Summer of My German Soldier (24 page)

“So you say we destroyed Hitler and Mussolini and that little Jap, Hirohito, so we’ve done our job. Nothing more to do!” The representative let his words lay uneventfully on his audience before suddenly bellowing out, “Well, is that what you all think?”

When the only sound that came back was the half-echo of his own question, he supplied, “No, ladies and gentlemen, that is not what right-thinking Americans led by real true patriots like Senator Joe McCarthy and I believe. No, sir, not by a long shot! We Americans have got to stand like Christian martyrs against any and all those faceless, Godless
isms.
Fascism! Communism! And Socialism!”

He talked on and on about “alien ideologies” and how we Americans can’t one bit more accommodate ourselves to the Russians than we could to the Germans. After a while, I noticed that some of the audience couldn’t quite accommodate themselves to their skinny chairs. Finally Mr. Stebbins half-turned from the audience toward us graduates, and I suspected that at long last our own “personal message” was coming right up.

“And so it is to you, the fine young men and girls of the 1950 Jenkinsville graduating class, that I want to personally tell, each and every one of you, that you MUST stand straight and tall against all Godless teachings in whatever form they are presented. And always remember this: All of us Christians represent God’s very own soldiers. Soldiers who are never afraid to fight!”

The applause that sounded for his ending remarks seemed a whole lot less vigorous than the applause that had first welcomed him, but it’s really hard to judge that sort of thing. So I could be mistaken.

After Coach—I mean Superintendent Begley thanked Mr. Stebbins, he introduced all of our class officers before turning the program over to our class president, Edna Louise Jackson, who gave a grand speech called “Jenkinsville High School, Farewell.”

I told myself that just because I was passed over for class office is no reason for me to feel bad. After all I’m not really a leader like a president or a vice president has got to be.

But probably more important, I stand convicted of exactly two crimes too many. The first charge is premeditated murder (after-the-fact—more than nineteen hundred years after the fact) of one Jesus Christ. Around here it is put more emotionally but less legally than that: “It was your people who killed our Lord.”

Once the charge was even made in home ec class (of all places!) by our teacher, Mrs. Henrietta Gibbons. I raised my hand to answer the lie, and when my hand wasn’t recognized by Mrs. Gibbons, I stood up anyway and spoke my piece. “Mrs. Gibbons,” I said in a voice trembling with fear and anger, “historians who don’t seem to have quite so many axes to grind as Baptists say that it was Roman soldiers and not Jews who committed that crime!”

Anyway, I think I should have been elected class correspondent even though Juanita Henkins can spell and punctuate rings around me. Because her vocabulary is rudimentary compared to mine. And that’s the truth!

It’s not because I’m smart, it’s only because words are my hobby. I would never want anybody from around here to know this, but I began studying Webster’s Elementary School Dictionary when I was in the second grade. By the time I was in the sixth grade, I had graduated to Webster’s Collegiate. And just last year my grandparents gave me the great Webster’s Second International Dictionary. Unabridged and indexed and on genuine India paper. But then it oughta be great. It cost twenty-five dollars!

But since my vocabulary isn’t that noticeably great, I wouldn’t have felt quite so upset about Juanita’s being the class correspondent if I wasn’t already a professional writer. I’ve written articles ranging from the Rice County Horse Show to the big Earle fire to the time last winter when Mr. Conrad Ellis, legislative assistant to Senator Fulbright, spoke before the Jenkinsville Rotary Club.

Now my being a stringer for the
Memphis Commercial Appeal
may not exactly intimidate Pearl Buck, but at fifteen cents per column inch, it’s not exactly nothing either. So would it have been so terrible for my classmates—far too much of a concession to this outsider—if they had allowed me to be class correspondent?

Besides having all the usual reasons for wanting one of the nine class honors, I guess I had still another reason. I needed an honor. Something that could erase from people’s consciousness the memory of my second crime. Anything to blot out some of the dishonor!

I’m making too much of it. After all, spending nine weeks in a reform school didn’t exactly make me a convict … did it? Besides, I truly believe that everybody has more or less forgotten all about that by now.

Sometimes though when I’m with somebody who seems especially nice, I want to ask them, personally speaking, if they ever think about that anymore. About what I did. But I always stop myself just in time because I know that it would only serve to remind people of the very thing that I need them to forget.

Also by Bette Greene

- Morning Is a Long Time Coming

- The Drowning of Stephan Jones

- Philip Hall Likes Me. I Reckon Maybe.

- Get On Out of Here, Philip Hall

- I’ve Already Forgotten Your Name, Philip Hall!

A Biography of Bette Greene

B
ETTE
G
REENE
was born in Memphis, Tennessee, on June 28, 1934, and grew up across the Harahan Bridge in Arkansas cotton country, thirty-five miles west of Memphis. Bette’s first twelve years were spent in Parkin, Arkansas, a town of 1,100, with two streets and no stop signs, in the very buckle of the Bible Belt.

With the birth of the family’s second child, Marsha, the care and protection of four-year-old Bette became the responsibility of the family servant and housekeeper, Ruth, with whom Bette came to share a child-mother bond. Ruth, a long-suffering, spiritual black woman, engaged Bette’s precocious curiosity with stories and songs. In Ruth’s arms, Bette knew unconditional love, but also felt the fear and anguish instilled by the nightriders of the Ku Klux Klan.

