” History of America “

Words and Music by Wayne Harper

Standing on Ellis Island, across the water to dry shores

I’m thinking about all of the people

Who passed through these halls and over these floors yeah

A human wave a mighty stream flowing like a sea

Hoping to realize American dreams

We’ve all come from distant borders trying to get a life

Some survive and some succumb, each one having to pay a price

To be on guard against the intrusion of a thief in the night

Bent on separation from the light

The history of America is a history of the world

The history of America is a history of the world oo la la la la la

Nature crawled as urban sprawled and devouring land

Living on top of each other what happens when the walls come tumbling down yeah,

If we stay strong we will carry on keeping faith in what is everlasting

Focused on the light of Universal Love

The history of America is a history of the world

The history of America is a history of the world oo la la la la la

My name is Wayne Harper. I am a singer song writer and a native of Kentucky. This is a song that was inspired by my mother and a trip to Ellis Island. My mother was born and raised in India. She met my father during the Second World War and moved to rural West Kentucky with him after they were married. They raised nine sons on a farm and taught us how to work and play music. It struck me that we Americans are the result of how the world has evolved and spawned the emigration of people from all over the globe to form our country thus making the history of the world our own. This song has relevance in light of the international nature of the Fall event at the Ky. Horse Park

Susie Bell, Midway KY

When Mom finally got it together to leave Dad, after 12 failed attempts and 12 years of marriage, it was in a high speed chase involving a handgun, a pickup truck, and some old Chevy, the latter of which I was made to “get down in the floor! get in the floor now!!” with my sisters. I could not see what was happening, but I learned some 50 years later that Dad had a gun and was chasing us in the pickup and Mom had pulled the Chevy into a repair bay at a gas station, the kind of place where they pumped the gas and you could get your car fixed. She jumped out of the car screaming, “close the door, he’s got a gun, close the door!” and they closed the door, and Dad drove on by not being able to find us and we then drove to Somerset.

At least, Mom says that that was the time that she left Dad, but I think it was another time. The time I remember was when I was in school and instead of going to class after lunch or getting on the bus; I can’t remember which, maybe both two different times, but I was pulled off of my routine by Mom, who was picking me up at school, and I was surprised because I didn’t know that she was going to do this because we always rode the bus except when Mom was leaving Dad, but I hadn’t figured that out. And I was not allowed to tell my friends good-bye, because nobody knew we were leaving, which was a strange feeling as we pulled away from the school driveway.

Not that it mattered a whole lot. I was so shy that I did not know the name of a single person in my class except my teacher. Truth is, I was something beyond shy; I was living in a world inside my head by that age, fourth or fifth grade, and was sometimes aware that other children had appeared in the classroom around me. So as we pulled away in the car, the only friend that I could think of to not say good-bye to was Agnes, the girl who sometimes sat next to me on the bus and who I thought of as sort of my friend.

The other time that I think that Mom finally left Dad was the day that I got into the pickup truck at school, where Mom had again picked us up instead of our getting on the bus, and all of our stuff that would fit in the truck was in it. The most colorful stuff was on top; the Barbie Dream House, other toys and games, like they were just going to be so much confetti driving down 27 to Granny and Granddaddy’s. They did not look secured. I think this must be the real time, because we did not go home again. We went to live at Granny and Granddaddy’s. Mom said the word “divorce” on the way to Somerset and I remember the woozy, weird feeling I got when she said it. The only people I knew who got divorced were in soap operas. I did not know of a single real incidence of real divorce. Were we still real?

A lot of our stuff did not make it on that initial trip to Granny’s. A lot of stuff that made it then did not make it to the apartment, where we went sometime during the next year. A lot of stuff was left behind when we left the apartment two years later, so I was always losing some favorite toys, beloved doll, or some other things that identified my life as “mine”, that told me that I belonged in this place because my doll or my book or some thing that I knew was there. Because I did not know my mother. I did not know who this new person was. Not that I was aware of this. And I soon did not know my older sister, Jennie, who developed rages. In fact, I was not at all sure of myself or my younger sister, Beth, who had been Beppie until the move.

When we first got to Granny and Granddaddy’s, people otherwise known as “Ruby” and “Charlie”, and “Mother” and “Daddy”, we were situated in their upstairs rooms and spent the first few days like we were on our usual visit. We sat on laps and hugged and got the Granny and Granddaddy treatment. If you are really lucky, you know what I mean. Then we kids were sent outside a lot while Mom and her parents “talked”. They talked a lot. After a time, my sisters and I were scheduled for doctor and dentist visits. This was the first time I had been to the dentist. My previous doctor visits had been limited to a shot of penicillin or a battery of immunizations. In those days, you got some of your immunizations at school. The Polio vaccine was administered to whole communities at the public schools. It has to have been cheaper than a visit to the doctor for each round of immunity.

