by Bette Greene
But unless I’m mightily mistaken, it didn’t smell altogether different. For I could still smell the sour sweat of yesterday’s basketball players mingling with the soap and perfumed dusting powder of today’s graduates.
“With dignity,” I took my seat on the stage along with the other seventeen graduates of Jenkinsville High School (class of 1950) and began searching the audience for familiar faces. I knew practically everybody by sight and most of those I could hang a name onto. In the first row was the biggest landowner in all of Rice County, Arkansas, Mr. J. G. (for James Grady) Jackson and his wife. And next to them was Gussie Fields, who has been clerking in my father’s store since even before her husband died.
And two rows behind Gussie were my father and mother, Mr. and Mrs. Harry M. (for Morry) Bergen, and my kid sister, Sharon (alias “the pretty Bergen girl” and I’ve even heard her referred to as “the sweet Bergen girl”). It’s her black hair with just a hint of a widow’s peak and her oval face that encourages people to say, “She’s the spitting image of her mother.” But the thing that really amazes me about Sharon is that she’s the only one of us Bergens who seemed to be born in this world knowing exactly the right thing to say … and do.
And next to Sharon are my grandparents, Mr. and Mrs. Samuel Fried, who drove all the way from Memphis—forty miles—just to see me graduate.
Standing before the lectern, Superintendent Begley (he hates being called Coach Begley on formal occasions) was saying, “We’re all real pleased and honored today to have as our commencement speaker one of Arkansas’s up-and-coming young politicians. so lets give a big hand of welcome to, State Representative Billy Bruce Stebbins.”
A whole burst of welcoming applause greeted Mr. Stebbins, who folks say is a good bet to be governor someday. He’s got about every qualification. A few years ago he was a star football player at the University of Arkansas and later on he killed enough Germans to qualify as a genuine World War II hero. And frankly speaking, his poppa’s money—the E. P. Stebbins of E. P. Stebbins & Sons, Ginners—won’t hurt him. Not a bit.
With his back against us graduates and his face toward the guests, Billy Bruce Stebbins said that he was here today to bring a “personal message” to us graduating seniors. Right off, it struck me strange that anybody would say something personal with their back against you, but maybe that was only because he hadn’t as yet reached the personal part.
“Six years ago, I was honored to have helped my country win their world war. I was there, ladies and gentlemen, when America called me. I was there when, with some help from our allies, this great Christian country of ours crushed the Axis powers to smithereens.” He stuck his hands in his pockets in a way that showed that here at last was one man who’d never run from a fight.
“So you say we destroyed Hitler and Mussolini and that little Jap, Hirohito, so we’ve done our job. Nothing more to do!” The representative let his words lay uneventfully on his audience before suddenly bellowing out, “Well, is that what you all think?”
When the only sound that came back was the half-echo of his own question, he supplied, “No, ladies and gentlemen, that is not what right-thinking Americans led by real true patriots like Senator Joe McCarthy and I believe. No, sir, not by a long shot! We Americans have got to stand like Christian martyrs against any and all those faceless, Godless isms. Fascism! Communism! And Socialism!”
He talked on and on about “alien ideologies” and how we Americans can’t one bit more accommodate ourselves to the Russians than we could to the Germans. After a while, I noticed that some of the audience couldn’t quite accommodate themselves to their skinny chairs. Finally Mr. Stebbins half-turned from the audience toward us graduates, and I suspected that at long last our own “personal message” was coming right up.
“And so it is to you, the fine young men and girls of the 1950 Jenkinsville graduating class, that I want to personally tell, each and every one of you, that you MUST stand straight and tall against all Godless teachings in whatever form they are presented. And always remember this: All of us Christians represent God’s very own soldiers. Soldiers who are never afraid to fight!”
The applause that sounded for his ending remarks seemed a whole lot less vigorous than the applause that had first welcomed him, but it’s really hard to judge that sort of thing. So I could be mistaken.
