Watching Walter Cronkite

(The following is an excerpt from Soul Deep, a novel I recently completed. The year is 1968, the narrator is a 12-year-old boy named Malcolm, Amanda is his older sister, the war in question here is, of course, Vietnam.)

Mama liked to watch the news…Walter Cronkite…every evening when she got home. Even before Daddy left (he didn’t have much use for the news most days…Amanda didn’t either), I would watch with her…usually sitting on the floor near to where she was sitting… and ask her questions about what was going on.

“Do you think the War will still be going on when I’m old enough to be drafted?” I asked her one day while images from Vietnam were on the screen.

Mama took a drag on her cigarette and shook her head. “Doesn’t matter,” she said emphatically, “you won’t be going either way.”

I frowned at that. If our country was at war, why wouldn’t I be going? To be sure, the thought frightened me…I had no idea if I could actually kill someone…but it still seemed like something I would have to do no matter how much it scared me. “Why not?” I asked

Mama shrugged. “That shit over there ain’t nothin’ that anybody’s children should be dyin’ for,” she said. “It’s ain’t like the war when I was a girl.”

Mama would sometimes tell me stories about living during World War 2…about food being sometimes hard to find in the stores…about willingly surrendering her precious comic books to the paper drives…about how hard her mother worked in the kitchens of white women while her father was lucky to have been able to keep his job as a postman…about listening to the President talk on the radio reassuring the country and making them all feel they were sacrificing for a grand cause.

That was, she always said, was one worth fighting for…worth dying for if need be. We were attacked…we fought back…that’s what we were supposed to do. Even if the country didn’t really think of you as being a full citizen, it was still what you were supposed to do.

Mama had no such feelings for the Vietnam War. She didn’t believe that “our boys” should be dying in some little country she hadn’t heard of before the fighting started.

Mama had been thrilled when Bobby Kennedy had gotten into the race for President. “If Bobby gets in there,” she said on the day he announced he was running, “we’ll be outta that war in no time flat. He’s a good man like his brother, the President…and he’ll set things right in this country.”

I had a fond recollection of President Kennedy and of my grandfather. We were in New Orleans and Papa, Mama’s father, had taken me and Amanda down to see the President. I was 6. Papa was a dark man with a sly smile and a knowing twinkle in his eyes…he always smelled like Old Spice and cigars.

When President Kennedy came to town he insisted on taking us to see him. We rode the streetcar and we rode the bus…all of which I found to be a grand adventure… and the three of us joined the throng gathering along the avenue to watch the President go by. Papa hefted me up onto his broad shoulders as the limousine whizzed by. I waved at the President and it seemed like he waved back.

“Did you see the President, baby?” Mama asked when we got back.

“Yeah,” I said happily though I wasn’t completely sure what the real significance of being “the President” was, “he had red hair.” It was a trick of the light but I would continue to believe that John Kennedy had red hair for years to come; Papa would always just chuckle when I said it.

I hadn’t understood what was going on when he was killed. The teachers, many of whom were crying, put us kids out on the playground that afternoon to wait for our parents to come get us.

“They killed him,” Mama kept saying after she picked me up. I sat in the back seat as we drove over to get Amanda from the Junior High School and Mama just kept saying that same thing every once in a while.

The thought of Robert Kennedy becoming President pleased Mama to no end. “If Bobby don’t get in there to stop the war,” she said more than once after his announcement, “then your rusty butt will be going to Canada before you go over there to die in that goddamn jungle.”

I didn’t bother to argue with her…but I hadn’t truly made up my mind if I would go that route…it still didn’t seem right. But I didn’t dwell on it either way since there was a still a long way to go before I would be called on to really make the decision.

Those times of watching Walter Cronkite and talking about the news was something we shared with each other and I loved that we had something between us that nobody else shared.