I've learned that people will
forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never
forget how you made them feel.
-Maya Angelou
My father Arnold was a man who
liked to be at home. He was a World War Two veteran who had been a supply
Sergeant in a Negro unit, as it was called in the racially segregated U.S. Army
of the 1940s. His quartermaster company coordinated efforts with the Red Ball
Express, a transportation convoy that rushed supplies to the front in 1944.
They advanced through France and Belgium and went on in the direction of
Germany. He had little desire to revisit his grim memories of that time but
there were three stories that I remember him telling me when I was a boy. The first was how he, having finished three
years of college, wanted to go to officer’s candidate school and how his
commanding officer would always take his application, glance at it, ball it up
and toss it into the wastebasket. The
second story took place in England and was about a man known as Big John who
took on a group of American soldiers from the south who did not like the idea
of Negroes being in an English bar. Big
John, my father and two other black soldiers had to fight their way out of the
pub but only after Big John had thrown two antagonists over the second floor
banisters. The last was how most of the black men in his company during Basic
Training came from the Deep South and how they enjoyed having a little fun with
the northern ones by putting snakes in their beds.
My father had been drafted
shortly after Pearl Harbor and was not discharged until late 1945. He didn’t
believe in lecturing children. He told
brief stories and let me think about them. I learned that it was important to
be prepared for things that may cause you trouble. I learned that you needed to
work if you were going to get anything in life. I learned that you needed to
believe in something greater than yourself. My father and mother took me to church,
museums and libraries.
I also got to see a lot of
movies, especially the ones with Sidney Poitier, Dorothy Dandridge, Pearl
Bailey, Brock Peters and Harry Belafonte.
I am very fortunate to still
have my mother Corrine who is lucid and energetic at 88. Although she has a few of her own favorite
stories about conflict and adversity, she is essentially the family’s optimist
and has always focused on the importance of faith, personal growth and
enrichment. She would not just take me to the library or museum, she would
bring my friends along as well. I have always associated her with
learning. When I was in grade school, I
can remember her reading “A Street Car
Named Desire,” which seemed a strange title for a play. She once showed me a novel by Richard Wright
and pointed to his picture on the cover so that I would see he was an African
American. I read some of her copy of Salinger’s “The Catcher In The Rye” until
she took it away and told me that this one was for later.
I never considered that it
was a privilege to grow up in a household that loved music. The songs in the
air were like the furniture or the pictures on the wall. In the morning
something by Nat King Cole, Ella Fitzgerald or Frank Sinatra might be playing
on the radio. When I came home from school, my mother would be ironing clothes
and have Symphony Sid’s jazz show on, coming in from New York City. In the
evening, my parents would frequently play records. To my young ears, Count Basie’s big band arrangement
of “Taxi War Dance” featuring Lester
Young on tenor saxophone left an impression larger and more lasting than any
late inning World Series home run or gruesome horror movie. I remember looking
at a glossy album cover with a young Miles Davis in an elegantly tailored suit.
He was holding his trumpet, while staring indifferently at the camera. He could make made that horn sound as
evocative as a great actor’s words on the stage.
And there were the memorable
vocalists Nina Simone and Billie Holiday, whose beautiful voices bordered on
being unearthly. They were unlike any performers that I had ever heard.
But
what caused these women to express so much pain and sadness?
It was not until I started
college that I discovered there were formal courses dedicated to jazz, its
history, and the music’s theory and composition. I learned then that this music was more than
a comparatively young art form. It was a great narrative and a vast repository
for talent as well as experience. It had many older and some newly emerging
episodes, all of them parts of a steadily growing story.
And now, when I look far back
on childhood and my family memories, it is with deep gratitude. My mother and father gave me a legacy of
love, hard earned wisdom and their most thoughtful attention. They have given me many wonderful
moments, as well as lasting and forever useful lessons.
I wonder if I have done
nearly as well with my own child.
W. S. Merwin, "Grandfather in
the Old men's Home"
Gentle, at last, and as clean as ever
He did not even need drink any more
And
his good sons unbent and brought him
Tobacco to chew, both times when they came
To
be satisfied he was well cared for.
And
he smiled all the time to remember
Grandmother,
his wife, wearing the true faith
Like
an iron nightgown, yet brought to birth
Seven
times and raising the family
Through her needle's eye while he got
away
Down
the green river, finding directions
For
boats. And himself coming home sometimes
Well-heeled
but blind drunk, to hide all the bread
And
shoot holes in the bucket while he made
His
daughters pump. Still smiled as kindly in
His
sleep beside the other clean old men
To see Grandmother, every night the same
Huge
in her age, with her thumbed-down mouth, come
Hating the river, filling with her stare
His
gliding dream, while he turned to water,
While the children they both had begotten,
With
old faces now, but themselves shrunken
To child-size again, stood ranged at her side,
Beating
their little Bibles till he
died.
Arnold R. Henderson, Jr.
Associate Dean
Student Support Services
