Hidden Love and Inman’s War

Posted on April 25, 2008 by moonbridgebooks

Jeffrey Copeland’s flea market find of a suitcase stuffed with old letters has blossomed into a movie. Inside that suitcase was the hidden love story of Inman Perkins and Olivia Merriwether, a young black couple separated by The War. The two teachers met in 1940 at Sumner High School in St. Louis, fell in love and were secretly married. At the time, married women were not allowed to be teachers so the young Mrs. Perkins had to hide her marriage to keep her job. This was not too difficult as her new husband was sent off to war in Italy where he was unfortunately killed in an fuel explosion caused by lightning. Miss Merriwether, to honor her husband, then insisted on being called Mrs. Perkins. She was not forced to resign and instead taught school for another forty years.

Inman’s letters to his wife described his trials with segregation and discrimination during WWII, all the more painful to a boy raised by his parents to believe that “differences were created by men, not inherently in men.” His letters inspired Copeland to write a book about Inman’s African-American military experiences, with the added interest of his hidden marriage to Olivia. Apparently none of Olivia’s students or colleagues thought anything of her later name change, and after 1948 her marriage would not have affected her job anyway.

How much do we know of our own parents’ or grandparents’ lives. Inman and Olivia became known because a stranger discovered a part of their lives lost in a suitcase. Our own families may have hidden lives that we might uncover if we only ask the right questions. After publication of Inman’s War: A Soldier’s Story of Life in a Colored Battalion in WWII, one of Olivia’s past students commented, “And to think, we all thought Mrs. Perkins was a little old lady with no life.*”

*from St. Louis Post Dispatch, 4/20/08

Linda Austin
“Cherry Blossoms in Twilight”
http://www.moonbridgebooks.com
Posted in book talk, letters, multicultural, WWII | Tagged | Comments Off on Hidden Love and Inman’s War

Earthquake Memories

Posted on April 18, 2008 by moonbridgebooks

Well, we in the Midwest were certainly surprised out of a sound sleep this morning by our unusual earthquake, our family’s first ever. The shaking bed woke my husband and I, then we heard the windows of our old house rattling nonstop and a strange rumbling noise that seemed to emanate from upstairs–what in the world were those kids doing in the middle of the night! Our disoriented minds took awhile to figure out what was happening. Our youngest daughter jumped into our bed; our oldest we thought had slept through it, but the next morning she said she had been shaken awake and scared but thought we would think she was having a strange dream if she had run downstairs to tell us. Midmorning, there was a shorter and milder aftershock. The earthquakes are the talk of our normally quiet midwestern day and provided the school teachers with learning lessons.

My mother in her senior apartment complex slept through the main earthquake, but felt the aftershock. She remembered the stories her mother told of the big 1923 Tokyo Earthquake and its tremors that lasted three days, killing many thousands and leaving many more thousands homeless and heading for the countryside. That earthquake began around noontime, when many people had fires lit to cook their lunches. In the damage, the cooking fires spread through the wood and paper-walled houses and helped cause much of the Yokohama and Tokyo area to burn to the ground. City people fled to the countryside, many following the train tracks since so many of the roads were buckled and impassable. My grandmother told of how the safest places to be during an earthquake were thought to be in groves of bamboo because of the tightly intertwined net of roots holding the closely spaced trees together.

Unfortunately, so many times earth’s natural events bring a burden of memories. Fortunately for us, our 5.2 Richter Scale earthquake caused no damage, not even a teacup falling out of the cupboard. Fortunately, we are left with exciting memories.

Linda Austin
“Cherry Blossoms in Twilight”
http://www.moonbridgebooks.com
Posted in memories | 2 Comments

Audio Recording Stories and Interviews

Posted on April 13, 2008 by moonbridgebooks

A couple weeks ago when I visited my dad, he surprised me by handing me a stack of CDs he had made of cassette recordings of some of his relatives talking about their lives. They were from many years ago, and contained fascinating stories told by his mother, uncle and some aunts, some going back to their years growing up in Holland pre-WWII. I plopped the CD of my long-gone grandmother into a computer and half-dozed until 1pm listening with wondrous delight to a voice I had forgotten quietly reminiscing of her childhood on a farm in Chicago… in the days when there actually was farmland in Chicago. I marveled at a grandmother I never knew, who once was a little Dutch girl working hard on a farm, who married a young man who offered her a ride home in the rain, who then left her family and friends for a rougher and lonelier farm life on the outskirts of the city.

I went to Grandma’s house almost every weekend as a child, but never got to know her well as I spent my time there running and playing with my sister and my visiting cousins while our fathers worked on the house and our mothers kept Grandma company. Listening to the CD, I was overcome with a wistful sadness. Grandma had been in the background of my childhood; I had neither been old enough nor of the modern era to think about spending something called “quality time” with her. And so, I am grateful that my father had thought to conduct these interviews with his relatives at a time when this concept was almost unheard of. Listening to the voices from the past, eyes closed, I imagine I am there in the room hearing the stories first hand.

For more on the joys of audio-recordings and old photos, see The Heart and Craft of LifeStory Writing post on The Power of Photos.

Linda Austin
“Cherry Blossoms in Twilight”
http://www.moonbridgebooks.com
Posted in capturing memories | 2 Comments