It was truthfully and universally acknowledged to be dark and stormy last night when I dreamed I went to Mandalay where I met stately plump Buck Mulligan who called out to me: “Lolita, light of my life” which ain’t my name but you probably want to know where I was born and what my lousy childhood was like (and I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me - but at least they didn’t call me Ishmael) but anyway that brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to the weather last night.
It was dark and stormy, all right, and Pa was fixing to get him a lynching. “They’re out there. Black boys in white suits up before me to commit sex acts in the hall and get it mopped up before I can catch them,” was all he kept saying. Most likely he should have been saying: “I am a sick man… I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I think my liver is diseased.”
All this happened, more or less. Mama died today. Or yesterday maybe, I don’t know. It was the day my grandmother exploded, too, but you don’t want to know about that. See, when I was three … we had arrived in Maycomb wearing tags on our wrists which instructed – ‘To Whom It May Concern’ – that we were the Cunninghams from Decatur, en route to Jasper c/o Mrs. Annie Henderson. Things hadn’t worked out and we’d stayed in Maycomb and then when he was nearly thirteen, my brother Tom got his arm badly broken at the elbow and they say when trouble comes close ranks, and so the white people did except the Cunninghams was left out of the circle and the entailment and all.
And now Pa is an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and … had gone eighty-four days …without taking a fish. In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since. Whenever you feel like criticizing any one, he told me, just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had. And it seems to me like the past is a foreign country: they do things differently there ‘cos I don’t remember no advantages. All I know is that it was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York, except that it was love at first sight. The first time I saw the chaplain I fell madly in love with him. But there was no possibility of taking a walk that day so I upped and wrote this. You don’t know about me without you have read a book by the name of To Kill A Mocking Bird but that ain’t no matter. That book was made by Harper Lee, and she told the truth, mainly.
Signed: Walter Cunningham Jnr.
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