"Joe Haldeman - Guardian" - читать интересную книгу автора (Haldeman Joe)

It's the story of Rosa Coleman, my father's mother, whom I knew as G-ma at the
end of her long life. She was born before the Civil War.
G-ma told me many stories when I was a boy, but never this one. Her son, my
famous father, never mentioned it either, understandably. His great fear was ending his
days in an institution, and that is probably where he would have wound up if he had
presented this as truth.
But Pops thought enough of it to go to some trouble and expense to have it typed
up and carefully preserved.
She was a sweet woman, the joy of my childhood, and I offer her story here with
respect and no further comment.
тАФBlake Coleman
21 March 2005


DECEMBER 29TH, 1952

I have started to write this down many times in the past twenty yearsтАФever since I turned
seventy, and felt that every day of life was a special gift. Like many an old woman, I've
chosen to spend that gift on my grandchildren and their children, with the odd moment or
hour given over to the church, and do not regret any of that.
But last month I had a small stroke and though I have recovered most of my
faculties, it's obvious that I have outstayed my welcome on this world. I do have a strange
story to tell, and have put off telling it for too long.
Parts of the story would be embarrassing to my son, especially in his particular
prominenceтАФso I have agreed to leave this book in his keeping, not to be printed until
after his death, or even after the death of his own son.
Perhaps from that distant perspective, the more fantastic parts of this account will
seem less strange.
During the Depression, I helped support my family by writing stories for the pulp
magazines, under a variety of male pseudonyms. I stopped writing during the War, paper
shortages having closed most of my markets, and never went back to it. But I was skillful
with dialogue in those days, and with the reader's indulgence I will have recourse to that
artifice in this memoir. Of course I don't remember the exact words of conversations
more than a half-century old. I do remember having had the conversations, though, and
trust that I can reconstruct the sense of them.
My son has set me up in this unused parlor with a comfortable desk and chair and
a bookshelf with all of my diaries. I count forty-three of them, most of them covering
more than one year. The earliest starts in 1868, when I was ten, but nothing of much
interest happens in my life until the nineties.
 Still, a few things for the record, as they say nowadays. I was born in Helen's
Mill, Georgia, in 1858, on a plantation with slaves. I remember almost nothing of that
except the image of a large Negro woman, who I'm told was my nurse Daisy. I'm told I
played with the slave children.
All of the children (the white children) in the family were sent to stay with
relatives in Philadelphia after Fort Sumter, in 1861. My father correctly divined that the
war would not go that far north. Though Gettysburg was close enough that we knew
people who went out to watch the battle, and hear the speeches afterwards.
Sherman's troops burned our plantation just before Atlanta, and I suppose my
mother and father died during that invasion. We never heard from them again.
There was really no room for myself and my brothers with Aunt Karen and Uncle