Brown Street

My earliest memories are from Brown Street. My very first memory is of me squatting on a small patch of yard beside our house, in diapers, with a metal teaspoon precariously held in my right hand. My mother was hanging clothes on the clothesline and I was watching her while I chewed on spoonsful of dirt. The memory ends with her scooping me up and pulling the dirt from my mouth. It must have been some time before my next vivid memory. I was still in the house on Brown Street, but now I am big enough to sit on the commode in the upstairs bathroom. The day was bright and the curtains on the window beside the toilet were blue plastic with little white fish swimming in opposite directions. Suddenly I was in this world more than in the other world I had inhabited, which, now that I think about it, had a striking similarity to being in deep sleep.

All of these memories came years before I learned that my father was an alcoholic and that my parents had problems that I knew nothing about. I still had a some years of innocence left to me, but only a few. Events beyond my control began to overwhelm us all about ten years later, but until then my brain was trying to learn how to perceive the world.

I have many other memories of Brown Street, though we moved from there when I was only five. I remember venturing up the alley one summer day to a place I wasn't supposed to go, the car wash down the block through the alley. The big boys working there squirted me all over with a hose. I went home crying and sodden, but it was summer, so there was no real harm done. My mother acted like she was mad at me, and then the boys at the car wash, but then it all went away.

Another experience I remember from Brown Street was when a friend of mine and I was playing outside one winter, snow on the ground, really cold, but playable. We were going through everyone's yards, playing and running and being cowboys, when my gun got dropped in a cement pond in this old ladies back yard. The water was nearly frozen and black with dirt and who knows what, but I jumped in to get my precious Roy Rogers Colt .45 cap pistol. Then there was the time when two colored boys turned the corner from Eighth Street while I was outside. I had never `seen a person a different color from me and my curiosity and ignorance led me to inquire of the two much older black boys if they were niggers. They responded by kicking my little ass with a couple of fierce blows, it all ended quickly with them running away and me running back home crying. I remember the reaction at home. I think my dad was not at work and was home at the time. My mother and father both told me that it was wrong to call colored people (that's what we called African-Americans in those days), niggers. That the word nigger was a bad word and that I shouldn't say it. In my mind I understood that to call people of the negro race nigger was an insult to them, one that they would fight over.

I remember a few other things from Brown Street but none more impressive than the day me and my brother were sitting on the front porch in the swing and these two old ladies came waltzing up on the porch and tacked a sign right on the front of our house. I couldn't read, but I knew that this looked authoritative. My brother could barely read, but enough so he could read the sign that said "FOR RENT." He started crying and I started crying, we were homeless, what were we to do, what about Mom and Dad, what ...?

We were soon relieved to learn that the reason the house was for rent was that we were moving. Wow, what a relief. A few days later we all took a ride to where our new home would be, this time the house was being bought, not rented. Somehow this was impressed on me as being meaningful and significant. It felt different, and it was on the other side of the railroad tracks, that I noticed. It meant that my brother would be changing schools and that I would be going to that school too before too long.

It all came true, we moved, Rusty changed schools, and the house was ours, and shortly we got a new car too. Things looked good. I felt I had it good, and I did. My father had a good job at the steel mill, we lived on the hillside of the railroad tracks, and I discovered baseball