Life in the Basement: Assignment # 14

My sisters and I continue giving one another writing assignments. Our latest is about books that had an impact on us.

Silver Valley Girl and InlandEmpireGirl wrote about books that had an impact on them here and here. And, coincidentally, Katrina at Notes on a Napkin, wrote a similarly focused post recently, here.

I don't know when I started going to the basement and reading all the Life and Look magazines we had piled on shelves and on the floor. Mom saved them all and it was quite a library, albeit a not very well organized one.

I must have been in the fourth or fifth grade. I was curious about the word "sexy". I didn't understand the word "sexy", but the magazines featured women who were described this way, in particular Elizabeth Taylor, Marilyn Monroe, and Sophia Loren. I found pictures of these three, often on covers, other times in the magazines, and stared at them, trying to understand why they were described with this word I didn't understand.

Nonetheless, they intrigued me. I knew Marilyn Monroe was dead, but pictures of her continued to appear. I knew that Elizabeth Taylor had been married often and found her eyes very pretty. Sophia Loren was unlike any woman I'd ever seen in person. I thought she was of another world. Such elegance registered to me as almost other worldly.

It was just a year or two earlier than this that Silver Valley Girl had been born, in 1963. I was starting to get some ideas from the playground and around the neighborhood that her conception had occurred by an act that involved my father and mother, but I couldn't accept those rumors.

I was flipped out crazy about my little sister. I thought she was the most beautiful baby on the face of the earth. I loved doting over her, playing with her, making her laugh, and teasing her. I had walked in on my parents at different times when they were dressing. I did not believe that anything as inelegant as their genitals could have had anything to do with my little sister being brought into being. (It was all right if I was created that way, I guess, but not her.)

Life Magazine changed my view. The astounding pictures in the issue whose cover is pictured above, which came out when I was in the fourth grade, gave me authoritative evidence that my mother's pregnancy had, if fact, been the result of fertilization, and that fertilization involved my father putting a seed inside my mother.

I was astonished. I stared and stared at the pictures that Life Magazine published of life before birth. I would look at Silver Valley Girl, all bouncy and funny and learning to talk, and I'd look at my father, asleep on the couch, his white T-shirt too small cover his growing belly; I'd look at my mom, working at the kitchen table, smoking Pall Malls, grading workbooks or making out report cards, and I'd marvel, silently, within myself, at how this passed out man and that overworked cigarette smoking woman had somehow, some time, come together some way in an act of fertilization that created this sister who was that little seedling I'd seen Life's pictures of.

I looked at that issue of Life while it was upstairs and then when it went to the basement, I'd pull it out and marvel more.

But, my marvelling did not end there.

At around the same time Silver Valley Girl was born, so was the Civil Rights Movement in the United States.

Life magazine covered marches and camp-ins and demonstrations and lynchings and leaders and all phases of that movement. As a grade schooler, I was entranced by what was happening in the South. The March on Washington. Freedom City. The fire hoses and police dogs. The church bombings. I was secretly familiar with names like Ralph Abernathy, James Meredith, Julian Bond, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Andrew Young.

I educated myself with Life magazine's pictures and captions about poverty and segregation and I could tell by the faces I saw in these pictures that something in the United States was deeply wrong and that these marches and demonstrations were deeply right.

It meant that I was going against the grain of some of the sentiment in Kellogg, Idaho. I'd heard Dr. King called Martin Luther Coon. A few years later, when he was shot, a classmate reported that his law enforcement father had said that it was about time someone shot that nigger son of a bitch. I would come to hear all things black mocked: the words Afro-Americans, African-Americans, Black Panthers, Black Pride, Black is Beautiful and I would hear, and would myself use, racial epithets.

I don't know what was real. I don't know if my father used racial epithets out of sense of genuine hatred or because it was how he dealt with what he didn't know. I used such language, when I did, not out of any commitment to racial prejudice, but because the words were around me and in the air. Sometimes it was a way to get a laugh.

In the long run, it was the reading I did in the basement that stuck. Those pictures shaped me into a person eager to learn more. I read Martin Luther King's speeches and sermons as I grew older. I listened to ideas of theologians and sociologists and others that talked about evil and sin and racism as not merely an individual, but a corporate thing.

I began to realize that I was and always would be a participant in institutions whose practices were larger than my individual principles or deeds. The idea of institutional racism made sense to me as I got older.

It all came back to me when my father died and we had a get together after the funeral in Mom and Dad's backyard. One of Dad's oldest friends, a great friend of the family, and a friend who visited Dad all the time while Dad was dying and who has been a great help to my mother, was talking to me and some others about a basketball player from Kellogg who was leaving the area to play college ball. He said, "Once he starts getting banged around by those niggers down there, he'll be back up here playing ball at NIC."

It was a statement fraught with all kinds of ugliness and bad logic. It was made by a good man, one of the finest men I've known, head of one of the finest families.

When I read in the basement, I was trying to figure things out. How are babies made? Why are these black people oppressed?

As I grew older I asked more questions: Why do people in my town refer to blacks with so many nasty names? Why did I pick up those names? Why, when I tried to argue with my dad about things he said, did he argue back so hard? My dad was a good man. He was intelligent. The men in Kellogg were good men. Almost all of them were intelligent. They weren't ignorant.

And, yet. . . .

Eventually, I figured out what sexy means and my reading in the basement took on added dimensions.

But sex itself has remained a puzzle.

So has the question of race.

The book that affected me the most wasn't a book. It was a magazine: Life Magazine. It started me puzzling about questions I doubt I'll ever solve.