Virginia, 1975

March, 1975 -- my dad received his transfer orders back to Fort Lee, Virginia from Korea at the tail end of January 1975. We stayed in temporary military quarters for a while, but within a few weeks, my parents had closed on a 3 bedroom brick house, just 20 minutes away, in the town of Petersburg. All cash, $20,000. It was located at 533 Kenwood Drive, and is still visible on Google maps. From the outside, it looks exactly the same now, as it did then. When my family lived there, it had three separate bedrooms, one bathroom, a living room, a kitchen, and a large family room that had been converted from a garage.

Family Room

The family room was actually 3 stairs down from the rest of the house, and adjacent to the kitchen. It had wall-to-wall red shag carpeting, and wood-paneling on the walls. Originally, my mom used this room for her sewing machine and seamstress equipment. Several years later, my parents remodeled. They bought a second small tv and couch, along with a heavy duty wall unit air conditioner. My mom also bought a refurbished industrial sewing machine with cast iron parts, and a dress mannequin. She started doing side jobs, making custom curtains, dresses, and occasionally, she’d work on period costumes for people who participated in civil war reenactments. My sister and I used this room to do our homework, and to practice pro wrestling moves. I was even allowed to hook up my atari console to the new tv. The family room was the only place in the house where any of us were allowed to bring food beyond the kitchen. When the A-Team debuted in 1983, this was absolutely essential to me. It was not a big deal if I missed the very beginning of the intro -- the stock Vietnam war footage of soldiers jumping out of the Huey -- but if I were to miss the part where the screen fades to red, and the machine gun sound effects notched out the white silhouette of the “A-team”, I’d be in a bad mood for the next ten minutes. In my mind, whoever thought up that little bullet-inspired flourish was one of the greatest creative minds of the twentieth century.

Non-dooree-room

Adjoining the family room was the laundry room, which my mom pronounced as the non-dooree-room. It was a ten by ten cement floor room that, in addition to laundry, was used for adhoc storage. It had a storm door that led out to the backyard. I suppose rich people up north would call this a mudroom. Because my mom thinks of herself as a crafty and resourceful immigrant, it wasn’t long before this room also became a vegetable drying and pickling area for the things she grew in the yard. The first year, she planted several rows of turnips, squash, scallions, cabbage, peppers, sesame leaves, and soy beans. My sister and I would help out as much as we could. With the easy stuff, like peppers, my mom would have us walk up and down the rows of the garden, pick whatever was ripe, and bring it all back into one of the several screened boxes my dad had built. These were twenty four inch square drying apparatuses he made from pine boards. Two of the sides had screw-in handles, and the bottom was chicken wire. They were lightweight, stackable, comfortable to hold, and easy to walk with. After hosing everything down outside, we’d let it air dry, and bring it into the non-dooree-room for my mom for further processing.  By the fall, the room was filled with several huge stone jars - grey, unpainted behemoths, twenty inches in diameter, two feet high, and weighing a minimum of 40 pounds. She had managed to buy a few from a Korean grocer somewhere close to Washington DC. Some of the jars had lids, others were topped with cheese cloth held in place by cooking twine. The room always had a pungent odor that my dad described as “spicy dog shit”. My main recollection of it was that it teemed with bugs. I didn’t mind so much, but I absolutely hated being the first one to enter, and turn the light on -- mostly out of fear that something small and squirmy would run across my hand as I ran it along the wall, looking for the light switch.

Living Room

For my sister and me, the living room was the proper entrance to our world. It was where my dad would first come in when he returned from work, where we kept the Christmas tree and the television. In the days before school, when my dad arrived home from work, he’d open the screen door, then the storm door, and walk in, dressed in camouflage fatigues. My sister and I would be in front of the television, either watching Kimba the White Lion or Star Blazers. We’d stay right where we were until the storm door closed shut, then get up and run to him just as he was unlacing the top eyelets of his combat boots. We’d each hug one of his legs, then plop our butts down -- me on one foot, my sister on the other -- and lock onto him by criss crossing our feet. Then he would lumber forward into the living room toward the kitchen, in slow halting steps with each of us balanced on a foot, and he would stretch out his arms stiffly and contort his hands and make weird sounds, and that would make us laugh like crazy. On some days, he’d head over to his bedroom and lay down a while for a nap. Sometimes, my sister and I would go in and lay down with him, and we’d all fall asleep for half an hour or so. I liked being on his left side, closer to the bedroom door. I remember rubbing my forehead up against his cheek and chin. The feeling of his beard stubble made me giggle. I remember his breath and face always smelled like coffee, and his hands like gasoline.

The Neighbors

Our house belonged to a semi-circular compound of two and three bedroom houses situated north of Blackwater swamp and west of I-95. The neighbors were a cross section of Philip Morris factory workers, military families, mechanics, truck drivers, and sewage plant workers -- predominantly white, but beginning to tilt black by the time we moved in. Some people (who were not at all very fine) didn’t appreciate the shifting demographics. Our first year there, around the time I was four years old, I remember waking up late at night, and hearing my parents open and shut the front door. My sister was too young to realize what was happening. She may have even slept through it. But I remember standing inside by the entryway with my face pressed up against the wire mesh of the screen door. I watched as the local fire department put out a burning cross that had been attached to a cherry tree out on the front lawn of the house across the street. A handful of the nearby neighbors came out of their houses, and milled around on foot to watch, huddled around the fire truck. Some of the men didn’t even bother to put on shirts.

