An American Childhood

No one questions the social hierarchy at work within the dancing school set. Equally, no one seems to rebel against the roles set out for them by their parents, which spell out implicit social rules established through such rituals. Each of these children follows the rules and does what is expected of them by their parents.

Strikingly, Dillard attends the dancing school but rebels in other ways. For example, she learns how to play football and baseball with the boys, particularly enjoying the mental and physical demands of pitching. Dillard’s sport experiences, playing with the boys, exemplify a motif of “playing by the rules.” There is honor in these games, where the children must play fairly with one another. The children themselves enforce this honor code without outside or adult influence. In addition, Dillard’s mild rebellion in playing boys’ sports foreshadows Dillard’s more serious teenage rebellions.

When a tornado hits Dillard’s neighborhood, she watches the tornado touch down in their street with her father, and marvels as she watches a broken electrical line burn a pit through the road’s asphalt.

Dillard next describes her neighborhood, with its rickety streetcars and mixture of stores and manufacturing plants. Dillard roams her neighborhood with great freedom on her bike, taking in all of the sights and sounds and incorporating them into her experiences. Constantly testing herself and challenging the world with scientific excitement, she attempts to derail a streetcar by placing a stone on the track, just to see what will happen. She realizes in the instant that the streetcar breaks the stone without derailing that she should never have attempted such a dangerous prank, which could have killed people. However, danger thrills her, just as testing her own limits does.

She begins to take great joy in the concentration and energy she expends on her projects, particularly reading. One day, full of exuberance, Dillard runs down the sidewalk flapping her arms, wanting to fly: she knows that she cannot fly, but she wants to try anyway. One woman meets her eyes and smiles, in kinship with Dillard’s desire.

The next section describes Pam Doak’s (Dillard’s mother’s) love for verbal jokes and witticisms. Along with jokes and storytelling, Pam enjoyed the sounds and shapes of words and phrases that delighted her. She passes on this love of word play to her children. Among her other traits, she also enjoyed shaking things up to keep other people on their toes, through rolling down the beach toward the ocean when the group’s conversation got boring, or handing the telephone to one of her children when the caller had the wrong number. Conformity, for its own sake, was anathema to Pam. For example, she challenged her children to see trailer park residents as poor rather than bad people, and she wanted her children to have their own thoughtful opinions rather than following the crowd.

Dillard becomes obsessed with the French and Indian war, particularly because Fort Pitt and the area around modern-day Pittsburgh played a central role in that war. No detail is too gory for her. Dillard daydreams that she is a scout who gets to live with the Indians.

She also recalls the many games the children in her neighborhood played together. These games were essentially reenactments of the French and Indian war, such as Capture the Flag or giving so-called “Indian burns” to cheaters. Dillard’s best friend is Barbara (a.k.a. Pin) Ford. They play at being Indians, sneaking silently through the local woods.

Dillard continues to perfect her drawing and detective skills by spying on locals going about their business in town. She chooses an attic room as her lair. She draws the faces of the people she sees around town, as well as her own family.

During the summers, Dillard and Amy went to the Presbyterian summer camp because it was local and cheap. At camp, the girls learned to recite Bible verses by heart and to sing hymns. Dillard remembers some of these long-ago memorized verses as she writes this section.

Dillard acquires a large rock collection from her grandparents’ paperboy. She enlarges the collection until she has over 340 rocks in her attic room. She reads about testing rocks until she is able to test and identify each of her specimens.

After conquering minerals, Dillard longs for a microscope. She receives a microscope kit as a Christmas gift. She proceeds to view the items around her, including her own blood and urine, through the microscope. She collects pond water in the hopes of seeing an amoeba, and is successful.

At this point, Dillard ruminates on how it feels to be alive. Her philosophy is based on the learning she has done during this period of her life, and holds that to be alive is to be awake and aware of her surroundings, noticing everything.

At age 12, Dillard visits her school friend Judy Schoyer’s family’s farm near Paw Paw, West Virginia. The Schoyers are one of the most liberal, well-educated, oldest, and richest families in Pittsburgh. Dillard adores the time she spends with the Schoyers, and they fascinate her in their differences from her own family. For example, they attend opera and invite foreign visitors into their home. Eventually, Dillard explains that she has to stop visiting Paw Paw with the family, “because I couldn’t tolerate it, I loved the place so” (155).

Dillard’s penchant for new and exciting experiences leads her into many studies: wildlife and plant life, geology, chemistry, and every possible study of the natural world. As she learns about life and the world outside of herself, she also learns to know herself. In this section, Dillard begins to form a thinking, mature mind. Precocious and endlessly curious, Dillard spends her time learning, always thinking and throwing her whole self into each of her endeavors. Though she loves her family passionately, through visits to Paw Paw with the Schoyer family, she comes to understand that families live differently than her own. She is preparing to grow up and leave home, to reach an age where she will live her own life on her own terms.

