Trauma, Terror, and Trepidation

The unholy trinity of my Daddy’s youth

I didn’t always understand it. Took me a long time to see it for what it was…  ‘cause I’d been lied to my whole life. But if you’re gonna get a true picture of how I’s raised, I gotta tell you ‘bout Mama an’ Daddy. After all, it’s their doin’, an’ you’re gonna need the backstory.

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My daddy grew up in Madison County, Iowa. That’s right. The one with the bridges. He was the sixth of seven children raised on a beautiful hundred acre Iowa farm in a tight knit community in Webster Township. The year was 1914.

In 1928, when it seemed like nothin’ could go wrong in the world, his father bought a hardware store in town. You could find ever’thing from ironing boards an’ truck tires to cook stoves an’ clothes pins in that store. There was a little bit of ever’thing. They split their time between the store in town an’ the farm where they lived, ‘bout six miles away. The few pictures I have of his childhood reflect a pretty good life.

He was fourteen years old when he quit school to work full-time with his father. That was a very good year. He was fifteen years old when terror struck as the Stock Market crashed in 1929, and the whole world lost their fortunes. That was a very uncertain year. He was sixteen years old when his father went bankrupt an’ he watched him break under the trauma of losin’ his business. That was a very bad year.

Trepidation that robbed their family of what little they had left would take another five long an’ miserable years to do its worst. First, sendin’ his father to the Clarinda State Hospital in 1934 when he finally broke under the pressure of empty pockets an’ empty fields. Then came the auction sale of the family farm in 1935. At forty cents on the dollar, it was just this side of bank foreclosure. When it was all over, Wallace’s parents were able to get out from under the debt they had created. Many of their neighbors weren’t so fortunate.

That pretty good life ended as they packed a whole lotta heartache into a decade of loss an’ humiliation. He talked about it just once.

His name was Wallace Milo Phillips. I called him Daddy.

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The 1930’s came in like a freaked out, strung out, maxed out drunken Santa Clause haulin’ a nasty bag of surprises that nobody wanted. Sticks an’ coal had nothin’ on the stuff that tumbled out of that sack of shit – an’ it was ‘bout to fuck up the whole world.

The boomin’ prosperity of the roarin’ twenties had roared right by most American farmers. Times were desperate but the folks in Washington who could actually do somethin’ about it – weren’t payin’ a lick of attention. Nobody seemed to give a good goddamn.

Mama Earth got pimped out an’ sold for $1.25 an acre to unproven farmers who couldn’t plow her under fast enough. Sowin’ the wind, they soon reaped the whirlwind as a monster rose up in mile high walls of dust, black as sin, lookin’ like the end of the world.

Trucks got blown 30 feet down the road an’ chickens went to roost in the middle of the day. Half of Oklahoma packed up an’ blew straight into Iowa corn fields where my Daddy lived.

This was the drought of the 1930s an’ it left nearly nothin’ to eat, for man nor beast. The one time he talked about it, Daddy said that livestock wandered around half blind bawlin’ in hunger. Said you couldn’t believe what you’s seein’. Made the daytime so dark you had to turn the lights on like it was the middle of the night.

The Dustbowl had arrived.

PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) may have been a foreign notion at the time, but it was alive an’ well, nonetheless. Domestic violence, murder, suicide, they’s far more common than anybody wanted to admit. Fields went fallow, tiny beds went empty, hearts went hollow, an’ families went homeless.

Some farmers strategically positioned machine guns to keep authorities off their land, fightin’ to stay in homes their grandparents had built. Bank robberies an’ midnight livestock thievery became as common as the sunrise, while farmers hangin’ themselves from their barn rafters elicited less an’ less surprise from communities already shock-ridden an’ broken.

Desperate men gathered in mobs tryin’ to prevent foreclosure sales called penny auctions where an entire mortgage settled for – you guessed it – pennies on the dollar. The mortgage holder walked away with a mere fraction of what was due, an’ the family walked away from a home they’d lived in for generations with nothin’ a ‘tall.

President Herbert Hoover an’ his do-nothin’ government sat idle, watchin’ the economy crash while crime got organized – thanks to prohibition. The Dustbowl spread like cancer across the Midwest, pushin’ farmers outta their fields an’ into the backwoods, buildin’ copper stills to earn quick cash with bootleg whisky. Honest, honorable people had reached the end of their rope.

The promise of the American Dream had twisted into a forebodin’ nightmare an’ my Daddy? He lived through all of it.

One life-long Iowa farmer said that “a slow, silent fear had settled in… fear about losing everything… jobs and savings, homes, farms, cars, children… many of us never recovered.”

I think it’d be fair to add that plenty only pretended to recover. Things get shoved down into a dark corner an’ you move on to whatever comes next, ‘cause it’s just too damn hard to look at what came last. My Daddy, like lots of people that went through the trauma of the 30s an’ World War 2 in the 40s— ‘specially the men — had an unspoken agreement not to talk about what hurts. So, they kept their stories locked away. There’s very little to say.

