Prisoners of War
My mother was from a very small town. It’s so small that, at the time, it didn’t even appear on many maps. I lived with my grandparents for a year and went to fifth grade there. It was one of the happiest years of my childhood. It’s the sort of town where people do not lock their doors and everyone knows either other. To say that my mother was a little naïve might be a bit of an understatement. That would change after she met my father and moved to the big city.
My father was a wounded WWII veteran that was at the battle of Normandy. He immigrated to the United States after WWII and met my mother while traveling around the country. They married, moved to Chicago and had four children by the time my mother was twenty.
By 1967, spurred on by the prevalent social attitudes of the time and perhaps feeling a little trapped, my mother got a job. Though we lived in one of the nicer houses in the neighborhood; though she had three children in Catholic school and another not yet two years’ of age; though we were in no need of the funds, she decided to work.
On her job my mother met a married, black man with three kids of his own. They had an affair which produced a mixed race, half-sister of mine.
While she was away from home, my brothers and I were left with a black babysitter named Dorothy. I remember her teaching me the lyrics to James Brown’s Say It Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud. I’m sure my Dad got a kick out of his six year old son singing this. In retrospect, I now realize that my dad and my family were targeted. My father was too busy working and my mother too naïve and brainwashed by contemporary media to notice. Years later, after more evidence, I would realize that targeting is exactly what happened.
Before he died, my eldest brother said that “we were prisoners of war”. He merely confirmed what I had figured out a long time ago.
© John Bielecki 2024
