Growing Up

“In all this large cast there is no one famous. This made the writing especially satisfying for I have spent most of my long life in journalism writing about famous people, and it is good finally to feel that perhaps I may have prolonged life for a few people who deserve to be famous though nobody has ever heard of them.” 

Baker writes affectionately of his large family, whether describing their foibles or gifts. Throughout his book, he highlights the small, everyday kindnesses he witnesses—Uncle Allen buying Baker’s first magazine, Uncle Harold recognizing and honoring Doris’s desire to be pretty and have pretty things, Herb’s patient tolerance of Baker’s adolescent resentment. None of these people make the news, but their actions improve, and sometimes transform, the lives of those around them, and their generosity and decency during difficult times is a lesson for all readers.

“In that time when I had known her best, my mother had hurled herself at life with chin thrust forward, eyes blazing, and an energy that made her seen always on the run.” 

Here, Baker captures the essence of his mother at her strongest. She was perpetually in motion, if not literally then in her thoughts, constantly strategizing her next move. His mother turned much of her energy on Baker, pulling him out of his indecision and laziness.

“Children rarely want to know who their parents were before they were parents, and when age finally stirs their curiosity there is no parent left to tell them.” 

Baker here reflects on an ironic truth of life. People sometimes do not know that they want something until it is out of reach. His children lack interest in his past, and he understands why because he felt it with his mother, as well. Yet, he regrets not having learned her stories, and this regret inspires him to record his memories in this book.

“We all come from the past, and children ought to know what it was that went into their making, to know that life is a braided cord of humanity stretching up from time long gone, and that it cannot be defined by the span of a single journey from diaper to shroud.” 

This quote captures one of Baker’s key concerns: preservation of the past. The theme is threaded throughout the book, as Baker captures his quirky, loving family in sketches and anecdotes that serve a dual purpose: to preserve family history and entertain his audience, his children included, in the process. Baker not only memorializes his family but a particular time and place that all Americans have some relation to and that is now irretrievably in the past.

“During their long separation their letters were creating an intimacy between them far deeper than they had known when they walked out together in Newark.” 

“They” are Oluf and Lucy. When courting in Newark, they strolled in public. In contrast, their letters possess a striking emotion intimacy, possible because the strict social codes governing courtship are removed. The letters give readers insight into Oluf’s declining situation and represent the many who lost hope during the Depression.

“If I had lived upstairs with the landlady I would probably have become a hard money Republican, but chance had put me on the lower level where the Depression stirred such passion that even a child could not resist.”

Here, Baker reflects on how point of view impacts interpretation. As a memoirist, this is an ethical move that foregrounds his awareness of subjectivity. It is a way to demonstrate trustworthiness. He knows that he tells his and his family’s story from a particular vantage point, in his case the struggling working class.

“I had been changed by Uncle Charlie’s influence. Under its power, I was losing childhood’s innocent credulity and beginning to realize that adults had weaknesses too. That night I knew there wasn’t a grain of truth in Uncle Hal’s story.” 

Baker initially judges Hal on appearance: He looks important therefore must be important. Charlie knows Hal’s big plans come to nothing and has little patience for Hal’s grand illusions. Baker notices this and begins to look at Hal through Charlie’s eyes. Hal’s vagueness and Allen’s reserve come to Baker’s attention as well, and he realizes he has been too quick to believe appearances.

“Usually, I listened uncritically, for around that table, under the unshaded light bulb, I was receiving an education in the world and how to think about it. What I absorbed most deeply was not information but attitudes, ways of looking at the world that were to stay with me for many years.” 

Transmitting values does not always happen overtly but through repeated exposure and established patterns. In this way, Baker absorbed his Aunt Pat’s faith in Roosevelt, his mother’s beliefs about education and the “good woman,” and her attitudes towards work. As he grows up, he questions and complicates his initial interpretations, but the values and beliefs remain a part of him.

“Gradually I came to see that Uncle Harold was not a liar but a teller of stories and a romantic, and it was Uncle Harold the teller of tales who fascinated me. Though he remained a stern figure, and I never considered assign him, I saw now that he knew I no longer received his stories with total credulity, but that I was now listening for the pleasure of watching his imagination at play. This change in our relationship seemed to please him.” 