The White Family

Perry and Esther White lived closest to us. They were a colored couple, older than my parents, with three teenage daughters: La Tonya, Peedie, and Ranita. Perry drove a beer delivery truck, and during most summer weekends, I’d see him outside while I was playing in the yard, nursing a can of Budweiser in his right hand. On sunny days when he wasn’t working, he enjoyed shuttling back and forth from his barbecue grill to the shed, usually carrying something odd in his non beer-holding hand: an extension cord, a lawn jart, or a small tool for barbecuing. Most people in the neighborhood who could afford a shed had one. Perry’s was the nicest. The whole structure was the size of a very small apartment, and was propped up on wooden four by four stilts so it sat about eighteen inches up off the ground. From a quick glance, it could pass as a miniature wood-frame house. All four sides were painted white. It had a solid core wood door with a deadbolt on it, a shingled roof and two glass windows on the sides that faced our yard. From my swing set, I could examine it pretty close up, and would daydream about what it might be like to live inside of it, and to use it as a clubhouse or base of operations. On most occasions, when Perry was off from work, and felt the urge to barbecue, he wore dark brown short pants, a dark tank top underneath an open short sleeve buttoned shirt, and “shower shoes” with dark brown or black socks. On days like that, he always kept two things very close by: a flyswatter and a can of beer.

Esther was a teacher at Peabody High School - which is where the colored kids went. On nice days, she liked to wait until the sun was coming down, then sit outside on a folding beach chair next to Perry. She wore long dresses, and smoked Virginia Slims. For a few years, she would babysit me and my sister, and on those days, we’d play Uno and Backgammon. She would let us play records of the Jackson Five, and we’d sing along as best as we could. For lunch, she would let us eat Oscar Mayer hot dogs right out of the package, and she made us Ichiban brand instant ramen, which I loved. Occasionally, she would substitute in a Lipton’s cup of instant soup, which was a disappointment. In Esther’s living room, there was a thick amber glass ashtray, always filled with Hershey’s kisses and M&M’s. Esther’s oldest daughter, La Tonya, told me that the candies were for her cousins, but Esther let me reach in there, and have as much as I’d want any time we were over at the house.

The Woods

All the kids I hung out with were experts at getting around the woods. Some of them called it “the creek”, but it was actually a maze of small creeks and streams that snaked through the marshes of the Blackwater swamp -- an enormous area that was a mixture of clumpy patches of swamp grass, nettles, honeysuckle, and thickets of wild berries. Scattered around at irregular intervals were large stones, and rotting tree trunks. The kids knew all sorts of things about getting around -- like which places to avoid on account of snakes, the best spots to jump streams, where to find crawdads, and how high the water could get before conditions would become unsafe. No one ever went in after a big rainstorm. There were several entry points in the neighborhood, many of which were in people’s backyards. My favorite was right by our house, where Kenwood Drive dead-ended into a dirt cul-de-sac. That’s where my dad taught my mom how to drive a stick shift. From our driveway, you’d turn left, then immediately right so you’d be standing on a paved patch of Century Drive, looking down a stretch of dirt road directly into a wall of trees. In the middle of that wall, there was a forty foot tall weeping willow, and beyond that, a rotted out wooden bridge that went over a ten foot wide creek. Once you crossed that bridge, if you turned right, you could follow the water for at least a mile. “Hey, you wanna’ go to the creek?” someone would say. And that’s all it took. On summer days, we’d go back there with beach buckets, and catch frogs, each as big as your fist. Sometimes, we’d bring nets to scoop up crawdads. Other times, we’d just keep going straight, and deep into the marshes. Once you were in, you could see a long hedge row of tall sycamores off in the distance, at least thirty feet in height. They bordered the concrete slabs and guard railings of the elevated highway. That part of I-95 ran about twenty feet above the ground, and ran roughly parallel with the swamp. Because it was easy to spot from a distance, we could always orient ourselves to it. If it was on our left and behind us, we were headed further in, and away from home. On our right, and we’d be headed back to our main entry point - the old wooden bridge.

Because so much of the ground was waterlogged, we would use long sticks to walk on top of anything we could find that looked dry -- busted up logs or dense clumps of grass, or a big oddly shaped rock. We used them like crutches and probes. If we came up to a stream, or a dark patch of water with grass poking out, we’d poke a stick in to see how deep it was, and to test for any snakes or turtles. Then we’d plunge them into the soft creek bed until they stuck, so they’d support our weight as we took vaulting leaps from one dry spot to another. Occasionally, there would be clearings, and the ground would be firm enough to walk on. In these spots, there were trees -- mostly sycamore, but some oak and pond pines. One time, we found a small wooden shanty that someone had built, hidden away in a thicket. There was no floor or door, just a single opening you could walk into, and a pitched roof of planks of old lumber. Inside, lying on the ground was a spring mattress, and scattered all around were cigarette butts, beer cans, and used up rubbers. We had no idea what the rubbers were, but we were convinced the fort was a makeout room for teenagers. I found a dirty magazine with all sorts of pictures I had never seen before. At some point, someone stepped on a huge dried up turd in the corner by the mattress. That’s when one of the older kids suggested an alternative theory. That the place we stumbled upon was actually a hidey hole for a couple of dirty hobos with nowhere to live. And that any minute, they might be back, and throw us into their shack and start doing stuff to us. We all started screaming, and hightailed it back to the bridge, not even looking backwards. I didn’t even bother to find both of my sticks.