After Coach—I mean Superintendent Begley thanked Mr. Stebbins, he introduced all of our class officers before turning the program over to our class president, Edna Louise Jackson, who gave a grand speech called “Jenkinsville High School, Farewell.”
I told myself that just because I was passed over for class office is no reason for me to feel bad. After all I’m not really a leader like a president or a vice president has got to be.
But probably more important, I stand convicted of exactly two crimes too many. The first charge is premeditated murder (after-the-fact—more than nineteen hundred years after the fact) of one Jesus Christ. Around here it is put more emotionally but less legally than that: “It was your people who killed our Lord.”
Once the charge was even made in home ec class (of all places!) by our teacher, Mrs. Henrietta Gibbons. I raised my hand to answer the lie, and when my hand wasn’t recognized by Mrs. Gibbons, I stood up anyway and spoke my piece. “Mrs. Gibbons,” I said in a voice trembling with fear and anger, “historians who don’t seem to have quite so many axes to grind as Baptists say that it was Roman soldiers and not Jews who committed that crime!”
Anyway, I think I should have been elected class correspondent even though Juanita Henkins can spell and punctuate rings around me. Because her vocabulary is rudimentary compared to mine. And that’s the truth!
It’s not because I’m smart, it’s only because words are my hobby. I would never want anybody from around here to know this, but I began studying Webster’s Elementary School Dictionary when I was in the second grade. By the time I was in the sixth grade, I had graduated to Webster’s Collegiate. And just last year my grandparents gave me the great Webster’s Second International Dictionary. Unabridged and indexed and on genuine India paper. But then it oughta be great. It cost twenty-five dollars!
But since my vocabulary isn’t that noticeably great, I wouldn’t have felt quite so upset about Juanita’s being the class correspondent if I wasn’t already a professional writer. I’ve written articles ranging from the Rice County Horse Show to the big Earle fire to the time last winter when Mr. Conrad Ellis, legislative assistant to Senator Fulbright, spoke before the Jenkinsville Rotary Club.
Now my being a stringer for the Memphis Commercial Appeal may not exactly intimidate Pearl Buck, but at fifteen cents per column inch, it’s not exactly nothing either. So would it have been so terrible for my classmates—far too much of a concession to this outsider—if they had allowed me to be class correspondent?
Besides having all the usual reasons for wanting one of the nine class honors, I guess I had still another reason. I needed an honor. Something that could erase from people’s consciousness the memory of my second crime. Anything to blot out some of the dishonor!
I’m making too much of it. After all, spending nine weeks in a reform school didn’t exactly make me a convict … did it? Besides, I truly believe that everybody has more or less forgotten all about that by now.
Sometimes though when I’m with somebody who seems especially nice, I want to ask them, personally speaking, if they ever think about that anymore. About what I did. But I always stop myself just in time because I know that it would only serve to remind people of the very thing that I need them to forget.
Also by Bette Greene
- Morning Is a Long Time Coming
- The Drowning of Stephan Jones
- Philip Hall Likes Me. I Reckon Maybe.
- Get On Out of Here, Philip Hall
- I’ve Already Forgotten Your Name, Philip Hall!
A Biography of Bette Greene
BETTE GREENE was born in Memphis, Tennessee, on June
28, 1934, and grew up across the Harahan Bridge in Arkansas cotton country, thirty-five miles west of Memphis. Bette’s first twelve years were spent in Parkin, Arkansas, a town of 1,100, with two streets and no stop signs, in the very buckle of the Bible Belt.
With the birth of the family’s second child, Marsha, the care and protection of four-year-old Bette became the responsibility of the family servant and housekeeper, Ruth, with whom Bette came to share a child-mother bond. Ruth, a long-suffering, spiritual black woman, engaged Bette’s precocious curiosity with stories and songs. In Ruth’s arms, Bette knew unconditional love, but also felt the fear and anguish instilled by the nightriders of the Ku Klux Klan.