On my first visit to a dentist, at the age of 10 years and 6 months, I had in the bottom of my left side jaw, right where the tip of my tongue could reach, a hole that would on occasion close over and then burst open and ooze pus. It had been there as long as I could remember. I thought everyone had one of those, in fact. I could put my tongue through it to the other, or out, side of my jaw. When it was open, it did not hurt. Poking my tongue through there helped to keep it open. But if I forgot, it would close up and throb and be so painful that I could not touch it and could not let anything, food or drink touch it. It would have to open up again by itself. It was in this condition that the dentist, who was the first adult to become aware of this phenomena occurring in my mouth, and who decided that I would have to have two teeth pulled. I was having to hold my mouth open for my second-ever dentist visit for what seemed like an excruciatingly long time, when the dentist announced that it would be easier to pull the two teeth involved if he pulled the one in front of them. So just like that, I got three teeth pulled on one sitting. Years later, I would not have those adult teeth for more than a few years, their development having been compromised by the chronic absess in my jaw.

This is included here because, in my memories, that visit to the dentist was all part of my parents’ divorce for me. Another part was that my Mommy, the mother who smiled so pretty and loved us and would help me hold the baby raccoon and other cool stuff, disappeared. We were in this new town where the kids did not say “Mommy” in the fifth grade. They said, “Mom”, so we said “Mom” pretty quickly. At the same time, my mother changed in radical ways. “Mom” was a woman who lied around crying and played sad Ray Charles records over and over again and cried. She was not able to see me or hear me much of the time. She had headaches in the middle of the night and I was asked to get up from my sleep and go to her bed and rub her back, get her cold wash cloths, and take care of her for what seemed like hours. My bed was a double shared with my two sisters. We had moved to a small shot-gun style duplex apartment on College St. Granny would have to come over and sit with Mom some nights for her headaches.

Everything was about the divorce and whether Dad loved anybody anymore. He did not keep any of the appointments to meet up with us in Lexington, it seemed. We had a Corvair at some point, unsafe at any speed, and it caught fire just about every time we drove up 27 toward Lexington. Mom would be out there in her beehive and a scarf pouring a jug of water on the motor. When the fire was out, she would jump back into the drivers seat and we would take off again. We would go to the old Phoenix Hotel in Lexington and wait for him to not show up. I would go into the elevator and ride up and down all the floors. After too many tripe of this, I got bold. I would climb up on the brass handrails, and they were handsome against the wood paneled walls, and I would stick my head out of the little trap door on top of the elevator car and watch the mechanical workings of the elevator. It was fascinating. One time, I saw what I thought was lovely little china box shaped like a heart with a lid, white with pink flowers on it. I asked Mom if she thought that Dad might buy it for me. She said “maybe”. When he didn’t show up, she slipped off and bought the box for me herself. I still have it on my dresser. It is my reminder to remember who really loves you, and who does not.

Jennie was increasingly troubled during this era of our childhood. Being without a father to protect us, she fell prey to a pedifile, our paternal grandfather. She was 11 and a naive country child. There is an innocence about country children and children who grow up away from the world. It is particularly hurtful that such an innocent child would be so violated. It hurts of of us deeply, to this day, any time we must think of it. There is no shame on her part, but there is shame associated with it. I shouldn’t tell this part. Nobody should ever tell.  The whole family will say that I should not.

But the fact that this happened to her blew our family apart. It completely altered our childhoods to a new level of nightmare. Understand here that she was a child, that through no fault of her own, she began to fly into rages with Beth and me, and nobody knew why or what to do. In those days, abuse was unthinkable. It just did not occur to anyone the possible underlying cause of her change in behavior. People blamed the divorce. They invented fiction about how close she had been to Dad, how she must have missed him. None of us were close to Dad.

The day that Beth and I read the love letters between our parents, which must have been letters that Mom wrote but did not send, in response to the letters in the box from him, Jennie had not come home from school. She had been beating us up every day, without mercy or warning. She threw a spatula at me and split my leg open. She seemed to have no limit as to what she would do to us.

