Tag Archives: memoir

141. K-8 in Another Century

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This is Teacher Appreciation Week, and I’ve known a lot of them. The good ones are a treasure beyond price and the bad ones ought to be shot – metaphorically, at least. Fortunately the bad ones are fairly rare and they usually don’t last.

Back in October I praised my high school teachers in a post that I plan to run again tomorrow. After high school and a couple of decades of assorted adventures, I became a teacher myself. I didn’t plan it that way; in fact, it was the shock of a lifetime.

I grew up in a different world. In many ways, a farm in Oklahoma in the fifties was closer to the nineteenth century than to the twenty-first. The same could be said about my elementary school. Those old ways were not necessarily better. Neither are our new ways, but a comparison can be useful.

I started school in first grade. Kindergarten existed in the cities, but not where I lived, and preschool was unheard of. Talala School had shrunk over the years as the town lost population. The building was half full of students when I enrolled. Mrs. Stout taught first and second grades in one room. There were eight first graders and about ten in second graders. We first graders were taught reading, then we worked on our own while the second graders were taught reading. Then we were taught spelling; then we worked alone while she taught spelling to the second graders. And so forth. We spent half of every day working uninstructed, but under her eagle eye. By the end of the year, we had heard everything she taught to the second graders. The next year, we heard it again, in the same room, with new kids in our old first grade desks.

Third and fourth grades meant a new room, a new teacher, but the same pattern. Fifth and sixth meant the same pattern again, except that in fifth grade the Russians launched Sputnik and science was added to the curriculum. By sixth grade the high school was consolidated and gone; we moved to the high school end of the building, but still with two classes per teacher. For the last three years of its existence, Talala School was seven-eighths empty and haunted by the few students who remained. When I was in eighth grade, there were still eight students in my class, but the only two remaining in seventh grade. They were moved on to the consolidated school and for the first time in my elementary career, we had a full-day teacher all to ourselves.

Educationally deprived? Don’t you believe it. For seven years we had worked and learned all day, every day, and that was plenty. Having a full time teacher in eighth grade was no better, and no worse.

Fast forward through high school, college, military service, more college, becoming a writer, more college, until thirty years later I found myself teaching sixth, seventh, and eighth graders. Now we had Kindergarten, and pre-school, and pre-pre-school, and nursery school, and before school help, and after school help, and tutors, and ———

A true believer might say that students needed all that help. A moralist might say that they had to be made to work more hours because they were lazy. A cynic might say that somebody had to warehouse the kids until their parents got home – whenever that might be.

Algebra was moved from the ninth grade to the eighth. The theory was that  they needed readiness, which is code for, “If they aren’t smart enough do learn algebra in the ninth grade, start teaching it in eighth. If that doesn’t work, start in seventh.” All down the line, I watched subjects get moved earlier and earlier, while the students’ scores went lower and lower, and pre-school started a year sooner.

The goal, clearly, was pre-natal algebra.

Somewhere in the middle of my career, a local high school announced that they were going to begin teaching Advanced Placement classes. That sounded like a program where I would fit in as a teacher, so I attended their orientation. Maybe I misjudged them (I don’t think so) but I heard nothing about better teaching or deeper understanding. Instead, I heard a lot about more hours, more work, more reports, a chance to get ahead of the other guy, and to earn college credits while still in high school.

I was not impressed. I returned to teaching challenging things which were age and skill appropriate – to filling my students’ days with knowledge, while leaving their nights and weekends free for the other lessons life would teach them.

While you’re learning, learn. While you’re playing, play. If you’re in high school, get what high school has to offer. If you are too advanced to do that, move to college.

If this be treason, make the most of it.

131. Chasing Cosmonauts

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This is a continuation of yesterday’s post First into Space.

I had the great good fortune of being born with the space age, less than two months after Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier. I was thirteen when Alan Shepard took his first sub-orbital flight and just coming back from my honeymoon when Armstrong and Aldrin landed on the moon. (see 27. That Was My Childhood)

I followed the American manned space programs closely, but the Russians were a mystery. They gleefully announced their victories – first satellite in orbit, first living creature in orbit, first man in orbit, first woman in orbit, first space walk, first space station – but there were no details. I developed a curiosity that never went away.

