Margotlog: Our Flanders Field

Margotlog: Our Flanders Field

     For the British, the deaths in World War I struck hard. In that "war to end all wars," some in British coastal towns could see the flare of mortars and hear the firing of guns in Belgian. In that war of attrition, men dig into trenches equipped almost like houses with cots and kitchens. For weeks, months, years, British and Belgians dug in opposite their German enemies. The soldiers could smell each other's cooking, hear occasional voices raised in agony or song.

     I imagine there is a double horror of war fought in such close proximity: fear for one's own agony, coupled with disgust and fear at the agony you cause. Erik Marie Remarque's quintessential war novel, All Quiet on the Western Front, (193?) tells it best--the young German students conscripted to fight a war they don't understand, and don't want, who in mud and fear become crazed with waiting, until they rush over the tops into blind hatred and enemy fire.

     Of my father and his three brothers, only the youngest, Frankie, went into combat in World War II. Whatever bloodshed he witnessed as he recovered from malaria in North Africa, once he was sent to Naples, his service became the rollicking events of an urban cowboy. He shooed whores into American officers' beds, requisitioed donkeys, bread, and wine. Since he spoke formal and dialectical Italian, he hinted that he's been part of an American/British contingent to urge the Pope to speak out against the war. Yet, even Frankie came home a changed man, refusing to visit his wife and daughter, divorcing and marrying a New York lawyer he'd met in the Army.

   My father, called the "professor" by his more he-man brothers, was excused from combat because of poor eyes and flat feet. Instead he did war work at Kabuta in Pennsylvania--who knew what was being manufactured there. In the worker's cottage where we lived, my mother's tales created my first memories--of a doctor leaning over me as she held me down on the kitchen table for him to pierce my eardrum and let the pus drain. "Snow up to the top of the windows," she would say, turning my early memories into scenes from her North Dakota childhood, and making me a prime reader later of the Laura and Marie books.

     It's been hard for me to bring war inside the family circle, that is, until this spring when I taught three veterans in a mid-level writing class. One never went overseas, one was a helicopter pilot in Iraq, and one spent a decade in the service, both in Afghanistan and elsewhere. The two who saw active duty both came home with PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder. Now as I drive my husband to the airport a few days from Memorial Day, my husband, the Vietnam draft refuser who spent 18 months in a federal penitentiary rather than escape to Canada or fight in Vietnam, my husband who does not talk about war, any war unless prodded, my husband who has his own kind of scars from his prison experience--he's on his way to play Scrabble in San Jose. But as I pause to study the rows of white crosses in Fort Snelling National Cemetery, I think of my three students, one who proudly described walking with his veteran grandfather among the rows of crosses, anticipating about his own burial there, who came home from Iraq, after flying the wounded from battle to hospital and could not shake the screams and terror from his memory, and the third who eventually trained U.S. soldiers to take their places in Afghanistan, surely one of the strangest wars American soldiers have ever fought.

     These two wrote about returning home with a sense of terrified emptiness, becoming easily agitated and losing emotional control, of being unable to look for work or keep their hands from shaking. This is service that saps life for years after the battlefield. With help from the Veterans Administration, each man has found ways to help himself recover--talk therapy, hard exercise, weeping, writing, working with other vets. Whatever else I may think of President Obama, and I'm largely a supporter, I honor his efforts to keep the United States out of active combat in the implosion that is the near east. I honor this, even as I'm horrified at the hundreds of thousands of refugees, and the breakdown of civilized decency. It is very hard to tell what will happen there, and what we may be called upon to do.

Margotlog: Across the Racial Divide

Margotlog: Across the Racial Divide

When I was growing up in South Carolina--before contemporary civil rights, before Martin Luther King, Jr., before busing, white fight, and the recent police violence against black people in many U.S. cities--I lived in a block-long, castle-like fortress that was built to house the military academy that became The Citadel. My father taught at that college, which had moved north of downtown Charleston, to a lovely site on the Ashley River. Charleston, in its amusing sense of self, used to brag that its two rivers, the Ashley and the Cooper, came together to form the Atlantic Ocean.

I was a kid who walked to school, to an elite, all-white-girls academy called Ashley Hall. But I walked through neighborhoods where many black people lived. An old granny sat every day in her yard, her hair in a turban, a pipe between her lips. Above, on a long porch, little black kids, too young for school, looked down solemnly at me, as I looked up solemnly at them. It would never have occurred to me, or I suspect to them, that we might speak to each other. But we saw each other every weekday, and I wondered why they didn't have shoes, and why the old granny sat outside and smoked a pipe. I'd never seen a white woman smoke anything at all. As I say, I was very young.

My parents had come from the north, my mother from a tiny town in North Dakota and my father from Pittsburgh, where they met. Initially when we arrived, they had nothing to say about the dark-skinned people we called Negroes. I didn't grow up with a black woman who cooked or cleaned or took me and my sister to the park. My parents knew nothing about the intensely connected ways of Southern blacks and white. But first in my walks to school, then from our Old Citadel custodian, Shorty, and later from riding the city buses, and arguing with my father as civil rights heated up, I learned quite a bit about the complicated, often disheartening, and infuriating, and sometimes simply human ways that black and white people interacted.

Let's say I gathered a satchel of images and voices, attitudes and surmises. Only a few black people actually spoke with me--Shorty came by our apartment to fix a water faucet. He doffed his soft fedora, and with a polite, "Yes, Mrs. Fortunato, yes, ma'am," he entered our kitchen with his tools and stopped the drip. He also took our colored Easter chicks down to his farm on Johns Island when they lost their pink or blue down and began to grow white pin feathers. "Can't have a chicken crowing in the house," my father informed us. Shorty touched the brim of his hat and kindly carted the growing chickens away. We considered it a favor. He probably did too.

