(Extra)Ordinary People • The Unexplained

Presenting speech in Austin, Texas, in 1974 on “true history of the Mexican War” (Americans real agenda the annexation of Mexisan lands); after speech, Mexican-American woman introducing herself as Mrs. Diaz approached me with what she said was a “story of a mother’s love.”

She laid on table a small knife and golden lipstick case;  photo of her husband, Hae Diaz; photo of Hae’s military funeral; and photo of their son, Juan. She explained her husband had been killed in 1945 in WWII. “A month after my husband’s death he came to me in a dream. He was holding the hand of a strange boy! Pregnant at that time, I asked him who the boy was. He said he will be “our son,” whom he warned would be joining him as a young man in death if he would ever go to a future war! My husband pointed at my pregnant stomach, saying I must do everything in my power as his mother to prevent our son from ever going to war! My husband and the boy then slowly vanished from my dream. A few years later, that dream still haunting me, one day I was holding my two-year-old son when a sudden chill came over me, as I recognized in his facial features the boy in the dream! In response to my husband’s warning, I could not believe what I felt compelled to do to our little son! As if in a trance, I carried my son into the kitchen where I pulled from drawer that small knife.” In shock I looked down at the knife. “Holding his hand, I opened knife and… and..and I CUT HIS LITTLE FINGER OFF!”

In that moment it was as if time stood still, as I gazed in numbed silence into that mother’s tearful eyes. “I told the doctor my son had lost his finger in an accident and though I searched, I couldn’t find his finger. I wanted to tell the doctor what I had done and why, but I knew he wouldn’t understand. He wouldn’t understand in the same way, Jim, when you tell my story to an audience, they won’t believe a mother could ever do such a thing to her child out of nurturing love! But Jim you must end this story by explaining when my son reached twenty years old, wanting to be a war hero like his late father who had won a purple heart in WWII, he had gone to enlist in the army to go to the Vietnam War. He’d returned home in a tearful rage, shouting “Mom, they rejected me! They, my country turned me down to serve just because of this one damn MISSING FINGER! My son was holding in my face that stub of his right hand’s pointer finger…that TRIGGER FINGER I had cut off!”

Mrs. Diaz gave me the telephone number of her husband’s best war buddy, for added insight into her husband’s character. On the phone his combat buddy told me at first they were not friends, but bitter enemies! “You see Jim, I had been raised to be a racist, thus I was constantly calling Hae a ‘spic’…until that day he had received a purple heart for saving a wounded comrade’s life. That wounded man was me! Jim, when a guy…a ‘spic’ saves your life, that’s when eyes of blind prejudice open up. It changed my life! It saved my life! Diaz had not only saved my physical life, but had saved the life of my soul.”  It was this John Williams who’d returned the photo of her husband to Mrs. Diaz at the funeral.

When I had returned to Ohio from Southwest, I had realized she had never told me what the golden case was in relation to her story, I called her and she told me “When my son died a few years ago from an illness, I had taken from that golden case the little cut-off finger I had kept there, and at night had gone to his grave and dug a small hole and gave my son his finger back.”