Its an illustrated work, and because im primarily an artist and then later became a writer, it was just an excellent avenue for me to express some of my feelings about the way that i grew up, in the place that i grew up in. And it was just there. It presented itself, and i jumped into it. I had two artistic influences from my parents because so my dad did this photography, and he had a lot of cameras, and he was really devoted to it and very passionate. But also my mother was a visual artist. And she grew up in a home where art was really elevating discuss, and her own father drew very well and taught her and her sisters how to draw. And then so my parents turned around and put that influence into our growing up experience. So not only was my father always taking photos and developing them, but my mother was painting peoples portrait ares and creating art portraits and creating art. And they always saw to it that my siblings and i i have three siblings had art supplies. Even though we were not people of means economically in any sense of the word, we always had paper to draw on, Art Materials to create, and this was something that was really, really encouraged in my family. So the story of my familys immigration actually has two parts, because before i was born my father, who had come in contact with american missionaries when he was a young orphan just running in the streets of mendosa, argentina which is there at the andes mountains, and he was completely destitute, so he came in, came around some american missionary ies. And they had a great influence on his life. He ended up deciding after he learned to read and write because he wasnt even literate at all and then learned english and then decided he wanted to come to the u. S. To study at a seminary. So in 1948 he boarded passenger freighter by himself and came to the u. S. And went and studied at new orleans e theological baptist seminary. And then later my mother and my oldest sister who was 11 years older than i am joined him there. And then my second sister was born in birmingham, alabama, when they moved from new orleans to birmingham. The whole family went back, and then i was born and my brother was born. And then we all came to the u. S. I landed in the u. S. On march the 28th, 1961. And after that we moved to birmingham for a period of time. I dont really go into that in my memoir. Is so here it is, the end of march, and then by mid may already things are happening in birmingham. This is when the freedom riders who were passing through the south challenging the laws, the jim crow laws through the south that had segregated buses and all of that, they passed through birmingham, and then at the birmingham bus depoe is where they were met depot is where they were met with violence that the police, you know, just turned their backs on and just let whatever was going to happen happen. And then within a year we moved to marion which is a small town of 3,000 thats in the black belt renal of the state. And that region of the state. And thats where i as a child, by then 6, and i had learned to read, and i was able to witness the still the evidences, the whitesonly signs and so forth in the stores. That made an impression on me. But we just happened to be in this particular part of the state of alabama where that was very much in evidence. And in a small town, its hard to not see whats going on. I do talk about sort of the culture clash that my family experienced. Argentina does have a very rich culture, and my parents embraced a lot of it. But coming to the u. S. , of course, you realize youre in a foreign land, you have different customs. And they were, to a great degree, resistant to many things. My parents wanted to keep the Spanish Language alive for us as kids, so and yet we were resisting because once we learned english, didnt really want to go around speaking spanish and have everybody staring at us because we were completely different and we sound funny to their ears. So that was one portion of it. Also my mother was a fabulous cook. And certain traditions of argentine cuisine that are really borrowed a lot from spain and italy and france and other countries because argentina is an immigrant country in itself, she wanted to keep those things going, of course. Those were the foods that my father and she grew up on. And so she just had to improvise and come up with ways to cook things when we didnt have necessarily the ingredients. It was especially being in a maul town and just having a small town and just having very Southern Food all around us. She wanted to, you know, make things that we were familiar with, that we knew from our native country. I remember when i was still probably about 5, i think barbie dolls were really kind of coming into the market and really getting big and all that. My sister and i wanted a barbie doll so badly. And so she got the blond, and i got the brunette. And i remember thinking brunette, thats closer to me. Thats, thats me. But, you know, this is big, big adulation of blonds that kind of still exists, but i think it was even bigger back then of the blond, feminine ideal and sort of that standard of beautiment and beauty. And i remember later when i was preteen and teenager looking through, like, the seventeen magazine and the other magazines that young girls would look at, youd go, like, theres nobody that looks like us in these magazines, you know . The allamerican girl was really the allanglo girl, you know, with the certain look that looked like she basically hatched in england and scotland. [laughter] and no mediterraneans, certainly no african or asian injected into that idea of what american is. So, you know, so there was that. So one of the things that i show in my book is how my mother, who was an excellent artist, would make paper dolls for us. And then we would make the wardrobe. So a little slightly kind of tongue in cheek, i show that one of the paper dolls that she made for us was based on this german actress named elle key sommer, elke. Anyway, she was very blond, very due tonic in her few tonic in her type, and she was one of those paper dolls that we made this massive wardrobe. We didnt have tv, so we either read or we drew, you know, my sister and i. Prick schools in alabama Public Schools in alabama were completely segregated all through my Elementary School years. And so even though, i dont know, you could make consider me white or not, it doesnt really matter to me, but by default we were white. So i went to the school with the white kids. And then so it was then right around 1966 where i first had just a couple of black classmates, and then a few years later, it was actually in 1969 when i was in the eighth grade that we became completely desegregated. In fact, they closed the cool that was where the black kids the school that was where the black kids had been going. So all of them came to the school where the white kids had been. So we were fully desegregated at that point. And i would say, okay, its surreal because here we have been in this county that is majority africanamerican, its like a 65 35 division there in that area. And yet i have not been around africanamericans all my life, you know, just barely in the street we see each other and all that, but we have not occupied the same space. Its so weird to be, to have this demographic setup and yet we dont share the same space. And so what did this do for me, is that it, you know, suddenly just, it humanizes everyone. Someone who was just abstract, who was a they, you know, in the distance even though theyre physically quite close. People become human, and then you begin to relate to each other on those terms. So i learned a lot about drawing human faces, and this is actually my very favorite thing to draw. So it was an important and huge and wonderful place that i came to when i was finally in, you know, social and scholastic and all of this kind of ambience where i could be around africanamericans that it was like my eyes were opened, and i lost that i would call it blindness that, you know, that a lot of people do experience when they are not around various racial groups that they have that inability to distinguish. So i was in the third grade, it was in the early part of 1965, when the Voter Registration drive that began through the black belt region of alabama really got going full steam. And, of course, selma is very famous for this. But it was also going on in small towns like marion and greens borrow and union town, all these little towns that dot the black belt region. And the cause of this, because youre living in a small town, you really cant help but see it. In our case we were actually one block, our house was one block from the up to square where the courthouse the town square where the courthouse is and then where an africanamerican church which was kind of home base for the Voter Registration drive. We actually were in a great place to see the daytime marches, because once people began to attempt to register to vote and were turned away, they started marching around and around the courthouse square. And my dad, being a photographer, he actually took his home movie camera down there and took movies of the marches. So i was aware of that. I didnt really understand what it was all about. It was pretty abstract to me. And then within a few weeks, im not sure of the time period of how long the daytime marches occurred, but within a few weeks there was a night rally. People that were armed with baseball bats, ax handles and chains and i dont know what else but came and attached the marchers and the journalist there. There was one big name knew about who was an
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