Funny how a man so quiet could feel so damn loud. Most days, bein’ with Daddy was like livin’ with the early tremors of an earthquake. It’s quiet now, but you know somethin’ bad is comin’. We lived with those tremors for years sometimes. You’re not quite sure anything is really happenin’, but you’re damn sure scared that somethin’s gonna happen. Then, without warnin’ the sidewalk starts movin’ like the ocean an’ things start fallin’ off the shelves.

Daddy rarely looked me in the eye an’ even more rare was a conversation between the two of us. Unless you consider moments of punitive judgement carried out on a little girl who didn’t understand the rules as a conversation. It was his quiet anger that screamed through the halls of our home, an’ after a while, I learned to do what had to be done to avoid it.

I saw it erupt three times in the eighteen years I lived with this man, an’ every time — it took us all by surprise.

First time was when Daddy threw the preacher outta our house. He was a friend— a good friend — an’ suddenly he’s gone, not allowed back in. But his wife was still sittin’ at the table. Angry words I couldn’t understand had been flung around the room.

Mama was cryin’, but you wouldn’t have known that unless you’s lookin’ right at her like I was. I remember, ‘cause that was my first year of kindergarten. I went to the Christian school in town. That’s where I learned my Daddy wasn’t the only one to be feared. God was pissed; my teachers were pissed, an’ on that particular day, I couldn’t tell the difference between my Daddy an' my school.

The next time was when I’s ten an’ my brother Audra Lee, who was seventeen, found himself smack in the epicenter of Daddy’s rage. From my point of view, ever’thing was fine — until it wasn’t. That day, we didn’t even get a tremor to warn us somethin’ was comin’.

About a year later, it happened again. Only this time, my brother wasn’t around, but I had a dog named Cocoa, an’ for some unknown reason, Daddy never liked him. Cocoa took the brunt of Daddy’s anger that night.

If you stand too close, it can be hard to see what’s really happenin’ here. But if you step outta the madness an’ take a breath, you can focus on what’s actually goin’ on.

My former life’s demise in 2010 gave me that chance. The collateral damage that surrounds that kind of ruin is heartbreakin’. When it all fell apart, ever’where I looked I saw the man I called Daddy lookin’ back at me. It freaked me out at first, but when I stopped fightin’ it, things got a whole lot better.

Once I learned the backstory behind the cruelty I experienced at this man’s hands, I felt real compassion for what he’d gone through. But that story never came to light while he lived, an’ by the time he died, it was too late to find the kind of reconciliation that woulda healed our wounded hearts. This kinda fear an’ loss seeps into the soul of the one who lives through it, an’ poisons generations to come who never even knew it happened. Rarely spoken of, it shouted at me every day an’ all night long, seepin’ through our home, poisonin’ our whole family.

I observed that same kind of fear an’ loss on January 6. These folks weren’t just my next-door neighbors or the man preachin’ from my childhood pulpit. They’s born from the same sad stock as my Daddy. They came to take back what they thought was rightfully theirs — what they believed had been stolen in the dead of night. They had been left behind an’ they didn’t like it one bit.

Like the farmers of the Dust Bowl, men called Proud Boys an’ Oath Keepers were watchin’ a select few climb their way to the top on the backs of average white folks who might as well have been their nigger slaves. To think of themselves this way — powerless, used, and left out — was almost unbearable.

When someone powerful showed up on the scene, like Donald John Trump, who had the balls to say out loud what they had been thinkin’ for generations, it gave ‘em hope. Hope that the unfairness they felt could be dealt with an’ things could be made right again. The kinda “right” they remembered from the 1950s — or better yet, the 1850s.

After all, it was liberal politicians, immigrants, black folks, and god-hatin’ atheists who had all but demolished our sacred nation. Once built on Christian values an’ the Word of God, we were sittin’ in that proverbial handbag on the edge of a very real Hell.

All they wanted was to put Jesus back on the throne, God back in the schools, an’ Trump back in the Whitehouse.

They just wanna stop killin’ babies in the womb, make sure honest right-thinkin’ men could keep their guns to protect their families, an’ if possible... move same-sex couples to another planet.

Sentiments born of a hundred an’ fifty-year-old miseries were resonatin’ in their hearts an’ every cell of their body, demandin’ attention. Experiences many of ‘em had only heard about felt like their own an’ it was time to do somethin’ about it.

Time to Make America Great Again.

On January 6 these folks might as well have been stormin’ the banks demandin’ a halt to their farm’s penny auction.

Or securin’ machine guns at the edge of their property to keep authorities out of their business, an’ brewin’ whisky in the back woods.

Or maybe… maybe just hangin’ lifeless from the barn rafters.