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Observations of a Toddler During the WWII Years in Guatemala

Observations of a Toddler During the WWII Years in Guatemala

Three years oldSome full moons are different than others. Last night’s did not let me sleep. I awoke at 2 AM with my creativity in full gear, and put pencil to paper to write about something no one else in the world – and I mean it: in the World – has experienced. I’m talking about early WWII, from the perspective of a Black child removed from her birthplace on the coast of Guatemala, to live in Guatemala City with her German parents. I was the toddler Mutti, my German mother, had fallen in love with – those were her words – and would not leave behind when, as most Germans in Latin America, they were expropriated. It was a US decree and meant that Germans lost their homes and properties and had to settle in the republics’ cities without any source of income – and for most an alien place. To add insult to injury, the men were deported to internment camps in Texas.

Young I was at the time of the departure, one and a half to be exact, I must have felt the anguish and confusion the disruption of a secure existence brought to the family. What I knew was that I was dearly loved, and fed, and told fairy tales, and loved some more, and fed some more. I wallowed in the comfort and security they provided me. In the exchange of days, as I became more observant, I knew that the women took care of each other’s needs. Like housing each other’s children, sometimes for a few months if necessary. They formed a community of foreigners in a foreign land that functioned like a close, harmonious family (whether they liked each other or not, mind you.)

How come we had food on the table? Where did our money come from? How were we surviving?

I vaguely remember Mutti telling me when I was in my teens, that Vati, my German father, had once gifted her with a passenger boat so she could motor upstream with friends who would regularly visit. They already had one boat, Mutti said, they didn’t need a second. What they needed was a nest egg. So she sold the boat and invested the money in the American stock market as well as in a bit of gold. I figure that must have been in the late 1920’s, early 1930’s.

I also recall occasional picnic outings, of which I distinctly remember three, when Mutti allowed me to accompany her as she met up with Jimmy, an English woman. I disliked Jimmy because she didn’t interact with me, and I gathered she disliked me because I was not blond and blue-eyed as a real European would have been. But Jimmy, thanks to her being born British, still had all the Guatemalan coffee plantations of her late German husband. It so happens that to discreetly meet Jimmy, we would go to the cemetery, arrange white calla lilies on her husband’s mausoleum’s vase, and sit on a bench under a nearby cypress tree. Our liverwurst sandwiches and juicy grapes were in a basket, nicely covered with a red and white checkered napkin. Jimmy’s basket carried cucumber sandwiches and raspberries under a blue and white serviette. When we separated after sharing our light lunch, Mutti walked away with the blue napkinned basket.

I dreamt of those scenes while writing Split at the Root. In the dream I saw that one basket had a few gold coins and the other regular currency. After almost six decades, I put the pieces together: it was Mutti’s boat that had floated us through the years of scarcity.

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