Later when I was allowed to go home with some schoolmates from Ashley Hall, I met their "colored maids." These were uniformed women with strict requirements for hand washing and sitting at the table to eat our snack. They bustled like my mother in our Old Citadel kitchen, and they corrected my friends when they got boisterous. Their voices had authority, and my friends obeyed.

Even later, I sat in the back seat of my girlfriend's car while her boyfriend drove us to visit her former cook, now too ill to work. She and her family brought this woman boxes of groceries and, if I remember right, paid for her doctoring. They treated her almost like family, thought she clearly lived a different life, in a small house with a dirt yard, and her daughter's children swarming in and out with questions and childish troubles. This was not the lovely, serene house near the Battery at the end of Charleston where my friend lived. In fact, other than the slew of kids, the old cook's house was more like our own rather cramped dwelling, now that we had moved across the Cooper River to the small town of Mt. Pleasant.

Recently, I've begun to harbor a theory about race in north and south. It goes like this. In Southern towns where white families hired black men and women routinely, where these daily experiences of interacting taught them a range of shared emotions, from irritation to appreciation to obligation and resentment, it was harder to categorize the other race as the enemy, or as hateful. Daily interaction proved time and again that individual connections were rich, valued, and human. Yes, of course, there was racism. The city buses were segregated, and the same black women who worked hard in white kitchens were forced to trudge all the way to the back of the bus, passing me with an empty seat beside me, ashamed and baffled at a system that could extract such indignity from decent, hard-working women.

White people in many Northern cities, like Ferguson, and more recently Baltimore, and including Minneapolis/St. Paul, have systematically moved out of contact with black people. The phenomenon is called "white flight" and it accounts for the acres of white suburbs, while the core cities have become increasingly black. The race divide that did not exist in the Charleston of my childhood has fostered several generations of white people, including many police, who have not grown up knowing black people in a regular, everyday way. The teachers in schools are mostly white, and though they teach black students, they do not understand how their students' extended families work, how clan systems and churches take care of what in white culture is managed within a tighter family circle. I venture to guess they can't "read" black behavior, nor fully understand what black students say.

What they do know is fear. Fear of the unknown, fear engendered by racism, hardened by their black students' poverty. It is very hard to be comfortable when you're teaching students who are intractably poor. You can't grasp some of the essentials of their lives--the fast moves, the shifts from a parent to a grandparent, the ways black boys and then men make up for their degraded status via violence. Because along with "white flight" have gone jobs. Companies have moved from the center of cities to the peripheries. 
It is harder and harder for black people caught in poverty to make their way out.

A very clear example is what happened in Minneapolis. About twenty years ago, I began hearing that when the steel towns in the east went bankrupt, leaving black men without the good jobs that had made it possible for them to support families, single black women moved with their children from Gary, Indiana, to Minneapolis, because there were generous public services here. That may have been true, but the communities they created, in North Minneapolis, for instance, have not been able to support their children and grandchildren. There is growing poverty and anger. Growing distance. It makes me sad and troubled. It makes me wish we could reclaim some of what was generous and interactive about southern life when I was growing up, what is now, an increasingly long time ago.

Margotlog: For the Love of Julia

Her tongue is warm and rhythmic. We’re sitting flank-to-flank on the back- deck bench, my hand on her back to keep her from sprinting off, though she shows no sign of wanting to because, instead, she’s laving my arm with her insistent pink tongue. What other creature in the world loves my salt enough to clean it over and over from the back of my hand, wrist, lower arm?

“Don’t let that cat lick you,” my persnickety father used to warn. “Who knows where its tongue has been.” Well, there is that. I don’t let her lick my face, at least not more than a few swipes.

Julia, herself, is quite sleek. When either of her human companions steps out of bath or shower, Julia is there, waiting to be “wetted.” She gets almost dripping wet and immediately dries herself with her tongue. She doesn’t have to wet herself. We do it for her. And she returns the favor. This has proved an easy way of getting Vaseline into her.

Julia hacks. For maybe the first five years of our residence together, she hacked up globs of hair and food. Hairballs. Even vets recommended Vaseline. Our other two cats reluctantly lick if off their paws. Julia takes it from the side of my arm.

A year ago, the hacking changed. Instead of bringing something up, she crouched down, head extended like a snake, and wheezed. Asthma? In a cat? The vet had to do an x-ray. The only remedy was steroids. Already she was plump. Steroids would have made her fatter. We tried a diet.

 Almost impossible. She loves to eat, or let’s say, she doesn’t wear off her food. I’m afraid the asthma is slowing her down, but she was getting fatter even before.

Julie spends the night in bed with Fran. Or rather on the quilt Fran throws over himself as he sleeps in his recliner. Bad back, recliner bed. After several years of this, he doesn’t sleep well if she isn’t there to warm his knees. “For the love of Mike!” my father used to swear. I’d say, “For the love of Julia.”

Beautiful, sleek Julia. Even strangers meeting her for the first time comment, “Tuxedo cat.” Or “Kitler.” This bestowed because of the white that starts at the tip of her nose and swags down her cheeks and onto her chest, with a spot of black right above her mouth—Hitler’s moustache. If any of our cats were a killer, it would probably be her because as far as we know, she is the only one who ever knew the outdoors. But in cat years, that was long ago, and probably in cat leagues, far away.

Puss in Boots, she is also, with her four white paws below the sleek black tuxedo. A fancy-dress, ready-for-the-ball cat. Now we twirl together in a slow dance of sprightly, warm affection, until she excuses her and heads toward solitude.