I hoped he had not seen me crawling over the damp, high grass. Here and there a swarm of mosquitos rose in protest, but I ignored them. Scrambling into the dense circle of plants at  the head of our driveway, I dragged the heavy carbine with me, feeling safe, as those who are good at the game of hide-and-seek do, but at the same time, afraid.

 

       Within the shelter of canna and elephant ears I looked out across the pasture where the horses, Ginger and Smokey, grazed and beyond them a few of our Guernsey cows stood knee deep in white tipped clover. At the far end of the field where our new barbed wire fence met the road, I could see him walking on the balls of his feet the way we had seen gunfighters do it on Saturday afternoons. On his shoulder he carried the rifle I had seen him shoot so well, one with a very long octagonal barrel, a real weapon.

 

   Feeling outgunned and hunted, I gripped the little Winchester's unfamiliar shape. It was the only gun I had ever fired, the only one I could carry. My father had showed me how to sight down the barrel, how to line up the vee and square, a mysterious mathematical process, and had actually let me pull off a couple of rounds. But that had been long ago, last year, and I knew nothing about guns really, only that the world relied upon them and that they were men's business.

 

       My killer was close to the corner of our property line, the one nearest the distant highway.  He did not seem to be in a hurry. Should he be? Movie gunfighters were always cocksure and calm, men who did what they said they would do. It was the Code of the West, and any fool knew, the South, too. Soon he would reach the corner and begin the long walk down our road. He would be harder to see then, passing behind the tall pines and low myrtles which lined our fields. I began to tremble.

 

       Where is my mother, I wondered. She should be here! Shouldn't she?

 

      But often she was not. She had a job, like many women during the war and after. And she was an officer of the PTA. Perhaps it was school business keeping her away. So much had happened in just one year, or was it longer?    

 

       This was her fault. Somehow, she had caused this. Like my father, I did not know exactly how, but it was easy enough to blame her.

 

      She had wanted to be here. I recalled that series of events very clearly. After all, I had not lived long enough to gather so many memories that some might become expendable.

 

       At first we had lived down by the river in a white, two-storied mansion, or so it had seemed. The paint had long since gone to chips and flakes, but it seemed grand enough.

 

       Although born in Sarasota, the only other place I'd lived was near Tampa, in a tiny isolated house not far from the bay. All during the war we'd rented it and had a marvelous view of the long military convoys which rumbled on the narrow highway at the end of our drive, and the great ships out in the roadstead, and all manner of army and navy aircraft flying out of MacDill Field.

 

      My mother worked in the shipyards as a welder and my father designed and built liberty ships, first of steel, then concrete.

 

       We rented this fancy white house, just the top floor of it, but nobody else lived there, so it seemed like it was all ours. There were fish in the Braden River, hidden in the shadows of an ancient humpbacked bridge, one of three it took to cross the whole river. Behind the house was a large barn where cows had been milked before the war. Now they just ran wild over the wide flat acres, sometimes grazing right  down to the river. 

 

      All sorts of birds were around the place, scratching in cattle droppings, wading with long legs along the river bank, descending like black clouds to eat grass seed. And before long, vultures came.

 

     During the week my parents raced the foggy morning roads through Manatee to Bradenton, then drove north out of Palmetto past Ruskin just in time to change the shift at the shipyard. “Just find a big truck,” my father would say, “and stay on his tail lights. That's how you drive in fog.”

 

       How did the truck see, I wondered. They, and all the cars, had narrow slitted lights. “Truck drivers sit up high, and the fog lies way down low,” he said.

 

       My brother and sister and I were always left at a house along the way, a squatty place with a long wide porch. The woman who took care of us was a Southerner. We, she managed to make clear, were Yankees and worse - my father was a foreigner most people, even the FBI, suspected was German.

 

       But he was not. He was a Dane, and even more suspicious, an educated, traveled man. And he was not young any longer, sixty, almost exactly twice the age of his attractive young wife. And that was cause for gossip, too. So maybe it was his fault we'd ended up here, for he was always talking about owning a lot of land, raising horses and thoroughbred cattle ... that sort of thing.

 

       Late in the war he bought the land, eighty acres of swamp and palmetto palm. It was down the road from the white mansion about a mile. On weekends he worked on the place, clearing two wide fields and a proper spot for the house, the only place truly above sea-level, and that hardly more than a foot.