Time marched on. The race to the moon was won – by us, after a painfully slow start. The cold war ended. The pioneers of space drifted mostly out of public consciousness. Everybody remembers Armstrong, but Buzz Aldrin morphed into Buzz Lightyear, and Jim Lovell came to wear the face of Tom Hanks in public memory. And who remembers Gordo, or Deke, or Ed White?

Well, I do, actually. I also remember the Russians, who were pioneers just like we were, and often got there first.

In 1987, Douglas Hart produced The Encyclopedia of Soviet Spacecraft which has been my go-to source for decades. I recommend it highly for information preceding its publication date.

Another book that I recently hacked my way through, like a noxious jungle, is Russians in Space by Evgeny Riabchikov. I found it at the *** Library, my favorite impoverished institution, a public library filed with seventy year old books and few new ones. Russians in Space was written in Russia, for Russians, during the sixties. It’s translation copyright is 1971 and I doubt if this copy has been read ten times in all those years.

Do you remember Chekov from the original Star Trek, who was always telling everyone that Russia invented everything? He was a comic version of late sixties reality, when Russian bombast made everything in Pravda sound like it was written by Donald Trump. Russians in Space is of that type.

I fought my way through the bombast and bad writing in search of the details I had not found elsewhere. No such luck. I took as my touchstone, the chapter on the Voskhod 2 flight, which I had recently researched (see 116. Spacecraft Threatened by Bears). Everything that made the flight memorable was missing. Riabchikov made it seem routine, when in fact, it was the planning and mechanical failures on the mission that spotlighted the incredible courage and skill of the cosmonauts.

Our brave, valiant, plucky boys in space – that could have been the subtitle of Riabchikov’s book. It reminded me of an alternate reality prequel to the Lensmen series. Kimbal Kinnison would have fit in well with the square jawed, sturdy, blue eyed, strong but gentle supermen who made up Riabchikov’s version of the cosmonaut corps. They were comrades who always helped each other, never fought among themselves, and were ready like all good workers to do their part for the USSR. The cosmonauts who welcomed the female cosmonaut group were courteous and supportive, always ready to help them overcome any hurdle. Like big brothers who blushed when their hands touched. That is from a quotation I wrote down, then lost. You should thank me for the lapse.

So why bother telling you about a book so bad? Because something else came through, despite its manifold failings. There was a sense of pride in the Soviet space program, and particularly in its cosmonauts, that was felt throughout Soviet society. Without glossing over any of the failings of the Soviet system, an American reader can see that the Russian people admired Yuri Gagarin in exactly the same way Americans admired John Glenn. It is clear that they felt a pride in Soviet successes that mirror-matched the frustration we felt at American failings during the same era.

The story of the Soviet manned space program deserves better than Riabchikov, and I am still searching for the book that tells that story succinctly and well.

I have some leads. I’ll tell you soon how they pan out.

130. First into Space

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220px-Vostok_spacecraftI grew up wanting to be a spaceman. I didn’t say astronaut, and I didn’t say cosmonaut. When I was just getting old enough to dream about the future, neither of those words were in use. Spacemen were the stuff of fiction, and the stuff of the far future.

The future arrived before I was ten in the form of Sputnik, an unwanted gift from the USSR that passed beeping over America and scared the whole nation out of its wits, and into a race for space. That was fine with me. I loved every minute of it, even though I knew I was never going to go. I was smart enough, and strong enough, but I couldn’t see across the room without glasses. Of course there were a thousand other hurdles I didn’t know about, but here we are talking about the dreams of youth.

I followed the introduction of our astronauts, and learned all I could about the craft they would fly. There wasn’t a whole lot of information available in Talala, Oklahoma in 1959.

Then, 55 years ago today, the Russians beat us into space – again – and in a much bigger way. Yuri Gagarin, cosmonaut, became the first human in space and the first to achieve orbit. Our guy Alan Shepard went up a few weeks later on a lesser flight, and America was outraged at the contrast.

