Portrait of a Generation: Up Close

Mona Guinn-Huff
MONA GUINN-HUFF’S FATHER was an air-force officer who’d been stationed with his wife and kids on bases from Tucson, Arizona, to Bitburg, West Germany. When Mona was ten, her father was sent to Vietnam, where his family could not follow. Mona’s mother became an alcoholic, and fighting alcoholism has become Mona’s mission. Not her only mission, however. Though she devotes twelve hours a week to doing volunteer work for the organization that helped her mom stop drinking, she spends most of her time at home, in West Palm Beach, Florida, raising her two girls, ages two and five, and a boy, age nine.

She and her husband (now the manager of a car-radiator manufacturing plant) got married when they were eighteen. They knew the prognosis for teen marriages is generally grim, but the couple’s attitude was mature from the start. “We sat down and said, ‘What do you want out of marriage?'” says Guinn-Huff, now thirty. “It was like ‘It’s very important that we be partners in this.’ In our roles, there’s very much an equal sharing. And of all our friends, I think we’re the only ones still married.”

Guinn-Huff’s memories of the Sixties are bittersweet. She approved of the hippie aesthetic — except for drugs, which she’s always shunned. But the war soured everything.

‘The first time we were taken off the air-force base and lived with civilians was when my father was in Vietnam. I was in fifth grade, and when people found out he was in the military, I caught a lot of flak. I remember coming home crying the first time I ever heard my father called a murderer. Inside, I knew he wasn’t. The military didn’t choose to go to Vietnam, they were told to. And I knew he didn’t want to be there; he was a very loving man.

Having a son, the idea of another Vietnam is real scary. I wish no one ever had to go through that. The people who had to go and fight, they’ve been touched by horrors for the rest of their lives — and being on the other end of that has affected me.’

Robert Slocum
WHEN JIMI HENDRIX SANG, “Are you experienced?” Robert Slocum could answer, “Absolutely.” “I experienced everything but shooting up,” he says, laughing. “I was a strong advocate of Jimi Hendrix.” But while Slocum, now forty-five, tuned in and turned on twenty years ago, he did not drop out. He couldn’t — he was in the air force. He never went to Vietnam, but wherever he was stationed, he kept up with the era’s rebellions. When Slocum returned to Memphis, Tennessee, in 1970, he could still see the imprint of signs that read, WHITES ONLY, at the bank where he now works as a computer operator. He and his wife, who owns a beauty salon, are teaching their teenage son and daughter to disregard all barriers of race and gender. Slocum belongs to the Church of Christ but says, “It doesn’t dictate to me.”

“In this house, we have the freedom to express ourselves. We don’t want to keep things in us to cause further pain. My kids can tell me what they dislike about me. … I may not take heed, but they can get it off their chests. We have sessions where we just talk about the world. We talk about everything — sex, drugs. When they leave this house every day, they ready for the world. Can’t no one come up on ’em and tell ’em anything. They’re not easily persuaded.

When I was a kid, I had plenty of sex but no shackin’ — no playing house. That’s falsifying a relationship, and in my church it’s a sin. But I used condoms even then. I tell my son, in having sex, try to be with someone who, if you make a mistake, you can be with. He wouldn’t have to get married but be man enough to take care of it. We don’t believe in abortion here.

My mom didn’t have strength to talk to me about drugs. Sayin’, “Don’t,” is not really talkin’ about it. I don’t want them into it, but kids have a mind of their own. They don’t even like me smoking cigarettes. Both of them have jobs, they’re in school…. My boy works and plays football and has good grades. There are more black role models now who kids want to be like. “Strive to beat me.” That’s how I talk. “Do better than I did.'”