My parents had wrenched me away from my gang in New York City when I was 12, and it had taken two years in Philadelphia for my life to finally work for me. That is, until the day Mom informed me that at the end of eighth grade we would be moving to Kansas City.
I resisted with every bone in my body and every ounce of strength and force of will I could muster. To no avail. How could they do this to me again? Nobody in my family really WANTED to go to Kansas City, but we needed to make more money which Pop could earn by opening an Israel Bonds office in that small but active and expanding Jewish Community. It was a good job and we'd only have to live there a couple of years. My girlfriends recorded a 45 rpm record for me with individual messages of love, cheer and hope: a thread of life to sustain me in alien territory. Seven of Mom's friends signed an elegant card, a lino cut of a rose made by "the children of Holland for the World Friendship Committee of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom," a group in which she was active. Handwritten inside was, "with all our love, and with sorrow that you are leaving," but their sorrow paled against mine, which knew no bounds. On July 23, 1954, Grandma, my 8-year-old brother Carl and I took an airplane to Kansas City and then a cab to Excelsior springs, 35 miles out of town.
We checked into a three-room cabin days to languish in the heat, while Mom, Pop and Julie drove in the Packard. We arrived in time for the hottest summer since 1936 along with migrating swarms of black locusts who stripped the vegetation, blackened the sides of buildings and blanketed the pavement. I had never seen anything like this plague crunching beneath every footstep.
The temperature hit 110 degrees and stayed there for two weeks. "That is hot enough to affect your eyeballs," wrote Pop to his friends. The brutal sunlight daily flattened the already flat fields and low buildings resembling cardboard facades hastily thrown up on a hostile landscape. The nightime darkness, rather than adding a dimension of allure to the visual monotony, seemed only to hold empty shadows rigidly in place. "The best that can be said about Kansas City," Pop noted in a letter to Philadelphia friends, "is that no matter how hot it gets in the daytime...there's nothing to do at night." He continued, "Alix is flourishing ... more of a lady every day."
But I was not "flourishing."
I was miserable. Hot, bored and displaced once more, I again inflicted my complaints upon any handy family member, usually Mom. Days I read and re-read movie magazines and searched for shade, trekking back and forth between the cabin's tiny porch and, should there be a breeze, a shady spot on the scrubby lawn separating the cabin from the road. Nothing stirred outside until six o'clock when we fired up the barbeque for dinner, after which Mom and Pop would drive back to their air-conditioned hotel room in town leaving the kids in bed and Grandma playing solitaire. I'd sulk on the porch listening to the crickets and watching the occasional traffic. There was no TV, no radio, and no stores within walking distance, making it difficult to sneak a smoke and compounding my distress. What to do to relieve the boredom? This was as far west as any of us had ever gotten, in recognition of which I spent an hour of one afternoon on a horse bouncing back and forth over a dusty trail. The next morning I woke up with sore thighs and the inside of my ankles on fire. Each had sprouted an open sore where layers of skin had been rubbed away by the stirrups. There was not much to do but endure my burning ankles until they healed. I hobbled over to the dry grass and sat. The stubble prickled my legs as I peeled my sock away to regard the painful circles, amazed that I hadn't felt it happening. A boy around my age approached and hopped off his bike for a chat. After a short conversation he extended his left hand and turned to go. I reached to shake it but he jerked his hand away and rode off laughing, "Left hand for niggers."
Kansas City, I decided, must be Hell itself.
