Chapter 2:   The Stuff of  Dreams

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Most people’s ideas about Vietnam are based on the same publishing, broadcasting and movie-making sources that popularized the peace movement’s cause during the war. According to these movers and shakers, whom I will refer to for the sake of convenience as "the media," the U.S. had no business sending its troops or its weapons against the Indochinese communists. They saw and reported the military effort of our allies as a sideshow to the one we mounted in support of theirs. They saw and reported ours as a war of futility with no good purpose and no hope for peace as long as we kept it going. To maintain that view, they had to ignore the evidence of history and current events that said the people fighting the communists deserved all the help we could give them.

Ignoring the evidence may seem to have been quite a trick after the communist victories in `75 produced two genocidal police states, one genocidal slave state and another decade of war. However, when your thinking rests on the proposition that the peace movement was right about Vietnam, you have to make some adjustments relative to all of Indochina. And you will. Aided by a few scholars and war heroes who have supplied the lion’s share of hard facts and intense feelings needed to keep the peace movement’s footings in place, most people did.

I’m asking you to follow me, not as a scholar or a war hero, neither of which I claim to be, but as a lifelong student of current events, highly motivated to learn. Think of me, the student, as a bit player at key places in time, on the big stage of history during some of the most influential dramas of the 20th century. I did not write them, direct them, produce them, star in them or affect what anybody else saw of them by my performance. But I was there. The foundations for my vision of the future were set in those times by the events themselves and the reactions to them by the people around me. I saw and heard and felt what happened as it happened, and, as all good students must, I learned the lessons that would have to be recalled for the crucial tests ahead...

My first clear memory of anything was of a large backyard on a street called Bridgeport in a predominately black suburb of Detroit called Inkster. Henry Ford created Inkster to give his black Rouge factory workers, like my father and three of his brothers, a home that was close to work and separate from the white suburb of Dearborn. We moved to Detroit when I was two, which gives all of my memories of Bridgeport a verifiable place in time before the middle of 1948. That was three years after the liberation of Auschwitz and the bombing of Hiroshima, a year after Jackie Robinson broke the baseball color barrier and a year before China went communist and Russia went nuclear. My first memory of anything came two years before the start of the Korean War, 6 years before Brown vs. Topeka Board of Education, 10 years before the last Confederate soldier died and 16 years before Jim Crow did.

On that bright summer day in `48, my big brother George and I were confined to a wooden playpen while our cousins who lived in the same four-family apartment house we lived in played on the lawn. They were running and laughing and rolling around in the grass. George and I could tell we were in the wrong place. We discussed the situation in the universal language of brothers less than a year and a half apart and he stood up to plead his case for getting out.

Somehow, he got one of the long-haired big people, in bright print dresses sitting on lawn chairs, to lift him over the top of the cage and turn him loose with the other kids at play.

Great! Now me.... Me....

Hey! What about me? The actual words I used, if any, were as close an approximation of the ones my brother had used as I could manage, and I knew that I was standing and extending my arms the way he had. Yet, I couldn’t get any of the big people to free me the way my brother had been freed.

I wanted out!

I wanted it so badly that I cried.

I cried so hard that it hurt.

I didn’t care how much it hurt. I wanted out! I gripped the wooden bars and tried with all my might to yank them apart. I pounded on them. I shook them. I banged my head against them, over and over until somebody stopped me, laid me down, and forced me to stay put.

I lay in the padded cage. And I cried, and cried, and cried.

Two generations later, I was visiting my Aunt Lillian-one of the "big people," as it turned out, who was in that backyard on Bridgeport on that summer day in 1948. I learned that the playpen incident was real enough to have left a permanent impression on my aunt who was startled to hear my detailed recounting of it much as she had remembered it. She confessed to having been as baffled by the ferocity of my tantrum as she had been frightened by it, especially the part about banging my head against the bars. Nobody could figure out why I did that. The way she remembered it, she picked me up and held me until I stopped crying.

I’m sure that she recalled her true feelings and what she truly wanted to do or wished she had done. If she was the one who reached me first, then she was the one who pulled me away from the bars; but the way I remembered it, and the reason I remembered it, was that nobody pulled me over them. I was laid down in the playpen with a bottle of juice that I thought I was too big for. My Aunt Lillian may have been joined by my mother and another aunt to make sure that I didn’t start bopping my head again. That was never clear to me, probably because my mind was trained on something else at the time.

