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In reply to the discussion: 1968 (Your Help, Please!) [View all]nolabear
(41,959 posts)I was thirteen. I lived on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, and had spent the previous four years shuffling between a dying mother and an Air Force father in Biloxi, and a little shipyard cafe run by my father's parents in Pascagoula. In January, my mother entered the hospital for the last time. It took her 'til March to die.
And then everyone else seemed to be dying too.
I don't know why; I never will, but I was a liberal from a very early age. It might have been because, like many kids back then, my early years were spent with a series of black caregivers (even though we were dirt poor, but when she was young my mother worked) and the cooks at the cafe. I was a nonstop talker and, unlike my family, they always talked to me and listened to me. And, like many people who turn out to be writers, I watched and thought about everything. I had wondered when I was very small why my mother didn't trust Lucy, the woman who looked after me while her own little girl stayed home and suffered from the heart defect that would kill her. I had wondered later why the cook who fed us and the men who frequented the cafe had to hand her own husband a plate out the back door. I loved my family for many and good reasons, but their ideas about race baffled the hell out of me.
So when Dr. King died, less than a month after my mother, I watched the people around me cheer-literally cheer-while I just wanted to put my head down and never pick it up. There was fear that the black folks around us would riot, a stupid fear, because they were terrified and depressed too. Maybe that too made me feel like we understood one another a little bit.
But I did have a little secret about my mother. She had been a Southern girl, with all the flaws that a young Southern girl could have, but she had some charms as well. And she had a crush on the entire Kennedy family. Jack's assassination stays fixed in my mind for having damn near killed her, much to her embarrassment and my father's amusement. Now it was just me and Bobby.
You all know the rest, except for one odd little item. I dreamed about Bobby's death the night it happened. It was literally a "We interrupt this dream" moment, the news anchor (I think I've got the right one) Frank Reynolds saying "Senator Robert Francis Kennedy...is dead." Next morning I turned on the television, and it was real. Now, if you look up how things happened it's possible that this is a false memory, because he didn't die that quickly. But the horror I still feel around that news has a dreamlike quality. It was the definition of "nightmare" for me. And the pleasure my people took in it widened a gulf that has remained. I don't know why, but I never talked to any of the black folks around me about the terrible things we were going through. I think I knew, and they knew, that it would have been outside the pale and looked down on by both their people and mine. In some ways, in those days, even we children were the enemy. So we went on, in a state of shock.
And in August that year my father volunteered to go to Southeast Asia and fight. I guess it was too much for him, and a war looked better. I didn't have that choice. I put my head down and went on. And I started writing, not about that, but about the kinds of things teenaged girls write about. It took me a long time to be able to write about 1968.
All those people are long gone, the cooks and maids and all the generation above me. I loved them, and I hated them, and I miss them, for all that I didn't understand them. But man, it was hard to be a kid in a world that seemed to be coming apart at the seams, with no one to talk to.
But I still write about it. I still watch and think. I still keep hope alive.