on the day my mother was born in West Texas. I learned this from a biography of Ethel Rosenberg, who was strapped to a chair in Ossining ten years later and filled with electricity. Her heart still beat after three shots but not four. Smoke rose from her head as if from a puffed candle. They’d chosen her to go first that night, hoping love’s valor would break truths from her husband, but Julius, he said nothing. And for him, one shot was plenty.
My mother’s hair grew long, as did Daddy’s. Mine grew long, too, as long as my not-yet sister’s. This was the time of high and tight above the collar (in what was still Jack Ruby’s Dallas, to boot). They named a new puppy after Freud, wore love beads and ponchos, and with me in tow, marched in paisley protest of every cruel thing they’d ever been taught to hold dear by Texas. J. Edgar has a file on you, too, they’d boast to me later.
I turned seven in ’76, the year Robeson died at eleven times that. Mother played “John Brown’s Body” on their cheap turntable. I loved how deep his voice was, how it vibrated dust from the speakers. I pressed my palms against them to feel his strength inside my hollows. I knew nothing of the man but this, the throb of him. Not for many more years would I learn of his righteousness, the utter Americanness of his persecution.
The red-brick row house he shared with his sister sits at the corner of 50th & Walnut, in the heart of West Philly. The marker out front gives his life just three sentences. Two miles east stands another, this one for Lady Day. She often lived here, it says. Four years before my father’s third-term Roosevelt birth, she sang bruisedly of strange fruit, a melodic horror. The man who wrote it later adopted two boys orphaned by voltage.
I drive by both markers now and again on my way to other places in the city, knowing they must go unnoticed by most these days. Beneath one, tired commuters wait for the bus. Graffitied garages fence in the other. Twenty-five days ago, my mother turned eighty. She and my dad still live in Dallas but not for much longer—they’re finally escaping its barbed hatreds next summer. But they can only flee so far, as Texas is America is Texas.
My mother’s hair grew long, as did Daddy’s. Mine grew long, too, as long as my not-yet sister’s. This was the time of high and tight above the collar (in what was still Jack Ruby’s Dallas, to boot). They named a new puppy after Freud, wore love beads and ponchos, and with me in tow, marched in paisley protest of every cruel thing they’d ever been taught to hold dear by Texas. J. Edgar has a file on you, too, they’d boast to me later.
I turned seven in ’76, the year Robeson died at eleven times that. Mother played “John Brown’s Body” on their cheap turntable. I loved how deep his voice was, how it vibrated dust from the speakers. I pressed my palms against them to feel his strength inside my hollows. I knew nothing of the man but this, the throb of him. Not for many more years would I learn of his righteousness, the utter Americanness of his persecution.
The red-brick row house he shared with his sister sits at the corner of 50th & Walnut, in the heart of West Philly. The marker out front gives his life just three sentences. Two miles east stands another, this one for Lady Day. She often lived here, it says. Four years before my father’s third-term Roosevelt birth, she sang bruisedly of strange fruit, a melodic horror. The man who wrote it later adopted two boys orphaned by voltage.
I drive by both markers now and again on my way to other places in the city, knowing they must go unnoticed by most these days. Beneath one, tired commuters wait for the bus. Graffitied garages fence in the other. Twenty-five days ago, my mother turned eighty. She and my dad still live in Dallas but not for much longer—they’re finally escaping its barbed hatreds next summer. But they can only flee so far, as Texas is America is Texas.
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Kevin Grauke has published work in such places as The Threepenny Review, The Southern Review, Quarterly West, Ninth Letter, and Cimarron Review. He’s the author of the short story collection Shadows of Men (Queen’s Ferry Press), winner of the Steven Turner Award from the Texas Institute of Letters. He lives in Philadelphia.
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