Friday, May 05, 2006
Seventy-Six Trombones
Four years after America's Great Depression reduced much of our country to extreme poverty, I was born into that poverty in a little Texas town. My birthday is the 4th of July. No brass bands marched by the tin roof house where Mama labored, but as I was born, lightning from a summer storm struck a tree outside her room and sliced it down the middle. I arrived without the comfort or safety of a sterile delivery room.
Penicillin wasn't yet discovered and, except for smallpox, no vaccines for childhood communicable diseases existed. Grandpa's gardens and orchards and melon patches, and his chickens and eggs, and cows and hogs kept us alive in that little town that, many years after the Civil War, would become famous for something more insidious than hunger; racial discrimination.
Penicillin wasn't yet discovered and, except for smallpox, no vaccines for childhood communicable diseases existed. Grandpa's gardens and orchards and melon patches, and his chickens and eggs, and cows and hogs kept us alive in that little town that, many years after the Civil War, would become famous for something more insidious than hunger; racial discrimination.
