I was born in a small township of New Jersey shortly after Big Joe Turner
climbed the R&B charts with "Shake, Rattle and Roll," and before Albert
Schweitzer accepted the Nobel Prize for Peace. A lithograph of the latter,
artist unknown, hung on our living room wall until the death of my mother
almost five decades later.
My entrance, I am told, was less dramatic than Hurricane Hazel.
Dad painted the porch trellis while my mother and a worn copy of Doctor
Spock's Baby and Child Care were whisked to Rahway Hospital
in a vegetable truck. I arrived unfashionably early, a habit that,
in my middle years, approaches obsession, and still induces my small
circle of friends to quote illegitimate times for a Sunday morning
brunch, baby shower and softball game. This deception has backfired
on several occasions, the most recent episode coinciding with my forty-sixth
birthday and a surprise party in my honor. I will not burden my readers
with the finer details of that celebration that, on reflection, still
causes me to reach for a cherry-flavored antacid tablet. Or two.
Notwithstanding, on the twenty-third day of October in the year
1954, Mom counted my fingers and toes and, satisfied, called my father
and sisters. Cutting short Rachel's howls of disappointment (she wanted
a brother more than a Betsy McCall doll), my mother beckoned a nurse
to escort her to the bathroom. Fifteen minutes later, Hank's head
crowned in the toilet bowl.
I can not recollect much about the place of my birth or, from
my mother's point of view, her double-birth. We lived on one of the
three streets that belonged to our township, a makeshift solution
to the housing shortage that followed the Korean War, and a crisis
on a much smaller scale: my oldest sister's insistence upon consuming
fried hamburgers for breakfast. Ruthie's carnivorous craving I do
not recall. However, since the death of our beloved matriarch, I have
notated in my journal a dozen times a curious phenomenon that occurs
during my weekend morning strolls that, at first by coincidence and
then by choice, place me in front of a 24-hour grill near the northeast
corner of Allen and Stanton. From this location, I am certain that
I can hear my mother's strained voice: "If you eat one more hamburger,
you will turn into a hamburger!"
I have a distinct mental image of our kitchen and kitchen cupboards,
and the door that led to the side porch and, eventually, to the street.
Consultation with my sisters, I am certain, would reveal the particular
name of our street and, perhaps, our exact address. Rachel, unfortunately,
is proctoring a final exam in Women, Sex and Politics at Columbia,
and Ruthie's recent divorce has qualified her as Missing-in-Action
although I suspect that she is engaged in any of several stages of
intercourse with the only heterosexual hairdresser in New Haven whose
uncanny resemblence to Shirley MacLaine's brother is a little unsettling.
Nevertheless, I am sure that this narrative can withstand the omission
of Warren Beatty references and the intimate details of my sister's
post-adolescent rebellion, as the latter approaches an age equivalent
to the sum of the two quarters in my trouser pocket. Luckily, they
are not my last.
I do not wish to mislead my readers into thinking that I am totally
unsympathetic, but I would like to avoid the sensitive theme of sibling
rivalry and return to the scene of my childhood with another recollection
of geographical merit: the bumpy road. This gravel road ran the circumference
of our township, cutting between the woods that bordered the Rahway
River and choked our communal back yards with thick foliage, further
isolating Winfield Park from it's neighboring towns . Engorged mothers,
cooing babies and whole families disappeared in the shade of the weeping
willow. Playpens and hammocks squeezed between chestnut trees, stout
and tall. Kite tails and robin red-breasts and the occasional howling
tom cat decorated the hardwood branches of the sycamore. Children
buried soda caps and lucky pennies under honeysuckle hedges, and argued
incessantly over the source of the sweetest nectar -- the white flower
or the yellow. I favored the latter. Suffocated back yards, collapsed
playpens, tangled clotheslines and cardboard wading pools predisposed
the few and far between traveler to reach the same conclusion: to
coin a phrase, white trash. If the reader has never experienced being
without money or a job, he may corroborate with the infrequent bumpy
road traveler. If he has been, he may see the slightly warped picnic
hampers under the giant willows or smell the aroma of fresh bottled
chocolate milk. Or he may note the burnt embers from the deep pits
of roasting chestnuts, or count the honey bees feasting on vine after
vine of bell-shaped flowers.
