DN 11

War, Thin Walls & the Common Man

June 4, 1944

I noticed that the children are calling each other Japanee, Nipponee, German and big-nosed Hitler now, instead of nigger as a term of opprobrium. The last term is now forgotten--until after the war.

Christmas, December 1944, 7:15 p.m., Sunday evening

It was December, 1944, the year of growing victories for the Allies. Winston Churchill, it was said, by a member of Parliament, had just 'laid the ghost of the Four Freedoms' in a recent talk. The United States had the Japs nearly on the run, and the pockets of its citizens--white and black--were running with bills and silver that they couldn't spend on luxuries, and were spending on liquor and whatever they could get their hands upon. Russia, having about finished her fight with Germany, was looking upon the Capitalist countries with eyes that daily grew more and more realistically in what they saw, and caused its tongue to speak in like fashion. The Years of the Great Steal, the old years that most of the great nations had known before the war, were slowly creeping back into existence. 

The Man [Christian] was beginning to wonder just how much the common man would really gain from this ghastly upheaval. Only God knows, he thought. Patsey, living next door in the house called "Thin Walls," was wondering when her daddy would be coming back home from across the sea. Evelyn, her mother, was beginning to wonder when her sailor boy friend would be getting home for good, and what would happen if both her husband, Patsey's father, and the boy friend both showed up at the same time or about the same time. The walls of the little three-roomed house were growing in greater need of repair daily. They were rotting away. The rain beat in through them and wet the plaster in many places, leaving large water stains and mildew spots after the weather had cleared.

The cold winds of December and January whipped in between the chinks and crevices of the weatherboarding, riddled with termites, and found its way into the rooms where lived the Negro man on one side and the white woman and her two children on the other. Cold fingers reached up through the cracks in the floor, and the parts of the floor where the joice supports were giving away and rotting. The house daily dipped further towards the street--so much so now that the last cement-covered brick foundation upon which the bathroom rested stood an inch or more removed from the sleeper that had formerly rested on it.

The man [Christian] in his side and the white woman in her side kept their gas fires going sometimes day and night and especially in cold damp weather. E.C. had a cold, and the little girl Patsey had one too. Their mother, usually stricken with periodic spells of asthma, was continually hoarse and spoke in a hoarse, discouraged voice. When the window panes began to fall out, the two occupants put them back with their own hands. When the sash broke an fell to the joices, their weight pushed through the thin, cheap termite eaten weatherboarding and fell to the ground where it lay. They did not worry to pick them up. They had stopped painting and decorating the house. The walls were getting too bad. But they continued to pay the same rent month after month.

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