Now I know why...

Now I think I know why...

So now I know why my grandfather was so angry when I said he looked like Truman! There was a photo on the desk of Granddaddy smiling, with white hair and those rimless eyeglasses on his nose. It looked like Truman to me, and I said so. "No he does not!" was the angry answer.
But today I  learned a little more about the Democrat who succeeded FDR and dropped the bombs on Hiroshim and Nagasaki. Those bombs probably saved my Daddy's life, as a US Marine in the Pacific Theater 1945. He had survived Guadalcanal, Tarawa, Midway, the Solomons, Peleliu; the common wisdom today is that he would not have survived the invasion of Japan. The bombs made that invasion moot. So why did he and his father hate Truman?
I knew that Truman desegregated the military, but I never thought my father hated that. Maybe he did. But also Truman promised to give Negroes the vote in the south, give Negroes the vote in the "white primary" the Democratic primary which decided southern elections. Truman promised to use the power of the federal government to override the state governments which were bent on continuing to deny Negroes the right to vote.
My grandfather was raised on a plantation in Berryville, Virginia. His wife, my dear Grandma, inherited plantation acreage in Alabama from her ancestor Major Tyus. My father told the story about Major Tyus being my "great great great" grandfather. He outfitted a Confederate regiment. He owned 301 slaves and killed one because he didn't like odd numbers. Major and Mrs. Tyus' portraits hung in the living room above the fireplace. Their heritage was white supremacy, and I guess they clung to it all my life.
We were living next door to Grandma and Granddaddy while my Daddy was over in Korea. And we stayed there a while after he got back, until he was posted somewhere else. Many of the Marines' wives had settled in California when their husbands were called to serve in the Korean War. My mother took 3 of us kids and her pregnant self out there, too.
My infant memories of that short stay on the west coast involve a babysitter who did things. I remember his face, I remember being made to take a bath even though it was not bath night. I remember the naked pictures he helped me draw. And I remember talking to another adult, not my mother, about this babysitter. Shortly after that, we all went back to Decatur, Georgia to live next door to Daddy's parents in one of Grandma's rental houses.
There was a lot of screaming in that house. There my mother was very big in her polka dot house robe, and stomped up and down the hallway screaming. She encouraged us to rollerskate inside the house. I tried to "run away" from her to my Grandma next door one night. Grandma was kind but firm, and I had to go back. When I got back home to Mother, she had given my bed to my brothers. During my baby brother's third birthday party, I broke the glass door between the living room and the hallway and scarred up my right arm. My questions about my baby sister who got born then, and how that worked with Mother's tummy were not well-received. I remember the little scar beneath her belly button that meant no more babies. I remember the ugly black sore on my baby sister's tummy, don't touch!
There was never never never any talking about the babysitter, the touching, the trouble. Much later Mother would lament to me the terrible misfortune she "allowed" to happen to my brother. But never any talk to me about anything I experienced. I was almost sixty years old before I found someone to talk to about it. Not twenty or thiry or forty years old. Nearly sixty. The therapist I talked to suggested that perhaps my brother, with whom we siblings were feuding, and my mother, then deceased, had suffered similarly. That might be the source of some of their difficult personalities. I'm inclined to agree with her.