When she did not come home that day, Beth and I did a strange thing. We tried to tell on Jennie without telling and without any awareness that we needed to tell or that we were telling or trying to tell. We went through the house and made it look like there had been a bloody struggle. We knocked over furniture, threw clothes on the floor and poured catsup through the mess, thinking that we wanted it to look like we had been killed. At the time, we thought we were being clever and funny. We said very little to one another about what we were doing together, and admitted very little to ourselves. Our emotions were so far from our awareness that we could not know the truth of what we were trying to say. What we could not say was that we were afraid that Jennie would kill us, or one of us, like we had been afraid that Dad would kill us. We made the house look like we had been killed, thinking that Mom would come home from work and find this. We crawled under the kitchen sink, a big old white enamel thing on metal legs with a curtain, and sat under there talking for some time, listening for anyone to come in. We got bored, so we went into Mom’s closet to look for something to do. We must have known that the letters were there because we got them down straight away and went back under the sink with the box of them.

We were under there when Mom came in, yelling for us and asking where was Jennie, why was the house such a mess and why hadn’t we cleaned it up, never noticing that it was supposed to be a murder scene. We were in big trouble for the mess and she never guessed our secret or heard our silent cry. To make matters worse,  Jennie was late because she had decided to join the band. She came breezing in asking for five dollars for her band fee as though a person could ask for five dollars at any given time in our house. I was so shocked at her brazen request, and mad that I could not bring myself to ask for anything, that I just went back into my shell for another ten or twenty years.

Jennie is my hero. She has every right to every praise we can give her for remaining sane and being a good sister to me these 54 years. This is her story, too. Even when she was in her rages, I knew that it was not about me or Beth, that something had possessed her and that it was not even her. She was gone during that time, lost in the divorce, not to be found again for many years. I love her so, and hope that she can understand the need to stop keeping some of our childhood secrets, for ourselves and for each other.

Mom gave birth to me, her second child, just two months after turning seventeen. She continued to live with her parents for a short while, but a second child sounded the final closing of her childhood and the end of their protective shelter. Her parents had two more children at home; twelve-year old Johnny and fourteen year-old Susan, for whom I was named.  They could not continue with the conjugal visits of Mom’s husband and unending pregnancies under foot. Mom had endured a miscarriage after a four month pregnancy  between Jennie and me. She would have one more baby girl fourteen months later and name her Elizabeth, after herself. We were all born Cesarian, as Mom was too small at fifteen for childbirth and stopped growing with the advent of four pregnancies.

Dad was in Covington working in a Kroger store meat department when his little family joined him. He is two years older than Mom and had graduated high school just before they married.  We lived in the projects on Scott Street and then in a two room apartment on Third Street, the latter in a condemnable Victorian building for which Dad had saved his money and bought for $1500. We shared a bathroom with six one-room apartments. Ours had a kitchen, so we had two rooms as the landlord family. Mom didn’t let us girls use the bathroom in the hall. We used a white enamelware pot with a red lined rim for a potty and bathed in a large galvanized tub. I remember watching my mother bathe, standing in that shiny gray tub in our kitchen. She was beautiful, but it was only in this moment that anyone could have taken time to notice. We kids slept three to the sofa or one in the double bed with Mom and Dad if it wasn’t too hot. We had a coffee table made from the base of an old wood burning stove that was  painted bright pink with gold trim. We had steam radiators, which made the room smaller in the winter. Too close meant burned. There was a bare bulb overhead, and the light was either harsh from that or eerie blue from the t.v.

We had an old wrought iron Victorian fence with finials on every other vertical rail and half circle wire on the others. Winos would stop and piss through the fence into our play yard while we watched, stopping with our toys and staring. At the other end of the yard were ferocious hunting dogs that Dad kept chained to dog houses. (They each got their own bedroom.)  We tried to play in the middle ground, but it was not possible to lose oneself in play in that place. “Beppie”, (our version of “Elizabeth”) got impetigo so often that Dad mixed and poured and leveled cement until he had filled in the whole yard. It wasn’t very big, just the a narrow space between two narrow buildings, which is probably why the winos thought that it was okay to stop there. All of the buildings were packed in tight in that German town built for workers to supply Cincinnati across the river. There were no luxuries of space.

There was a bar on every corner of our part of town. I would ask Dad what a bar was, and he would reply, “Well, which kind? A red one? A blue one? Why, there’s all kinds of bars..” and repeat this answer until I stopped asking. We would all ride around in his old car to cool off on summer nights. He would sing along with the radio and he knew all the words to all the songs. He looked and sounded a lot like Elvis. He loved it when they played “Blue Suede Shoes”. His voice would get stronger, he would get into character and he would rock that car. Dad went out to those bars, and at least once he brought home a badly beaten friend.