When the adults call Harold “a liar,” they say it dismissively rather than accusingly. As a child, Baker is initially too credulous to appreciate this and is preoccupied with knowing whether Harold’s stories are factual or false. The more outrageous Harold’s stories become, the more Baker realizes that Harold tells them for the pleasure of using his imagination. With little money and little education, Harold has few options for entertainment and is pleased his stories can bring as much pleasure to those around him as to himself.

“But that was in a time far beyond those years when he was showing me the pleasures to be had from setting imagination—even a limited imagination—free to play. To me he was the man playing Parcheesi and drinking cocoa in a two-room flat so close to H. L. Mencken, the man who infected me with the notion that there might be worse thing to do with life than spend it in telling tales.”

Here, Baker further reflects on Uncle Harold’s central role in Baker’s development as a storyteller. For him, part of growing up means letting go of simplistic dichotomies and seeing the world in more complex terms, more than either/or. The pleasure and diversion Harold brings with his stories brighten the lives of those around him in ways that cannot be quantified. This quote also demonstrates Baker’s eye for the telling detail and his ability to bring the people in his stories to life.

“After the first year thinned our ranks of sluggards who couldn’t keep the pace, some twenty-five of us survived as a small elite cadre of scholars, and when I realized that I was good enough to keep up with the best I began to view myself with extraordinary respect. I also began to look upon the common masses of humanity with pleasurable disdain.” 

Baker’s mother insists he attend City College High School, a rigorous academic program that allows students to graduate high school with a year of college credits. Baker’s success in the program fuels a sense of self that eventually enables him to begin separating from his mother, but it also encourages intellectual arrogance. He sees his education and academic achievements as elevating him above others in his blue-collar community.

“Something else that had bound us together parted that night. It had been cruelly done, but I had issued my first declaration of independence from childhood.”

In late childhood, Baker begins to question the adults in his household, but not his mother. He depends on her for help with his schoolwork and knows that she will not let him be lazy. In this quote, Baker declares his emotional independence from his mother. Lucy is no longer able to help Baker study because the work is beyond her level. Baker wants her to know that he is aware of this. He asks her to help him with a Latin translation he knows is tricky and for which he already has the answer, provided by his teacher. He watches her struggle to produce an inferior translation then shows her the correct one in triumph.

“It galled me that my mother should be married to a man with so little schooling, a man who licked the point of his lead pencil when struggling with the simplest mathematical calculation, a man who had never heard of Cicero, Virgil, or Shakespeare, a man who read nothing but the sports pages and moved his lips silently while trying to puzzle out some unfamiliar word in the baseball news.” 

Baker describes Herb’s lack of education in painstaking detail, but rather than diminish Herb, Baker is highlighting his own arrogance and childishness. He looks down on Herb’s lack of education and overlooks Herb’s generosity and patience. Baker fancies himself independent from his mother but is upset that she has displaced his central role in her life by getting remarried. He still has growing up to do.

“I saw that though Herb knew nothing about Cicero or Shakespeare his wisdom was far larger than mine. This explained several obviously stupid plays he had made earlier in the game. A little happiness for her would lead to peace of mind for him, as well as for me, and putting the Madame in good spirits was well worth a loss at cards.” 

Herb teaches Baker that wisdom and education can be mutually exclusive. Baker, Herb, and Lucy are playing cards, and Lucy is annoyed because Baker is winning. When she excuses herself briefly, Herb tells Baker to let Lucy win because it will make her happy. Baker had thought only of himself and his pleasure in winning. He allows Herb to show him that selflessness can serve our needs in unexpected ways, in the process learning that Herb’s lack of schooling does not mean he has nothing to teach Baker.

“My words! He was reading my words out loud to the entire class. What’s more, the entire class was listening. Listening attentively. Then somebody laughed, then the entire class was laughing, and not in contempt and ridicule, but with openhearted enjoyment. Even Mr. Fleagle stopped two or three times to repress a small prim smile.” 

Here, Baker experiences his first great triumph as a writer—witnessing the enjoyment his writing brings his classmates and teacher. The experience reinforces his commitment to making writing a career, even though he is not sure how to do it. Baker takes pains throughout the book to observe himself from a critical distance. In this passage, he shows his elation by breaking the grammatical rules he has followed previously.

