I pledge allegiance to the flag
of the United States of America
and to the republic for which it stands,
one nation*, invisible,
with liberty and justice for all.
Then we’d sit down and a passage was read from the Bible. I don’t know how old I was before I realized ‘invisible’ was supposed to be ‘indivisible’.
To salute you placed your right hand on your heart, although I was never sure I’d found my heart. The pledge said things that I knew weren’t true once I’d seen Autherine Lucy and heard all the talk at home about what rights we didn’t have.
I hoped nobody at school would ask what I thought about the Autherine thing because I wasn’t allowed to lie. The teacher usually asked our opinions about current events, but I could tell from the way nobody mentioned Autherine in class that it was something we could not talk about. Patriotism was running too high to challenge it. America was like God. People believed in it.
When I discovered there was no Santa Claus, I think I cried. Part of my hurt was being robbed of my favourite myth and the rest was realizing that I had believed with all my might in something that older people knew all along was fake. I remember being told that since younger kids still needed to believe in Santa, I wasn’t to tell them he didn’t exist. I became an accessory to promoting a continuing myth and assumed I was doing the littler kids a favour by letting them believe a bit longer.
The same applies after I realized we’d been pledging ourselves to a myth about America. Obviously nobody wanted to deal with the truth, so as a child of eight I became an accessory, never exposing the deception, which everybody needed to go on believing in.
*The words ‘under God’ were added by act of Congress in 1954.
5 MOUNT AIRY AND CHESTNUT HILL
John Wister school mysteriously caught fire one Sunday night when I was in the second half of second grade, and I never went back there. I was bused to another school for quite some time.
Gradually the rougher elements became the majority in Germantown. Crap-shooters monopolized a corner of the street where we had to walk past them to the neighbourhood store. Some of them used to make passes at Ikey and Thelma. My mother was unnerved and called them gangsters. Edna called them riffraff and dared them to lay their hands on her. I suppose they were jobless as they were always there, throwing dice, calling bets and making idle threats to each other. ‘Gimme a double, sir.’ ‘Come on baby, come on.’ ‘A five and a four.’ ‘Double or nothin’.’ ‘Take yo’ hands off the dice. I’ll shoot yo’ ass.’ ‘You jive-ass mothafucka.’ We could hear them halfway up the block.
Late one afternoon when Ikey and I were coming home from Charlie Chernoff’s grocery store, all of a sudden a couple of police cars swerved up to the corner. As the police spilled out on the sidewalk, there was a melee and a shot was fired. It was like something straight out of the movies and I was scared nearly to death by the guns going off. But no one was hurt and I never found out who fired.
After my father’s medical tenure at Boston State Hospital, he came to visit with his youngest brother, Ernest, and I was more worried about the two of them walking around the neighbourhood than I was about Edna, Thelma and Ikey. My father was so gentle. His soft voice always made me feel he needed protecting, whereas I imagined only a fool would dare lay hands on one of my mothers, who each had a wild temper.
The summer Blair and Ernest came to visit us in Germantown is the summer I remember there best. To sit next to him or pass him on the stairs was nearly too exciting. This was less because I had missed my father than because men rarely crossed our doorstep. Aside from the insurance broker who made a regular Friday collection of my grandmother’s insurance premium, a couple of doctors making house calls when we were too sick to go to their surgeries, and a friend of Thelma’s who took us on a family outing once to Bear Mountain, I can’t remember men coming to our house. In those days respectable women didn’t receive callers as they would today. In the 1940s and 1950s when I was growing up, the social and sexual role of women was entirely different. There was no parade of ‘uncles’ trooping through. The only uncles I had were blood relations like Henry, and he only made one whirlwind visit to see us after the Korean War ended before he moved to California.
Both Blair and Ernest had marked Bostonian accents. A Bostonian accent in the fifties was equivalent in American to speaking the Queen’s English in England. It held a class distinction as much as anything else. For some reason a Bostonian accent implied that you were educated, cultured and well bred.
Blair didn’t act as if he was at all impressed with himself, though. He made jokes which I didn’t understand but I laughed all the same, following him about like our puppy followed me. When he arrived he’d brought us each a Timex watch and a pair of turquoise slippers with bronco riders printed on them. He might just as well have given me diamonds.
He had a big grey Studebaker parked in front of the house behind our grey 1950 Chevrolet. I hated to see him go outside the front gate, because I thought it was dangerous and couldn’t conceive that somebody who never raised his voice could deal with danger. He’d been in the war, but fighting with guns I didn’t imagine had anything to do with ferocious street combat.
I adored my uncle Ernest and thought he looked like Louis Jourdan, whom I’d seen in a movie at the Band Box. My father had never brought him before. Ernest was young and would scramble about on the floor, demonstrating some of his war skirmishes, showing how he pulled out his trusty sword when the Japanese attacked. I never believed that they used swords in the Second World War but I didn’t tell him. To look out from the kitchen window and see him lazing in the blue hammock near the fat heads of Edna’s orange and yellow marigolds made me wish he would marry Thelma.
Blair and Ernest took us to Valley Forge so that we could see where George Washington engineered America’s victory against King George’s army. Then they rushed back to their studies. Blair was already specializing in psychiatry. Ernest still had to pass his Massachusetts bar exam to qualify as a lawyer. I couldn’t imagine what it would have been like to have a father living in the house all the time.
By Blair’s next visit, we had moved to Mount Airy, which is the district beyond Germantown Avenue. In the late eighteenth century it originally attracted wealthy families who built country seats there, like Upsala, owned by the Johnson family descended from a German, Dirk Jensen, one of the original Krefelders who settled in the district. Like Cliveden House opposite Upsala, these local landmarks were always there to recall the past, those early European settlers and their struggle for freedom. The old buildings looked odd in a neighbourhood of 1930s terraced houses.
Cliveden House at 6401 Germantown Avenue was built between 1763 and 1767 and was turned into a fortress in 1777 during the Battle of Germantown when British soldiers used it to stave off George Washington’s advancing troops.
I walked around the Cliveden House gardens when I went back in the summer of 1985. This English-looking estate occupies an entire city block of a Melangian urban community. The design of the façade of this mid-Georgian house was based on an engraving entitled ‘A View of the Palace at Kew from the Lawn’, published in London in the Gentleman’s Magazine and Historical Chronicle in 1763.
Edna, Thelma and Ikey continued to work as they did throughout my childhood and Blair sent regular contributions. As much as anything, I think that they willed our progressive moves which always bettered our circumstances and improved the environments that we were growing up in. Like the move from 23rd Street to Germantown, the move to Mount Airy when I was nine made a great improvement in our lives. There were trees and tended hedges everywhere and the nearly new apartment complex across the road had the lawn mown regularly. My mother liked the neighbours and the