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21 The Art of War Coal from the mines in southern Illinois burned dirtier than western coal, so my hometown grew slowly poorer, decade by decade, after the highproduction years around World War I. Back then my grandfather was an international organizer for the United Mine Workers of America, a subdistrict union president, and a state senator, the kind of man who intended to buy an entire city block so he could install his four grown children in homes around his own. They’d be a working-class American dynasty, and he would take care of everyone. My mother was the youngest of four children and was always “Baby” to him and he “Daddy” to her, and my earliest notions of manhood were based on his rise to beneficent power from such a rough start. He managed only to get a mail-order certificate from the Miners’ and Mechanics’ Institute, but he sent my mother to Stephens College, where Joan Crawford had gone briefly. A couple of our older citizens still remember my mother as a beautiful young woman in a convertible, breezing into town from some new adventure. She worked as a secretary for Life and taught in Florida. She married twice—three times if you count the shortlived secret marriage to a common foot soldier in World War II, which Daddy got annulled. He also wouldn’t let her join the Women Airforce Service Pilots, or wasps, so she got her private pilot’s license to spite him, and it was reported in the newspaper. She went back for a master’s degree, spoke some French, and loved it when Jackie Kennedy asked André 22 the art of war Malraux to the White House.When I was very small, she still dressed stylishly around the house and was perfumed with Chanel No 5. As you can imagine, she had a complicated relationship with the miners, shopkeepers, and factory workers whose children were in her classroom. Her Daddy died in 1948, a victim of his pipe and the poisons of the mines he’d started in as a boy. With him gone the family lost influence, and her own fortunes began to fail. No doubt some townsfolk thought she had a superiority complex with no basis in reality. But southern Illinois was her home, and she knew and identified with the people better than some may have realized. Like them, she took pride in being hard when necessary —she was “both mother and father”to me, she said—and I think some understood that about her. The barbershop she took me to was downtown, in the same building as the Western Union office that was also a toy shop, a candy store, and a Greyhound bus terminal. The owner had been the town’s scoutmaster for so many years that he’d taken boys to see Red Grange, the Galloping Ghost, play ball at the University of Illinois, and when their flivver boiled over coming home, he had his scouts run relays down to a creek by the road, scoop water in their hats, and pour it in the radiator as he kept driving along, slowly. The building wasn’t air-conditioned, as I remember, and the old wooden floors creaked when you walked from one business to the other. The giant transom over the shared door was always open, so the toy shop smelled of talc and drowsy warm lather, and the barbershop rang with register bells and phone calls from next door. There were two barbers. One was squat and greased his hair back flat.The other was thin and bald.I was about five and thought of them as old,old men, but they were surely only in their early fifties. My mother asked them if she could leave me to wait my turn while she ran next door to the cobbler. Other men waited in metal armchairs in the heat. I was almost never around men. My dad was gone, and most of my close relatives were women. I didn’t want her to go but was too afraid to cry.The barbers laughed and said sure, they’d take care of me alright and to take her time; I was going to be just fine. My mother told me to be good and to listen to them and walked out. The thin barber, who rarely spoke—he had a kind, patient grandpa voice, [18.226.177.223] Project MUSE (2024-04-19 14:12...

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