Matthew Graves in WWII

Well, I just landed out by East Anglia in England, my adopted homeland.  They call me Matthew.  Private Matthew Graves of the United States Army.  It should have been nicer out here, but the damn Germans got to them first.  Rainy, cold, and stinking with the odors of the bombing raids by London.  My boys from high school followed me out to this American base: Fat Freddie and Erwin, they're my other brothers.  My bund.  My co—companions.  

What a lot of people don't know is that if weren't for this place, I probably wouldn't even be an American as per the American way of life.  According to some historians in the Philadelphia area, my ancestors included two journalists who worked with Benjamin Franklin at The Pennsylvania Gazette, a local newspaper: With a little research, they and I managed to trace my name all the way back to a man named James Hiller and a British woman named Sarah Phillips.  They say that Sarah was a loyalist until the day she married James.

Not only did people say that she was As you would expect, the guy had his children out in the northeast, some went down to the south to grow cotton and capitalize on all the nigg—colored labor that came in from North Carolina.  
Some of the children got stuck down there when the war between the states broke out, one—my great uncle, of course—had about forty-seven slaves and his 90-acre plantation out in Georgia, picking all sorts of cotton for the gins in North Carolina.  He was also very lonely, so much so that it is said that he would inappropriately think nothing of mating with some of his livestock and squeeze out more workers.  I only talk about him for he was a slimy one.  

Conversely, my grandfather made it big as a book publisher out in Detroit; people in academia once feared the name of Graves and Dorffman Publishing.  Like his ancestors, he was a writer, but he wrote and promoted material that could sell rather than rake the muck of the government and the private sector, even if it meant selling his soul to appeal to the very order in hoods that my uncle fell to anyway.  He wrote some brilliant prose, but intermittently, it was not his sentiment, for sometimes I could not believe that his research would tell me that colored people were not humans nonetheless.  I only didn't question it when he would take me to the theatre and let me watch the Jim Crow shows that he would write.  Those clowns in the deathly blackface, big red lips, jolly senseless dancing, and gaudy coats were terrifyingly hilarious, especially when they would start talking like professors.  

My ancestors aside, I had a father who also went into writing at a university.  He was by way of Champaign, Illinois, sporting a short blonde hairstyle the way I have a ginger red one.  His vision, both ocular and mental, were lightly damaged from his days in the early great war.  Sometimes, I would see my father in the study of our house just sitting there at his desk, crying with a pen in his hand, lamenting that so many things went wrong in the heat of combat.  I don't think he ever got over the idea that his friends died in the war, or that he almost didn't see my mother again.  Every other day, when he came home from lecturing many classes at the University of Illinois' English Department, he would speak of the most brilliant prose, and then he would close his eyes tightly, forcing his somber tears when he could, and slip into this depressed state.  It was so bad that the university dismissed him in time, especially when he slipped into such a panic that he didn't recover for almost four days.
Ultimately, by the Great Depression, angered at the fact that he was a mentally diseased intellectual rather than a strapping worker, my mother wanted nothing to do with him and I followed him out to where my ancestors spent their lives.  She felt that being home for him should not be rewarded with his distant nature or emotional abuse when he tried to drown out his shellshocks in hard imported rum.  In 1938, we made a rather painful train trip from Chicago to Philadelphia, stowing away in boxcars and hiking across state lines sometimes because we had no money.  Over the trip, he became impossible to deal with as a son to a father, for he became paranoid of the chances of being attacked by hobos stowing away in some hoppers or box cars.  At any rate, people recognized my father's talents from his days in Illinois and we made it to the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, where our ancestors witnessed the Revolutionary War firsthand with Dr. Franklin.

While he wrote and professed his skill at the University of Pennsylvania, also started by Dr. Franklin, it was tough times, but we got through it.  Some days, my boy, Fat Freddie, and I would sneak off into the woods on Saturday evenings and steal chicken eggs from some of the local farms.  Yeah, there were days when I was excruciatingly hungry, such that not even the crack of a 22-caliber rifle could deter me from getting a few ears of corn or an egg.  If I was really smooth, I'd pinch off a small bit of milk from the cows that were still awake in the darkness of twilight.  It was good eating, especially as a teenager who was not seeing the latest vaudeville or Disney playing in town, just barely getting by with his arithmetic grades.