Tails
by Amanda Goldblatt

When I flew home from school in Massachusetts for Veteran's Day, Walter Reed Army Medical Center was not even on the itinerary. I planned to take my mother to the Vietnam Memorial Wall, listen to the long list of distinguished speakers and speak with Vets. I imagined that we might even get into a little trouble with my mother's peace sign button attached to the blue Gap backpack she uses as a purse.

When we park and arrive at the gates, there is a small collection of men and women. A few antiwar signs bob in the misty, cold air. Flyers are passed around while a few cameramen and reporters jostle the laymen protesters to get good shots. The eleven o'clock Veteran's Day Veterans for Peace (VFP) press conference is already in progress.

The press conference tumbles through a long list of speakers - all passionate, resolute, and well spoken. When it ends, the crowd begins to talk amongst themselves. I'm approached by an old black man in an old military blazer laden with medals. Old red eyes, a neat haircut with a thin shaved part that begins at his temple above his right eyebrow and disappears at the crown of his head in a mass of tight curls.

"Joseph," he says as way of introducing himself, and launches into a thick babble of how the State did him wrong after he did his job liberating the Jews during World War II. Flashing a Veteran's identification card, Joseph tells me how he worked at Walter Reed after that, and was fired after a spate of fainting spells that were eventually proclaimed a symptom of post-traumatic stress. He tells me more, about his family, about his ninety-seven dollar check that comes every month and just isn't enough. Just as he begins to cry, a reporter wedges between us without even an "excuse me."

The reporter asks him what he thinks of the war Iraq . He is fishing for a soundbite, but he won't it get here. Poor Joseph launches into the same speech he has just finished telling me, and the reporter interrupts every word with coarse questions about how did he feel about the U.S. at war again, what did he think about all of this. But Joseph can only tell his story, and the reporter stops him mid-sentence, thanks him quickly, and moves on to a young Socialist in a tan suit.

Later, Joseph pulls me aside to tell me a story he says he probably shouldn't. "The night after the last liberation, I was drinkin'," he says, his voice in a high whisper. "I was drinkin' and all I wanted to do was lay down with a woman, and there was a sweet German woman I met and she spoke a little English and it was enough. After a time, we were naked in the bed and she wanted to know where my tail was. And I said 'Woman, what do you mean tail?' and she said wasn't it common knowledge that black folks had tails, like the devil?

"After that I kicked her out and wasn't it a shame on such a happy evening something like that had to get me?"

Of all the things that have happened to Joseph, all the expository sentences in his speech, this is what makes him mad, sobbing, still, and this is the power of a memory. All of the men and women here bear their personal memories of war, just as my mother remembers 60s activism, and what it was like to be young and embattled against the seemingly all-encompassing force of the Federal Government that diametrically opposed everything she thought to be true about the world. Joseph, probably McKee, surely my mother, we all have our tails.

Amanda Goldblatt graduated from Hampshire College in literary nonfiction in May 2004. This piece is an excerpt from her senior thesis, "Hello Again, Kent State ," a piece that explores how the writer's mother, (a witness), and our society remembers and commemorates the 1970 Kent State Shootings.