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Aside from being naturally quiet from the hours spent isolated at home, I was carrying a family secret in these years. At times we had secret political meetings on our farm and strangers would come from miles away to gather in our warehouse and sing freedom songs and make some sort of plans. All I understood about it was that I must never tell anyone at school or my parents could go to jail. The deep bass voice of Paul Robeson sang the sad evidence of man's inhumanity from our victrola. This secret was the beginning of a lifelong sense of being an outsider, a desperado. Some years later when Julius and Ethel Rosenberg died in the electric chair, my parents wept. So I added to the terror in my adolescent heart the certainty that this could happen to them, too.At school I retreated into the books that were so comforting to me and by the end of the first year, because I had read all the books for that year and the following year, I was moved directly to the third grade. |
Now I became different in another way. If I showed my intelligence and love of learning, my father and the teacher were pleased - but not the other children. And how I longed for them to take me in. The farm children I recall were tough, practical and physical. They liked you if you kept up on the playing field of their very real world. In the end, I compromised, foregoing the rough and tumble world of the team players for a world that would include my father's love, and that of the gentlest of friends.