My Generation: A Memoir of the Baby Boom

Preface – King of the Wild Frontier

A deep motive for making literature or art of any sort is the desire to defeat the formlessness of the world and cheer oneself up by constructing forms out of what might otherwise seem a mass of senseless rubble.

—Iris Murdoch

Born to a nation rapidly expanding westward, with highway construction and exploding sales of automobiles, I became obsessed from an early age with trains. Small wooden toy trains, new plastic trains, trains big enough to sit on and pedal.

Like many of my generation, I began rootless, cast adrift in a world of strangers, and had to transition through numerous experiments and explorations, inspirations and disillusionments... seeking, finding, seeking again, my place in the world. Despite struggles and setbacks, I was nurtured, molded, guided... changing homes and schools, falling in and out of love, working where I could... to what end?

Looking back at those thirty nomadic years, I notice a fractal cycle of change. During each chapter or phase of life, I pass, as the pop psychologist might put it, through seven stages of emotional attachment. First attraction, then adaptation, and even assimilation into a new cultural milieu, where I almost feel at home, where I might belong; but then a turning point, a crisis of alienation and disillusionment; and the cycle runs its course through my detachment and progressive disconnection, until I reach a new discovery or decision to go beyond... on to the next cycle, a new destination. For a time in each waystation, I wear the colors of that home, that love, that role and self-image.

Through all the changes of costume and script, I needed to find out: was it possible to create a life of one’s choosing? To break free from the mold of prescribed lifestyle, and to enjoy connection with wilderness, living culture, vital spirit? My travels spanned the quadrants of North America as I craved a comfortable home, a love worth lasting, a means of right livelihood; in short, a life well lived and worth sharing. At the age of thirty—the very age of adulthood defined by my generation—I followed a dream of compatible, sustainable community, set in surroundings of wild nature.

My hero at age five was Davy Crockett, king of the wild frontier, who, sporting his signature coonskin cap, killed him a b’ar when he was only three. Fess Parker, cast as Crockett in the Disney miniseries, projected a rugged, handsome independence. Dealing with bad guys, but in his homespun wilderness way. Not just a gunman, but a woodsman.

To get there, I was compelled, and chose, to go my own way. In this stubborn, rebellious, idealistic independence, I came to represent the countercultural impulse of my generation, and at the same time to assert my freedom from it. The Baby Boom generation was characterized, in our tumultuous adolescence, as a wholesale rebellion against the structures and mores of mainstream society—President Nixon’s infamous Silent Majority. Ironically this collective reaction gave rise to a competing tribe of conformity: hippiedom, with its trademark long hair, beads and sandals, pot and patchouli. Faced with the choice between standardized and alternative culture, I resisted locking steps with either legion, rather wove a winding path skirting both.

Adaptable to city, country or suburb, I was a moderate rebel, a part-time hippie. From each node of temporary settlement, I progressively learned what it was like to let go, to fly into freedom; to sink new roots into unfamiliar soil; to become rootbound and seek more space to grow; to let go and fly again, seeds bridging past to future.

Freedom has its costs. My obsession with it betrays an inner emptiness; as running toward something new implies shunning a deeper engagement with who and what I’m running away from. In chasing the light, some would say, I miss painting the shadow.

In regard to my own character, in those first three decades, I hold him lightly, without harsh judgment; rather, with complete forgiveness. But I have to ask: Did I learn at an early age to suppress feelings, to have concern only for myself—in my incubator tank, crib cage, or TV hypnosis—and to block emotion whenever possible... because it was painful to cry out, and not be received with love? Somehow I continued to survive and strive, with the hope to find resonance of home, shared heart and community, peaceful realization of this soul’s potential.

I confess my own weakness, looking to externals in my quest for love, peace and happiness. Fixated on fondness for a particular house or chosen city or adopted homeland; desire for a partner with a pretty face and pleasing figure; pursuit of a relevant career expressing my ideals and talents. In every cycle of the familiar script, I sought improvement in the particulars, even as experience accumulated to teach me that there would be no final stage of utopian perfection. Each relative stage of happiness, then, would have to serve... until the next.

Prologue – The Baby Boom

by Robert St. John Gray (1952–1952)

You were so anxious to leave the womb, your last refuge. Eight months of preparation, you felt, was sufficient. You’d been promised to your sister for her seventh birthday, three weeks hence. But you had no intention of fulfilling someone’s doll fantasy. And you were sick of nicotine and alcohol streaming through your veins.