 

       He did most of the work by hand, with a grubhoe, and burned huge piles of fibrous roots and saw-toothed palm fronds. Then he began building our house and that caused a lot of commotion, too, for he was building with something new - concrete blocks. No one in Florida did that!

 

       He and a huge black man named George Washington slaved in the blazing sun and in a single weekend they raised up the first room, the kitchen. It had two huge window openings and two doorways. There was no roof, not yet. 

 

       Then Monday came and my father went back to work. I suppose mother had quit her job, or because the war was ending, had been laid off. She stayed with us in the big white house.

 

       We were there when the cattle began to die.  

 

       They'd eaten something, a poisonous plant, and it killed them. They lay where they'd dropped, swelling up in the blazing sun 'til they burst like giant melons. Flies and carrion eaters were everywhere and the smell of death kept us all nauseated.

 

       There was no one and no spare equipment to bury the poor creatures, so we moved out to our own place, a place with four walls, no windows, doors or roof.

 

       My brother and I slept in cut down bunk beds which occupied the corner between the two open doorways. My sister, now nearly three, had her own bed under the kitchen table. Mom and Pop slept in the car, a huge black Packard with a chromed grill and spare tires in the fenders.

 

       They made a roof of surplus canvas and anchored it with cement blocks. Every morning, before any of us were allowed to get out of bed, Mother or Father would come in, check for snakes and scorpions, and with a broom handle push up the sagging center of the tarp so that the collected rainwater would drain off. It seemed to rain every night. Some of it was caught in drums and we used it for cooking and bathing.

 

       Over time my father replaced the tarpaulin with a real roof, added windows and doors and more rooms. He ran pipe across the swamp from the back forty where a shallow well forced water all the way from Georgia into our house. Later he had shell hauled in to keep the road and our driveway from turning to swamp every time it rained and planted grass, clover and exotic South American trees. He bought horses and cattle, and our pigs and chickens roamed freely inside our fences.

 

       Mother grew a victory garden, “a real one”, she said, because we finally were victorious. She planted tropical shrubs, fruit trees, like papaya and guava, and dazzling red, yellow and green cannas which grew so high they hid the south side of our house and formed a huge circular flower bed at the head of our driveway.

 

       This flower bed provided me cover on a hot, humid day - the last day of my first year in school - the day I expected to die.

 

       Did I really deserve to die? 

 

       Colonel Riley, the school Principal, had said so to me and my mother, to the entire student body. I harbored secret, un-Christian thoughts, he said, and they were sinful, hopelessly beyond redemption. 

 

       I was afraid of him. I hated his huge, hoary head and great booming, condemning voice. Every Friday, at assembly, he and his friend, the Baptist Preacher, scolded us for our misdeeds, real and imagined, and  promised each of us fiery, eternal torment. So I guessed that I did deserve some kind of punishment. Who could count the number of things I’d already done wrong and I had just turned seven.

 

       But I wasn’t angry at them for that. It was what they'd said about Pop and Mom that enraged me most.  My mother was an 'uppity' woman who did not know her place. She smoked cigarettes and worked outside the home. My father smoked, too, Cuban cigars, and sometimes he drank a beer or had Port Wine at the dinner table. Both of them were doomed to hellfire, the Colonel intoned, and the Preacher echoed “Amen.”

 

       "No!" I had stood up and shouted, and everybody looked at me as if I'd passed gas out loud, or yelled 'Zig heil!', an odd glance of amazement followed by giggling. But I could not continue, for the image of my father wreathed in fire was too vivid. Twice I had seen him enveloped in tall flames, and I carried the scars of fire on my own feet. I knew how agonizing fire on flesh could be. Twice my father had walked out of his flames without a word. I,  his inferior likeness, had writhed and screamed for hours, whimpered and complained for days. How could I explain to  these assembled children and adults? I could not, even had  it been my place to try. 

 

       Instead I bit my lip and slumped back in my seat. I had only made things worse, as usual. The only part of me strengthened by such events was anger. One day, I imagined, my loathing of the Colonel would be equal to that which he felt for me.

 

       In the meantime, I knew I'd probably earned myself another whipping, another humiliation. Because the Principal believed in swift punishment, I expected it to occur that very morning, right after devotions. Usually we were punished for fighting. “Fighting is Satan’s work!” he’d say, and all who fought would be punished and those who were forced to watch would know that as surely as those who were paddled.

