Chapter 1: Early Years

This is the first page of my autobiography, for which I have now written about 31 pages. If there is interest, I will post further installments as time goes on.

Prophesy

One of my earliest memories was of me, my mother and two sisters in my sisters’ bedroom all reading a chapter book together. Baths had been taken and teeth brushed. We were in our pajamas. After listening to my mother read the chapter, I entertained my family by dancing to this song:

Deep in the heart to of the Gitchee Gamee Gumee,

Deep in the heart of the Gitchee Gamee Gumee,

Deep in the heart of the Gitchee Gamee Gumee,

There lives a beautiful woman.

The first three lines are like drums being beaten violently, and the last line is a lazy floating melody (F4G4F4G4F4G4E5C5). I have no idea where I got the song from, or whether I had heard parts of it before somewhere. I may have just made it up.

Since I grew up in Minnesota and Wisconsin, it is likely that I had heard of Lake Superior being called Gitche Gumee ‘big lake’ by the Ojibwe. But for me, the Gitchee Gamee Gumee was characterized as having a heart, like a forest or a jungle. The song revealed that in reaching its heart, I would find a beautiful woman. It prophesized events to come. 

After college, I went to serve in the Peace Corps in the small country of Togo, West Africa, where I met my Togolese wife, who is indeed a very beautiful woman. Going to Togo and meeting my wife were events that defined most of my life. Somehow, I had been able to foresee these events very early on from the comfort of my childhood home.

I don’t think any mysticism is needed to understand this prophesy. Rather, our lives are a puzzle. We are born with some of the pieces in place, a direct result of the DNA provided by our parents. The environment we are born into supplies some of the other significant pieces. Even at that young age, I could sense the structure of this puzzle, and see how some of the sections would turn out later.

Other than this brief brush with imaginary foreign lands, my childhood existence in Minnesota and Wisconsin was deeply white, and mostly isolated from any of the kinds of cultural diversity that the United States had to offer at the time. I don’t remember seeing any African-American, Hispanic, Asian or Jewish children or adults in-person (or any other kinds of people other than white people) until I was in college. I don’t remember any such people attending any of the schools that I attended all the way through high school. Although in those years we did not have the internet, we did have television and encyclopedias, so I knew that different kinds of people existed and what they looked like. But any kind of sympathy for them or interest in them was literally inconceivable. Years later, I confirmed with both of my parents (long since divorced) that none of their friends fell into those categories either. We were in a cultural bubble of white middle-class protestants, with a sprinkle of Catholics thrown in for good measure.

What I do remember about African-Americans from my childhood is that we children all knew highly racist songs about them, and used to sing them all the time, with absolutely no regard for of their racist content. We either did not realize they were racist songs, or did not care. Here they are:

Daniel Boone was a man,

Yes, a big man,

But the bear was bigger,

So he ran like a n***** up the tree.

Einie, meenie, minie, moe,

Catch a n***** by the toe,

If he hollers let him go,

Einie, meenie, minie, moe.

I am sure I sang and heard these songs sung hundreds or even thousands of times. For example, I would have heard the second song any time there was a choice to be made in our young world, as in picking teams for a game. For any choice we made, we would sing it. I am also certain that I never saw either one of the songs written down on paper. Both of the use the n-word. Both of them negatively characterize African-Americas as weak and afraid. How did these ghastly little songs affect my views of African-Americans subconsciously? How did we as children learn them? We must have passed them on to each other. Certainly, our parents did not sit down and sing them to us. They were malignant viruses circulating through the playgrounds and the minds of children in rural Wisconsin. 

But my experiences raise the question of how widely known the songs were in different parts of the United States, and whether they died out or are still being sung by children to each other. Are there children in rural Wisconsin still singing these sinister little songs? I do not have answers to these questions.