You imagined a small silent voice intoning: Out there is jazz; in here is smoke, a crowded theatre. To stay is to suffer the slow boil...

So you kicked and squirmed—froggy you!—broke the waters and slithered out. It seemed so easy. A droplet riding a wave, propelled toward a glistening shore...

Not like you had a choice, but you failed to anticipate the world you plunged into, a bigger version of the body you left behind; the source of its toxic smoke, chaos of sounds, tight tension.

Blinding light, cold air, rough hands pulling... Snip! For a moment there is shock, fear... even, might I say, a first taste of indignant anger, as the cord is cut from the center of your being. Then—Wham!—comes the doctor’s hand on your little red bottom. Whack! Slap!

You screamed, as our mother would say, like the dickens. They calmed you down with a little suckie, your first and only.

Next, the stinging silver drops in the eyes... No pain, no gain, get it?

More injuries followed these insults. The coup de grâce, a hot slash to slice off the end of your lightning rod—snubbed in the bud, like a chick beak trimmed for the poultry farm (read: the slaughterhouse). A parting jab from a needle, to seal the deal.

Yell all you want, thrash with your buttery limbs, it’ll get you nowhere. At age six they’ll have to call in reinforcements to hold you down. Say bye to Mommy, is the message you hear with each assault. They’ve got you now.

Breathe... breathe again... it hurts.

You knew your rights to complain, and exercised them to the hilt. But you were not to expect that spongy breast again: it was just a taste, one you would have to do your best to forget. It was off to the incubator for you... the repurposed fish tank for rude little brats who had to learn how to wait their turn.

* * *

You’re on your own, now. The circle of love broken, you will learn the principles of autonomous throughput: manufactured nourishment, the anal sphincter, your own thoughts to kill.

Cry a little, they won’t hear. And these other crybabies around you, such entitlement. You will refrain.

If this is the way of the world, you comprehend, you will have to make your own way in it: to find your own home; to peel back the layers of the self; to find out who you are.

What else is life for? They say there are dragons of death just beyond the gates; winds of fate to blow your gains away; a trail of broken hearts, your own included. And just when you think it’s all peachy, watch out.

Looking out for number one, you’ll follow the sun.

You’ll get used to moving on. You’ll change hats, coonskin to fireman to soldier, emulating those you look up to. In the meantime, don’t despair...

Breathing, still breathing, after all your hoarse cries, take comfort in the intuition that you will continue.

As with every waystation on the road, you’ll blow this pop stand soon enough.

* * *

Mother awaits, in the pea-green visitor’s room; her aching breasts still bound, drying up. You’re in your glass box behind antiseptic walls, squirming your legs, sensing her proximity. She barely registers the magazine on her lap, the Atlantic of July, 1950. Its stories convey either retrospectives of the last big war (The Torpedoes that Failed) or anxieties of the one to come (H-Bomb: Too Damn Close).

Mid-month, mid-year, mid-century: the watershed where you begin; the divide between a past that isn’t yours, and an onrushing present history. This wave will carry you beyond the heavy seas of our parents’ generation, over the boiling reefs of Bikini Atoll—with the great god H-Bomb casting its long and awful shadow across the waters—on a quest for some more tranquil, provisionally safer harbor. And while Mom and Dad will always seem to be looking over their shoulders, haunted by what lies behind, you will find the freedom to move faster, go farther.

In hometown Baltimore, you ride in the back of the old Packard with dusty upholstery cruising past brick rowhouses with backyard clotheslines block upon block, smokestacks fuming over the steelyards, dogs barking and electric streetcars rattling and air conditioners humming, faces beaming toward their next appointments past storefronts stocked with synthetic goods of every description.

In the postwar fifties, America moves on from a chicken in every pot to a TV in every living room; a washing machine, dryer and automatic dishwasher in every home; a car or two, and maybe even a boat, in every garage; a busy lawn mower roaring over the uniform grass. These are the first fixations of every housewife, of the corporate-happy husbands who pay the bills, and of the gleeful four children, two boys and two girls, who dive under the gaudy Christmas tree and tear open the wrappings from a cornucopia of presents preselected from the Sears catalog.