 

       Other misbehavior, like skipping class or yelling out during the sermon, might warrant a paddling, too.

 

       He'd always begin with something like "this is for your own good", and after he'd paddled us the strokes on one side of our boney butts he'd say, in a loud, deep, kindly voice, "Now what did Jesus say?" and we'd find the courage to answer, loud enough for our fellow students to hear, "He said 'turn the other cheek!’” Only then could the punishment be finished.

       I didn't want to fight, of course, not until I was strong enough, whenever that might be. It was the Colonel's gang who caused this trouble. He called them The Poor and was fond of holding his hand out over them, saying, “Blessed are the Poor,” and “the Poor will always be with us.”

 

       Almost all of them lived across from the school in tar paper shacks at the end of the rail spur. Their parents were virtual slaves to the factory which made packing crates for various agricultural products and most of the time, my mother said, the most obvious produce was an over-abundance of underfed, sickly babies.

 

       It was easy to imagine the Colonel sitting in a comfortable stuffed chair in his second-story office, gazing down upon this never-ending supply of Poor. Did he envision some long-ago battalion of soldiers, gaunt and hopeless in their entrenched prisons, or had he never been a real colonel - just one of those make-believe kind that come out of Kentucky and Texas. In either case, they were his and they did his bidding.

 

       And so I found it necessary to oppose his gang, too. I recoiled from those anemic, malnourished, diseased sons of mill workers, but I was not a fool. I tried to fit in at first, to learn what they demanded. I learned to leave my shoes on the school bus, to go barefooted in the cold mud, because that is what they did. I could not disguise the fact that my clothes were newer or cleaner, and I would not misbehave in class, for studies were serious and important. But, for their sake, I did learn to lie to my mother, to shrug when she wanted to know how I'd gotten ring-worm or half-a-dozen other skin-diseases. Why tell her the truth? There was already too much for her to tangle with on that bleak, hostile battleground. She and the colonel despised each other.

 

       Maybe, by some twist of the facts, Sambo could be made to take all of the blame - but I doubted it. It had been bad before him, but no one had ever threatened to kill me. They'd stolen my shoes, beaten me up, broken my glasses twice, no, three times. Glasses cost thirty-five dollars a pair, more than a mill-worker earned in a month back in 1945. Without glasses, the doctor warned gravely, I'd go blind in the next two or three years, but even though my father was not poor, he could no longer afford them. "Money doesn't grow on trees," my father told me harshly, as if I'd broken them carelessly.

 

       If the Colonel was right, I’d be dead soon, so I wouldn't have to die blind. Did one need to see in Hell?

 

       Hell was one of the first great contradictions. Whenever the colonel railed about it, my mother would contradict him, try to reassure me. "Hel is a cold, damp place, Dear, not hot." She'd speak in a superior tone. "You aren't likely to  burn there. Besides, you’re more likely to go to Valhalla, a good place. Remember, you are a Norseman and they go to their own places." 

 

       It was true . I remembered the stories she read by kerosene lamp - Greek and Norse myths, those of the Troad, especially Hector, the failed warrior, whose name my father and I have been given, and other tales, of Arabian heroes and more modern ones. Was that the first time I'd heard of Little Black Sambo?

 

       She contradicted the school often. "Yes, son, Hitler was a Christian too, regardless of the Preacher's denial. I will have a talk with him." 

 

       No! I wanted to cry out, please don't talk to him again, or the colonel! I'd only wanted to know if the colonel could shout Hitler to Hell, like the rest of us.

 

       "Why no," my mother said, when I asked whether or not Jesus really loved me, as the song we had to sing in class asserted, "the Bible says that Jesus loved his twelve disciples, but could trust only one of them ... Judas." Judas, you see, had betrayed his friend so that Jesus could die for our sins. It was part of the Grand Plan, which apparently had not worked very well because mothers all over the world were still sending their sons out to die for all manner of sinful things. "I think what the preacher means is that God loved the whole world so much that he sacrificed his own son. The Bible does say that."

 

       "Like the Germans and Russians and everybody?" I asked.

 

       "Yes," she said.

 

       Somehow her remarks comforted me.