“To them, 1938 was the year of Munich, when Neville Chamberlain sold Czechoslovakia to Hitler for ‘peace for our time.’ In Lombard Street, however, it was the year the dignity of the white race hung in the balance scales of history. While uptown Baltimore debated war and the future of civilization, the men of Lombard Street sat on their stoops in shirt-sleeves, puffed their pipes, and pondered the cruel theological mystery. It could best be stated as a question: to wit, why had God permitted Joe Louis to become the heavyweight champion of the world?” 

“Them” refers to the boys Baker admired at City College, and “Lombard Street” is the white section of Baker’s working class neighborhood. Baker contrasts the debates about world events happening “uptown” with the men in shirt-sleeves wondering why God isn’t a racist. The passage displays Baker’s wry humor and ironic awareness. While WWII would change the world, Joe Louis defending his heavyweight crown would also cause a seismic shift. Both turn out to be important events, though in distinct ways.

“Joe Louis had given them the courage to assert their right to use a public thoroughfare, and there wasn’t a white person down there to dispute it. It was the first civil rights demonstration I ever saw, and it was completely spontaneous, ignited by the finality with which Joe Louis had destroyed the theory of white superiority.” 

Race is one of Baker’s recurring motifs. He expresses shock at the overt racism he encounters when he moves from New Jersey to Baltimore. In this section, he discusses the consequences of Joe Louis defending his heavyweight title against a white opponent: the myth of white superiority is smashed and contributes to transformational change in the U.S.

“I believed in the distinction between good women and bad women. Good women were to be respected and loved purely. That’s what they expected of a man. It was all right to wallow in lust with a bad woman but not with a good woman, not with a woman who was married to a man, possibly a Navy hero facing death for his country, for his wife, for me, in the faraway Pacific. I didn’t want my belief in the good woman shattered.” 

At this point in Chapter 15, Baker is training with the Navy Corps during World War II. He has been trying to lose his virginity without success, when three women pick up Baker and two friends. One of the women propositions Baker. Knowing she is married, he automatically puts her in the “good woman” category and cannot bring himself to sleep with her. His simplistic distinction between “good” and “bad” women will resurface again and become a source of inner conflict for him.

“For those of us in Florida awaiting our chance at glory, the age of our childhood ended that morning in the premature dawn exploding over the desert. We didn’t know about the test, of course. Doors were closing forever on our past, but we could not hear them slam. Soon the world we had known and the values we had lived by in that world would become so obsolete that we would seem to Americans of the new age as quaint as travelers from an antique land.” 

These are Baker’s reflections after the July 16, 1945 atomic bomb testing at Los Alamos, New Mexico. Just as the Victorian age his mother was born into eventually died away, the world he grew up in will die away. As Baker notes with the spontaneous civil rights demonstration, monumental change may not be recognized as such in the moment.

“A later generation, with hindsight’s invaluable judgment, found the atomic bombing easy to condemn as a crime in which we had all connived, if only subconsciously. Neither my mother’s letters nor mine, however, indicated that we even realized anything very extraordinary had happened.”

Here, Baker further reflects on history and change, in particular on how much easier it can be to judge the past from the future. Baker shares excerpts from his and his mother’s letters to highlight how different events look in the moment, a caution against judging an experience without having lived it.

“I think my mother realized right away that in Mimi she was meeting her most formidable opponent since the time of Ida Rebecca. Maybe, watching me lead Mimi up to the porch at Marydell Road that Sunday, she caught a glimpse of life repeating itself as an ironic joke and dreaded what was to come.”

In the Foreword, Baker argues that children should know where they come from because they are not isolated threads but part of a braid of human experiences. In this passage, he shows one way this is so: in the way history repeats itself. Humans are the same. His mother tells him this about race, and it applies to human emotion and choice as well.

“Still, my feelings about Mimi were so complex that I was far beyond thinking of her as either good woman or bad. Enchanted by love, I thought of her as a woman so special she could not be catalogued.”

From the beginning of his relationship with Mimi, Baker knows she is unique and special. She challenges his oversimplified categorization of women. Despite this, it takes time for him to commit to his more complex view of women and embrace the new age he, not his mother, lives it.

“Vanity fought with love for possession of my soul, and the battle settled into a prolonged stalemate that was to drag on for the next four years.” 

Baker equivocates for four years while dating Mimi. His vanity urges him to marry a woman with pedigree who will improve his profile, while his heart wants Mimi. For love to win, Baker will have to move beyond his mother’s Victorian notions of “good” vs. “bad” women.