White Like Her

by Gail Lukasik

  “Cannot be restored to a duty status” turns my stomach. Of course, this was before posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) became a symptom of a severe psychological condition often associated with being in combat.

  Once fully discharged from the army, the war would not leave my father who suffered from persistent bouts of malaria and shell shock (PTSD).

  In the first years of my parents’ marriage, they lived with my father’s parents in the small upstairs apartment, conducive neither to my father’s recovery or their marriage. It would take my parents almost two years to conceive me.

  My mother painted a bleak picture of their early marriage. “He’d wake in the night screaming. He’d shiver and sweat from the malaria.” She put her hand to her throat. “One night he tried to strangle me. He thought I was the enemy.”

  The war had psychologically crippled my father. Whatever he had seen, whatever he had done had changed him forever. He would never fully recover. As he said, “I wasn’t the same man.” And he never would be.

  Seven months after my father returned to civilian life, after nearly four years in the army, an article appeared in the Cleveland Plain Dealer detailing my father’s struggle to secure his GI Bill of Rights.

  “Three times he has sought benefits supposedly available to qualified veterans under the bill. Three times he has been denied.” The article calls him a hero of Buna, listing his two Presidential Citations and the near loss of his vision in the right eye.

  Unable to attend college for a degree in architecture because of his inability to secure his GI benefits, needing to earn a living to support a wife, and still tormented by the war he turned to alcohol for relief, to erase the memories that crept in at night and the bitterness that would not leave him. His would be a life-long addiction that nearly killed him in 1979 and caused years of havoc for our family.

  Some memories stay with me as well.

  The late afternoon sun blazes the window over the kitchen sink, sending shards of light around the room. The radio plays Blue Moon. The radio plays from morning to night as if the music can take away my mother’s loneliness. I sit at the gray Formica table coloring leaves on a tree, the leaves are different shades of green: olive green, dark green, yellow green. I am seven years old. It is important to stay inside the lines. It is important to be obedient.

  My mother stands at the sink holding up my father’s bottle of sweet sherry that she found hidden in a cabinet, screaming at him, “Choose, choose. Me or the drink.” When he doesn’t answer, she tips the bottle and lets the sherry pour into the sink.

  His hands are by his side. He stands helplessly watching her, making no attempt to stop her or reason with her. He appears stunned by her rage, the audacity of what she is doing.

  I’m wishing I could run away and hide. I’m wishing I could escape into the tree of the many shades of greens. But I can’t. Instead I concentrate on the sherry’s amber color as it streams from the bottle, the way the liquid catches the light from the window in the green kitchen of the old house on West 98th Street where the night we moved in a tornado hit, stranding us in the dark house where no one now is happy.

  When the bottle’s empty, she smashes it to pieces, marring the porcelain sink, glass flying everywhere. My father leaves the kitchen. I hear the front door close and the car rumble away. My mother doesn’t cry. She takes the broom and dustpan from the closet and bends to her task of broken glass, of what she has done, of her rage that has no end.

  Somewhere in the house my brother wakes from his nap crying.

  21

  Hiding in Plain Sight

  Parma, Ohio, 1950s/1960s

  SEVEN MILES SOUTHWEST of Cleveland, Ohio, the suburb of Parma was the bastion of whiteness in 1954. After World War II when my parents bought a tract house in Parma, the suburb was experiencing tremendous growth as part of the nationwide post-war housing boom. Between 1950 and 1960, its population grew from 28,897 to 82,845. By 1956, one year after we moved to Parma, it was the fastest growing city in the United States with a heavy first-generation Polish American population.1 The GI Bill and the population’s move out of the cities and into the suburbs fueled its growth. War-weary soldiers flocked to the green suburbs wanting a fresh landscape where they could put the war behind them.

  Our lower middle-class neighborhood was composed mostly of blue-collar workers and nuclear families where the women stayed home to raise the children and the men went to work. There was one exception to the stay-at-home mothers on our street: my girlfriend’s mother who worked as a secretary in Cleveland. Her life away from home was exotic and alluring to me, made more so by our forays into her closet where her business suits and tailored dresses were shrouded in garment bags. We’d unzip the bags one by one releasing the stale scent of her perfume and sweat, then we’d select suits and dresses to try on, every one as somber and quiet as her mother with tightly permed, fawn-brown hair. When I asked my friend, an only child, why her mother worked, she told me a doctor said she had to or she’d be too depressed.

  There were no people of color on our street, except for one family, two houses south of us, the Nakaos, a Japanese American family, who kept mostly to themselves.

  Parma, specifically Lincoln Avenue, at least our block of Lincoln, was the kind of neighborhood where when a heavy summer rain fell, causing the sewers to overflow, we’d take off our shoes and wade in the water, splashing each other.

  One summer I started a neighborhood newspaper, gathering news from the other stay-at-home moms and typing up the news on the old Underwood typewriter in the basement, then sending my brother out to deliver copies to the same neighbors who’d given me the news, charging them a modest dime for the paper.

  We stayed up late on the cool Ohio summer nights catching June bugs in glass jars, their fluorescent glow flickering like some magic trick, until we were called inside for bed. It was very Ozzie and Harriet, at least on the surface, held together with religion and societal mores.