I was combining concepts in a very deliberate way, which may be another reason this particular memory stayed with me the way it did. Though I didn’t have the names for the things I was putting together, I had the experience and the ability to generalize from that experience. That is what I was doing, as I cried myself sick.

That was my first memory. This was my first lesson: Freedom, that nameless thing I wanted so desperately, meant being able to do what you wanted to do. Freedom and power went together like rubber nipples and baby bottles. They could be thought of as separate entities, but you couldn’t get what you wanted out of one without the proper application of the other. Freedom came out of power. Power came from being big and strong. No matter how badly I wanted to join my laughing cousins on the lawn, I was never going to be able to without the help of someone bigger and stronger than I was. The world belonged to the giants.

My "Size Equals Power" hypothesis underwent a radical adjustment when we moved to 5619 North Campbell, a coal-heated duplex on the west side of Detroit. My Uncle Jasper, who served in Europe as an Army cook during World War II, moved in upstairs with my Aunt Lillian and my baby cousin Florence. To be honest, I don’t remember Florence very well back then because she was too little to be of any use.

The three kids next door were a different story. The spread of years between them made them a perfect yardstick for measuring how well the "Size Equals Power" theory worked. It seemed to work perfectly for awhile.

Philip was my age. He was the first person I can remember who wasn’t family. We spent a lot of time together in the Summer, playing outdoors in front of his house or mine in the hard, grey dirt which was highly resistant to the cultivation of grass. Philip’s oldest brother Kenny, was so far removed from Philip and me in age and outlook that he seldom deigned to talk to us. His brother Carl, was a little more than a year older than us, the same age as my brother George.

Carl and George were bigger, stronger, smarter and better coordinated than we were. They had a better command of the language of the giants and they could do impressive things that we couldn’t, like eating with forks instead of spoons. They were our superiors in every way. They played outside mostly with each other. When they stooped to play with us or our mothers forced them to, they spared no opportunity to remind Philip and me of our lowly place in the pecking order.

To get a good mental picture of my friend Philip, think of the dirtiest little two or three-year-old you ever saw. Now add dirt where you don’t see any. That was Philip. My first sight of his grubby face each morning boosted my toddler ego to dizzying heights. My face never got that dirty. I was bigger than he was, too. Maybe a little older.

Then came the great debate of 1949.

Philip was in his backyard. I was in mine. We were passing dirt back and forth between the wire fence. That was Philip’s idea. He had a lot of ideas like that. Although I could never figure out what he was doing, he was always so busy doing it and so sure of himself that I usually went along. This time I wanted to do something different. Philip didn’t.

Despite my superior size, Philip had an irritating way of trying to boss me around as though it was in the natural order of things that he do so. He was assuming that air as he insisted on having his way. This time, I asserted the universal right of bigness which I had been holding in reserve and insisted on having mine.

He wouldn’t budge.

I tried to reason with him.

He still wouldn’t budge.

I got mad and told him about his dirty face.

He gave me a look of utter astonishment. Then he got mad. "You’re the one with the dirty face!"

"Ha!" I sneered.

"You’re dirty all over! You’re black!

That stung.

"Am not!" I said, uncertain of what the word "black" meant but confident that it had much to do with dirt and fearful that it might have something to do with me.

"Are too!" said Philip.

"Am not!" I said.

"Are too," said Philip....

With each "am not/are too" refrain, Philip seemed more secure in his position-not more convinced that he was right about me but less concerned over what I had said about him. The dirt on his face was no longer the issue. The issue was whether or not I was dirt, an issue which extended beyond me to include my big brother, my cousins, their parents and mine.

After the 15th or 20th repetition, he was beginning to wear me down. The grimy-faced little boy’s rash assertion didn’t sound true... but it felt true... Maybe he was right. Maybe I was black.

Oh do-do....

With the addition of color to the freedom and power equation and my growing sense of social relationships, the ways of the world and my place in it got far more complicated. I learned without anyone having to tell me that "black," though highly context sensitive in meaning, was usually synonymous with "nigger," the lowest thing a human being could be. It was followed in ascending order by "darkie," "colored" and "Negro."

