Just Kids

Ecco

Chapter One

When I was very young, my mother took me for
walks in Humboldt Park, along the edge of the Prairie
River. I have vague memories, like impressions on glass plates, of
an old boathouse, a circular band shell, an arched stone bridge. The
narrows of the river emptied into a wide lagoon and I saw upon its
surface a singular miracle. A long curving neck rose from a dress of
white plumage.
Swan, my mother said, sensing my excitement. It pattered the
bright water, flapping its great wings, and lifted into the sky.
The word alone hardly attested to its magnificence nor conveyed the
emotion it produced. The sight of it generated an urge I had no words
for, a desire to speak of the swan, to say something of its whiteness, the
explosive nature of its movement, and the slow beating of its wings.
The swan became one with the sky. I struggled to find words to
describe my own sense of it. Swan, I repeated, not entirely satisfied,
and I felt a twinge, a curious yearning, imperceptible to passersby, my
mother, the trees, or the clouds.
I was born on a Monday, in the North Side of Chicago during the
Great Blizzard of 1946. I came along a day too soon, as babies born
on New Year?s Eve left the hospital with a new refrigerator. Despite
my mother?s effort to hold me in, she went into heavy labor as the
taxi crawled along Lake Michigan through a vortex of snow and
wind. By my father?s account, I arrived a long skinny thing with
bronchial pneumonia, and he kept me alive by holding me over a
steaming washtub.
My sister Linda followed during yet another blizzard in 1948.
By necessity I was obliged to measure up quickly. My mother took
in ironing as I sat on the stoop of our rooming house waiting for
the iceman and the last of the horse-drawn wagons. He gave me
slivers of ice wrapped in brown paper. I would slip one in my
pocket for my baby sister, but when I later reached for it, I discov-
ered it was gone.
When my mother became pregnant with my brother, Todd,
we left our cramped quarters in Logan Square and migrated to
Germantown, Pennsylvania. For the next few years we lived in
temporary housing set up for ser-vicemen
and their children?
whitewashed barracks overlooking an abandoned field alive with
wildflowers. We called the field The Patch, and in summertime the
grown-ups would sit and talk, smoke cigarettes, and pass around
jars of dandelion wine while we children played. My mother taught
us the games of her childhood: Statues, Red Rover, and Simon Says.
We made daisy chains to adorn our necks and crown our heads. In
the evenings we collected fireflies in mason jars, extracting their
lights and making rings for our fingers.
My mother taught me to pray; she taught me the prayer her
mother taught her. Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul
to keep. At nightfall, I knelt before my little bed as she stood, with her
ever-present cigarette, listening as I recited after her. I wished noth-
ing more than to say my prayers, yet these words troubled me and
I plagued her with questions. What is the soul? What color is it? I
suspected my soul, being mischievous, might slip away while I was
dreaming and fail to return. I did my best not to fall asleep, to keep it
inside of me where it belonged.
Perhaps to satisfy my curiosity, my mother enrolled me in Sunday
school. We were taught by rote, Bible verses and the words of Jesus.
Afterward we stood in line and were rewarded with a spoonful of comb
honey. There was only one spoon in the jar to serve many coughing
children. I instinctively shied from the spoon but I swiftly accepted
the notion of God. It pleased me to imagine a presence above us, in
continual motion, like liquid stars.
Not contented with my child?s prayer, I soon petitioned my
mother to let me make my own. I was relieved when I no longer had
to repeat the words If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my
soul to take and could say instead what was in my heart. Thus freed, I
would lie in my bed by the coal stove vigorously mouthing long let-
ters to God. I was not much of a sleeper and I must have vexed him
with my endless vows, visions, and schemes. But as time passed I came
to experience a different kind of prayer, a silent one, requiring more
listening than speaking.
My small torrent of words dissipated into an elaborate sense of
expanding and receding. It was my entrance into the radiance of
imagination. This process was especially magnified within the fevers
of influenza, measles, chicken pox, and mumps. I had them all and
with each I was privileged with a new level of awareness. Lying deep
within myself, the symmetry of a snowflake spinning above me, inten-
sifying through my lids, I seized a most worthy souvenir, a shard of
heaven?s kaleidoscope.