One of the most significant metaphors in the memoir is repeated in this section: the idea that time is a river that carries Dillard along with its current.

At age 13, Dillard experiences several events that change her and help her to grow. One such experience is the incident of the Polyphemus moth. At this time in her life, she is interested in everything and enjoys learning about everything, focusing her reading on science and medicine.

Her class watches a Polyphemus moth break out of its cocoon, but it cannot spread its wings because the mason jar containing its cocoon is too small. The moth’s body is the size of a mouse, and its full wingspan could have been six inches. However, because the moth is not able to open its wings as it emerges, the wings remain clumped together and deformed. When the teacher shakes the moth out of the jar onto the road leading away from the school, Dillard knows that the moth, teetering along on its tiny legs, would soon be eaten or hit by a car. Still, she admires the spirit of the moth: it keeps going, full of life, with no regard to its deformity.

The moth leads her to study insects, which she originally is afraid of and continues to hate. However, she overcomes her fear by forcing herself to learn about them. Genuinely interested in microbes, Dillard decides that area is still open for new discoveries. Her mother tells her a story about how doctors discovered that premature babies’ blindness was caused by too much oxygen in their incubators.

Dillard also recalls the fact that she and her sisters participated in the testing of Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine. Poliomyelitis had been stalking the children of the U.S. for twenty or thirty years, and nearly every family was touched by polio. Salk introduced a vaccine in 1953 during his work at the University of Pittsburg. Salk’s vaccine was tested on 5,000 Pittsburgh schoolchildren, of which Dillard was one. Ninety-five percent of parents signed the release form to allow their children to receive the vaccine, which was instrumental in eradicating polio from the U.S.

The losses and grief of others touched Dillard’s life—such as the knowledge of her mother’s grief over her father’s death when she was 7—but did not touch Dillard’s life directly. However, to stem the flow of loss, Dillard made a series of vows which she attempted to keep as her life’s work and responsibility: to remember everything, including Molly’s babyhood and the old house that the family lived in before moving to Richland Lane.

Frank’s father, Dillard’s beloved grandfather, dies, and the Doaks buy the old family home and move into it. It is a large, old stone house, built on a hill with other, similar “little castles” (175). A long staircase, the Glen Arden steps, connects the family’s first neighborhood, near St. Bede’s, with their new one, at the top of the steps. Neighbors join from each side of the street to watch the Memorial Day parade, then go their separate ways.

Dillard begins reading about WWII, and she is captivated by the study of this war and its history. The Nazi death camps she reads about form a backdrop for her school’s drills to prepare for possible nuclear attack by the Soviet Union. Having read all the novels and memoirs such as Exodus, Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl, The Bridge over the River Kwai, Thirty Seconds over Tokyo, South Pacific, and To Hell and Back, this generation of teenagers knew too much to remain innocent of the war and its evils, particularly with the Soviet threat at its height. Dillard imagines her family living in the basement of their home with their food stores and freezer. From her reading Dillard knows how to ration food and water. When the time comes, she plans to take charge to ensure that the family survives until the radiation dissipates.

After her reading on WWII, Dillard begins to chafe at the hypocrisy of her life, largely consumed now with thoughts and feelings about boys, with subscription dances with the “right” boys—the group from which she is expected to choose a mate. Despite her moral misgivings, she pronounces the dancing sublime and the boys wonderful.

The next day in church, Dillard muses about the fates of all the generations of Pittsburgh’s elites gathered together there in one place. She herself occupies one place reserved for her simply by being born. Knowing that the boys fought with their parents, but still arrived at church, she wonders what will become of their generation. Who among them will rebel? Her own parents do not attend church, though they expect that Dillard and her sisters will. Who among them will dare to openly call out such hypocrisy? Who among them will refuse to take his or her place among Pittsburgh’s elite?

Dillard next recalls the days when her father took her on the Alleghany River on his 24-foot cabin cruiser. She was free to jump from a rope swing or to ask her father any questions she liked, typically about how things worked or were constructed. For example, Frank explains the coffer dams used to construct bridge pilings. He also explains steam engines and the workings of all manner of machines and engineering tools. He answers all of her questions carefully and thoughtfully.

However, when it comes to an explanation of the American economy, and Frank describes how money trickles down from the top to the bottom, Pam intervenes. She describes the example of poor black sharecroppers in Georgia, barely able to feed or clothe their families. Through this contrast, Dillard begins to see that her father does not know everything; he may be wrong about racism and sharecropping.