 

       “Good,” I thought. “If Jesus doesn't love me then I don't have to love him!”

 

       The dog barked again, a short warning yap.

 

       My killer's form appeared briefly between the trees. He was still moving slowly, half-way down the road. Lesel had been a friend once, before Sambo. He visited infrequently. We acted out movies. He had owned a Tarzan-like sheath knife. One afternoon he threw it at a stump. It was a good throw, but the hard wood snapped the blade right off. The next week he came over with a new one. This time he threw it at a huge black snake and I was so impressed when it stuck right through the snake's back. But the snake hardly noticed and crawled off into the thick underbrush which bordered our deep swamp. The next time he came it was with a empty knife sheath and I felt bad for him, as if his lost and broken knives related somehow to my broken glasses. His father, like many of The Poor's fathers and brothers, was still in the Army,  clearing Hitler's minefields and the rubble of Europe.

 

       The last time he'd come he'd shot a six foot long rattlesnake out by our toolshed and I could not forget the great chunks of flesh his bullets had ripped out of the snake's sides.

 

       In a short time my own body might be torn like that. Lesel had said so. He was thirteen, nearly a man, and men had to do what they had promised. So did boys, for that matter. Everyone agreed on that.

 

       "This afternoon I'm comin’ t’ kill you!" They were plain hard words, said loudly enough for everyone on the bus to hear, and everyone pretended they had not, even the driver. "When we get off this bus," he'd yelled, "I'm goin' home to get my rifle. Then I'm comin’ t’ yer house an' I'm gonna' kill yuh'! Understand?"

 

       A girl had giggled, then, and some of the boys had laughed. The bus driver still said nothing.

 

       I ran all the way home to the protection of my mother, but the big black Packard was not in the drive and I knew she was not home.

 

       Lesel was getting closer now. I had to pay attention, to concentrate. I rubbed the blue, well-oiled metal of the heavy carbine and remembered my father's solemn words. "When I am gone you are the man of the house."

 

       Because of that I knew I could not run away. For a moment or so I entertained the silly notion that I might win this duel. But Lesel was twice as old, twice as big as me, and he had killed with his gun, not just snakes but raccoons and birds, even a huge armored snapping turtle.

 

      Bitterly, I accepted the inevitable. I am named  Hector and he was a noble of Troy, loyal to his family and a trainer of horses. He died heroically too, in combat, and enemies dragged his body 'round and 'round the white walls until his bones fell apart. I remembered the bloated, rotting cattle and tried to imagine my own corpse offered up to the sun and fought  down a wave of nausea. Alright, I knew about duty, too. 

 

       Perhaps it was my father's fault.  Colonel Riley was fond of ranting about the 'sins of the father' and my father was too tall, too stern, too foreign. Poppa spoke many languages with a thick accent. So they all thought he was a German? He is not and neither am I!
 

       In my mind I tell the colonel,”Yes, my father is fierce and I am afraid of him, but you don't have to be. He isn't a German.”

  

       I wasn't always afraid of my father, but since the war I seem to be afraid of everything.

 

       Lesel had come near our gate. Ginger, the youngest  horse, raised her head and pointed her ears in his direction. Then she went back to feeding. What had she heard? In a moment I heard it, too. A bird? No, Lesel is whistling softly as he comes to kill me.

 

       It is very hot. The sun is yellow, red when I close my eyes, and all around me is green. I felt very cold and cowardly, like a Jap sniper.

 

       I am not the enemy! I have seen the enemy. On posters and banners, photographs and newsreels - he is foreign and ugly. I am not like that! I have seen the places they live and fight - the deserts and ruined cities and stormy seas.  I do not live there.

 

       Why do they attack me? Why is there no relief from the beatings and bullying, the taunts?

 

       I wanted my parents to be proud of me. I tried to do well in those sweltering classrooms, to please the sluggish old teacher. It was hard to make good circles and straight lines, because my sweaty hands always stuck to the paper, but even so it was too good, for the boys always called me “Goody, goody” and shoved me around for making them look bad. I tried to swagger and shuffle and adopt the crude language of my classmates, but I was already too different, too resentful to pull it off.

 

       But I had pulled it off as Sambo! Foolish, pathetic Sambo.