Bette’s elementary school classroom was a place of despair: She and her classmates, many of whom were the shoeless and hungry children of sharecroppers, learned straight from the chalkboard with no access to books. When the last bell of the day rang, Bette knew many of her fellow students would join the black children in the cotton fields, working until dark.

At age seven, Bette, tired of the ten-mile walk to the nearest library from her small town, was allowed to travel to Memphis to visit her grandmother. After riding the train alone from Parkin to Memphis, Bette was met by her grandmother, Tilly, and a chauffeur, and driven to the Peabody Hotel. Tilly, the family matriarch, took Bette into her world. Their love and trust for each other grew over many lunches and conversation punctuated with Yiddish phrases.

On one such occasion, Tilly gave Bette a four-inch-thick dictionary. The gift fed Bette’s voracious hunger for knowledge, and she promised Tilly that she would learn every word. That same year, at Tilly’s request, Bette wrote a letter to Pope Pius XII begging for his help in locating Tilly’s brothers, missing in battle in Lithuania during World War II.

At age eight, Bette submitted an account of a Parkin barn fire, complete with burning cows, to the Memphis
Commercial Appeal
. The story was published and Bette received her first byline—and twenty-four cents—making her the youngest professional journalist of her time. Bette’s experience growing up in the only Jewish family in a suffocatingly small Southern town would later inform her award-winning novel
Summer of My German Soldier
.

After entering the University of Alabama in 1952, Bette became a consistent betting winner, putting her money on Coach Bear Bryant’s Crimson Tide. But when the English faculty ruled that Bette could not be admitted into the creative writing program until she completed courses of English grammar, Bette said, “Bye, bye ’bama!”

In 1953, Bette began school at Memphis State University. She became feature editor for the
Tiger Rag
while also writing for United Press International and publishing stories worldwide.

Then, in 1954, Bette took her tuition money and fled to Paris, France, enrolling at Alliance Française and spending a year studying French, life, and love.

In 1955, Bette returned to Memphis and began work as a freelance writer for the
Commercial Appeal
. At the same time, she turned down an invitation from Colonel Tom Parker to write about a new talent he was managing, an unknown singer named Elvis Presley, as it was known that the Colonel didn’t pay. Bette soon left for New York City and entered Columbia University to study writing. She quickly became Columbia’s “rising literary star” and was offered a significant publishing deal for her first novel,
Counter Point, My Love
. Unhappy with the novel, rather than accept the deal she tore up the manuscript and watched it burn in her fireplace.

Bette married Dr. Donald Sumner Greene, a neurologist from Boston, in 1959. Leaving her Southern roots, she moved to Brookline, Massachusetts, where her two children, Carla and Jordan, were born. In the security of their family home, Bette wrote
Summer of My German
Soldier while studying creative writing at Harvard University.

In 1973, after thirty-seven rejections,
Summer of My German Soldier
was published. The novel garnered numerous awards and honors, including the first Golden Kite Award from the Society of Children’s Book Writers, and the Massachusetts Children’s Book Award. The novel was also named a
New York Times
Outstanding Book and an ALA Notable Book, and was a National Book Award finalist.
Summer of My German Soldier
was translated into ten languages.

The television film
Summer of My German Soldier
would go on to win the Humanitas Prize for human dignity, meaning, and freedom in 1978, and that same year, Esther Rolle won an Emmy for her performance as Ruth. The screenplay was written and adapted by Bette Greene and Jane-Howard Hammerstein.

In 1974, Bette published her second novel,
Philip Hall Likes Me. I Reckon Maybe
. It was named an ALA Notable Book and a
New York Times
Outstanding Book and collected numerous additional honors including the Newbery Honor, the
Kirkus
Choice Award, and the Child Study Association of America’s Children’s Book Award.

Inspired by her readers, who demanded more adventures of Beth Lambert and Phillip Hall, Bette Greene wrote two more books in the Phillip Hall trilogy:
Get On Out of Here, Philip Hall
and
I’ve Already Forgotten Your Name, Philip Hall!

In 1978, Bette published her sequel to
Summer of My German Soldier, Morning Is a Long Time Coming
. In 1983, Bette was awarded the keys to the City of Memphis. That same year she published
Them That Glitter and Them That Don’t
, a novel inspired by the real lives of Loretta Lynn and Dolly Parton, which received the Parents’ Choice Award.

In 1991, Bette published
The Drowning of Stephan Jones
. This book, based on the true story of the death of Charles O. Howard in Bangor, Maine, was banned, censored, and challenged by school boards, libraries, and parents across the country. To this day, the Eckerd Wilderness Camps use
The Drowning of Stephan Jones
as bibliotherapy, giving copies to campers who have been victims of abuse.

By 2010, Bette Greene’s readers had taken it upon themselves to create a Facebook page for her, as well as a page for
Summer of My German Soldier
, which includes performance videos about the love between Patty and Anton and even rap songs about Hitler.

In 2011, three years after the death of Dr. Donald Greene, her husband of fifty years, Bette discovered a manuscript for a book series long-forgotten in her computer titled
Verbal Karate
. She trademarked the title and earmarked a percentage of the book’s income for the Phoebe Prince Anti-Bullying Foundation, and returned to her island home and writing sanctuary to begin the final edits of
Verbal Karate
.

As a twenty-first century master author with four decades of fans worldwide, Bette Greene uses electronic media platforms and social networks to reach out and embrace her readers.

Bette Greene and her mother, Sadie (far left), organizer of the townspeople of Parkin, Arkansas, answering the nationwide call for scrap metal destined to become ammo for the war effort in 1942.