Bette’s elementary school classroom was a place of despair: She and her classmates, many of whom were the shoeless and hungry children of sharecroppers, learned straight from the chalkboard with no access to books. When the last bell of the day rang, Bette knew many of her fellow students would join the black children in the cotton fields, working until dark.
At age seven, Bette, tired of the ten-mile walk to the nearest library from her small town, was allowed to travel to Memphis to visit her grandmother. After riding the train alone from Parkin to Memphis, Bette was met by her grandmother, Tilly, and a chauffeur, and driven to the Peabody Hotel. Tilly, the family matriarch, took Bette into her world. Their love and trust for each other grew over many lunches and conversation punctuated with Yiddish phrases.
On one such occasion, Tilly gave Bette a four-inch-thick dictionary. The gift fed Bette’s voracious hunger for knowledge, and she promised Tilly that she would learn every word. That same year, at Tilly’s request, Bette wrote a letter to Pope Pius XII begging for his help in locating Tilly’s brothers, missing in battle in Lithuania during World War II.
At age eight, Bette submitted an account of a Parkin barn fire, complete with burning cows, to the Memphis Commercial Appeal. The story was published and Bette received her first byline—and twenty-four cents—making her the youngest professional journalist of her time. Bette’s experience growing up in the only Jewish family in a suffocatingly small Southern town would later inform her award-winning novel Summer of My German Soldier.
After entering the University of Alabama in 1952, Bette became a consistent betting winner, putting her money on Coach Bear Bryant’s Crimson Tide. But when the English faculty ruled that Bette could not be admitted into the creative writing program until she completed courses of English grammar, Bette said, “Bye, bye ’bama!”
In 1953, Bette began school at Memphis State University. She became feature editor for the Tiger Rag while also writing for United Press International and publishing stories worldwide.
Then, in 1954, Bette took her tuition money and fled to Paris, France, enrolling at Alliance Française and spending a year studying French, life, and love.
In 1955, Bette returned to Memphis and began work as a freelance writer for the Commercial Appeal. At the same time, she turned down an invitation from Colonel Tom Parker to write about a new talent he was managing, an unknown singer named Elvis Presley, as it was known that the Colonel didn’t pay. Bette soon left for New York City and entered Columbia University to study writing. She quickly became Columbia’s “rising literary star” and was offered a significant publishing deal for her first novel, Counter Point, My Love. Unhappy with the novel, rather than accept the deal she tore up the manuscript and watched it burn in her fireplace.
Bette married Dr. Donald Sumner Greene, a neurologist from Boston, in 1959. Leaving her Southern roots, she moved to Brookline, Massachusetts, where her two children, Carla and Jordan, were born. In the security of their family home, Bette wrote Summer of My German Soldier while studying creative writing at Harvard University.
In 1973, after thirty-seven rejections, Summer of My German Soldier was published. The novel garnered numerous awards and honors, including the first Golden Kite Award from the Society of Children’s Book Writers, and the Massachusetts Children’s Book Award. The novel was also named a New York Times Outstanding Book and an ALA Notable Book, and was a National Book Award finalist. Summer of My German Soldier was translated into ten languages.
The television film Summer of My German Soldier would go on to win the Humanitas Prize for human dignity, meaning, and freedom in 1978, and that same year, Esther Rolle won an Emmy for her performance as Ruth. The screenplay was written and adapted by Bette Greene and Jane-Howard Hammerstein.
In 1974, Bette published her second novel, Philip Hall Likes Me. I Reckon Maybe. It was named an ALA Notable Book and a New York Times Outstanding Book and collected numerous additional honors including the Newbery Honor, the Kirkus Choice Award, and the Child Study Association of America’s Children’s Book Award.
Inspired by her readers, who demanded more adventures of Beth Lambert and Phillip Hall, Bette Greene wrote two more books in the Phillip Hall trilogy: Get On Out of Here, Philip Hall and I’ve Already Forgotten Your Name, Philip Hall!
