Dan Wakefield - Kurt Vonnegut: The Making of a Writer

When I was growing up in Indianapolis, the name Vonnegut referred to the hardware store. The headquarters of the Vonnegut Hardware Company was in a handsome six-story building downtown, while most neighborhoods in town, like my own small world of Broad Ripple, had its own branch. How else would your father get nails or your mother a can opener?

It was not until the spring semester of my senior year at Shortridge High School that I heard that one of our graduates, the Vonnegut boy (Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.), had published a story in Colliers, one of the leading weeklies in that golden age of magazines. (This was before most Americans had a TV, before the internet was even a dream of the future, and when reading stories was one of the three major forms of entertainment, along with watching movies and listening to the radio).

Those of us who wrote for the Shortridge Daily Echo, one of the only two daily high school papers in the US at the time, were inspired to learn that one of our own graduates, himself a former writer and editor for the Echo, had made it as a writer.

Even after I got to know Kurt Vonnegut as a writer and a friend, it didnt dawn on me for a couple of years that he was from the hardware store family. His only connection with the store had been brief: after his freshman year in high school, his uncle Franklin had given him a summer job working at the downtown hardware company headquarters. He had operated the freight elevator, running it up and down the six floors every day, and he had sometimes wrapped packages in the shipping department. Going up and down six floors every day was the opposite of inspirational, but Kurt felt a little sentimental about the business in later years. I like what we sold, he once said. It was all so honest and practical.

You could say the same for his stories, novels, and memoirs. And for the way he spoke. He said things that other people thought but didnt say or hadnt dared to think but recognized as true when they heard them. The truth is often shocking, he wrote, because we hear it so seldom.

He knew, before I did, that I would move back to our hometown of Indianapolis. I think thats why he told me one day in New York, seemingly out of the blue as we walked back to his house after lunch: We never had to leave Indianapolis to be writers, because there are people there who are just as kind and just as mean, just as smart and just as dumb, as people anywhere else in the world.

I often have occasion to remember his words.

Dan Wakefield

1.

THE BEGINNING

The house is big, and you are the smallest person in it. Closest is your artistic sister, who is five years older, and your scientific brother, who is three years more, and then your pipe-smoking architect father and your elegant society mother. They all have things to do and places to gooffices and lunches and parties and schoolswhich leaves you alone a lot except for Ida Young.

Ida is not a nanny. She is the cook and housekeeper for your family, but she is much more than that. There is no adequate title for her. She is a black woman whom you know to be humane and wise, and she gives you decent moral instruction. She is exceedingly nice to you. She is as great an influence on you as anyone.

There is a saying that goes around during the Depression of the 1930s among black household workers: Things got so bad, white folks had to raise their own children. Many well-to-do white families, like yours and the Blocks, who own the William H. Block Company department store in downtown Indianapolis, employ black women who are described in the census as domestic workers.

Bernard, Alice, and infant Kurt, the children of Kurt Vonnegut, Sr. and Edith Leiber Vonnegut, 1923-ish.

Kurt at about three.

White families who employ domestic workers often refer to them as the help or our colored girl, but they arent girls; they are women, and most of them do much more than cook the meals and clean the house.

Ida Youngs grandson Owen says in an interview, We were the recipients of the Vonneguts hand-me-downs, and it helped us survive because of the Depression. I remember it well.

Among themselves, the black women domestic workers refer to the hand-me-downs as Thank-you-Maam bags. They are also given food to take home, leftovers from family meals. If a domestic worker has been with a family a long time, she may receive a remembrance in a will, any amount from $500 up to about $2,000.

After your family leaves the big brick house in the morning, it almost seems hollow, silent except for the barking of the bulldogs next door and the hum of traffic outside on Illinois Street and the clinking of dishes as Ida cleans up the kitchen after breakfast. She comes to you, wiping her hands on her apron, smiling.

Ida Young came to work for your family when she was thirty-nine. She has Thursdays and Sundays off. Her husband, Owen, works at the National Starch Factory, and together they own a house on Yandes Street. Its a twenty-eight-minute trolley ride from there to a stop a few blocks from your house that she can walk from.