  Parma spun with safety and repression. I’d ride my bike most evenings escaping my troubled household, roaming the streets, sometimes venturing to the next town, Seven Hills, with its rolling hills that were no challenge for my young, strong muscles. Summer offered me escape, and I escaped as often as I could.

  What motivated my mother to choose Parma? She wanted something new, a house no one else had ever lived in, with no one else’s memories and scents. She’d grown up in a boarding house run by her great-grandmother, Mary Brown Williams, sharing space with strangers. She’d been an interloper in her own life, dependent on hospitality and charity from this or that relative, succumbing to their tastes, their likes and dislikes. A newly built house was like a blank canvas to her. She could put her own mark on it.

  But more than that she wanted a house that matched her newly created life, not like the tornado house with its dark corners and creaky stairs where, no matter how hard she scrubbed the walls and floors, certain odors lingered. In this new house, she and my father could start anew, could be different people.

  Our house was one of the first built on our block. The subdivision was so new, the builders had yet to pave the street. There were no lawns, no garages. The house reeked of new wood and fresh paint. Every time a car passed our house, a trail of dust lingered behind it. My mother complained of the dirt and dust.

  Once shed of the city and its isolated pockets of diversity, she must have realized the daringness of her choice of a white suburb. Was she laughing up her sleeve like her father likely did during World War I when he passed for white in the North in Indiana? Was she fearful someone would find out her secret? Or had she by this time felt that if her husband hadn’t guessed then nobody would?

  Though she kept her opinions to herself, she followed the burgeoning civil rights movement that was heating up across America with particular interest.

  In 1955, our first year in the Parma house, Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama, city bus, sparking the Mont
gomery bus boycott and bringing Martin Luther King, Jr. to the forefront of the civil rights movement. A year earlier, the Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown v. Board of Education overturned the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision. State laws on segregation were deemed unconstitutional. Public schools could no longer discriminate on the basis of race, paving the way for integration.

  Whatever she felt about these legal changes that had ruled her life and determined it, forcing her to make the difficult decision to leave her home and pass as white, she never said. And whatever progress was being made for racial equality in the United States, it had little to no effect on my mother’s personal circumstances and her day-to-day existence in the white suburb. It was almost as if she was in a witness protection program.

  Closer to home, tensions were rising in the rigidly segregated East Side of Cleveland where the majority of African Americans lived. In 1966 the predominantly black Hough neighborhood erupted into a race riot purportedly sparked by the owner of the Seventy-Niners’ Café who refused to give a black customer a glass of water and subsequently posted a sign outside the café that read: NO WATER FOR NIGGERS. The riots lasted six nights and resulted in the death of four African Americans.2

  In the working class town of Parma, many white people’s attitudes toward racial segregation held firm, regardless of the changing laws. Their attitudes were born of cultural racism, fostered in the tight ethnic Cleveland communities, where many of them grew up. My father was one of those racists.

  Though the streets of Parma offered safety, more immediate dangers of another kind resided inside our tiny Cape Cod tract house on Lincoln Avenue so alike in appearance to the other houses it was not uncommon in the dark to pull into the wrong driveway, which my father did on more than one occasion.

  It’s one of those rare July days when the sky is so untroubled everything appears brighter, crisply defined. In the long concrete driveway that leads from our house to the garage, I practice shooting basketballs as my father taught me, arcing the ball as I aim for the hoop. The repetition of the practice matches the slow lazy day. My mother drags the garden hose across the back lawn and then waters the tomato plants near the garage. Their greenish orbs hang heavy on the vine as if they too have had enough of summer.

  It’s late afternoon. Soon my father will be home from work. Already I’m planning the long bike ride far from home when the sun shimmers into evening.

  From the corner of my eye I spot my brother sneaking into the house through the side door, not bothering to interrupt my game as he usually does by swatting the ball from my hands and taking a wild shot. Something is up.

  After my mother finishes the watering, she coils the hose and places it behind the house. She rarely works in the yard, her domain confined to the domestic, cleaning and cooking. Even this briefest of tasks in the glare of the summer sun requires her big floppy hat and long-sleeved cotton blouse and slacks.

  Turning to retrieve the ball that has bounced away from me, I see Mrs. Nakao, our neighbor, walking down our driveway. She’s never come to our house before. And that alerts me.

  My mother looks up and says hi.

  Mrs. Nakao is a small woman with a pretty face. “Alvera,” she begins. I can tell by the way she stands hunched and furtive as if she can make herself smaller, and the soft tone of her voice that something is wrong and she’s come to ask something of my mother who is not her friend, only her neighbor.

  I glance toward the house and see my brother’s face at the kitchen window and know that whatever reason Mrs. Nakao is here has something to do with my brother and Mrs. Nakao’s son, Jimmy, who is my brother’s summer friend.

  “The boys were playing,” she says, not raising her eyes, “and well . . . Did a woman come by here?”

  “No. Why?” my mother answers, tilting her head.

