out of the kitchen and asked me, “What did they say? I said, “Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. got shot.” I still remember the picture of him lying on that balcony, looking so lost, struggling to breathe, eyes glazed over. Soon there was another flash, and they said he was dead. Mama walked back and forth between the living room and kitchen like a blind person memorizing the number of steps it took. Then she grabbed our coats, pulled my arms through the sleeves of mine and zipped me up. I don’t know where my brother was, but I don’t remember him being home that night. He was maybe at a Boy Scout meeting. Mama and I went for a walk. We went past the liquor store, where Mama would buy her vodka, past the grocery store, and past the railroad tracks. It was at the tracks we heard the first shots. Bang! Bang! Mama turned toward me, but didn’t say nothing. She didn’t cry either. We walked back home, and I remember going to bed without my bath and hearing the shouts of people and seeing flames rise from the dumpsters. I could hear the footsteps of people rushing everywhere and sirens, screaming, and crying. But I didn’t make the connection between the news flashes and what was happening. Mama came into my room and saw me looking out the window and told me to lie down. “Don’t look out that window,” she said angrily. I did lie down and fell asleep only to awake the next morning to the sights and sounds of rioting that came through the TV. The West Side was on fire. The National Guard was called in, poised to shoot to kill. Our neighborhood was quiet compared to what we saw on TV. As it turns out, the Blackstone Rangers cooperated with the police to control the neighborhood. The North and East Side Disciples patrolled the North and East Sides. I guess no one patrolled the West Side.
The next day, my father went to work, but my brother, mother, and me stayed in the house all weekend. Mama tried to keep the TV on cartoon programs, but every now and then a news flash still broke through. That was back in the days before cable TV. We didn’t have a hundred channels to choose among. Over the next week or so, our house was quiet. My father didn’t even beat Mama up that weekend. All I remember about King’s funeral was his daughter, who looked about my age, laying her head on her mother’s lap during the service.
Although I really didn’t understand what was going on at the time—the Civil Rights Movement, the war in Vietnam, or the numerous protests, I did know those events were important, and they affected me. I started a quiet protest on my own. I stopped reciting the Pledge of Allegiance at school each morning, because I realized I didn’t know what I was pledging to. Something seemed wrong about the country. I refused to pledge to it. I wonder how many other six year olds had stopped pledging, too. Although I was in the middle group in just about everything at school, except for language skills, I had the wherewithal to quietly make that decision.
A little before school let out for the summer Robert Kennedy was assassinated. I have to admit I don’t remember much about it. But I do think I was aware of it because when I see footage of him lying supine on that, I believe, kitchen floor, I realize I’d seen that image many years before on our TV. It was a sad summer with all that death and dying and violence. Vietnam War coverage seemed to be intensifying, or perhaps I was just getting old enough to be aware of the coverage. Medics were rushing the injured and dying through battle zones and onto helicopters and large swaths of jungle were being defoliated, laying bare villages. I felt sorry for the Vietnamese people; they had it in their backyards. The Chicago police turned on demonstrators outside the Democratic National Convention. It looked like the police were just wilding. They were swinging their night sticks willy-nilly at the demonstrators and anyone who happened to be around the Amphitheatre, or Grant or Lincoln Parks. I didn’t realize Mayor Daley was known for malapropisms at the time, even though Mama laughed at him every time he spoke, but he always looked like an authoritarian fool to me. I didn’t like him because he always seemed angry. So when he told the cops to beat up those protestors our relationship was sealed. I know Mama didn’t like him either. One year she voted against him, saying she was sick of him.
Comments