Not me. I was thrilled that a human being had reached space; Russian, American, Finn, Bolivian, it didn’t matter. Space travel was real. The future had arrived. No one could ever again say, “We can’t go.”

But for all my enthusiasm, there was almost no information about Gagarin’s flight. For nearly another thirty years, Russian triumphs and disasters would be hidden from the world. Now we know enough to appreciate Gagarin’s feat.

The launch vehicle was an A-1, little different from the Soviet ICBM fleet, or the vehicle that launched Sputnik. Unlike the US, the Soviets have stayed with variations of a single workhorse vehicle through most of their space program. Also unlike American procedures, both Yuri Gagarin and Gherman Titov were suited up and ready at the pad, so that even in the event of a last second glitch, the launch would have been made by the backup pilot.

The space craft was Vostok 1. It consisted of a sphere holding the cosmonaut and a separate life support module, a style adopted by the US during Gemini and Apollo. The launch was successful and only one orbit was planned. The Soviet style was to make many launches, each incrementally more daring than the last. Unlike some subsequent launches by both countries, Vostok 1, possibly the most important launch in the history of spaceflight, went off without error.

Russia had a large land mass, a small navy, and a penchant for secrecy. Consequently, all Russian missions landed inside the Soviet Union. Technology during the Vostok missions could not yet provide soft landings, so Gagarin and his immediate successors flew their missions on ejection seats, which they used after heat shields and spacecraft mounted parachutes had brought them near the surface and slowed them to a survivable speed. They completed their missions by means of personal parachutes.

Four months later Gagarin’s backup pilot, Gherman Titov, became the second man to orbit the Earth, staying up for 17 orbits and 24 hours. more tomorrow

128. Science Fiction in the Wild

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If you are what you eat, I used to be beefsteak, fried okra, and hominy. That comes from growing up in Oklahoma. I also lived outdoors most of the hours of every spring, summer, and fall day, and way too many hours of every winter day. That comes from growing up on a working farm.

If you are what you read, then I used to be an Andre Norton protagonist, at least in my imagination. Although I never met or corresponded with her, Andre Norton was something of a long distance mentor.

Alice Mary Norton legally changed her name to Andre Norton early on, in an era when being a woman was no help to a science fiction writer. I didn’t know that when I first read her; I thought Andre Norton was a man. Not that I thought about it much, but she didn’t write like a girl. Looking back, I see that she actually wrote like a person, but I wasn’t that sophisticated then.

One reason Norton got away with writing gender neutral fiction was that her characters spent most of their time alone. Even in their relationships with others of their own kind, they were loners, if not complete outcasts.

Star Man’s Son was the first Norton I read. In it, Fors spent all but a few pages on a quest away from his people; that was a pattern to which Norton frequently returned. I could easily identify with the solo quest while I spent endless hours alone on a tractor. The only variations in my daily life were whether I was pulling a disk or a hay rake, and which Norton novel was replaying in my head, forty years before someone invented the iPod.

Every time Shann Lantee on Warlock, or Naill Renfro on Janus, or any of a dozen other young men found himself stranded alone, or nearly alone, on an alien world, I could look up from my tractor seat at the Oklahoma prairie and say, “Yup, been there.”

The best thing about Norton’s characters was that they didn’t whine about being alone. They liked it. So did I.

I didn’t live in a city until I went to college. I spent my adult life living in the suburbs of a reasonably small city, and taught school in a very small town. As soon as I could retire, I moved to a few acres in the foothills. I would move further out if I could afford it.

I was born not liking cities, and my opinion never changed. It should be no surprise that my first novel was about a hunter surviving alone in the woods, or that my first science fiction novel was about a hundred or so humans stranded on an alien world (Jandrax, presently appearing in Serial). My three fantasy novels have a rural and medieval feel. David Singer, in A Fond Farewell to Dying, is a mountain boy who has to go urban to get his life’s work done. And Cyan, due out soon, begins with ten explorers on an empty world, then continues with the story of the peopling that world by hyper-urbanized refugees from an overcrowded Earth.

