Living to Tell: Collected Memoirs

By Eddy Douglas Brown

Spanning approximately forty years, these memoirs are tied together with the thematic thread of a writer-to-be coming of age. They chronicle his discoveries of nature, family, love, community and self. For several years he becomes immersed in music as a member of an R&B and jazz band. During the 1960s Civil Rights Movement he narrowly escapes, but has a close look at death by the hands of law enforcement officers in of all places, a college campus. He drops out of college, fights off drug abuse and winds up in the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War. After regaining his equilibrium, he continues his higher education, and realizes some measure of personal success. During this time he is recruited by the CIA. The final piece, "Rewind", reveals a mature, stable, self-aware man who knows who he is and where he fits into the world as he now sees it-a still-racist world that is reluctant to embrace him, but one in which he is determined and prepared to realize his long-recurring dream of being a writer. Engaging and articulate, these memoirs go beyond being one person's life excerpts, to reflecting American history and culture, and human search for self.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Mar 2, 2001
• ISBN: 9781469702124

Eddy Douglas Brown

Eddy Brown grew up in the Myrtle Beach area of South Carolina. He has an M.A. degree in English from The University of Arizona in Tucson, and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Goddard College in Vermont. He is an Emeritus Member of the Faculty in writing and literature at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA.

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All Rights Reserved © 2001 by Eddy Douglas Brown

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Contents

INTRODUCTION

ANT LIONS AND DRAGONFLIES

SURVIVING CHILDHOOD GAMES

MAMA EVELYN

MAKING MUSIC

REPARATION

MASSACRE AT ORANGEBURG

THE BUDDY SYSTEM

BOOT CAMP

HUACHUCA

THE RECRUIT

DESERT RENAISSANCE

REWIND

REFERENCES

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

INTRODUCTION

REGARDLESS OF MY ethnicity, and the fact that I may draw extensively on that background, given a choice, I prefer not to be labeled purely or solely as a black writer. That being said, I would be proud to have my name as a writer grouped with the likes of Toni Morrison or Richard Wright, either of whom may or may not care (or have cared in the case of Wright) about being labeled as black writers, or may even prefer it. After all, in indisputable ways, they are. These individuals who happen to be black have distinguished themselves as literary artists of the highest order. Another name that comes to mind is James Baldwin. I usually hedge when asked who is my favorite writer. But if pressed, I would probably name Baldwin. In his Introduction to Notes of a Native Son, he says something with which I wholly agree: One writes out of one thing only—one’s own experience…This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art.

Writers who happen to be white aren’t typically or in a knee-jerk fashion called white writers, even if they write only about white experiences. Yet writers of color are reflexively, unconsciously, often exclusively categorized according to their race, ethnicity or both. Many, of course, for varied reasons—none of which I wish or need to judge—categorize themselves.

Whether as writers, police officers, supervisors, parents or individuals, much can be said to justify or validate self-identity based on ethnicity, race or other group affiliations. Pride in a group affiliation can be a powerful, positive vehicle for self-esteem and community building. But when that pride degenerates into an ism it remains powerful, but often plays out in disdainful, dehumanizing ways. A common scenario is that some group or individual is marginalized, oppressed, physically brutalized or worse, to keep the perpetrator’s power and ego intact. Human history, contemporary news reports, literature and films are brimming with ugly examples. The odds are good that countless others were never documented, or that you have witnessed or been involved in one of these aberrations.

I contend that social labels and categories are discretionary, artificial, and politically problematic—particularly race. As well, that history—the dynamic, actual events, not just their documentation and interpretations—has led us to this linguistic, social and political conundrum, which may never be resolved to consensus satisfaction. Following then, at the risk of excessive digression, is what I consider a significant step along our collective paths to this problem with a capital P.

Two Europeans, Carolus Linnaeus (b.1707), and later Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (b.1752), with whatever initial intent, developed the race classification system. The powers that be co-opted it; and now the world-at-large takes it to be as factual as the Earth’s circumference, the number of feet in a mile or the half-life of plutonium. Blumenbach, in 1795, released the third edition of his pivotal work, DeGeneris Humani Varietate Nativa (On the Natural Variety of Mankind), which was based heavily on his conviction that Caucasians—a label he contrived—were superior in beauty and brainpower, and consequently ranked them ahead of the other so-called races. This document set off—at the very least stoked—the racist firestorm that has blighted global culture. He allegedly researched for its own sake more than to change world views (though perhaps to confirm some). But as the piece was released in Latin, he wasn’t writing for a general audience, rather, for the literate, privileged, power brokers of the time.

Regardless, he was taken quite seriously. The victims of his findings never knew what hit them. Sadly, by the time they did, most were unable to fend it off, and too many of them in effect exacerbated their own demise by locking themselves inside Blumenbach’s classes out of racial pride, and worse, lashing out when that self-labeling was challenged. They confused race, the artificial construct, with culture, the authentic, organic phenomenon. To his credit, however, Blumenbach allegedly later conceded to the superficial nature of racial groups and their rankings, had a special library of works by black authors, and apparently understood that it would be superhuman to become a great textual intellectual during an era when it was illegal—punishable by death—to learn to read and write. Alas, the damage was already done.