In 1978, Bette published her sequel to Summer of My German Soldier, Morning Is a Long Time Coming. In 1983, Bette was awarded the keys to the City of Memphis. That same year she published Them That Glitter and Them That Don’t, a novel inspired by the real lives of Loretta Lynn and Dolly Parton, which received the Parents’ Choice Award.
In 1991, Bette published The Drowning of Stephan Jones. This book, based on the true story of the death of Charles O. Howard in Bangor, Maine, was banned, censored, and challenged by school boards, libraries, and parents across the country. To this day, the Eckerd Wilderness Camps use The Drowning of Stephan Jones as bibliotherapy, giving copies to campers who have been victims of abuse.
By 2010, Bette Greene’s readers had taken it upon themselves to create a Facebook page for her, as well as a page for Summer of My German Soldier, which includes performance videos about the love between Patty and Anton and even rap songs about Hitler.
In 2011, three years after the death of Dr. Donald Greene, her husband of fifty years, Bette discovered a manuscript for a book series long-forgotten in her computer titled Verbal Karate. She trademarked the title and earmarked a percentage of the book’s income for the Phoebe Prince Anti-Bullying Foundation, and returned to her island home and writing sanctuary to begin the final edits of Verbal Karate.
As a twenty-first century master author with four decades of fans worldwide, Bette Greene uses electronic media platforms and social networks to reach out and embrace her readers.
Bette Greene and her mother, Sadie (far left), organizer of the townspeople of Parkin, Arkansas, answering the nationwide call for scrap metal destined to become ammo for the war effort in 1942.
Bette (far right, wearing cowboy boots) next to her mother, Sadie, and across from her father, Arthur, “the best-dressed man in Parkin,” in their store, Evensky’s Dry Goods, in 1941. Evensky’s Dry Goods was the inspiration for the Bergen Department Store, the epicenter of Summer of My German Soldier, where Patty meets Anton.
Bette (right), age eight, with her younger sister, Marcia, and mother, Sadie, in their victory garden outside their home in Parkin, Arkansas.
Bette’s 1954 Alliance Français student ID card. Her time in Paris served as inspiration for her book Morning Is a Long Time Coming, the sequel to Summer of My German Soldier.
Bette Greene at age eighteen in Paris, France. This portrait was taken by her lover, French photographer Roger LeGrand, who would later serve as Bette’s inspiration for the character Roger, a freelance photographer—and Patty Bergen’s lover—in Morning Is a Long Time Coming.
Newlyweds Dr. and Mrs. Donald Sumner Greene cutting their wedding cake on June 14, 1959, in Memphis, Tennessee.
Bette Greene with Dr. William St. John and Massachusetts governor John Volpe, who is signing the Commonwealth’s Mental Health Bill, in 1960. Bette helped write and edit the text of the bill with Massachusetts lawmakers.
Bette holding her first child, Carla, at their house in Brookline, Massachusetts, in 1964.
The Greene family a
t their home in Brookline, Massachusetts, in 1975. From left to right: husband Donald, Bette, son Jordan, and daughter Carla. It was in this home that Bette wrote the groundbreaking Summer of My German Soldier.
Bette during a visit to Los Arboles Middle School in Marina, California, in 1988. Bette made many of these school visits, talking to students about writing and challenging them, as she often does in her books, to “speak their truth.”
Bette signing copies of The Drowning of Stephan Jones at the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) Annual Conference in 1991. The book, based on the true story of the murder of Charlie Howard in Bangor, Maine, in 1984, went on to join Summer of My German Soldier on the ALA list of Top 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 1990–2001.
Bette at the Dewey Boatyard in Culebra, Puerto Rico, where she lives part-time in her island home. Here, she joins the locals in calling for government aid after the destruction caused by Hurricane Earl in 2010.
Bette editing a new book series on her iPad in her garden in Boston, Massachusetts, with her cat, Polly Ester, in 2011.
Bette Greene with her collection of the original paintings and drawings created as covers for her award-winning books. This portrait was taken by friend and American master photographer Steve Dunwell.
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