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to Specific Childhood Experiences
Novelist
Willie Morris recalls his wartime childhood in Yazoo City, Mississippi.
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. . [T]he teachers would exhort us with shouts and occasional
slaps to finish all of our weiners and sauerkraut or our bologna
and blackeyed peas. It was our small contribution to the war
effort, to eat everything on our plate. Once the third grade
teacher, known as the cruelest in the school, stood over me
and forced me to eat a plateful of sauerkraut, which I did,
gagging and in tears, wishing I could leave . . . and never
come back….
The
war itself was a glorious and incomparable thing, a great panorama
intended purely for the gratification of one's imagination.
I kept a diary on all the crucial battles, which I followed
every day in the pages of the Memphis Commercial Appeal and
the Jackson Daily News, and whenever the Allies won one of them,
I would tie tin cans to a string and drag them clattering down
the empty sidewalks of Grand Avenue.We never missed the latest
war film, and luxuriated in the unrelieved hatred exercised
for the Germans and the japs. How we hated the japs, those grinning
creatures who pried off fingernails, sawed off eyelashes with
razors, and bayoneted babies! The Germans we also hated, but
slightly less so, because they looked more like us ....
Willie
Morris, North Toward Home, 20, 35.
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