Though "Negro" could refer to any shade of skin color as well as "colored" could, they were not always interchangeable concepts. The worth of colored people was measured in just how colored they were, the lighter the better. Being a Negro was, theoretically, almost as good as being white, regardless of how dark one’s skin happened to be. If you sounded white, that was almost true. These were unspoken bits of wisdom that nearly every American preschooler in 1949 accepted as true without a second thought.

When I turned four, in 1950, I knew a lot of things that were true, a lot of things that weren’t, and a dangerous combination of both. For instance, where some things were concerned, I knew that I was whatever my parents were. I knew we were Baptists. I didn’t know what Catholics were, but I knew they were white and white people didn’t go to our church. I also knew that Baptists were better than they were but white people were somehow better than Negroes and Negroes were obviously better than chings.

I was a Negro. I knew a cute little children’s rhyme about chings. One of the older white boys in the neighborhood taught it to me and my new friend, Leonard Gary, who moved into the house on the south side of Philip’s shortly before his family moved out. Lonnie was also a Negro. He and I were less than a month apart in age and we would delight in saying the rhyme over and over, out of earshot of our parents who we knew would not have approved:

"Ching Ching Chinaman sitting on a fence Trying to make a dollar out of fifteen cents. Along came a Chinaman and hit him on the head. Ching Ching Chinaman fell down dead.

It made us laugh because we knew you couldn’t make a dollar out of fifteen cents. We knew that it took two quarters and a dime, at least. Negroes were smarter than chings.

It always felt good to know why you were better than somebody. If you gave it too much thought, it made you feel guilty because of the falling down dead part. That was reason enough not to.

I didn’t know anyone of Chinese ancestry when I was having such a great time with that vicious little rhyme for children. But as I grew older, I stood on the sidelines of an event which opened my eyes to the necessity of actively opposing intolerance, regardless of which "out-group" was its target.

The old man two houses north of us on North Campbell was a Polish emigrant who spoke little English. His daughter’s husband was a native-born American of Italian descent. I don’t recall whether he spoke any of his father-in-law’s native language. It probably didn’t matter as long as they had a common medium of violent disagreement, which they did. Their verbal assaults on each other were always a hot topic of gossip.

One summer day in the late `50s the old man took an ax and hacked his son-in-law to death. Speculation abounded as to why he did it. One theory, consistent with what was known of their arguments, held that it was because the murdered man wasn’t Polish. Another was because he wasn’t Catholic or because he wasn’t the right kind of Catholic. The bottom line was the old man did not believe in mixed marriages. He couldn’t tolerate one of "them" being married to his daughter and he finally put a bloody end to it.

"Them," I realized, could have been anybody, and being one of "them" was sometimes enough, all by itself, to get you killed. It would be two and a half decades before I recalled seeing the lumpy, blood-stained sheet over the body being taken from the house on a stretcher. Even then, I recalled seeing it in a dream through the eyes of a four-year-old when I must have been eleven or twelve when it happened.

I do not have a satisfactory explanation for that bizarre distortion of memory. Was it a trick of my subconscious mind to remove me in time from a scene too grisly for a boy my age too cope with? If so, why did it lay dormant for so many years? Why did I remember it as something other than a dream? And why did the dream, or whatever it was, include every other aspect of the experience, right down to the cloying smell of blood?

I did have one dream around the time of the ax murder that couldn’t have been anything else, although it didn’t seem anything like one. I dreamed I was waking up-from a nightmare I couldn’t remember....

The room was dark as I looked down at the foot of my bed and saw a cluster of white balloons held aloft by wooden rods. I wasn’t sure, at first, what they were, but as it seemed that I was shedding the last of my troubled, leftover sleep, they came into sharp relief against the blackness of the room.

Shortly, I discerned a gradual change. Human faces began to appear on the surface of the balloons. With the sinister subtlety of a slow-acting poison, working in reverse and then reversing itself again, the lifeless objects on the long wooden rods began to show tortured signs of life before reverting to lifelessness. The smooth outer surface of the balloons reconfigured themselves to the shape of human heads. The eyes stretched, the mouths opened and I knew that I was looking at severed heads impaled on sticks.