Yet the shine on each year’s holiday gifts wears thin. Batteries run out, plastic parts break, and novelty gives way to boredom. Enter fresh desire for coming attractions, piqued in larger doses by persistent ads through the dozen daily hours of TV and radio programming, on billboards lining the concrete highways, in newspapers and magazines delivered to every door. The cycle of your discontent is set in motion.

* * *

Beyond the flatlands and foothills of the Eastern states, the comfort of the family station wagon, you will blaze your own path to the storied West, with its real mountains to climb, nature’s streams to quench your thirst. Your gypsy ways will guide you to find roots deeper than your era, deeper than the twentieth century, deeper even than civilization. To taste fresh animal flesh and blood; to sink fingers and toes into the soil.

After forty-five addresses, you will still make rare visits back to Baltimore, where the folks have settled in a smoke-stale apartment across the street from Artie Donovan’s liquor store. There our mother will muse to your wife, Goodness, sometimes I have to wonder, is this really my child? Where did this guy come from, anyway?

But I get ahead of myself. Anyway it’s your story to tell, bro. I’ll see you on the other side.

Prelude – American Dream (1950–68)

Follow your bliss.

—Joseph Campbell

i – Family Album

A large photograph in the family album shows a smiling ex-officer, dapper and handsome in his civilian coat and tie, with slicked, short black hair, sitting on a couch with my mother. They’re holding cocktail glasses. My mother is wearing a long flowing postwar dress, bright and flowery even in black and white; her shiny lipstick and smiling eyes gleam out of the glossy eight-by-ten print. Bill and Jane Gray are both tall and well-groomed, in the prime of life, embarking at last upon the American Dream, the free pursuit of happiness.

My parents thought of themselves, their lineage and their offspring, as better than most. But their wealth, for all the pretension, wasn’t of any great magnitude. I grew up hearing my mother’s commonplace delusion of grandeur, that I would become president someday (or failing that, a dentist).

My older brother and sister were a couple of fast acts to follow. Steuart, a talented painter, married a model and became a respected architect. Sally, a straight-A student and sweetheart of Sigma Chi, married a star athlete and had seven kids. The culture of the fifties catered to their tastes: saddle shoes, sock hops, American Bandstand, Elvis. Sal and Steuart would have their own families and careers by the time Jimi Hendrix came burning onto the scene with his revolutionary anthem for my generation.

Before my first brush with death—pneumonia at age four, fevered visions of Indian sunsets coming alive in the oil painting on the wall—little brother Robert St. John had died of a collapsed lung at birth. He endured two days of hospital half-life, one lung stuck shut and the other feebly flapping, before returning like a wounded stork to the night. My little sister Randall survived, the following year, an even smaller premie at two and a half pounds.

For all four kids, stars or survivors, the usual rules of the era would apply: Children are to be seen and not heard. And if you don’t like the supper on your plate, too bad; you’re not getting up from the table until it’s gone.

Both parents were born and raised in Baltimore. In my youth I longed to hear more tales of the sketchy ancestral lines, prominent in industry and government, but profligate with fleeting fortunes. My grandfather Biscoe Lafayette Gray, with his bristling brows and twinkling eyes, had left the family tobacco farm in Calvert County to become a Baltimore city lawyer. More mythical yet, his wife, Margaret Nowick, had immigrated from Russia in 1904, at the age of six. Not until high school history would I discover a likely cause, the ferment of the first Russian Revolution of 1905.

On my mother’s side, Gordon Steuart had a gruff voice, a kind heart, and a green thumb—showing off expert photographs of his flower garden; pulling grapefruit (or coins) out of my ears. I grew up under the impression he owned or managed a corn syrup factory; much later I learned he merely worked in the office, sales or accounting. Whatever his status, his wife, Ida, felt obliged to wear a hat to the grocery store, and prided herself on the roast beef dinners she hosted so graciously, served in silver by her devoted colored maid, Dora.

Chocolate-skinned Dora had previously worked for my mother. When I was two, she quit on the day I asked her, Why is your skin dark?

Later, whenever I heard that story repeated, her reaction mystified me. I thought it rash, excessive.

But who was I to judge, a little white prince?

It seemed a matter of principle; a spark of long-smoldering indignation, flashing to freedom. 