My love of prayer was gradually rivaled by my love for the
book. I would sit at my mother?s feet watching her drink coffee and
smoke cigarettes with a book on her lap. Her absorption intrigued
me. Though not yet in nursery school, I liked to look at her books,
feel their paper, and lift the tissues from the frontispieces. I wanted to
know what was in them, what captured her attention so deeply. When
my mother discovered that I had hidden her crimson copy of Foxe ?s
Book of Martyrs beneath my pillow, with hopes of absorbing its mean-
ing, she sat me down and began the laborious process of teaching me
to read. With great effort we moved through Mother Goose to Dr.
Seuss. When I advanced past the need for instruction, I was permit-
ted to join her on our overstuffed sofa, she reading The Shoes of the
Fisherman and I The Red Shoes.
I was completely smitten by the book. I longed to read them all,
and the things I read of produced new yearnings. Perhaps I might go
off to Africa and offer my ser-vices
to Albert Schweitzer or, decked in
my coonskin cap and powder horn, I might defend the -people
like Davy
Crockett. I could scale the Himalayas and live in a cave spinning a prayer
wheel, keeping the earth turning. But the urge to express myself was my
strongest desire, and my siblings were my first eager coconspirators in
the harvesting of my imagination. They listened attentively to my stories willingly performed in my plays, and fought valiantly in my wars.
With them in my corner, anything seemed possible.
In the months of spring, I was often ill and so condemned to my
bed, obliged to hear my comrades at play through the open window.
In the months of summer, the younger ones reported bedside how
much of our wild field had been secured in the face of the enemy. We
lost many a battle in my absence and my weary troops would gather
around my bed and I would offer a benediction from the child sol-
dier?s bible, A Child?s Garden of Verses by Robert Louis Stevenson.
In the winter, we built snow forts and I led our campaign, serving
as general, making maps and drawing out strategies as we attacked and
retreated. We fought the wars of our Irish grandfathers, the orange and
the green. We wore the orange yet knew nothing of its meaning. They
were simply our colors. When attention flagged, I would draw a truce
and visit my friend Stephanie. She was convalescing from an illness I
didn?t really understand, a form of leukemia. She was older than I, per-
haps twelve to my eight. I didn?t have much to say to her and was perhaps
little comfort, yet she seemed to delight in my presence. I believe that
what really drew me to her was not my good heart, but a fascination with
her belongings. Her older sister would hang up my wet garments and
bring us cocoa and graham crackers on a tray. Stephanie would lie back
on a mound of pillows and I would tell tall tales and read her comics.
I marveled at her comic-book collection, stacks of them earned from
a childhood spent in bed, every issue of Superman, Little Lulu, Classic
Comics, and House of Mystery. In her old cigar box were all the talis-
manic charms of 1953: a roulette wheel, a typewriter, an ice skater, the
red Mobil winged horse, the Eiffel Tower, a ballet slipper, and charms in
the shape of all forty-eight states. I could play with them endlessly and
sometimes, if she had doubles, she would give one to me.
I had a secret compartment near my bed, beneath the floorboards.
There I kept my stash?winnings from marbles, trading cards, reli-
gious artifacts I rescued from Catholic trash bins: old holy cards, worn
scapulars, plaster saints with chipped hands and feet. I put my loot
from Stephanie there. Something told me I shouldn?t take presents
from a sick girl, but I did and hid them away, somewhat ashamed.
I had promised to visit her on Valentine ?s Day, but I didn?t. My
duties as general to my troop of siblings and neighboring boys were
very taxing and there was heavy snow to negotiate. It was a harsh
winter that year. The following afternoon, I abandoned my post to sit
with her and have cocoa. She was very quiet and begged me to stay
even as she drifted off to sleep.
I rummaged through her jewel box. It was pink and when you
opened it a ballerina turned like a sugarplum fairy. I was so taken
with a particular skating pin that I slipped it in my mitten. I sat frozen
next to her for a long time, leaving silently as she slept. I buried the
pin amongst my stash. I slept fitfully through the night, feeling great
remorse for what I had done. In the morning I was too ill to go to
school and stayed in bed, ridden with guilt. I vowed to return the pin
and ask her to forgive me.
The following day was my sister Linda?s birthday, but there was
to be no party for her. Stephanie had taken a turn for the worse and
my father and mother went to a hospital to give blood. When they
returned my father was crying and my mother knelt down beside me
to tell me Stephanie had died. Her grief was quickly replaced with
concern as she felt my forehead. I was burning with fever.
Our apartment was quarantined. I had scarlet fever. In the fif-
ties it was much feared since it often developed into a fatal form
of rheumatic fever. The door to our apartment was painted yel-
low. Confined to bed, I could not attend Stephanie ?s funeral. Her
mother brought me her stacks of comic books and her cigar box of
charms. Now I had everything, all her treasures, but I was far too
ill to even look at them. It was then that I experienced the weight
of sin, even a sin as small as a stolen skater pin. I reflected on the
fact that no matter how good I aspired to be, I was never going
to achieve perfection. I also would never receive Stephanie ?s for-
giveness. But as I lay there night after night, it occurred to me that
it might be possible to speak with her by praying to her, or at least
ask God to intercede on my behalf.
Robert was very taken with this story, and sometimes on a cold, lan-
guorous Sunday he would beg me to recount it. ?Tell me the Stephanie
story,? he would say. I would spare no details on our long mornings
beneath the covers, reciting tales of my childhood, its sorrow and magic,
as we tried to pretend we weren?t hungry. And always, when I got to the
part where I opened the jewelry box, he would cry, ?Patti, no . . .?
We used to laugh at our small selves, saying that I was a bad
girl trying to be good and that he was a good boy trying to be bad.
Through the years these roles would reverse, then reverse again, until
we came to accept our dual natures. We contained opposing princi-
ples, light and dark.
I was a dreamy somnambulant child. I vexed my teachers with
my precocious reading ability paired with an inability to apply it
to anything they deemed practical. One by one they noted in my
reports that I daydreamed far too much, was always somewhere
else. Where that somewhere was I cannot say, but it often landed me
in the corner sitting on a high stool in full view of all in a conical
paper hat.
I would later make large detailed drawings of these humorously
humiliating moments for Robert. He delighted in them, seeming to
appreciate all the qualities that repelled or alienated me from others.
Through this visual dialogue my youthful memories became his.
I was unhappy when we were evicted from The Patch and had to
pack up to begin a new life in southern New Jersey. My mother gave
birth to a fourth child whom we all pitched in to raise, a sickly though
sunny little girl named Kimberly. I felt isolated and disconnected in
the surrounding swamps, peach orchards, and pig farms. I immersed
myself in books and in the design of an encyclopedia that only got as
far as the entry for Simón Bolívar. My father introduced me to science
fiction and for a time I joined him in investigating UFO activity in the
skies over the local square-dance hall, as he continually questioned the
source of our existence.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Just Kidsby Patti Smith Copyright © 2011 by Patti Smith. Excerpted by permission of Ecco. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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