I recoiled in absolute horror, knowing that I could not have been seeing what I thought I was, but unable to close my eyes or think them away. Stare them down, I told myself, trying to brave things through. They’re not real. They will go away... They will go away... They will go away....

They did not go away; they multiplied.

A long wooden rod would go up and a new head would appear on top of it, the contorted features distinct and distinctly East Asian. With their mouths open as though trying to call for help, they didn’t seem to know they were already dead. I was totally paralyzed but fully alert, knowing damn well that I was seeing something that wasn’t there. But I knew what I saw; I saw severed human heads jammed on bloody wooden rods at the foot of my bed. I smelled the blood and I felt the rising tide of panic.

Another stick went up with someone’s head on it. This one could have been a male or a female of any age or ethnic identity. I could determine only that it was not East Asian. I felt my rational mind being swept away in a flood of unrelenting fear that my head would be next. I prayed to God and struggled with everything I had inside of me to scream for help as the severed heads were also trying to do. For a long time, nothing happened. Then a low wail shook its way out of my throat mutating rapidly into an ear-splitting shriek...

Maybe I should have been unhappy with myself for crying out the way I did, but I was far too thankful that it had brought everyone in the house to my rescue to feel anything but relief.

Shortly after that, my rescuers and I were going through my mother’s photo album of the Garrisons and her side of the family, the Yeargins. I spied a picture of a funny-looking man in a baggy pin-striped suit, sitting cross-legged in an easy chair.

My mother tried to speed past that page, but I stopped her and asked who the man was. I think it was my father who said he was my mother’s uncle, the husband of her eccentric Aunt Helen. My aunt called him "Papa."

For reasons I could only guess, Papa’s appearance in the family album was an embarrassment to my mother. Perhaps it was because he and my aunt weren’t really married but were "living in sin." It may have been because he was white, which should have been an embarrassment only if that was the reason my aunt married him. Knowing my Aunt Helen, who no one knew better or loved more than I did, that was absurd, although you couldn’t begin to tell that to most people who didn’t know her.

What did seem likely was that Papa’s religion more than his race was at the core of the issue since my father volunteered the fact that he was a Jew. Though I was more than a little confused about whether Jews and white people belonged to the same race, I had no doubt that Jews and Christians were not of the same religion. That may have been the key to the marriage question-which is to say, the unauthorized sex question, or something of broader significance that I was able to articulate to myself only in my dreams.

People could be bunched into innumerable groups, according to any standard of appearance or behavior. The secret of survival was to conform to the standards laid down by the dominant bunch-to look and talk and act the way they did. Whatever variables in size, shape, color, language, philosophy, religion or sexual proclivities which might be found in the human race were only tolerated when they fit within the norm for those dominant members of the race. We had even come to think of ourselves as members of different races, some closer and some farther away from the ideal, the human ideal created by men for the image of God.

Apparently, Jews among Christians were as blacks among whites, or "sexual deviates," like my Aunt Helen and the man she loved, among "normal" people who slept only with "members of their own race." Even when they were tolerated in limited numbers or for a limited duration, an evil force was undoubtedly at work all the time to undermine their freedom if not their very existence. It worked best against the oddballs of society with few defenders who didn’t fit well with any dominate group. I could not, at that time, have identified what that evil force was, but I felt it. I knew it existed. And I knew that it held sway wherever it was permitted to go unchallenged.

The greatest inhibitor of my ability to put those feelings into words was not my youthful ignorance but my religious education. If you did not accept Jesus as your personal savior, you were doomed to hell. Jews rejected him as their savior. Logically, a loving God wouldn’t condemn people to everlasting torment if they were essentially good. Therefore, Jews had to be essentially bad. But, if that was true, what of someone like my good aunt who married one? What of good people like my mother and father who worshiped one?

It was all too complicated and too dangerous for my little brain to handle. I loved my Aunt Helen very much. She was extremely bright, talented and independent. She was a wonderful source of encouragement to me and my brother in our early ambitions to become great artists. She wore bizarre clothes, got into speed-walking contests with people who passed her on the sidewalk, propounded strange ideas about nearly everything, and didn’t particularly give a damn if anybody else approved. I thought she was terrific.

If the funny-looking man in the baggy suit was so special to her that my mother felt obliged to include his picture in her book, he had to be alright in my book, too.

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Copyright © 1994 by Jasper Garrison

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