A leggy young woman, my mother had once ridden, standing up, a pair of horses for the circus; or so the story went. She also maintained she left her first husband after he contracted polio—a half truth. My half-brother Steuart informed me sixty years later that it was father’s infidelity, more than the withered arm, that spurred my mother to leave with her pair of toddlers and run back to her parents in Baltimore. 

She upgraded, she thought, to my father. Someone with whom to share the required addictions on roughly equal footing. A smoker from age sixteen, my mother would carry her carton of Salems defiantly to her deathbed, still watching her favorite shows on TV.

In the Second World War my father piloted B-26s from England to bomb Germany. Whether military targets, or cities, I didn’t think to inquire. I was glad just to hear the harrowing tale of his parachuting to safety—behind enemy lines, was it?—when his bomber was downed by flak over France.

With the fascination of the still-innocent, I studied Lieutenant Gray’s collection of grisly black-and-white photos: aerial shots of pockmarked landscapes and, closer in, portraits of the black, bloated dead—soldiers and horses. With reverence I fingered his parachute, his knapsack and duffel sack, the more benign tools of his trade. In a couple of years I would outfit myself proudly, in officer’s cap and medals, for war games with my friends. War was fun, if you didn’t have to smell dead bodies.

Once my father showed me a long scar on his calf.

Ooh, how did you get that? I asked, not sure I wanted to know.

That’s where the Japs got me, he said with a wink.

Wow, a bayonet?

My mother scoffed, Oh, come on. He flew in Europe, not the Pacific.

My father did run an officers’ club in Japan for a brief stint during the Korean War, so maybe there lay an alternate explanation. Instead he regaled us with another tale, about eating monkey brains served up fresh at the table.

Such is the mind of a boy to be enamored with a man like that. Forgiving his absence during the Korean War; acquiescent as he carted us along from city to city. In my first four years we moved four times: from Baltimore to Boston, then Syracuse, Buffalo, and back to Baltimore again, places where my father ran stateside officers’ clubs. Rewarded for his traumatic service with the cushy job of overseeing the collective ritual of forgetfulness, he became immured in the military–corporate culture of drinking, the curse that never forgets.

ii – Rules of the Game

I came to understand my father anchored an invisible hunger or dread, eating away at him like my mother’s cancer. After reaching their allotted seventy years, his demise followed hers by three months, from alcohol poisoning. I held my parents not wholly to blame for their own preventable deaths; for their deadly habits were cultural, symptoms of a creeping despair.

In 1954, when he turned thirty-three, my father said goodbye to the service and got into the oil business. His rise through the corporate ranks, from retail buyer to executive sales manager, would lead us in five more years to that promised land, Suburbia. Along the way he insisted I call him sir. Yes sir. No sir. The answer didn’t matter—just who was boss.

Oh, your dad must be in the military, I’d always hear when arriving new in town.

No, oil, I’d say.

As if there was a difference.

All the moves of those first few years, I went along for the ride. But at age six, the mandate to go to school rankled, a deep affront to my self-determination. I was happy enough to continue sitting at home in front of the TV set watching Ding Dong School, in which Miss Ding Dong would introduce me to big words like scissor and dozen. Even the infantile Romper Room was better than the monolithic Roland Park school, with its towering dark walls and labyrinthine halls; its ancient hag of a kindergarten teacher who had my own mother in her class thirty years before.

It’s difficult to pinpoint, from afar, the reason why I didn’t want to go. Was it the enforced naps on reed mats on the floor? Reciting the daily Pledge of Allegiance? Having to raise my hand for permission to go to the bathroom? It could have been the nauseating smell of lukewarm milk at afternoon break—or worse, the liverwurst sandwich that girl upchucked next to me in the cafeteria. When the carpool station wagon arrived honking outside the house to start week two of first grade, I kicked and screamed and flatly refused.

In that case, my mother responded, you can stay in your room all day.

Funny how all the pleasure goes out of play when it’s enforced, confined to four walls by decree from on high. I sat messing with my trains, coloring, moping on the bed, getting the message: this close imprisonment was worse than school. One more taste of solitary confinement on the following day, just to make sure, and I was ready to plea bargain and serve my sentence: twelve years mandatory, with seven more added for good behavior.

No sooner had I buckled to that rule of life, and my mother informed me we were moving again.

What, why? I’m not going!

Here, and look what I have for you, chocolate cake.

We talked it over sitting at the red painted booth, red and white checkered plastic tablecloth.

