Les Green Archives - Page 19 of 19

Two Letters

I’m thinking to myself, “You talk about me at work?”

When I was 22 or 23, I wrote my father a really nasty letter. I no longer recall what prompted this, though I’m sure he ticked me off in some way. Nor do I recall what was in it, except I’m sure there was something pointed about his spanking policy. I suppose my goal was to engage him, even angrily.

The results: he didn’t talk to me for six months. Any communication that took place went through my mother. But I should not have been surprised. My father’s modus operandi when angry was often to become like this black cloud, and he’d just shut down. One didn’t always know WHY he was upset, but you usually knew THAT he was upset. I was pained by this, and I hated having my mother in the middle of this triangulation.

So I wrote him another letter. I described how great he was, how much I appreciated him coming to school every semester to sing to my classmates. How much I liked singing with my sister Leslie and with him. How much I enjoyed going to minor league baseball games and exhibition pro football games with him. How much I really enjoyed playing cards – pinochle and bid whist in particular – with him. How much I enjoyed him cooking waffles on Saturday mornings, and spaghetti Saturday nights, especially during those six years he worked nights at IBM and we didn’t see him that much during the week. My father made a great spaghetti sauce; the secret is that he cooked it for hours.

Then my father started talking with me as though nothing had happened. For 50 years, we never spoke about the letters.

Now, I’m not recommending this. But I do think that it allowed me to vent my frustration with him and my love for him in a way my sisters did not have the opportunity to do. I talked with sister Leslie at length around her birthday, and she agrees with the theory. There were things she and our sister Marcia never said to him.

Not that there aren’t issues I still wish I could ask him about, such as his genealogy or his time in Europe after World War II. But I don’t think I had unstated FEELINGS left unsaid.

The bottom line is, ultimately, I think it helped our relationship. I remember one day when I needed to catch a plane back to Albany from Charlotte, NC. For some reason, peat – the stuff you burn – came up in discussion, and I, as was (is) my wont, went to the dictionary or encyclopedia to look it up. He said that he tells people at work that I’m prone to do that, in a way that made it seemed like a good thing. And I’m thinking to myself, “You talk about me at work?” I was floored. Pleased, but very surprised. He’d often given me the impression in the past that me, buried in some reference book, was somehow, for lack of a better word, nerdy.

Sidebar: if you wanted to get a ride from him to take you to the airport or train station, you needed to lie to him about the departure time. In fact, that particular day in question, if the rules of flight now were in place then, I’d have missed my plane altogether, rather than running through the airport and just catching the flight.

The Spanking Policy

I got spanked a number of times, and usually I had no idea why.

Today is my sister Leslie’s birthday. Happy birthday, Leslie!
She is the middle child, and I’m the oldest, by sixteen and a half months. I have no recollection of my life without her.

Here’s one of those family stories, the telling of which will make more sense in a couple of weeks, I hope.

The worst spanking I ever received directly involved her. I tell this tale not to embarrass her – after all, it WAS a half-century ago – but to indicate how much that incident has imprinted on my whole life.

When I was four or five years old, Leslie marked up the piano with some crayons. My father went to Leslie and asked her who marked the piano, and she said that Roger did. So my father got the strap that hung in the kitchen – this brown leather thing about a foot long that barbers used to sharpen their razors – and started wailing on me. One of the things he was looking for from me was an apology, yet even in the midst of my pain, I was unable to do so. “I didn’t do it, I didn’t do it!” I sobbed.

Eventually, and these are pretty much in the words of my father, recounting the incident years later, he figured that I was either really stupid or I was actually innocent. Finally, he requestioned Leslie, who finally confessed, and he started wailing on her.

So, what had I learned from this?

1) Leslie was his favorite, even after Marcia was born. None of us alive – my mother, my sisters – dispute this fact, and at some point, Marcia and I became OK with it. But for years, it ticked me off that he took her word for what happened, but didn’t even ASK me, disbelieving me until he had to believe me.

2) Despite the discomfort, one ought not to admit to things one did not do.