Meanwhile, unavoidably—and thankfully for the resultant richness—I perceive and experience the world as an African-American. (I happen to see that distinction as an ethnicity rather than a race, although race is inextricably implied and co-mingled for the reasons given above.) But it is only one of my world view windows or lenses. I am also a heterosexual male, an artist, a Southerner, a Westerner, a Greener (those of us closely affiliated with The Evergreen State College, where I now teach), and assorted other identities, alternately and in combinations—in both-and, rather than either-or fashion. Occasionally, one of my friends, who came from Chile as a youngster, speaks emphatically about what’s wrong with America. Now, I don’t necessarily find her observations, opinions or criticisms untrue or undue. I have plenty of my own complaints. But because I am—like it or not, and in whatever proportion of my identity—American, I find myself flinching and feeling under fire. I appreciate and, in a second-hand way, take pride in African art and culture; I have African friends and acquaintances. Certainly, Africa is literally and figuratively at the root of my ethnic heritage; but as a citizen and individual, I am not from Africa, and have yet to even stand on African soil. Although parts of my childhood would give little or no indication of my ethnicity or so-called race, I could also relate things that emphatically and unmistakably signify my ethnic and cultural heritage.

Like white boys growing up in Illinois or elsewhere in America, I collected stamps and baseball trading cards, played marbles, had a Lionel train set, was captain of my Little League baseball team. I made and flew kites, went hunting and fishing, and watched the World Series on TV with my dad, who told me, among many other anecdotes, about how he accidentally shot off one of his fingers during World War II. (It was re-attached, is still discernibly a bit crooked, but remains functional.) How as a G.I. playing O’Grady Says (a military or adult version of Simon Says), he once won tickets to a Sugar Bowl game in New Orleans. I played cornet and French horn in my high school bands and competed in all-state band auditions. Most of those activities probably make my gender obvious, but there is nothing categorically African or black about those parts of my childhood. But consider the following pieces of that upbringing.

I had no white friends until I served in the army around 1970, by which time I had concluded my teens. I went to public school in a totally segregated system. Every classmate, teacher and principal was black, as were the student teachers from the historically black colleges around the state. In retrospect, I can see that the demographics of that schooling served to reinforce in me the idea that many blacks went to college and entered honorable professions as a matter of course; it was even expected among many of my high school classmates. I was amazed—but not altogether surprised—to discover how many people in my racially segregated high school class of about 125 were now college graduates, including some LL.D.s, Ph.D.s and M.D.s. Even so, although blacks and whites lived within the same town limits, saw and interacted with each other daily, we were socially—and often economically—on different planets.

Even the beaches were separate. Just north of Myrtle Beach is what used to be called Atlantic Beach (now called North Myrtle Beach and known in part for being the hometown of Vanna White). Large wooden dance patios were scattered around the fringes of the northeast corner of the colored beach. While just down the coast, whites did the Shag at the Myrtle Beach Pavilion or some other whites only venue, in Atlantic Beach the latest R & B hits blasted through megaphone-speakers, providing the music for doing the Shing-a-ling and varied other unnamed dances. Jackie Wilson, Wilson Pickett, the Shirelles and James Brown ruled the jukeboxes.

The Atlantic Beach businesses—the dance patios, which also sold food and drinks including booze in paper cups, the restaurants and motels—were all black-owned and did a booming business from Easter to Labor Day. As with Myrtle Beach, most of the vacationers were not Horry (pronounced oh-ree) County residents, and business was primarily seasonal.

Myrtle Beach hosted a black community, which was centered around a hip but potentially dangerous night-life area known as The Hill. Most of the black summer visitors, so to speak, worked at restaurants, motels, hotels and the homes of wealthy whites. I spent a summer boiling corn-on-the-cob in a 10-gallon pot and being a soda jerk at the Pavilion arcade, amid the odors of Coppertone, cotton candy and seafood, and the loud, chaotic sounds of the adjacent amusement park.

As indications of progress, some ten years later, during the 1970s, my brother Quantrel would compete in a Myrtle Beach open tennis tournament, work at the Myrtle Beach Sun-News as an advertising artist, then run his own advertising art business. Just before retiring in the 1980s, my father would supervise the golf course maintenance crew at the Myrtle Beach Air Force Base. During the 1990s, my nephew, Braxton III, would appear in national brand TV commercials and have speaking parts in three nationally released films (including Once Upon a Time When We Were Colored) by age ten. These examples are not simply to chronicle my family’s overcoming—or maybe just enduring—the aftermath of racial segregation; rather, again, to partially illustrate some changes in the social and economic status quo in a geographical palimpsest: the South of my childhood, where the separation of blacks and whites seemed to be given little thought, or thought to be no more inappropriate than separate rest rooms for men and women.

So, whether I am ultimately