How come you and Daddy get to decide?

She looked at me through her thick glasses. Daddy’s been offered a better job.

Was a man’s, a whole family’s destiny to be guided by the almighty company, Esso Standard Oil?

Sullenly mouthing my required prayers that night, I climbed into bed and stared at the ceiling. My mother brushed a kiss on my numb cheek and went away. I lay in the dark, feeling home give way to hunger.

Posing by the For Sale sign, with the wobbly Irish setter, Bridget, by my side suffering dog rickets, I too felt puny, weak, insubstantial. I leaned on the sign, smiled dutifully for the camera, heaved a sigh of resignation.

I had to understand, I was born to move.

* * *

Situated beyond Cumberland’s coal fields and wedged between western Pennsylvania and West Virginia, the town of Oakland, Maryland was surrounded by woods, farms, lakes and rolling hills. Walking silent in the mottled light of the ancient Allegheny forest, in the coattails of my father, I got to re-enact his boyhood dream of squirrel hunting down home in southern Maryland, on the Eastern Shore.

He took me out a couple of times, stalking turkey and deer, accompanied by timid Bridget. His stories evoked my own memories of a visit to the old family farm: the smell of curing tobacco, the thrill of seeing watermelons thrown bursting to the hungry pigs. Maybe I got him talking too much, because each time, we came up empty-handed.

My father redeemed himself—at least as a resourceful businessman—the day when he arrived home from work carrying his briefcase in one hand and a dead grouse in the other.

He stood at the screen door and smiled, and my mother, flustered, couldn’t decide whether to act proud or disgusted. My laws. How in the world—

He explained his ingenious technique—piloting over the bird so it knocked itself dead, a clean kill, against the bottom of the car.

She looked dubiously at the mass of feathers and dangling head, then submitted to the ritual of plucking and gutting the creature.

There was enough tough meat for all six of us to chew a bite or two while, bemused, we heard Daddy tell the story a second and third time, and my mother rolled her eyes.

That meat was pretty stringy, but so what? I was impressed by the expediency of my father’s success: Hey sport, whatever works.

iii – We Own You

The Army can do anything it wants with me.

—Elvis, 1958

It was in Oakland that my early-childhood passion for trains gave way to war games. Those freight cars in coal country got monotonous after a while—counting them, when stopped at a railroad crossing, by the hundred, their rattling as staccato as the tobacco auctioneers singing harmony on the radio.

My new interest was fed by Walter Cronkite’s dramatized narration of war footage on TV’s Air Power, where I saw my father’s deadly bombers in action. Wearing his castoff lieutenant’s cap and insignia of two silver bars, his canvas-covered canteen and olive ammo belt, I roamed with my gang of friends around the town and surrounding fields; clambered over the field gun on the courthouse lawn; ducked around buildings with guns cocked; took prisoners and locked them in abandoned garages. In moments of dramatic inspiration, we mimed our own heroic deaths, twisting, sprawling to the ground.

For Christmas I scored the top choices on my wishlist: a full-scale plastic machine gun, with its clattering, oscillating red tip on the barrel; a set of shiny six-guns and double holster, cowboy hat and kerchief; a set of tiny plastic army men; and the prize, a plastic Winchester .30-30. American boyhood never had it so good.

Once day scouting out of town by the National Armory, snaggle-toothed George and I roamed like scouts over a rolling cow pasture with round boulders like a Nancy comic strip, toting our useless toy weapons. Far down the hill, where the mounds of pastureland came together in a verdant valley, another couple of boys appeared, like our mirror images,

One of the boys raised his rifle and aimed, and a little pop sound carried in the breeze.

George cried out, tugging down the neck of his T-shirt to reveal an ugly bump the size of a BB raised directly over his heart. Its velocity spent over the distance, the shot had failed to penetrate the skin.

Not deadly force, but as close as I cared to brave it. The Sunday comics crumpled in my war hero’s heart. We turned and beat a hasty retreat over the hill and back to the safety of the town.

It wasn’t the same, playing army after that.

A more painful lesson to assimilate came when I arrived home from school one day to hear distressing news from my mother. The sheriff had arrived at our front door, asking for Bridget.

The sheriff? For Bridget? Why?

He said she was making too much dog-doo on Mr. Schwartzentrooper’s lawn.

