Free Modern American Memoirs by Annie Dillard Page B

sleepily mumbled “ Spatch [sleep]” they briskly rushed him to the cold toilet in the hall, vaguely remembering a similar Polish word that they thought meant shit, sratch . Unable to explain, I resorted to rough pantomime: run into the toilet, shake my head vigorously, pull him, confused and weeping, off the seat, and carry him to one of the beds, where I dump him and his lush glorious howling, to let them take care of the rest. Conversely I had to watch for the suffused worried face and the shifting buttocks that they tried to settle in bed while he yearned for a toilet. The story of bed and toilet was frequently told in our household to considerable laughter; my brother and I were never amused, it gave us both anxious bellyaches.
    Force-fed like a Strasbourg goose by everyone who looked at him, my brother began to strengthen and even to take a few tentative steps now and then. An early talker, his only strengths his brain and speech, he was prodigious at three. He might easily have learned to read but he preferred talk, preferably oratory. The first time we were taken out on a sled one winter afternoon, he declared when we came home that so small a child (as he) must not be taken out in snowy cold. People had to realize that a small body got colder faster, that snow was for animals with fur and not for people with skins. And so on and so on, in his adept combination of splashing guilt as he charmed. And how he could cry, high wide luxuriant wails to which his whole body danced, and to which everyone responded anxiously, except one time when we were taken on an elevated train and, at one station, a black man walked in and sat opposite us. I didn’t know how to feel: maybe he was a charred man, darkened like wood in a fire and I must be sorry for him, maybe he ate coal, maybe he was some sort of monkey like those in a picture book and I should be afraid of him. While sorting it out, I admired the light palms of his hands against the dark backs, the big purple lips, and the wide holes in his nose. My brother shrieked in terror, screaming—in Polish, fortunately—“Take him away, take that black giant away! He’s going to eat me! Kill him, Papa, kill him!” It was a crowded train; to give up our seats and move to stand in another car would have been foolish. My father slapped the small pointing finger and with his hand stifled the howling. The child thrust his head into my mother’s armpit and, shuddering, rode that way the rest of the journey.
    My brother’s fear of blacks dispelled itself in the stellar entertainment we found on 98th Street, between Lexington and Third avenues where we had moved from the Lower East Side. At the top of the street there were three tall-stooped narrow tenements and below, running to Third, small houses with crooked porches. These were black houses and to us places of great joy and freedom. My brother was already walking quite well and we were allowed the street—I was always to hold his hand and watch that he didn’t go into the gutter and see that he didn’t get dirty and not to talk to strange men and not wander around the corner. We watched, at a distance, the black children fly in and out of their houses, calling strange sounds, bumping, pummeling, rolling, leaping, an enchantment of “wild beasts” my father never permitted us to be. The best of the lower street were the times when everyone, adults and children, marched up and down, carrying bright banners, and to the sound of trumpets and drums sang, “Ohlly Nohly, Ohlly Nooo. Bumpera bumpera bump bump bum, Ohlly Noooo.” Ohlly Nohly became our favorite rainy-day game, my brother banging on a pot with a clothespin, I tootling through tissue paper on a comb, high-stepping jauntily, roaring from hallway to kitchen to bedroom our version of a revival hymn that must have begun with “Holy Lord, Oh Holy Lord.” We never could reconstruct the bumpera bumpera words though