When I was six, my family moved to a two bedroom ranch house on five acres in the country, near the Licking River. We had our own bedroom for us three girls and an entire bathroom for our family. The house was new and felt palatial. It has to be all of 1000 square feet. The living room and dining room were “combined”. We already knew all about that. We had two twin beds in our room. Beppie and I shared one and Jennie got the other. My parents bought new furniture when I was eight years old, right around the time that President John F. Kennedy was killed. It was delivered the day of President Kennedy’s funeral. Mom sobbed so much and gestured toward the new t.v. that nobody could understand what she was saying and the movers had to guess as to where to put the stuff. I was in third grade.

We had four years of childhood there in that little house. It was like a member of the family, like a pretty princess who came to visit after the wicked witch had gone. We could play outside in the yard without a care in the whole world. I loved to climb the little maples planted out front and sway in the breeze for what seemed like hours. We loved best of all to run way up to the old apple tree on the hill behind our house. We felt far, far away and it was peaceful. There was always a breeze and a view, and sometimes there were apples. We were left to roam the fields; the world was safe then and nobody was watching or worried.

Dad put in a big garden, maybe half an acre or more, and we children were put to work in it. He would get us up at dawn and take us out to pick bugs off the potatoes or beans, giving us a coffee can with some kerosene in it and telling us to put the bugs in there. We would also be made to pull weeds, to plant the larger seeds for things like corn and beans and peas, to hoe and to work as hard and as long as we were physically able to do so. We knew better than to “make a peep”. We were already afraid of Dad. When he raised his voice, there was a threat in it that he never had to clarify. We learned to hate living in the country, to hate the garden, and to absolutely hate green beans. Dad grew 14 half-acre rows of green beans, which Mom dutifully canned, and I was in my 30s before I could eat them again.

Dad went hunting and fishing for all of our meat. Though he worked at Kroger in the meat department, he did not bring meat home to us. He kept a dozen or so hunting dogs in a pen out back and brought home a greasy box full of half rotten meat every night. He would cook this up on the stove and add dog food and water, and then haul the large bucket out to the pens. What we ate was what Dad caught. We spit buckshot out on our plates without knowing that everybody in the world did not do this. We liked squirrel, rabbit, pheasant, quail, frog legs, every kind of fish, and venison. I would sit on the step and watch Dad skin every kind of animal in our garage. I can’t remember now if you’re supposed to take the guts out first or after. Mom learned to cook whatever he brought through the door. She liked making things from scratch. We ate a lot of roe, wondering what the big deal was about caviar.

Mom took care of us and the house and helped Dad with his dogs and the yard. She put up all the vegetables by home canning and taught us how to do this. Dad helped the neighbors work on their farms and we got a baby raccoon out of that. “Elsie” is another story altogether. One time, she let an entire bucket of frogs loose in the garage, thinking that she was going to have a feast, I suppose. Those were going to be my birthday dinner, and Dad had worked hard enough to catch them. At one time, we had 25 dogs, nine cats, twelve quail (for training the dogs), six rabbits, a horse and a raccoon. The rabbits were going to be for eating, but Dad could not kill them by hand as easily as shooting the wild ones. They were more like pets.

Sometime in my middle childhood, Dad became a seriously violent man. I guess he didn’t have a bar nearby in which he could find a fight. There were times that I thought that he was going to kill Mom, and then he was going to kill me and my sisters. I had out-of-body experiences on nights like that. I wet the bed and sucked my thumb until Mom left him. I thought every night that the pounding of my heart was the sound of a monster coming up the basement stairs. Mom was high-strung and unable to bring a sense of serenity to the house whether Dad was home or not. Seems like he only came home long enough to beat her up and make her cook a meal. Beppie took to vomiting all the time, just out of nervousness. Jennie started to act tough. She went hunting and fishing with Dad. He showed his favor for her by kicking her across the front yard. He became a terror. He chased Mom and us with a gun, fathered other children with other women, got thrills out of pretending to shoot unsuspecting men with a blank pistol. I remember him telling another man about this in our kitchen, as though it was the best practical joke ever.

