1962 A prose poem by Jady Montgomery
It was the first day of my eleventh summer. Me and my “bestie” just giddy about everything, in our cotton crop tops and flip flops. The air luminous and breezy, an infinity of summer days awaiting.
Then — a front page unimagined upending of everything. Life divided into before and after. The door shut tight. All that had been, now going dark and quiet, left behind in a kind of night. And me somersaulted across town to join the one parent I had left.
Long lost dad, recently redeemed, washed clean in the self-help wellspring he’d patched together with a motley band of misfits — fifty or so drunks, junkies, and ex-cons, along for their lives, for more than the ride, hanging tough together in a grand old armory standing tall on the beachfront promenade.
Standing tall on that White’s Only beach, Santa Monica, California, 1961. I was flung inside this pack of potential while our beachfront neighbors went to work to get us out — me and my new mothers and their little ones, uncles, aunts and more — unimagined family galore in all colors of the human rainbow, from east of anywhere those beachfront neighbors ever knew.
This rainbow of souls holding me together inside their togetherness — inside their doo-wop tunes and downbeat drumming, humming while they worked, and worked to change their ways, teaching me the Lindy, and laughing their asses off like the world was their oyster, which it was.
Yes indeed. Laughin’ and hummin’ even while they fought City Hall and long-lost dad stood up for the first time in his whole life. Their holding filled all the holes that landed with me, even my mother’s wicked death. Filled all the holes like wet sand packed into castles at the water’s edge.
Their holding together opened that beach, and opened minds too, one day at a time. Opened minds near and far, far away. Even those neighbors came to seethat what they had believed, could change in unimagined ways and utterly rearrange the world — as they knew it.
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