Musing
on the subtext of my political memoir Ten Years and Change: A DFL
Boyhood in Minnesota I meandered my mind to discover the
following story in its own right:
I
had two childhoods. A third was never meant to be. It molted,
fermenting on the doorstep of an interracial couple. It lay in the
vortexes that posture themselves down narrow streets, down the
pebble-strewn alley-ways that leave American dreams out on the steps
like milk bottles or pails of worms for fishing. But I digress from
the maturation that did not happen, the one apt not to be as
exciting, liberating, or character building. The one that likely
would have given me fewer opportunities to be able to see the world
as the liberal arbitrator I am.
In
1965 I imagine a world in which the color of a man's skin supersedes
the true, or false, love he was for a woman. I think of a world
wrapped tightly, shaking off the cocoon of Cold War paranoia, of
attempts to rescue the damaged idea of America that lay among the
ticker-tape in times Square and lost in the policed hills of Korea. I
consider the jilted puritan ruse that took root in Jamestown, led the
revolution, enslaved decades, drove men to the moon, sent military
advisors to Vietnam, fed the tea-party, made Trump and billionaire
“Christians” in vogue and made sure that every blessed American
with half a brain to sell has clear and present access to a gun. Life
began for me when I slid screaming, with the closed eyes of a
pekineses, through the gunnels of a ship-shaped vagina to the lap of
a stranger who was soon to be detached and, eighteen years later,
attached to me. It was an amniotic park slide, a harrowing ride not
worth writing home about. I was hygienically cut hood-less and waited
to be adopted. There we all were, waiting for our lives to begin,
fresh in the opening weeks of February, just as our president was
conceiving his unilateral chess move, his offensive air, land and sea
strike whose allowances lay in the fold of the Gulf of Tonkin
Resolution. He, for all intents and purposes, began the war in those
fleeting weeks. He made it clear with Operation Rolling Thunder that
America had a vested interested, that America's youth, regardless of
its origins and parameters of hypothetical lines of longitude, were
willing to fight for the freedom of faceless Asians. Johnson packaged
the war, his perceived commitment from his predecessors, and tried
like hell to sell it to kids as the honorable thing to do. Like it
was noble and in some kerfluffled, misanthropic way they were
fighting for America's freedom, that they be lionized and canonized
as the saviors of the way of life we all grew up knowing, the way of
life the greatest generation saved in the “Big One.” No one
blinked. For the next three years bombs whistled out of the dark
shadows of Thunderchief's bay doors. Most congressmen ignored the
resultant draft dodgers, maps for medics to MASH units and boys who
might have been that older neighbor boy I'd look up to one day. They
exploded in firestorms, making jungles lakes of napalm, burning
through the yellowest most helpless, dislocated and impoverished skin
they could find. LBJ showed North Vietnam U.S. muscle that first week
of March. And we waited, like Charlie who had been trusted with a
piece in the puzzle that is wont to be the bone picking of any baby
of ethnicity.
The
Amrams, Fred and Barbara, married in New York, were transplants to
Minnesota in 1958. Ah, the world had a lot on its plate; France,
Vietnam, the Soviet Union―America. It was about to erupt into what
was initially dubbed the second Indo-China War (the first one hadn't
ended well). Fate chose for the Amrams the land of the DFL
(Democratic Farmer-Larbor) within the land of the guilty puritan
conscience. Decisions are made on a need-to-know bases. The Amrams
each had come from progressive backgrounds. Barbara Flowerman
supported progressive nominee for president Henry Wallace in 1948.
Wallace would not campaign among segregationists. In the borough of
the Bronx, with buttons, with the philosophical sophistries of the
Ethical Culture Society spinning her world until the colors blurred,
with the songs of Woody Guthrie romancing the purpose and lives of
the hobos and through-crack fallen, she made her first steps in the
battle of evermore, the quest to build a better world. Fred, current
owner of the Amram name, borrowed from the father of the
one-man-staff who led the Israelites out of Egypt land, gained his
moral and justice-driven character from his balcony in Hannover,
Germany. On November 8, 1938 a five-year-old boy saw flames pour from
the windows of his family's Bergstrasse Synagogue. It was one of over
1,000 burned in the course of the three nights the pogrom (ethnically
inclined riot).
For
their worth, for the suppressed societies worth, for the narrow
streets that beg to be echoed with a megaphone, a fugue for chants of
protest like the pied piper and his followers, Fred and Barbara met
and eventually married, came to Minnesota, bore one child and decided
to adopt another. But why a white baby. Why not shake things up in
1965 and jump-start America's—or their little slice of it—mindset.
Sun
filtered through slits on our awning as residential life played
outside on Aldrich Avenue. I would be out there soon enough, swinging
my bat or pounding worms with a ball-peen hammer in the alley. In
March, as Johnson did his best to obliterate only military personnel
of northern Vietnam, I was safe in my play-pen, counting the shadow
grids the awning slits made on the rusty shag carpet. I was an
Amram. My mom, in between tending to me and my three-year-od sister,
plotted how best to end the war. She was going to help end it, by
political means, before it was popular to want it to end. In
those days she was involved with the WILPF (Womens International
League for Peace and Freedom). They met, Marv Davidov (future founder
of Honeywell Project) met, she made food for WILPH sales and, in
November 1963 traveled to Washington D.C. With the purpose of voicing
her concern for the immediate end of the Vietnam War.
It
all began that way, or some sorted, salted version of it, depending
who's telling it. Life commenced biologically, succeeding its meiotic
processes and embryonic and fetal phases science knows so well,
ending with a slap on the ass to know if you're still born. I wasn't
really born though. And the cruel irony was that, as I waited in that
foster shelter—or wherever baby's in limbo wait—a war that would
total 20 years—depending who's telling the stats—was about to be
unmitigably aggravated by the country into which I was being born.