My mother said she put up a fuss, but the lawman had his mind made up. He leashed the cringing setter and drove her out to the town dump, where he unholstered his service pistol and pumped six shots into her. Or so an informant had told her. Word gets around quickly in a small town.

I was at once shattered and enraged. How could he! It’s not his dog! Cause she was pooping? That’s so stupid! Are you sure she’s dead?

Yes, Billy, I’m afraid so.

Why couldn’t you stop him?

He had a gun.

So this is justice at work, I thought, in the land of the free, that they made us pledge allegiance to, at school. More like, free to kill, in cold-blooded murder.

There is nothing even to cry for, I tell myself, because there is nothing to bring Bridget back.

At least, not until years later, when I thought of her again as I read the term Stephen King gave to perpetrators of such outrages: the Dallas Police.

iv – Damn Yankees

When it came time to move again, I knew my place. Mr. Crittendon, my father’s friend and fellow Esso sales manager, was given an ultimatum: move where the company told him, or lose his job. So he told them to stuff it. Or words to that effect. My parents discussed the matter. My mother took to singing a popular song, like an incantation: Que será, será / Whatever will be, will be...

My father, seeing the the writing on the wall, pre-empted his own transfer to parts unknown. He took an offer to work for a new company, Hartol Oil. We would live in Mamaroneck, a posh suburb of New York City, on Long Island Sound.

I had just turned nine, and the coming year, 1960, beckoned with all the shiny promise of that burgeoning, suburbaning, American Dream. Mamaroneck boasted a community pool, boat dock, mansions of movie producers and game-show hosts. My father, given a ten-year guarantee by his company that he wouldn’t have to relocate, bought a big stone and stucco Tudor house.

My parents said we were moving up in the world, and that we would be there a long time. Which didn’t quite match up, when you thought about it. Sort of like an economy that always grows... on what?

Indeed, after only two years in New York, our upscale house, with its ivy walls, arched interior doorways, shag carpet, and library adjoining the living room, proved just another stage set, ready to be replaced. Once climbing the corporate ladder, you had to keep climbing. Hartol Oil was swallowed up by a rising giant, Tenneco, and the result for my father was yet another move, this time to the booming Southern regional market whose hub was Atlanta. So much for the ten-year guarantee for our Tudor castle.

We kids were consulted about the new house, courtesy of shiny color prints. A couple of earlier house offers got me excited but fell through, so I was circumspect about the colonial lookalike with its antique brick and towering white columns. It appeared raw and unfinished; a slapdash plantation house, built plain and cheap, with a front lawn of sparse dry grass forlorn in the baked red clay.

While my father had to bend to the rule of the corporate world—We own you—I felt elated with the reprieve from the sixth-grade class of the dreaded disciplinarian, Mrs. Cohen. But parting was bittersweet. I left behind a new girlfriend, Jeannie Washburn, this time saying goodbye with a spin-the-bottle party for six of us kids at her house.

Just turned eleven, my young hormones were stirred in Jeannie’s basement by the romantic hits at the top of the charts: Runaway and Blue Moon. Not like I was going to be boyfriend–girlfriend with Jeannie or her two friends with the budding chests. No, I would have to make my exit with the taste of tentative kisses fresh on my lips, wondering what it all meant.

America’s first astronaut had launched in May, and the second in July... and I still hadn’t ridden my first train. But a special perk of the move to Atlanta was my first plane ride, a big passenger jet. After shrimp cocktail and a stinger of my own in the airport lounge, we lifted off with a roar into the heavens... to what I thought of as a new life, and a new phase of life. With my first departure from terra firma I caught a whiff of the exhilaration of the Space Age, the age of detachment.

v – The Art of Detachment

My pretty new sixth-grade teacher, Miss Jones, sucking a lemon from her iced tea, introduced the class to current events. She had us study newspaper reports about Civil Rights actions all over the South. The news was alarming, but still relatively remote. Atlanta was spared the more dramatic shootings and bombings, which would claim the lives of blacks and Northern sympathizers alike in Alabama and Mississippi.

Around the city famously burned a century before in the Civil War, housing developments and shopping centers sprouted like kudzu. From Aberdeen Road in Sandy Springs, my world faced front: the opulent, white-columned verandah of the ersatz mansion, the country club my parents joined, the shiny new school I attended, the lawns I mowed for spending money, the neighborhood pool parties and ball games. The other view, out back, began in the shadowed glade with its bed of soft pine needles. Venturing into that dreamy forest, I stumbled one day upon an actual decaying and overgrown plantation house, a shaded pond, and a little farther on, Barfield Road.