When I was ten, Mom left Dad and we moved back to Somerset. We stayed with Granny and Granddaddy for about six months until they could help Mom get an apartment. They lived in a stuccoed bungalow with three rooms upstairs. The front room, where we slept, had a dormer with the windows running floor to ceiling on the narrow end. I could sit or lay in front of that window and look straight into the trees. It helped me to not miss our trees that I had climbed at home. We only got to stay there for about six months. We moved on to a duplex owned by the Superintendent of the county schools. He and his wife were very nice and they lived next door. They had a lovely big house. Ours was a shotgun style cottage with a kitchen on the rear side. We had 3 rooms and a kitchen and a bathroom. I continued to share a bedroom with my sisters, but now we slept three to a double bed.

Mom did not have her high school diploma, having married at 15. She had three children to feed and no way to earn a living. Dad paid child support, but he fought it. it was often late and it was in no way adequate. There was no enforcement in those days. Mom went back to school. She attended the vocational school that was right across the street from where we lived. She studied secretarial skills and earned her general educational equivalent of a high school diploma. During this time, though, all we had to live on was the child support. There were no food stamps or welfare. I am sure that Granny and Granddaddy helped to some degree, though I doubt if they knew what we had to eat every night for supper. Mom was too anorexic herself during that time, what with the divorce, the chaotic and dramatic emotional state she was in, and the number of new things she was trying to do. I know now that she had post-traumatic stress disorder. In spite of this, my mother went from being a high school drop out to being an administrative assistant in the governor’s office within five years.

Since Mom was at school all day and had to study in the evenings, and since we basically had no money for groceries, she devised a rotating supper menu that we kids could help prepare. One night a week, we had spam and apple sauce. That is one can of spam and one small can of applesauce for four people. Add one can of peas and you have supper. The next night, we would have tuna, macaroni  and cheese and a can of peas. No more macaroni than a four ounce hunk of Velveeta would cover. Another night was one can of Campbell’s tomato soup and one sandwich each on a hamburger bun, with one slice of Velveeta cheese and one paper thin, difficult to peel without tearing, slice of ham. Hungry still? Well, don’t drink up the milk, don’t eat the cereal that’s for breakfast, and don’t touch anything in that refrigerator. Make some toast or bread and sugar.  On the weekends, Mom would make hamburgers or cook a chicken.  A chicken was meant to last two or three meals. The meals were okay; we were hungry and pretty much anything tastes good when you are hungry over a long period of time. The problem was, it was never enough food and I was always hungry.

For lunches, we had one slice of American cheese product on two slices of white bread and sometimes we had bologna. Our snack, the sugar bread, was white bread with margarine spread and white sugar sprinkled on. My mother never bought a bag of chips in my entire life before I left home. We did not have fresh fruit unless one of our grandparents brought it by or we got it in our stockings for Christmas. (We always got an orange in our stockings.)

We appreciated going to our grandparents and eating nice meals there. Our best dresses were the ones that Granny made for us. As it was, we had only enough clothes for each of us to get dressed each day. We had the beige skirt, the blue skirt, the white blouse, the red sweater, and so on. We had a chest of drawers and a closet for the four of us. We were all about the same size and so we shared our clothing. Sometimes I had to wear Mom’s old panties with a big safety pin to keep them up. Usually, my socks were folded over at the toe so that my toes did not stick out. As it was, I could not get through one week without having to wear both something dirty and something twice. I can still feel the humiliation of having to wear my mother’s worn-out panties. But I always had white gloves for church, and a dress from Granny to wear only on Sundays.

Mom remarried pretty soon. She married a life-long friend, most likely at the suggestion of their respective mothers, who were best friends. We moved to Lexington to another small ranch house, this time in the suburbs, and then to an apartment. Her new husband was a social worker. Theirs was a marriage of convenience, not romance. He was very gay and an alcoholic. She needed help and was good cover.

He was not paying much attention to the food menu and our meals remained spare. His idea of breakfast was one poached egg on two saltines. It was decided that we would each have this breakfast and that I would be in charge of preparing the meal every day. I would get up before the family and set the table, put the water on to boil, crumble the saltines into cups, and poach the eggs every day at 6:00. I got some sense of accomplishment from my small chore.

I was a teenager by this time. For my adolescence, with a man in the house we at least had meat. We had one pork chop each, one small potato, and one can of green beans for four of us. We had the same mac and cheese casserole, but we had meatloaf. We did not eat Spam anymore, and we had chicken through the week.

Susie Bell, Midway KY

“I am a transplant living in Floyd County. My favorite thing about Kentucky is the wave. When I first came here and I saw everyone wave I thought I must have met them somewhere and since I didnt’ want to offend my new neighbors, I’d wave back. I have come to realize that the wave is just people being friendly. I love it.”