You write what you’ve lived.

121. First-in Scout (post 1)

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When Kirk, Spock, and an anonymous crewman in a red shirt beam down onto an unexplored planet, things never go well. Whether you view the events that follow as high drama or low soap opera is a literary judgment, but did you ever consider what you would really face if you were the first down on a new planet?

The closest thing in history would be Captain Cook landing at Botany Bay (Australia, not Ceti Alpha V). The natives were as black as Africans, but otherwise resembled them very little. The animals couldn’t run, but they hopped at super speed. The trees shed their bark instead of their leaves.

But these were humans and animals and plants. Explorers of other planets won’t find that level of similarity. I considered this in my first novel Jandrax. Jan Andrax, a Scout, is stranded with a group of untrained colonists. Talking to a friend among the crew of the damaged starship, he says . . .

”Jase, do you know what the mortality rate is for Scouts on a new planet? Trained men whose whole life is dedicated to survival?”

“No.”

“Ten percent for each new planet.”

Jason greeted that with stunned silence.

“Jase, the first planet I explored, three of my twenty companions died; nor was it an exceptionally dangerous planet. On my second planet two of my friends were cut down before my eyes by an innocuous-looking flying mammal whose poison was deadly to humans.

“I came through my third planet with no particular difficulty, but on the last one I tangled with a large, horned herbivore during my first day planetside and left in a coma. I spent a total of two hours on her surface.

“Those were planets which had been properly scanned from orbit. I was working with trained and experienced scouts and the latest equipment. Here . . . I’d give odds there won’t be a human alive inside ten years.”

The day I wrote those lines, I decided the life of first-in scouts deserved to be to explored further. Three books later I began the novel Cyan about a group of them. More about that next post.

120. Still Inclined

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Six months and four days ago, this site was new. I was making my best efforts, knowing that no one would be reading yet, and knowing that if I didn’t make a start, nothing good would ever come. The post below was first placed at the time of that equinox.

The novels Cyan and Jandrax were involved in that post. Since Cyan is coming out shortly from EDGE and Jandrax is being presented in its entirety over in Serial, its time to try again.

Axial Tilt

Earth’s inclination causes our seasons. It would be hard to find a more ordinary fact, or one less valued. Yet everything about the Earth derives from that inclination, even our religions and our philosophy . . .

Those were the words of Gus Leinhoff from the novel Cyan.

I like axial tilt as a means of individuating planets, so much so that I have run the bases, hitting all the possible extremes. Cyan has no axial tilt and no seasons; Stormking, around Sirius in the as yet unwritten sequel Dreamsinger, lies back at a Uranian inclination and has seasons you wouldn’t believe. Harmony, from the novel Jandrax has a tilt of 32 degrees resulting in heavy glaciation with a narrow habitable band around the equator; it has two summers and two winters each year.

So does Earth – at the equator.

I’ll bet you didn’t know that. One of the great pleasures of world building is finding things you should have realized, but missed. This is one of them.

Let’s imagine the changing tilt of the Earth as the seasons progress. Of course I know the tilt doesn’t change; it only appears to do so from an earthbound perspective. But three decades of teaching science to middle schoolers has taught me that casual language gets the message across better than an excess of formality.

Today is the equinox, autumnal in San Francisco, vernal in Sydney (In September, it was. All this is reversed today). The sun lies above the equator at noon, and will (seem to) move southward in the coming weeks. I won’t waste your time telling you what you already know, but consider these facts from a new perspective.

Today at the equator the sun is overhead (call it summer) and for the next three months it will move southward until it gets as low and ineffective as it will ever be (the equivalent of winter), then it will come north for three months until it is overhead again (summer), and continue northward to its other lowest position (winter again), and so forth. Two “summers”; two “winters”.

Earth’s dual seasonality is masked by local conditions, at least in its oceanic regions. The world in the novel Jandrax has a stronger tilt and its oceans are tied up in glaciation. The refugees naturally settle at the equator, where summer and winter really do come twice a year.

