Part II
Neither of my surviving grandparents, both native born, had learned English until they went to school—and Grandpa’s family had been citizens since the Revolution. Someone in that family had been scalped, another was a Hessian deserter, as I understand the matter. But I’m probably garbled: When the information was available to me I was in my early teens and family history wasn’t even at the bottom of my list of interests.
I know that my grandmother would speak some of the dialect of her parents to my father and his siblings, and her generation used it among themselves. But it was the era of From Many, One, which meant Speak English and learn to play baseball. And those rules weren’t unspoken either; they were policy. Americanization, it was. Melt in this here pot buddy. Even Dad would remind his father, another arrival from The Other Side, to speak English. I have heard of other children doing the same. I have trouble reconstructing those scenes in my imagination. Children in our day didn’t talk back to their elders, my elders claimed. “You’d just say, this is how it is here Pop,” Dad explained to me.
Hunh. Dad couldn’t put his finger on any specific incident. I don’t think it was about dating, because as far as I knew people didn’t “date” in his geological epoch. In flickering moments I wondered if, at one time, people communicated to each other rationally, calmly, but little or no evidence to corroborate that human condition has ever emerged.
Anyway foreign languages died in the mouths of the first generation and the awarenesses of different human awarenesses all but died with them in the sphere made for me and my cohort. We had Hoody Doody on television after suppers that came regular as sunrises and we studied the endless specifications and rules of baseball with American intensity. Nothing in our experience ever cast a shadow on the notion of our American-ness. Now that a minute has passed since my original remark about Americanization, let me say, Americanization was a grand idea too, a shimmering ideal that people of diverse origins could live together. The cold metal fire of Liberty’s torch, upheld there in New York’s waters, threw another kind of illumination across the waters.
I suggested, just before, that Americanization imposed one mindset on all others, that it was a specie of imperialism and / or of stifling conformity. But now that the matter revolves some degrees in my consideration I remind myself that everyone’s life was changing in the Western kaleidoscope of Industrialization in the 19th and 20th centuries. Think of someone born in 1800 near, say, Concord Massachusetts. The nation is still plastered along the Atlantic coast, although lands beyond the Appalachians are starting to be added to the Union. The railroad appears; people begin to travel at unimagined speeds—twenty-five, thirty miles an hour!— over unheard-of distances. People leave Concord; other people come. Cities like Chicago bubble up on the prairie as though it were the surface of a boiling cauldron. Young people do things their elders wouldn’t have thought of and can’t approve.
That person passes away after a colossal, epic Civil War. A babe arrives into a nation sprawling from coast to coast. In this lifetime things made of metal abound in the household, where something of whittled wood, by the person herself, might have inhabited a pocket or shelf. Steel and coal drive factories, power immense sail-less ships, bring forth new substances. Machines fly. A great war spreads over the planet; it shakes values of old to the core, belies the very notions of rationality, of Progress. Automobiles zip along every street and road. Modern industrial economies breed ebullience and a youthful, jazzy break with old mores; the economies abruptly fail; another war erupts whose evil and corruption corrode war’s mask of valor. The war ends with a terrifying bang. Our second lifetime ends as self-confidence springs leaks to self-examination.
All those things were pretty disruptive of everything, to everybody. Democracy upended ancient wisdoms. The idea spread that peoples were a people, that they could construct a rational benevolent society. In the USA, we all just had to speak English, that was part of the deal, one of the clauses in fine print from the unwritten agreement.
What started as a unifying ideal, as it gained dimension, took on numerous practices of exclusion and exclusiveness—what I thought of first. You do it like us at first in the minds of some people, or You do it like me in the minds of others. Maybe it was that way from the beginning, maybe it took root later. Black people, as they well knew, were excluded from the unity wherever they went; they faced ever more ingenious, ever meaner tricks. Unity became conformity, the rule, while conversely freedom in instance after instance—that made lurid reading—appeared to devolve to mere license, an expectation to be loosed from any convention or authority whatever.
Beatniks appeared, positively weird and threatening characters in New York City and San Francisco. They were threatening because they were so different, intentionally different, and that made them seem subversive to the commonsense that everybody agreed to—we all did agree, didn’t we? It wasn’t hard to convince adolescent me those people were part of a spreading disorder instigated and sponsored and supported by a malevolent power: Communism. Along with the threat of nuclear war, the even more disturbing fear of my life then was of mind control. American prisoners of the Korean War were displayed denouncing their country in show trials. They had been brainwashed. It was a creepy fear that crept into the bottom back of my mind and burrowed.
Being different became suspicious. Did the whole country turn inward, turn a bit paranoid? I don’t know, but we had bomb drills in school. Hunker under your desk and kiss your ass good-bye. According to the popular magazines, bomb shelters were being built in back yards, all across the country (I never saw one, from then until now). The culture I lived in, between one authority and another, insulated me from other thoughts and other people; I felt different enough as it was. For some individuals, although I thought they were distant from my home, it was the task of other newcomers outsiders, and so on, to understand them, whatever the effort. Some looked on the desire to learn a foreign language as suspicious.
Not myself, you understand; that’s how I thought opinion ranged at a distance. For me, other languages were tantalizingly close. The Mass had just ceased to be celebrated in Latin, and my parents both said some things they’d learned in their childhood—a few remaining words, scraps. And there was just something about another language that fascinated me, even when I was just learning my own. You could say the same thing in different ways—wow!
So I struggled on.
(to be continued)
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