3) Sometimes the innocent do get punished. This is a huge reason for my antipathy for the death penalty; sometimes the authorities get it wrong. (That’s not the only reason, but an important one.)

4) I just don’t believe in corporal punishment.

In January 1997, Leslie and I were visiting the folks in Charlotte, NC. My father was brooding all day; my father’s brooding practically had a physical manifestation. When we were younger, we referred to him – but not to his face, thank you – as The Black Cloud.

Finally, that evening, when I was taking a 1 a.m. train back to Albany, not so incidentally, he opens up. He believed that my sister Marcia, who was in her 30s, was not being very respectful to her/my mother; that 19-year-old Becky, who was also visiting, was not being very respectful to her mother, Leslie; that Alexandria, who had just turned six, was not being very respectful to her mother, Marcia – OK, we could discuss all of that – and that none of them were too big to use the strap on.

I’m pretty sure I bit my lip.

Leslie, always the diplomat when it came to dealing with my father, thanked him for sharing, and said some more affirming things before indicating that she would not be doing any spanking. I followed Leslie’s lead (though I had no child at the time), and Marcia did the same. Then our mother launched into this discussion of the family finances, appropriate at some point, but not right then. My father shut down, and said maybe two words – “Good night” – the rest of the evening.

So, no, I don’t spank Lydia; Carol doesn’t either. This is not merely a knee-jerk liberal parenting mantra on my part. This is because, and the sisters and I have talked about this at length, I got spanked a number of times, and the only reason I can recall to this day WHY I got spanked was the aforementioned piano incident, for which I ought not to have been spanked. I can’t think of a good reason Leslie got spanked, except for that same event. There WAS a time when Marcia was 10 when she talked back to my father, and Leslie and I independently thought, “Ooo, she’s dead!” But he didn’t spank her; maybe he mellowed a bit with the third child.

“Spare the rod, spoil the child.” I’ll risk it.

Drug Money

It becomes clear to my sister and me that since my mother had the check in hand, and that who knows how long it would take A-Z to reissue a check – and they don’t relish the expense of doing this again…

The good news is that a check came to my parents’ house in North Carolina this week. It was a substantial amount, in the low four figures, in response to some class-action lawsuit settlement; not positive which drug was involved. The company issuing the check is a pharmaceutical company who I won’t name; we’ll just call it A-Z.

The slightly not-so-good news is that the check is made out to Leslie H. Green, my father, who is deceased, has been deceased for nearly ten years. This is quite annoying since my mother filled out paperwork back in April informing A-Z of this fact. At least the check came to my father c/o my mother, but it doesn’t make it any easier to cash.

At my sister’s request, I contacted A-Z. After going through a myriad of telephone menus, I reached a real person, who transferred me to another real person, who expressed her condolences at my father’s passing. “How long ago did he die?” “Ten years.”

I was then transferred to the nurse. This was not for MY benefit, but rather CYA for A-Z since the deceased (i.e., my father) died around the time he was taking their medication. The nurse wants to know when he died – “August 10, 2000” – and from what “prostate cancer”. After she was done, she too expressed her condolences at my father’s passing.

Then she transferred me to someone who was going to transfer me to the person who could address my question. She expressed her condolences at my father’s passing.

I was told I would be on hold for three minutes, then someone would pick up and help me. Instead, I was on hold for two minutes, then I was disconnected.

OK, so I call A-Z back. After eventually getting a real person again, I conveyed to her why I had called, and also that I had already spoken to the nurse. I was transferred to someone who was going to transfer me to someone else when I indicated that was the point I had gotten disconnected the LAST time I called. She stayed on the line the full three minutes (or more – I didn’t time it) that I was waiting, then made the transfer, after expressing her condolences at my father’s passing.

I explain the situation to this guy. He says my mom should deposit the check. I say my mom no longer has an account in my father’s name, so she cannot deposit the check. He said that she could mail back the check, but that she would need to write VOID on it, write a letter explaining the situation, provide his death certificate, provide proof that she is his primary heir, etc.