 

       Is my mother the enemy? She seemed very angry in her first speech to the PTA, criticizing our grassless, muddy grounds, bare feet and diseases whose names hardly anyone could pronounce. She mentioned poverty and prejudice and ignorance. It was disgraceful, she said, that Florida ranked forty-seventh in education. Only Mississippi was worse!

 

       But she spent most of the time talking about the school lunch program. My stomach still rebels whenever I recall those school lunches. From early morning the entire neighborhood reeked of stewing collard greens, an odious, now mandatory staple of every meal.

 

       "Everybody in the South is anemic," Mother explained. "Iron cures anemia, but Florida's soil has very little iron in it, so none of the vegetables have very much. None except collards, and," she beamed, "we've found a place to buy them cheap, as much as we can use."

 

       That was important because the school district was too poor to raise more taxes, or something like that.

 

       Lunch proctors smacked our hands and fingers until we ate every gagging bite. Surely my mother had caused that.

 

       Mamma didn't stop there. She complained loudly about shoeless boys, useless books and lack of medical checkups. But her most memorable comments, called a diatribe, were against gospel preaching in the auditorium and corporal punishment, and (hardly anyone could believe their ears) the criminal conditions in the local Negro elementary school, something called separate but equal.

 

       Everyone was furious. My mother, the colonel, the mothers and fathers of my classmates, and especially the surly mill workers' sons, The Poor, who never failed to overcome their lethargy and anemia to hound me. The leader was a Sixth Grader named Stitch. He was mean enough, even when he wasn't flashing his pocket knife around. One of his younger brothers, skinny and dirty, was in my classes. His name was Corky because, his mother had said, he was something his father had popped out of a moonshine jug.

 

       The gang always made sure Corky got to push me around, made him call me 'dingle-berry' and 'piss-ant', and other things. They crowded around to pin me so that I could not respond, hit or shove him back. 

 

       But that was not really necessary. I would have eaten my outrage, endured almost any abuse on the playground, so long as I did not have to be publically humiliated for fighting. But even when I didn't fight back I was singled out for whipping on the Assembly stage.

 

       Did I have to go to school? Of course. It was the new 'law of the land', which many people said was un-constitutional, whatever that is. Besides, my parents expected it of me.

 

       That very morning I had been the only boy in the school to receive a perfect attendance certificate. On stage with several girls, I had trembled with fear all over again and felt no sense of pride at all.

 

       My mother was not just talk. Public beatings had been discontinued but being anywhere near the stage made me afraid. 

       The Colonel had eyed me angrily. The Preacher was mad, too, for of late he had only given a 'benediction' on Friday mornings.

       Mother had also begun a series of carnivals to raise money for the PTA, so they could buy shoes and books. Apparently it had gone very well, for lately she had been fighting with the Principal over who should control so much money. In this the colonel won out.

 

       He is at our gate now, entering our property. This is significant. I had seen my father chase hunters away from our fields and swampland. Defense of property is a man's primary responsibility.

       I shifted carefully, steadying the carbine. It had grown very heavy. I thumbed back the worn hammer.

       Lesel came toward me, his bare feet silent on the compacted shell.

 

       That night was dazzling. I had never been permitted on the school stage before, except to be paddled. It was sacrosanct, a pulpit for Colonel Riley and his friend, The Preacher, and teachers, especially the ones who led us in song.

 

       I played blocks in the First Grade 'band', while others banged triangles and rang bells. It sounded awful and mournful, chaotic - especially the kazoo section, but the audience applauded loudly. Afterward I hurried backstage to change into my costume. Mamma had made it for me, even though I sensed that she did not want to. Twice she'd tried to talk me out of it, but I was determined to be Little Black Sambo.

 

       Why not? Didn't the other children dress as Bo Peep, Jack Horner and the other nursery rhyme characters, even pumpkins and corn? 

 

       I'd liked Sambo instinctively. He may have looked odd in his finery, and lost all of those swell things one heart stopping humiliation after another, but in the end he got it all back. More, he survived to witness the self destruction of the bullies who'd tormented him. And I was indignant, arrogant, ignorant and devious enough to think I might do the same.

 

       Besides, I loved pancakes with fresh butter, which I'd sometimes helped my mother churn during the war. Sambo, despite, or maybe because he was so exotic, was my idol.