118. Jandrax redux

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I originally wrote this when I had barely begun blogging, to introduce myself and one of my novels. I am presenting it again because no one was listening back then, and because Jandrax is now available to be read in its entirety, over in Serial.

Jandrax

Here is a story so old that I have no idea where it originated. A group of Irishmen were sitting in a bar, solving the world’s problems. One of them asked the rest, “If a cataclysm were to destroy all the poets in Ireland, how many generations would it take to replace them?” One of the others simply held up his hand with a single finger raised. (If you know the origin of this, let me know.)

You will note that this is not an ethnic joke, but a comment on how the Irish view themselves. It is also true – and not only about Irish poets, but about any of those human traits that lie latent in all of us until circumstances call them forth.

That includes the capacity for religious controversy.

Before Martin Luther made his opinions stick, there was a long history of dissent within the Catholic Church. Dissenters were called heretics, and they were usually burned at the stake. Look up Jan Hus (AKA John Huss). Once Luther opened the floodgates, here came Zwingli, Calvin, Knox, and good old Henry VIII with his political and personal agenda.

Quakers, Shakers, Anabaptists, Methodists – you get the picture. As someone once misquoted scripture, “Wherever two or three of ye are gathered together, there will be a fight.”

When I needed a religion for my first science fiction novel Jandrax – available battered and cheap in used bookstores everywhere – (And now available over in Serial.) I came upon Joseph Campbell’s Hero With a Thousand Faces. I read the introduction, saw the notion of the monomyth, and the entire religion I needed exploded in my mind, complete in a heartbeat. I closed the book and never went back to it, not wanting to dilute the purity of that flash of inspiration.

Some hundreds of years in the future, Louis Dumezil, a scholar with a self-imposed mission of peace, collates all the world’s religions, winnowing out the common core, and setting it down in his Monomythos. His hope is that a common religion for all men, carved out of mankind’s various faiths, will bring an end to sectarian fighting. Fat chance. In fact, Dumezil unwittingly sabotages his own work by coming out with later, updated editions of his Monomythos.

You can guess the result. His initial success at setting up a pan-human religion based on the Monomythos breaks down into warring sects killing each other over which Monomythos is the correct one.

In Jandrax, the title character is a disillusioned former zealot who lost his religion in the sectarian fighting on Hallam’s world, and now finds himself marooned on an unexplored planet with a shipload of purists.

117. Seven and a Half Months

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On September 2, 1975, I had a year to spare and an itch to see if I could write a novel. As is common with first novels, it never sold.

On September 2, 2015, forty years later, I wrote a blog entry about the experience. It was the third entry on a new blog, so nobody read it.

Today, things are better. This twin blog site has been in place for seven plus months, with a total of just under 300 posts. My new novel Cyan will be out soon from EDGE.

Today over in Serial, I am beginning the serialization of my novel Jandrax, which was published by Ballantine in 1978. It is still available in used bookstores, and I hope that a new generation of readers will discover it.

The rest of this week in A Writing Life will be taken up by talk about Jandrax, but first I would like to rerun the post that tells how I started writing, forty and a half years ago.

It Was Forty Years Ago Today
first posted Sep. 2. 2015

I feel guilty of bait and switch. This post isn’t about the Beatles, or Sgt. Pepper, or the Summer of Love. It actually was forty years ago today that I first sat down to see if I could write a novel.

Would-be writers should take note. This was a controlled experiment. I wasn’t writing from the depth of my soul, nor writing the books that had been burning a hole in my brain for years. That came later. This was simply to answer a single question – could I sit down every day and write, or would my well run dry after the first week.

September 2, 1975 was the day after Labor Day that year, and I was at loose ends. My wife and I were had just rented a tiny house in the poorest part of town; she had a new job as a picture framer. She proved to be very good at it, and ended up managing the gallery for most of the next decade. If my writing experiment hadn’t worked, I would have gone to graduate school the next fall.

Writing a science fiction novel or a fantasy novel would have called for a lot of time spent in world building. That wouldn’t tell me what I wanted to know. A historical novel would have called for even more research, and a detective novel would have called for crafting a complex puzzle. I wasn’t worried about any of those skills. I just wanted to know – could I write word after word after word, day after day, week after week.

