Jimmy Cagney — or Does the Way We Fight Make Us Strong or Weak?

A False Fight Begins Early

Growing up in Florida, the times I saw the world as most likable were through music and dancing. I remember when I first learned how to do a triple-time step in tap—it was so precise and so free! The step begins with a fight—you stamp the floor with your foot. Then you take a little jump, and what follows immediately is lightsome and pattering. Then another stamp, and the pattern begins again. When the dancer gets that rhythm of stamp and patter, something fighting and then almost delicately caressing the floor at once, it is beautiful.

But mostly I felt the world was a place to get, as Mr. Siegel writes in Self and World, "victories for just me." I was a snob, and competitive with other children. My family had a nice home and cars, and I compared us to every other family in the neighborhood with us coming out on top. I could appear like the friendly boy next door; but inside I was calculating. I avoided fist fights, but in my mind I was constantly arguing with people, scoring points and trying to put them down.

I prided myself on being a sharp person and I couldn't under-stand why, as time went on, I felt miserable and that something big was missing in my life. In an Aesthetic Realism class years later, Ellen Reiss described so truly my desire to fight the world and the kind of emotion it made me miss when she said, "You are a 'nobody-is-going-to-pull-the-wool-over-my-eyes' person. But you also want to see a sunrise."

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