Peeking out from the woods, I saw this long, straight gravel road was lined with a string of shanties, hardly visible but for half-hidden tarpaper roofs issuing thin columns of smoke, and clotheslines hung with bright patches of laundry. This was the Negroes’ road; they never appeared on the front side of our nouveau-colonial house. Lying awake late on a Saturday night, I heard the roar of their drag races, muffled by the thick Georgia woods that stood between us. Theirs was a world apart.

Both my parents subscribed to the cliché: They’re fine as individuals. It’s just as a race... Tuning the dial on the kitchen radio, I would catch a station blaring James Brown and listen, fascinated, until a parental voice would order me to turn off the screaming.  I did as I was told but didn’t buy into their prejudice, a hand-me-down from past generations.

Why do you send me to Sunday School, I wanted to know, if you don’t believe in brotherly love?

In fact my parents rarely attended church, choosing to send Randall and me off on foot to the closest religious establishment. I made up my own mind to quit confirmations classes, convincing the minister and my parents that I didn’t need the trappings of religion to take its teachings to heart.

My own big brother proved mentor enough at home, when he counseled me to take a step back from the family arguments I engaged in: Not worth getting upset about. Shortly I had the opportunity to practice what he preached, the art of detachment.

A spontaneous rockfight with the young boys of Barfield Road erupted in the woods, no-man’s land between the two worlds. Though caught up in the first rush of adrenaline, the gangy sport of it, I sailed stones wide, half-hearted, dutiful. The proxy race war proved surreal, ephemeral, and our adversaries melted, dreamlike, back into the forest.   

* * *

Civil Rights, the Space Race, the Arms Race, U2 and the Cuban Missile Crisis... these matters of state largely transpired on the edge of my boyhood, concerns framed in a talking box in the living room. Since John F. Kennedy’s inaugural speech nearly three years before, the national spirit took residence in a mythical realm shamelessly referenced as Camelot—our collective hope for the future. That hope died a most ignoble death, the day we heard the grave news: President Kennedy, champion of all the noble ideals of our country, was assassinated.

I was too young, only thirteen, to grasp the full import of it. I just absorbed the blunt impact of the shock wave that passed through the halls of North Springs High School that day. Shortly we all sat watching coverage on the school TVs wheeled into classrooms for the network feeds. The astronaut launches had been mildly exciting to witness, live and in progress. But the presidential murder had already happened; and like audiences everywhere, we students were left to try and digest the unpalatable wrapup.

How do you wrap up a regicide? What can a body politic do, after a coup d’état? I found the coverage at once both maudlin and matter-of-fact, puzzling and depressing.

The whole drift of the cultural zeitgeist had been reversed in one coup. I didn’t understand this intellectually, or personally. Even as a national public, could we grasp its full implications then, or in the days to follow? No, it was a tsunami of the unconscious, silent and dark. We believed the official story, because it was the only one told... though the noir device of Jack Ruby, the classic mob hit on the patsy Oswald, reeked of a cheap and artificial ending.

Camelot no more, what kind of world was I growing into? Whatever had been taken as a given, held true no longer. Me and my generation, we were on our own now.

When my father lost his job in Atlanta, did it matter whether it was, as he claimed, a restructuring, or as my mother insisted, that he blew it by drinking too much? Sal and Steuart had already fled the nest; and Randall and I were left to go along for the ride, in our ’58 wood-paneled Pontiac station wagon loaded like a dust-bowl jalopy. We said goodbye to our faux colonial mansion and crawled back to Baltimore, a brick wilderness of rowhouses all the same.

vi – Man Burning

The life is mightier than the book that reports it. The most important thing in the world is that our faith becomes living experience and deed of life.

—Norman Morrison

November 2, 1965. A thirty-one-year-old Quaker named Norman Morrison drove from Baltimore to Washington, DC and parked near the Pentagon. He carried his year-old daughter, Emily, and a gallon jug of kerosene to within view of the office of Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, and doused himself with the fuel.

Morrison was concerned that no one in the death-dealing machinery of the government was listening to the rising tide of protest over the war in Vietnam. Buddhist monks there were