How do we learn the true history of where we come from, if not in school or at home? I was on the other side of the world when I learned of the Greensboro Massacre. Adam and I, while living in Asia for several years, had flown to Vietnam from Thailand to travel with Adam’s dad, whom I had never met before. Over dinner one night, my future father-in-law said, “So, you’re from Greensboro. What do you know about the Greensboro Massacre?”
His question hung in the air, gelatinous, as I fumbled with my chopsticks. I was 24. I’d never heard of it. He explained what had happened and why he knew about it. One of the victims, Jim Waller, had been a friend who had invited Adam’s parents to the protest. They were living in West Virginia at the time, raising three little boys, and decided not to attend the rally.
Because the story was told as part of his parents’ history, Adam had already known about the Greensboro Massacre, even though he grew up in Seattle, even though his parents never visited Greensboro before our wedding. The massacre took place a few miles from my house, yet the story was not told as part of my family’s history, or mentioned in my public schools, from kindergarten to university. It was not even publicly memorialized until a historical marker was erected on a street corner in 2015. Doubtless some kids from Greensboro grew up knowing about it, but not me.
On that trip, too, I finally learned more about the Vietnam War, seeing as my AP U.S. History course didn’t go past WWII. Flying into the country, I knew so little. I knew my dad had been in the war. I knew he was drafted and didn’t want to go. I knew he was in the Judge Advocate General’s Corps because he had already graduated from law school. I knew he went to Bangkok on R&R and bought my grandmother two rings, a star sapphire and a fire opal, both of which I inherited. Even though the rings were from Thailand, they made me think of Vietnam, along with my father’s Army fatigues that I’d appropriated for a jacket in high school. My best friend did the same with her dad’s jacket. We walked the halls with our last names stitched over our hearts. In class, we had memorized something called the Gulf of Tonkin but I could no longer tell you what that was. Like most kids of the ’80s, from movies as much as school, I had a vague sense that the Vietnam War had been a tragic mishap, a blot of shame.