The others, Naoma, Eleanor, and Louise were off working; married.
"My father, though of absolute English descent, swore he was an Irishman and certainly had that temperament; never finished grade school. He went to work in a Pittsburgh foundry when he was barely twelve and became a molder, black-sheep of a moderately well-to-do family. He was an argumentative man; the highest wage he ever made in his life was in the fifty-dollar-a-week range.
"There were periods, especially during the Depression of the late 1920s and the early 1930s, when I would not see him for months. He was a blue-collar workingman's working man and became involved in the International Workers of the World, 'the Wobblies,' left-wing labor organization, in the 1920s. When I was only four or five I remember him coming home one night bloodied and bruised, results of tangling with police during a strike.
"My mother was so different that we children (when I was a little older) could never understand how these two people got together and got married. She, delicate and fragile; he, stocky and muscular. Mother, reciting poetry; father, talking about the 'working man' endlessly."2
Taylor recalls his childhood in rural North Carolina as, "one short happy adventure, knowing and caring little about what was going on in the outside world simply because there was so much going on in my inside world.
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