SuperNova Afterglow: End Of Days

Growing up with Dad

I had a strange feeling wash over me when I read this line...

Say howdy to George Carter, and thank him for taking the pistol from you when you were shooting at me.

...which comes from a yahoo story I just read here...

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/sideshow/letter-freed-slave-former-master-draw-atten...
http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/01/to-my-old-master.html

If you have time to read the story, a freed slave is propositioned to return to work by his former master in Tennessee.  It's a bid odd and bizarre to read. The freed man goes back and forth like I seemed to do with my dad as a child. You know him and you were conditioned by living with him and so you were ready to crawl right back into that den of snakes, but you want assurances that he will treat you better this time.

I'm impressed with the letter and I'm sure very candid and courageous for its time. You can see the former slave is empowered now that he can raise his family somewhat comfortably after the civil war. But he would actually consider returning to the place where he was stripped of all dignity and treated more or less like a common farm animal.

I don't think this story is too far removed from the way my dad treated my family, especially my mother, as I am sure growing up in his Italian family he witnessed his own father's atrocities towards his kin. So many generations it takes to separate us from the past and even shift the balance of power to the family matriarch while dad becomes duller and more dimwitted (like me) these days.

I was bullied by kids and put up with it as a child, because my dad conditioned me not to respond 'or else' I would get the stick...a three foot long flat wooden cane kept above the entry door frame. We never thought to hide it, except when we knew we were really in trouble, ran for it and took it with us wherever we found safe passage to barricade ourselves from him.

'Children are to be seen, not heard' he joked. He laughed when he heard some old man down the block tied his wife to a plow and made her till the garden. He would try to get my mom's attention by whistling after her in the yard like a dog, "Here, Marget!" he bellowed. He killed family dogs that wouldn't hunt. They went out in the woods with him and never came back. He'd get another, we'd befriend the pooch, and it would happen all over again.

We got back at him in the end, as I became a teenager who surpassed him in strength. I remember the night my brother and I were out past our curfew and tried to come in the house through the back door so as not to wake anyone. We didn't expect him to lynch us in the kitchen. And he went after my 15-year-old, scrawny brother. My mom tried to intervene and he hit her in the face while revealing a gleam in his eyes that seemed to say I don't want to be deprived of my wicked fun.

I had put him in a reverse arm lock and listened to him mock us all. And when he started to mock me and told me things about how I wasn't a man, I set out to prove him wrong and went on a wild rampage of my own.

After wrestling him into the living room, I threw him on the couch, sat on top of him and repeatedly hit him with glancing blows off his thick noggin. I seemed to be pulling my punches while yelling at him how much I hated him (though secretly I still loved him), as all he could do was look up at me in shock, maybe terror.

I don't remember how it ended, but after that day he stayed away from me and my younger brother. I moved out several times and kept coming home and he never bothered me again. He still had his veiled insults and other innuendo and never gave me credit for anything I yearned validation, as I continued to grow into manhood. I eventually landed in radio and was the local news reporter and my mom told me that he said he was proud of me. And he started to converse with me more civilly and would be chummy with me like his friends.

That was okay. I felt like I can do this, but somewhere in the back of my mind I didn't trust him. I couldn't be there for him during his last days, because I was so conflicted. He hadn't changed much. He took my sister-in-law to some senior citizen's dance a few years before his death and was threatening to knock the block off some other old guy.  I could not see him ever changing his habits. I would always be his victim, if I let him.

So, I found my emancipation away from home. Though, I returned to it several times up until 1993 before I finally got my act together and eventually met my current wife and taskmaster. I let her control me now, but she can be kinder and more nurturing than my former master.

It's been 10 years since his death. I didn't acknowledge the anniversary. Forgot about it actually. That's good. But I'll never truly be free. I will always restrain myself in one way or another and not think I'm good enough. I will always be tempted to crawl back into that den with the snake and be treated like a nobody, because that was the way I was raised.

Fortunately, being bullied is not an option anymore. But, it gets in my head from time to time whenever I'm in a social situation that tears me down. I've had my virtual moments in places like this, too.

I pick myself up today, having the epiphany from the slave's liberating letter.  A little bit freer, a little bit wiser now. Thankfully, I had my mom to take the figurative 'pistol' from my dad.

I hope comparing my child self to a slave is not too racially insensitive.