“I Want Piece”

a poem by Ron Jones

When I was 10 or 11 years old
sometimes I would ‘just happen to be’ in the kitchen
when Mom fetched a chocolate cake from the oven.

“Wait a few minutes, Ronnie,” Mom would say.
“You’ll get your piece. Just let it cool down a bit.”

I created a ritual for those restless moments.
The routine never varied.
Parading around the kitchen
I would chant:

I want piece… I want piece…
I want peace between the cowboys and the Indians.

Again and again.
Each time
the same theatrical march,
the same sing-song cadence:

I want piece… I want piece…
I want peace between the cowboys and the Indians.

Over and over
until – at last!
My performance was rewarded –
warm chocolate cake delighting my tongue.

~~~

It was the mid-1950s in northern California, and our prototypical white, suburban, nuclear family would gather around the glowing black-and-white screen most weeknights. TV Westerns were a staple in those early years of television. And I remember how it used to bother me that ‘the cowboys and the Indians’ always seemed to be fighting.

I performed this kitchen refrain countless times during that year or two of my youth, and I’ve repeated it out loud hundreds of times since. It remains deeply ingrained in my psyche today, and I can still hear it in my head like it was yesterday.

I came to understand this oft-repeated child’s play on words as an early expression of an inborn and enduring hunger, not for chocolate cake – well, that too – but to live in a peaceful world, a world where people are kind to each other, helpful and cooperative, loving and forgiving. And it seemed obvious to me that life should be like this and could be like this.

Like all human beings who grow into adolescence, I was exposed more and more frequently to the sad fact that people were not always kind and helpful, to put it mildly. Indeed, human beings could be downright mean and even unspeakably cruel to their fellow human beings.

‘Welcome to the real world,’ I have been told so many times in so many ways over the years, right up to today. Well, perhaps that’s a serviceable rationalization for ‘man’s inhumanity to man’ for some people, which I understand. But it was not and is not for me.

And I have never lost my conviction that it does not have to be this way.