It was 1972 when I came back to the United States, and I could tell right away I didn’t belong any more than I did when I left.
More than anything else, my family had gotten dead set on fighting for civil rights. My sisters had turned into activists: they held meetings with their “comrades in arms,” as they were calling them those days, and all of them were wearing their hair natural like halos around their heads and not in the commonsense styles that they said were meant to make them look more like white women. And they weren’t even one bit the homemakers they’d been when I left anymore.
Ronda and Doris got angry at me and gave me an earful for being weak, for not putting up a fight over what the white government had put me through by sending me into a war I had no business being in. I hashed things out as best as I could, saying it was my duty as an American and I’d done it. Every time I snuck out of their get-togethers with all those folks giving me side-eye, every time I said no to marching with them, Michelle said I was just the type that Whitey always dreamed of, nothing better than a good little—The word that came out of her mouth next was like a slap in the face, and she knew it.
The older I got, the more I had to allow that I’d steered well clear of that whole struggle, but back then I didn’t know how I ought to act if not the way I figured a reasonable young God-fearing man should. Raising a fist, calling for action, butting heads with the police—that wasn’t like me.
Once I was in the Army, I felt like I was what I ought to be: a good soldier, never mind what grand plans top brass had shipping me off to battle. I did it for America, even if America didn’t do all that much for me after I came back.
So I found myself a job stocking shelves at one of those new supermarkets that had just opened and I got my own apartment. That did all of us good. It was just a small studio, not much more in it than a bed and what have you, full of all sorts of smells from the restaurant downstairs, but for me it was paradise.
Then I met Martha one Sunday at Pastor Williams’s service. We saw each other for months and then we tied the knot. She was like me, well-behaved and quiet, and, as God is my witness, she was the only woman I ever had eyes for. Leslie came along a few years after our wedding and the doctors said that Martha couldn’t have a second child: another pregnancy would be too much for her heart. That was just how it was—what was there to say? We accepted this decision the Lord had made because He had given us so much already. A son was more than enough, and for a long while that was the truth of it. But all things are fleeting, especially happiness.