 

       I waited in the wings until all of the grades had finished, then, as the Sixth Graders cleared the stage and the curtain fell, mother gave me a gentle, encouraging push. I took three long steps, just as I'd practiced and turned to face the uncountable, fathomless faces. Standing tall in my ridiculous costume, all red and yellow, blue and green, I opened my mouth as wide as I could.

 

       It must have been a rebellious, angry mouth in a face mamma had carefully blackened with burnt cork, under hair she had deftly changed from yellow-white to shoe polish black.

 

       My voice began deep inside my chest, but in my ears it sounded girlish and frightened. Yet it was loud and clear, as I'd promised my father. Perhaps it was even piercing. "I'm Little Black Sambo," I said profoundly, "and I've come to play with you!"

 

       There had been no applause for me. Instead a shocked silence followed me off the stage.

 

       And now I was to be killed.

 

       It was right and proper. The vast majority thought so.

 

       "Blessed are the Poor ..." Are we so rich?

 

       "Jesus loves the little children ... spare the rod ... suffer the children ... red and yellow, black and white ..."

 

       "Thou shalt not kill ..." But Moses slew, Joshua slew, David slew and Jesus taught Peter how to kill with a look!

 

       "The U.S. Marines are first to fight!"

 

       "Love thy neighbor ..."

 

       "Honor thy Mother and Father ..."

 

       I had let him get too close!

 

       He was right there in front of me, just ten feet away, standing with his feet apart, hip aslant, weapon hanging off his shoulder and a frown on his face, glaring past me at the house.

 

   He hadn't seen me. Moving ever so slowly, I sighted up the Winchester's barrel. His face filled my sights. I couldn't miss!

 

       He yelled, "Come on outta there, you coward!"

 

       I pulled the trigger and heard the hammer fall.

 

       My killer seemed stunned. His eyes darted right to me, wide and horrified. Panic blurred my vision, made his face warp and under his nose a great oval hole seemed to appear. His  teeth showed briefly, like raw bone. The hole was pink, like his tongue and spittle sprayed from it. His knees began to buckle and the long barreled gun slid off his shoulder. Slowly, he sank to the ground. It was terrible!

 

       I leaped from concealment and threw down my father's rifle. Bolting to the side of the house, I cowered among the stacks of concrete blocks, gasping for air.

 

       Shortly I heard a strangling sound, half-laughter, half-cry. I peaked around the blocks, toward the driveway. Lesel sat with his head in his hands, sobbing, or laughing, or maybe just shaking with anger.

 

       He would get me now, and drag my body 'round the house until nothing was left except the dark odor of my death and the bitter memory of another failed warrior.

 

       I could hear him moving around.

 

       Maybe Mother would come home and save me, or Roy Rogers would ride out of the swamp. But there was no one except a clucking red hen scratching in the grass, pecking at what she found. She did not care about me, even though I had often fed her.

 

       Lesel came closer. His shadow fell over me. Any second he would start shooting chunks of flesh out of me. I closed my eyes and waited.

 

       "You scared hell outta me," he said. His voice sounded almost friendly, like it had before Sambo.

 

       I looked up at him. The hole in his face was not there any more. Instead there was a grim smile where I’d thought my bullet had torn into him. He looked perfectly normal and had both rifles. The smaller one he propped against the pile of blocks, near me. "You gotta put bullets in these things, dummy!"

 

       Then he shouldered his own rifle and walked away.

 

       I waited until he was out of sight before I began to cry. I was proud of that.

 

       In the end I had to leave that school. The Poor ran me out of town I guess, when my nerve and outrage and resolve became exhausted. The new school was far away, on the other side of  Bradenton. Kids wore shoes there and none of them ran in gangs or carried knives. There was grass and a park nearby. Best of all there was no prayer or preaching or religion in those classrooms, for the Supreme Court, somewhere way up north, had ruled it all illegal.

 

        There were lots of other changes.

 

       Back in Manatee Station my mother became president of the PTA. The preacher ran off with the young wife of one of his parishioners. Shortly afterward the colonel took all of the PTA improvement funds and disappeared, some said to Havana.

 

       Even the name Manatee seemed destined for change, for not too long afterward the town was re-named East Bradenton.

 

       Many years later, in the early Sixties, I heard that Lesel, by then a long serving U. S. Army NCO, had been killed in a Viet Minh ambush.