In a photograph taken in the early 1960s, I’m sitting on the side porch of our rambling Victorian off Hope Street in Providence, with my parents and three sisters and brother. We’d just come home from Sunday school at the First Unitarian Church. We girls are wearing skirts and crisp white blouses, stockings held in place by garters. (Pantyhose, which will shortly arrive on the scene, will seem liberating.) My father and brother have crew cuts and narrow ties; they wear drip-dry polyester shirts — perhaps in genuine Dacron polyester, more likely, some off-brand: with five kids in the family, we pinched pennies. We are smiling, clean, white, well fed, well dressed, cheerful, bright.
I suppose we could have been described with the adjective “typical.” Although at the time, when I was in junior high school, I was aware of our differences. My mother worked when few mothers did. Unlike nearly everyone else on Providence’s East Side, we weren’t Catholic or Jewish, but Unitarian. And then, of course, there were my braces and crutches: I’d contracted polio shortly before the introduction of the Salk vaccine.
In the photograph, my right leg, the leg always described as “bad,” was tucked behind the one called “good.” Someone — maybe one of my parents, maybe the neighbor who took the picture — would have, without speaking of it, probably without even thinking much about it, moved my crutches out of the frame. Years later, during the brief period when I walked with nothing more than a cane but had let go of my shame about my disability, I’d grab my cane and plant it in front of me when my photograph got snapped — a declaration: This is part of me.
[For more on this story by Anne Finger, go to https://www.nytimes.com/2019/0...timate-violence.html]
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