I needed a no-research story, so I decided to send my protagonist on a deer hunt, where he would get lost. I would set it in autumn, in a part of the Sierras I could drive to in a day if I needed to be on the scene. I would roll in a storm, with low hanging clouds so he couldn’t find north and couldn’t send up smoke. I intended to let him get out on his own. Over the weeks I piled misery after misery on the poor guy’s head.

GPS? Cell phone? Don’t be silly; this was 1975, when lost meant lost.

That was the setup. Here is the payoff – I wrote the novel. There is nothing exciting to say about sitting down every day and pounding the keys of a typewriter. (1975, remember; no computers.)

There were no exciting stories to tell my wife at the end of the day, but inside my head I was having a ball. Getting lost in the woods and finding my own way out was infinitely exciting, and every night I could go to my comfortable bed while my protagonist tried to sleep on the frozen ground. I was hooked. I never went back for my Ph.D..

I did go back a few years later for a second BA and MA in History, while I was writing, but that’s only because I love learning almost as much as I love novels. It had nothing to do with career plans.

The novel, Spirit Deer, was only 141 pages, far too short to publish. It turned out better than I had expected, and its core story was not age specific. A few years ago I got rid of Tim’s wife, his best friend, the forest ranger, the old hunter, and even Tim’s last name, and turned Spirit Deer into a young adult novel. It’s looking for a home. If it finds one, I’ll let you know.

95. Literature of Passing

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When I was very young, I learned a lot from things that weren’t openly said. Not that anyone was shy about their opinions on race, but they didn’t talk much about sex, and the two subjects seemed joined at the hip.

I someone was having a baby, and there was some doubt about who the father was, someone would mention that there was a nigger in the woodpile. Even if the father was white and known, there was a racial subtext.

I rarely saw any black people, but there was one woman we saw occasionally in Claremore whose arms were mottled brown and pale. I heard my parents say, “That’s what happens when you mix the races,” with the silent implication of God’s disapproval.

At the drive-in one evening, we saw the theatrical trailer for Imitation of Life while waiting for another movie to begin. I was only seven or eight and it didn’t make any sense to me, but my parents looked knowingly at each other and I knew that there was something sexual and forbidden in the dark skinned girl’s passing – whatever that was.

Thirty years later I read what Mark Twain said about how his book Huckleberry Finn was doing. He said, “I feel like the lady felt when the child came out white.”(see post 90.) How interesting that the lady was worried. To put it bluntly, had she been fooling around with someone black, or was she worried that some ancestor had, and that the genes would show themselves?

Everybody knows that most American blacks are partly white, even though it is no longer politically correct to say so. Everybody should know that most American “whites” are at least slightly black, because of blacks who have passed into the “white” gene pool throughout our country’s history. Mark Twain apparently knew it, but the “white” half of our common race has been trying for four hundred years to convince themselves it just isn’t so.

Or at least that it shouldn’t be so.

I have to admit that I hadn’t thought of Imitation of Life since childhood, and had to look it up on the internet. I must have seen the trailer for the 1959 remake, but in both movies the light skinned black girl who passed for white came to a bad end, drove her saintly black mother to an early death, and repented in tears at her mother’s funeral that she had been passing.

Yeah. Right. Sure. Doesn’t that sound a lot like a movie made by white folks to show to other white folks?

Passing is a novel by Nella Larsen, published in 1929. It treats the subject of passing seriously and has been accepted as a classic by literary scholars. I have to admit that it has been sitting on my to-read shelf for about a year and I am reporting on it from research. If it seems racist that I have not gotten to it yet, you need to know that my to-read shelf is groaning under the weight of books by authors of all creeds and colors. Blogging is incredibly time consuming, so the shelf keeps growing.

I have read Pudd’nhead Wilson, 1894, Mark Twain’s last novel.  In it a black slave woman is given a white infant to nurture. She has only recently had a child of her own, who is seven-eights white. By coincidence (shades of Prince and the Pauper) she looks at the two of them side by side and they are identical. Thinking of the beautiful life that lies in store for the “white” baby and the horrors that lie in store for her “black” child, she switches them.