I don't remember much else about Winfield Park except that it
wasn't really a park, and that all of the one, two, three, four, five
and six-family houses were painted white with green trim. The township
boasted nothing more, nothing less than a roller skating rink, a liquor
store and, at the end of Seafoam Road, an elementary school. I remember
that once, in Kindergarten, I was scolded by Mrs. Farber when I drew
a face on the dusty sole of my red shoe with a wad of frothy saliva.
She sent me, barefooted, to the far corner of the room and ordered
me, in no uncertain terms, to face the wall. I did. After she instructed
the other children in fan folding techniques and the difference between
the color red and the color orange, she approached me from behind.
"Lift," she said. I lifted my arms. Her voice sharpened.
"Lift," she repeated. I dropped my hands and pulled the
hem of my brown cotton dress to my waist. "No, dirty Jew!"
cried Mrs. Farber. She kicked my right heel. I raised my foot off
the ground. "Now lower it," she said. I did. Even at that
tender age, I distinctly recall the acute sensation of shame when
Mrs. Farber sent for Rachel to observe my state of disgrace. My sister
did not see the sharp object--a nail or, perhaps, a coveted piece
of broken glass from my teacher's mirror--embedded deep inside my
flesh. Inside my soul.
I have a distinct mental image of the day that transformed our lives. I
ask the reader to pardon my use of literary license, and I will enhance the
pivotal event with a dialogue that happened or did not happen. It occurred
in the fall of 1959. On that day, my father came home from work with a
bloodied nose:
"Get the dish basin, Hank!" my mother cried. "Hurry,
son, hurry!" My lanky five-year-old twin plucked the plastic
basin from the sink, shoved it at my mother and ran to his bedroom.
My toes curled and uncurled on the linoleum floor. Ten unclipped nails
scratched at the surface of the gritty tiles that held me hostage.
Although I longed to escape, too, I could not move. I could not run.
In retrospect, my action -- or, rather, inaction -- does not surprise
me. Even then, I was my father's child.
I focused on my dad's bobbing Adam's apple as my mother wiped
and crooned, crooned and wiped. "What's wrong, Morris?"
she asked. "What happened?"
The direct descendent of Jacob Goldstein, Mahatma Gandhi and Abraham
Lincoln stretched his lips into a large donut hole and bawled, "They voted me
down, Gwen! The housing board said that no colored people were moving into
this town! They called me a nigger lover, Gwen. The president of the
stinking board called me a nigger lover and a kike and a bad role model to
our children!"
"Lean back, Morris."
An ice cube skidded across the floor. My father and I watched its path
of least resistance. The chip ricocheted off our second-hand Frigidaire, the
leg of a chair and disappeared under the table.
My father made a fist. Then he shuddered. Then he flattened his
hand against his forehead. The drama unfolded. "Oh, Gwen!"
he cried, "I hit the god damned Nazi first!"
His words stabbed me like the prickly spines of a chestnut bur.
I dropped to my hands and knees and crept under the kitchen table.
Out of my father's range of vision, I plucked the frozen chip from
the floor and covered it with two pudgy hands. Cradled at my chest,
I hummed softly while the solid cube liquefied and my father's tears
subsided.
By the time my tee-shirt dried and a wet crust plugged my dad's
left nostril, I had already forgiven the larger-than-life man who
embraced his ideals before hugging his frightened youngest daughter.
From that moment on, I accepted the contradictions of my father's
actions and sought his approval through blind imitation.
Three months later, our family moved from Winfield Park Township
to the south side of the tracks in Cranford, New Jersey. Our street
boasted a corn field, a playground and three churches. Our neighbors
were ministers, school teachers, undertakers; the unemployed, the
underpaid, high school drop-outs; liquor store owners, garbage collectors,
housekeepers. Every flesh tone was accounted for in warm hues of brown,
darker shades of chocolate, and charcoal black. Every flesh tone was
accounted for except for the determined white jaw of my liberal father,
the milky-colored face of my ex-card carrying mother, and the frost-bitten
cheeks of four siblings that neither resembled their parents or each
other. Hank, Ruthie, Rachel and I did not sleep well that first night
in our new home. I don't know if anyone in that small suburb of New
Jersey slept at all on the night our family integrated a black neighborhood
at the dawn of a new decade.
I distinctly recall the strains of the last sound that filled my ears on
that long ago evening. It was the voice of my father. He sang with a
passion that, to this day, rekindles my spirit and swells my bosom with pride:
Shake, rattle and roll, shake, rattle and roll.
Shake, rattle and roll, shake, rattle and roll.
Well, you won't do right to save your doggone soul
