The Beat of My Own Drum Read Online Free PDF Page B

increasingly frequent since we moved there. One day the bleeding just wouldn’t stop, despite Moms’s usual remedies like pinching my nose or placing a cold towel on the back of my neck. I drank a glass of water and watched in horror as it turned red. The doctors couldn’t stop the bleeding either, and I ended up vomiting up what I couldn’t help but swallow, which scared me even more. It seemed like hours before anyone was able to make it stop.
    The memory of that incident remains—panic, Moms’s helplessness, and my own terror that I’d bleed to death.
    I learned of President Kennedy’s assassination in that house too. Moms and I were sitting on her bed in front of the TV while she folded laundry. Walter Cronkite interrupted whatever we were watching with a report that the president had been shot. Moms gasped and then let out a scream, holding her head in her handsand rocking herself to and fro. I looked up at her and then back at Walter Cronkite and didn’t understand. Was it for real? Hearing Moms’s cries, I realized that it had to be.
    Three days later, I was in front of the TV again when the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald was inadvertently broadcast. There was a shot and screaming and lots of men shouting as I sat open-mouthed and mesmerized. The assassination prompted the news station to air footage of JFK just before he was shot. There was our president on the screen, smiling and alive. I couldn’t make sense of it. Why was he smiling? Wasn’t he dead? It was too much for my five-year-old mind to take in.
    It was in that house where I witnessed my parents have an argument for the first time, too; the only time I ever saw my father lose his temper. That really frightened me, as he never got angry or yelled or hit us—Moms had all the southern fire that one family needed. I have no idea what it was about—money, probably—but I’ve never forgotten it.
    As if there wasn’t enough going on within our four walls, the next thing to happen was that people warned us that our new next-door neighbors were Gypsies. We lived in a mostly black neighborhood, and the newcomers were exotic looking, like Indians, and they didn’t send their children to school. At such a young age I didn’t know about the Gypsy stereotype, but I detected that it was something not to be envied.
    Their arrival all seemed part of the dark power that house held over us.
    My fears were allayed when one of the dreaded Gypsies turned out to be a friendly nine-year-old boy. It was the 1960s, and everybody’s children played openly in the streets or in their yards, moving carefree from one house to another as games or faces changed.
    “Go outside and play,” Moms or Pops would say, and none of uswould be expected home until Moms whistled loudly, which would be our cue to come inside for supper.
    One day when I was wearing a dress (so we must have just come back from somewhere special), I ran outside to play in front of the house as usual. Our Gypsy neighbor spotted me and urged me to crawl with him into the gloomy two-foot space underneath his house.
    “I have something to show you,” he told me with a smile.
    Being a natural tomboy, I was all for an adventure and followed him eagerly, completely forgetting about my dress.
    Once we got into the cramped, spidery space, though, I wasn’t so keen. Then he did something strange and pulled out a tube of glue, unscrewing the top. He squeezed some of the goo into a brown paper bag, which he held up to me in the half light, and said, “Sniff this.”
    I shook my head. The bag was stinky, the space was dark and dirty, and I told him I wanted to leave.
    “Look, it’s fine,” he said, and shoved his nose into the narrow opening of the bag to inhale. When he lifted his face, he was grinning.
    He placed the bag in my hand. “Try it,” he urged. “It’ll make you feel good.”
    He made it seem like fun, so I eventually gave in. No sooner had I taken a sniff, though, than I felt unwell. Dropping