Need I say that things go badly after that? At the end of a long and angry life, Twain wrote Pudd’nhead with vicious dark humor. Raised to the privileged life of a slave owner, the passing “black” grows up to be an unmitigated villain, and the unwillingly and unknowingly passing “white” grows up as a battered and passive embodiment of slave mentality.

Critics call Pudd’nhead Wilson unreadable. I did not find it so, but then critics need something to complain about. I did find it tangled and unpleasant. I don’t recommend that you read it for pleasure, but I suggest you take this away from it—

In 1894, Mark Twain knew that there were a lot of blacks who looked white. He knew that passing would be easy to accomplish. Twenty years later there was a massive migration of blacks to the cities in the north where, unlike the small towns and villages from which they came, they would be anonymous. In America, in the early twentieth century, it was easier to live white than to live black.

You do the math.

94. We Are All Passing

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Is anyone so comfortable in his own skin that he never fears exposure?

How many preachers shout hallelujah at the top of their lungs to cover their own nagging doubts? How many ministers comfort the bereaved while their hearts are burned out from sharing too much grief?

How many businessmen brag about their accomplishments to silence the small voice whispering in their ear that it will all come crashing down?

How many part-Asians or part-Hispanics write white on the census, then feel guilty for betraying a part of their heritage?

How many husbands and wives say “I love you,” while a voice inside adds, “I did, and I should, but I’m just not sure any more.”

Passing isn’t just about race, but if it were, it would not be just about white and black. In Japan, Burakumin hide their origins. In India they say, “Beware the black Brahmin and the pale Chamar,” for people have been fighting to escape caste identity ever since caste was invented.

Gays know a lot about passing, too, although their phrase for it is “in the closet”.

I was once “in the closet”, a very peculiar closet, and I passed for two and a half years. Not a gay closet, but a religious one. That experience is another reason a white science fiction writer has such an interest in race. I know first hand the fear of exposure that passing brings on.

Until I was just shy of sixteen, I was a straight-laced, Bible toting, young Baptist. I believed what I had been taught, despite normal adolescent doubts, and I was reasonably sure of a trip to Heaven when I died. Then, in a flash of insight, all those doubts came together and in one instant, all belief fled. One moment I was a Christian; the next moment I was an atheist. I never asked for it; I never wanted it; but there it was. Like Saul on his way to Damascus, struck down by a total change of life – only in the other direction.

I was afraid of what had happened to me, but I was even more afraid to tell anyone about it. My father was a deacon and lay minister, good natured and fun loving except where religion was concerned. In that regard, he was God-struck into inflexibility.

I feared him, with a fear that made me mute when confronted by his disapproval.

The fear was unjustified. Years later I came to realize that he hid behind certainty to disguise his own fears.

Unjustified or not, the fears were real, so for two and a half years I lived inside myself and confided in no one. I went to church three times a week, I sang hymns, I read my bible, I prayed aloud when called on. I fully lived the lie, and no one doubted me. I passed, successfully, but at an emotional cost that I wouldn’t wish on anyone.

In 1967, on the way to Michigan and college, I vowed to never lie again. No doubt, that is why I’m a writer; I’m still trying to tell the stories I couldn’t tell before. It’s also why my long suffering friends probably know more about me than they ever really wanted to know.

In these last weeks I have spoken often about black people passing for white and turning us all into one race. These have been logical arguments intended to clarify the American situation. I have tried for a neutral tone, although, in fact, I approve of miscegenation and passing and any other thing that people do to make their lives work under harsh circumstances.

I always realize my privileged position. Yes, I’ve worked since I was eleven, I came up from a harsh and rustic environment, and I went to college on a scholarship that I earned by hard work. But if I had done all that, and had been born black, I would never have made it.

I don’t feel white guilt, but I feel an endless obligation to the men and women of all races who fought for civil rights, particularly to the black men and women who fought hardest and against the steepest odds; and an endless obligation to tell the truth through what I write.