uncles.
Since there were so many, I lost track of some of them. But I believe they were fairly normal working-class folks with Southern accents and a shared affinity for fried chicken and sweet iced tea.
If you've ever sat down at a Cracker Barrel restaurant on Sunday after church, you might have seen some of them at the next table over, maybe talking and laughing about the rest of us.
We Don't Have a Sputnik
Recalling the 1950's, most folks who lived through them reminisce fondly about the good ol' days of a peaceful and prosperous decade. That's not exactly how I remember them.
Way down in Waycross, our entire way of life was changing, under attack by forces far and near. All the news was about racial integration sweeping throughout the Deep South, and about Russia threatening us.
On the home front, some black people wanted to send their kids to the white schools, which we were told would surely lead us to ruin. Meanwhile, my older brother, Wiz, told me that the communists over in Russia were seeking world domination.
About half the people in our town were black, and since I was only a kid, I didn't understand why they had their own schools, churches, and neighborhoods, even if their houses were mostly rundown. It seemed they had their own world and that white people had to stay away. None of that made any sense to me since all men were created equally, according to what we learned in grade school.
Since our parents had told us more than once not to be too friendly with any black people, they were a mystery and we were more afraid of them than we were of the Russians; after all, the black folks lived just across the railroad tracks from us.
During a lull in Dad's home building business, he took over the train depot restaurant, which had gone under when the passenger traffic died out. When my brother Wiz asked him why he had all black employees, he said they were good workers.
The first black person I remember was Lizzie, who worked the counter at my Dad’s restaurant. She got along with everyone and was always really nice to me. Whenever I came in, she'd treat me to a special hot dog.
I was in second grade, and wanted to touch her to see if her color would rub off. One day, she hugged me and I was amazed that her skin was soft and that I didn’t turn black from her embrace. I then realized that she was a nice person with different colored skin, a person just like any of us.
After a few months, Dad gave up on the restaurant business and I went back to eating Mom's cooking, which none of us was too thrilled about. But we began to fare a little better when Dad came home one day and announced that he'd landed a commercial project: He was building a community room onto a church -- and not just any church, but a black one.
“I thought they were poor and couldn’t afford new things,” I said. “Don’t worry," he told me. "I got paid in advance.”
Several months later, Dad announced that the church addition was finished and that all of us were going to the dedication ceremony. This seemed strange to me, as he didn’t believe in religion and never went to our all white church.
On the Sunday of the dedication, the whole family, dressed up for the occasion, nervously entered the Tabernacle of Praise. To our surprise, they prayed pretty much the same prayers and used the same hymn books as ours, but they sang a lot better from them than we did. They also seemed to have a good time, in contrast to our church, where the preacher said that everyone was bad and going straight to Hell.
Some of them were dressed nicer than us, and the preacher drove a big Cadillac, while we had a Ford. They called my Dad "Mister Charlie" and said a special prayer for him, but I didn't think even a special one could have done him much good.
In the new community room, we six white people had dinner with more than 100 members of the black congregation. Since they were all so friendly to us and the food was really good, I asked if we could come back next week instead of going to the Church of Christ we attended. The answer was no.
The black children had been nice to us, too, and I wondered what would happen if we all went to the same school. Maybe that would be good for everyone. I was already having a problem at my school, where I was not good in English.
Sure, I could speak our Southern dialect with ease, but written English was different. For one thing, a lot words that were spelled the same way had more than one meaning. For example, fair could be used to describe the weather or it could mean the county fair, with rides and cotton candy. Then there were words that sounded the same but were spelled differently, such as the steel wheels on boxcars, which didn't have hubcaps you could steal.
And then, some perfectly fine typical Southern sentences would turn out to be wrong. For example, “I'm fixin' to fix the fixin's” had to be translated into “I'm about to prepare the turkey dressing” for it to be proper English. I found it all too confusing, and wondered if English at a black school would make more sense and be easier to learn.
On top of that, I was worried that I might have to learn a whole new alphabet. Wiz was already studying Russian, just in case the communists took over the United States. He told me that they had 15 strange looking letters, and another 18 that could be English, but that they didn’t have an N or an L, and that one letter was like our R but turned backward.
I didn't have such trouble with history and geography. I learned that Russia was a backwater country that became important only after it helped defeat Nazi Germany in WWII. Then the Russians took over all of Eastern Europe and kept half of Germany, and the whole area was protected by an Iron Curtain. It covered a lot of territory, but most of it was a wasteland known as Siberia. Until the Communist Revolution, the country was ruled by Czars.
I learned that Communism was invented in England but didn’t get catch on there or in Germany, so the Germans sent the communists to Russia, where the people wanted to create a classless society because the Czar had been cruel to them.
Our world map at school showed that Russia was huge, much bigger than the United States. I thought the reason the newspaper said we were in a Cold War with them was that it was always cold in Russia. The good news was that the commies were so far away. How could they do anything to us?
. Trying to copy the USA, they changed their name to the USSR, but that was like putting a different label on a can of Spam and calling it caviar. They had vodka, we had moonshine; they had ballet, we had baseball. Russians had the freedom to vote for any candidate hand-picked by the communist party; we had two parties and anyone could get elected in Georgia, as long as he was white.
Then the Russians somehow stole the secret formula for our atomic bomb. It was amazing. No one could figure out the secret Coke recipe or the 11 secret herbs and spices in the Colonel's fried chicken -- but the sneaky Russians got their hands on the A-bomb blueprints! And once they had the bomb, it was no secret that they could use it.
Civil Defense signs were put up all over town, even at school. We were told to hide under our desks if we were attacked, and once a month we practiced doing that. We were also told that massive supplies of canned food were hidden underground. I hoped we would never have to go underground to eat Spam.
Meanwhile, things were heating up between us and the Commies. The United States started a group called NATO, which I thought stood for the North Atlantic and Turkey Organization. That allowed us to keep thousands of soldiers in Europe and to have A-bomb missiles in Turkey. My school map showed that Turkey is right next to Russia, so our putting missiles there would be like the Russians putting them in Cuba, which of course they did.
We started to have more emergency drills at school. Our radio had a special place on the dial so we could tune in to hear a government broadcast if the missiles started flying. “Don’t worry," Wiz said. "If there is an attack, it will all be over in less than a minute.” That was not reassuring.
Later on, though, Wiz showed me a copy of the Atlanta newspaper, which printed a map of the United States and all of the cities that Russia had selected as its A-bomb