As I explained this to my sister, it becomes clear to us that since my mother had the check in hand, and that who knows how long it would take A-Z to reissue a check – and they don’t relish the expense of doing this again – they should try to deposit it. If that didn’t work, they (my mother and sister) would set up an estate account for my father and deposit the check; this might require setting up a DBA of some sort, but it would be worth it.

So I spent a half-hour during the week leading up to Father’s Day being reminded that this is the 10th Father’s Day I’ve spent without my father. I knew that already, of course, but I did want to thank A-Z, who COULD have, I’m thinking, written the check to my MOTHER, and keep me from all this rigamarole. Just saying.
***
I state this every year, but it is no less true for that: I wish my father had had the opportunity to meet my daughter.

V is for Veteran

Most of the wars fought by the United States, starting with the Revolutionary War, included a subtext, even the promise, of justice for, and fair treatment of African-Americans.

Back at the end of February 2010, I did a presentation for the Underground Railroad conference about Black Soldiers in Post WW II Germany. I’m certainly not to replicate it here, but a few points I’ll mention.

Even though the first casualty of what would become the American Revolution was Crispus Attucks at the Boston Massacre of 1770, the American colonial powers fighting Great Britain were resistant to allowing black soldiers to serve. It wasn’t until the British offered freedom to black fighters that ultimately got George Washington’s attention. Ultimately, blacks fought on both sides of the conflict, but their reason was singular: freedom.

Again, in the American Civil War, many black men felt that serving in the military was a way they might gain freedom and full citizenship. As Frederick Douglass asserted that if blacks fought, “no power on earth can deny that he has earned the right” to freedom.

General David Staunch took it upon himself to free slaves, not just on islands controlled by Union forces, but in south Florida, where he recruited men capable of bearing arms to form the first black regiment. This was ultimately opposed to, and disbanded by President Lincoln, fearing moving more quickly than “public opinion would bear.”

There was a modicum of freedom for the newly emancipated but this was negated by the Jim Crow laws and other restrictions. During World War I, WEB DuBois wrote in The Crisis magazine, “First your Country, then your Rights”. A by-then familiar refrain.

So, most of the wars fought by the United States, starting with the Revolutionary War, included a subtext, even the promise, of justice for, and fair treatment of African-Americans. World War I and especially the Civil War brought the issue to the fore.

But it was with World War II, with large numbers of black soldiers in uniform, that the contradiction between fighting for freedom for others and a lack of freedom back at home reached a tipping point.

Germany in post World War II was occupied by thousands of American soldiers, many of them black. While Hitler’s mantra of racial superiority might suggest that the black soldier might have a difficult time in the former Nazi-led country, the experiences were far more mixed. A huge part of this involved the black GI and the German fraulein, something that clashed with the norms of two countries. What took place during that period changed both the condition of African-Americans back in the United States and the occupied German people as well.

Due, in part to the pressure by the black press, reporting on the superior conditions for the black troops in what was Hitler’s country, the armed services were integrated in 1948.

So, was it a sense of history or a more personal connection that my father to keep a Newsweek article delineating this phenomenon for 54 years, from 1946 until his death in 2000, or was there something more? My father was in the European Theater of operations from February to November 1946, but we never really talked to him about the war.

There is a surprisingly large bit of literature on this topic of race and Germany after the war. It doesn’t cite the Newsweek article, but rather an article from a then- relatively new magazine called Ebony (October 1946).

I would particularly recommend The Civil Rights Struggle, African-American GIs, and Germany, a research project and digital archive. The creators received a prestigious award from the storied civil rights organization, the NAACP.
I’d also note Historians study black vets’ role in civil rights for the very first paragraph: In the words of retired Gen. Colin Powell, postwar Germany was “a breath of freedom” for black soldiers, especially those out of the South: “[They could] go where they wanted, eat where they wanted, and date, whom they wanted, just like other people.” Or, as it notes in the Ebony article, Berlin was freer than Birmingham (Alabama) or Broadway (New York City).

Additional bibliography:
Blacks during the Holocaust.

An unexpected freedom: Black U.S. soldiers found acceptance and tolerance in post-war Germany – and sometimes even the love of their lives. By Peter H. Koepf