  “The boys were taunting that new boy who moved in at the end of the block. It might have gotten out of hand. There was some shoving, some name-calling. The mother stormed over to my house very angry. Jimmy said the other boy started it by calling him a dirty Jap. I told her I’d talk to Jimmy and you.”

  “Alvera, would you handle it,” she pleads, briefly touching my mother’s arm. “You know I can’t say anything.” The “you know” hangs in the warm summer air rife with meaning, words she’s hesitant to say but that she senses my mother would understand.

  An uneasy expression comes over my mother’s face as she considers what the woman is asking her to do. Then she agrees to talk to the irate mother. “I’ll talk to her,” she says.

  Later when I learn of my mother’s mixed race, I remembered this incident and wondered what thoughts swirled through her mind being asked to be the white emissary with this other white woman. Of course, she was the logical choice to intercede with an incensed white mother who might hurl racial slurs at Mrs. Nakao, so visibly Japanese American. The war was still fresh in everyone’s minds.

  I can see my mother straightening her shoulders, brightening up her makeup, then walking to the woman’s house, facing the angry mother with the confidence that only a white woman could have with another white woman.

  I hear her measured words: “I’m sure the boys didn’t mean any harm.” Leaving the irate mother to figure out which boys she was talking about.

  My father’s racism was a reflection of his upbringing in the close-knit Cleveland Bohemian neighborhood. Though he never used the N-word, he was vocal about his bigotry using words such as jig-a-boo, spear chucker, and coon, deriding the African American race for lack of ambition and criminality.

  My mother reprimanded him with little vigor. “You shouldn’t talk like that, Hal.” Was she afraid to be too insistent, bringing too much attention to the race issue?

  Quixotically, my father’s bigotry didn’t extend to an African American man who worked for him when he was the maintenance supervisor for a building on Euclid Avenue in the heart of downtown Cleveland, his last position before alcoholism ravaged his body—another medical discharge of sorts.

  There’s a photo of my father and his men in the makeshift kitchen he installed in the basement of the building where the men could cook their meals. Because my father and his men’s workday started around seven in the morning, sometimes they would make breakfast before beginning work. My father spoke highly of this black tradesman with the unusual name of Argosy.

  Once when my mother’s patience wore thin with my father’s racism, the barbs hitting too close to home, though he didn’t know that, she protested, “How can you talk about colored people that way and work with Argosy?”

  My father huffed. “Well, he’s not like the rest of them.” In my father’s universe of selective racism Argosy, the hard-working black man, got a pass, was exceptional, and most likely proved my father’s rule about black people being lazy and shiftless.

  Would my mother have received the same pass as Argosy or would her deception been beyond forgiveness?

  And how did she endure his racist remarks? Did they beat on her like a hard cold rain? Or had she convinced herself that she deserved it for the lie that sat at the heart of their marriage? Is this why denial was the cloak she wore night and day?

  The slow ticking silence is broken only by the sounds of my mother filling our plates as we sit around the cramped kitchen table festooned with a scalloped white bowl of waxed fruit that crowds the table but that my mother refuses to move. The claustrophobia of the space does little to encourage closeness. We are sardines in a can.

  Tonight it’s pork, sauerkraut, and dumplings. The food holds little interest for me. I’m chronically underweight with jutting bones and safety pins to cinch my skirts’ waistbands.

  I can tell by the mottled red of my father’s face that he is seeped with drink. At thirteen I recognize the signs, watch for them, like storm clouds on a horizon, harbingers of danger, alerting me to take shelter as quickly as I can. His drink this evening is sherry: acrid smelling, sweet, and inviting. His pores seem to ooze with the scent.

 
Glancing past my brother and father who sit opposite me, I can see the living room, the door with its three oblong windows, my father’s recliner, and the stairs leading up to my bedroom, my refuge.

  When my mother sits down, my father stops eating and glares at her. “You didn’t have shoes until you met me.” The disdain in his voice makes me stop eating as well.

  I look across the table at my brother. He’s shoveling food into his mouth, his head down. I know he’s thinking up something funny or outrageous to say, something to deflect what we both know is about to happen.

  “I had shoes.” My mother’s answer is tinged with outrage. The sleeves on her white blouse are rolled up, exposing her shaved arms that seem wounded with perfection.

  My father starts eating again, stabbing at his food as if it is the source of his anger; his face now has a purplish hue like the drink in the strange turquoise plastic glass.

  “Before you married me you didn’t have shoes,” he blurts at her with contempt as if he can’t figure out why he’s sitting eating her food, staying in this marriage.

  I shift in my seat wanting the meal to end, for my father to rise from the table, and go into the living room, turn on the television, and fall asleep in his recliner.

  “Of course, I had shoes before I married you,” she says. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  I don’t know if I want her to continue defending herself or to stop talking. My stomach clutches around my food.

  “You were walking around the bayou with no shoes. If it wasn’t for me, you’d still be there with the crocodiles.”

  “I never lived in the bayou.” Her voice is smaller now, quieter.

  I want to come to her rescue. “She grew up in New Orleans, in a city,” I want to say. But I’m afraid. I stare at my plate. I’ve hardly touched my food and I know I won’t escape the table unless I eat most of it because my parents’ escalating anger will need a place to land.