Above: 4th-grade folders, “Fatty” Mitch, two film classics

My Real Memoir: The Year My Conscience Awoke

A lot of things occupied more real estate in my 4^th-grade brain than the plights of others. Things like improving my spelling (note “My Exilent Work” folder above) and perfecting my autograph (“It’s in the paper! He’s everywhere!”).

Adventure and science-fiction movies occupied significant cerebral footage (as did books): Around the World in 80 Days, Forbidden Planet, Journey to the Center of the Earth, The Swiss Family Robinson–I would have given anything to be shipwrecked and live in a treehouse like theirs! Disneyland’s Swiss Family Treehouse opened two years later, and I spent hours there pretending it was my new home.

Humor also occupied a major mental parcel. I loved Abbot and Costello movies and Rocky and Bullwinkle episodes. When Some Like It Hot came out that spring, I laughed until my stomach ached (I also developed a prepubescent crush on Marilyn Monroe). And The Twilight Zone staked out its own deliciously creepy corner of my brain (“Submitted for your approval…”).

Yet despite all these intellectual preoccupations, my 4th grade brush with “persecution” had awakened a new level of awareness about others, especially those who were oppressed. I delivered newspapers, so I knew there were places like China, Cuba, and the USSR where people weren’t completely free. And that was just wrong!

Movies opened my eyes too. I’d seen The Diary of Anne Frank and Ben Hur, and learned that Jews had been persecuted forever. This gave me a context for a particular Jewish boy who was our school’s official “cootie bug.” I hated this, but was secretly glad it wasn’t me, and was ashamed of feeling that way.

Then I got a taste of stigmatization myself. Having grown more sideways than vertically that year, I started being shoved around and called “Fatty.” Still, it was nothing compared to what that Jewish kid or our Japanese-American classmates were called. One of whom was particularly proud of his father’s medals for serving on “our side” in WWII. When I stood by him and tried to explain this, I was labeled a “Jap-lover.”

I’d also seen movies about people with unique or deformed features. I would distort my voice and body, then look in the bathroom mirror and say lines from those movies, and cry. Even though I was regarded as “clever” these days, I still identified with people who were “different.”

And then one afternoon, I overheard Mom arguing with Dad regarding his signing a petition against letting a “colored” family move into our neighborhood. I was stunned. Many of my friends were Hispanic or Asian, but I always wondered why there were no Black people here. Was this why? I told my father I was ashamed of him! Surprisingly, he didn’t yell or punish me. He said I didn’t understand–he wasn’t against negroes but other people were, and it would lower “our property values.”

The following year, Mom insisted that we see a movie, A Raisin in the Sun, about a family “politely” blocked from moving into an all-white suburb. I remember the way she kept looking over at Dad during the screening. And the convictions that awoke in me the year before grew deeper still.