When I was in junior high in Jackson at the school where my aunt taught most of her life, she had sat me down before the ninth grade for a “talk.” It was in her small living room, dominated by blue carpet and paintings by my grandmother. She served strong black coffee and her Scottish shortbread. She always assumed I wanted coffee, which made me feel older. “This year Bailey will be integrated,” she said. Bailey was Bailey Junior High, where she taught and I attended. She was more serious than usual. Normally, there was a teasing hint to her eyes.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“It looks like there will be one black male student in your grade and one black female. I think there should be more, but I don’t think there will be.”
“Yes, ma’am.” I didn’t know what to say.
“I want you to think about what it would be like to leave Bailey and go across town to Peeples,” a black junior high school in south Jackson. “You wouldn’t know anybody or have any friends. You remember what it was like when you started at St. Andrew’s and didn’t know anyone? You were really nervous.”
“I was?”
She laughed. “For a day or two. But St. Andrew’s was small, and the kids were all a lot like you. Imagine going to a big school where you didn’t know anyone.” Bailey had more than five hundred students. “And imagine if you were one of two white students.”
I didn’t say anything.
“The student’s name is Sammy Edwards. I want you to do everything you can to help Sammy.”
“What’s he like?”
She thought for a minute. “I don’t really know. I’ve read his record. He’s a smart fellow.”
“Does he play sports?”
“He did, but I’m not sure he will at Bailey.”
“Why not?”
She hesitated. “It might be hard being the only black player on a team.”
I nodded.
“I want you to help Sammy.”
“Help him?”
“He’s going to sit next to you in the classes you have. Mrs. Hester and I arranged that.” Mrs. Hester was her closest friend, another formidable woman who had taught at the school forever.
“Okay.”
“And just…help him. You get along with everybody. Make it easier on him.”
“He may not like me.”
She reached out and took my hand. “This is important.”
“Yes, ma’am.” I tried to think of what to say or ask but had no idea. But then something came to me. “He’s not a little guy, is he?”
She knew what I meant. If he was small, it would make it easier for him to be picked on. “No,” she said. “He’s tall for his age. And he’s brave, or he wouldn’t be doing this.”
“Nobody made him?”
She shook her head. “It was his choice. All the children coming to the schools being integrated made the choice.”
“Takes guts,” I said and meant it.
“I’ve talked to the principal. You won’t get into trouble standing up for Sammy.”
“You mean, if there was trouble and—”
She nodded. “I think he’ll understand.”
Now I was nervous. The idea of spending the school year getting into fights for somebody else sounded lousy, even if I wouldn’t get into trouble.
“I know you’ll help him,” she said.
I tried and I’d like to think I helped, but I don’t think I did. I sat next to Sammy, who was tall and quiet. He was a good student who always had his homework done on time, which not many of us did, at least with his regularity. But if he needed a friend, and surely he must have, I failed spectacularly. In some To Kill a Mockingbird fantasy, we would have found a way to become friends, discovering we had more in common than we realized, maybe a love of cars or maybe girls or football. That never happened. All year I sat next to him, but there was such a gulf between us, there was no use pretending. He knew it from the start, certainly wiser if not older than I. He had steeled himself for this experience, and who was I to say that was wrong? I sat next to him a few times at lunch, and we tried to make conversation. But it was all so transparently phony. It was as though he wanted to put down his fork, stop eating the daily mystery meat, and say, “Look, I know what you are trying to do. That’s fine, but I don’t need your help and don’t want to be friends with somebody who thinks they are helping me just by being my friend. I have friends. They just aren’t at this school. You have friends. We don’t need to be friends so you can feel better and tell yourself you helped me.”
Or so I imagined. After the first couple of weeks, I quit seeing Sammy at lunch. I suppose he just skipped. All that year, I sat next to him in class, both of us in our different worlds. I’m sure he must have been brushed in the halls, heard whispered taunts, found notes in his locker. But he had a quiet dignity about him that seemed above all of that.
My aunt would ask me from time to time how I thought he was doing. I always said fine, great, but of course I had no idea. “Have you invited him home after school?” she asked one weekend, when I was hanging out at her house, watching television and eating her shortbread.
I felt a quick rush of shame. The thought had never occurred to me. But then I didn’t ever really invite anybody over, like some “playdate” of kids. There were sports and then my pals in the neighborhood; we were in and out of one another’s houses all the time. Friends just showed up.
But one day I waited until the end of a social studies class when everybody was filing out. Sammy and I sat in the far-left row, the one nearest to the windows and farthest from the door, and we were usually the last to leave.
“Hey, Sammy,” I said, “wait up.” He turned and looked at me with a friendly look.
“Yep?”
“I was wondering, uh, if you wanted to come over sometime, when school is out.”
“Come over?” He seemed genuinely confused.
“To my house.”
He frowned. “Why? Is this a school thing?”
“Nah, nothing like that. I just thought it might be fun.”
“Yeah, sure. I got that.” He nodded. “That’s nice.”
“We could go swimming?”
“Yeah.”
Then I was suddenly embarrassed. What a stupid thing to say.
“You got a pool?” he asked.
“Yeah,” then I quickly added, “it’s like a neighborhood thing.”
“So we’d swim with your neighbors?” He smiled. “Man. You talk to them?”
“No, but I mean, it’s our pool.”
He nodded. “That’s really nice of ya. But I help my mom out taking care of my younger sister after school.”
“Right. Yeah. Well, look, anytime you want to, we should do it.”
“That would be real nice.”
“Okay, great,” I said. “Talk to you.”
Of course it never happened. I mentioned it once or twice again, and Sammy always said the same thing: “That would be nice.”
When I told my aunt, she nodded and said, “It’s good you asked. That’s all that matters.”
The next year, I went away to a boarding school in Alexandria, Virginia, which had yet to integrate. I was in study hall when it was announced that Martin Luther King Jr. had been shot. Some students applauded. But others stared silently into space, and a few cried. Soon we watched the orange glow of Washington, D.C., in flames from behind the walls of the school.
—
That was a different era. Jackson now had an African American mayor. I got back in the car. The three of us—me, my mother, and my father—sat there in their old Toyota, not saying anything, but thinking about the past, each lost in different memories.
“Do you remember,” I asked my mother, “when you started bringing all those pregnant teenagers to the house?”
“I can’t believe you remember that,” she said.
“Remember? How could I forget hugely pregnant teenage girls in bathing suits?”
It was the first time I’d seen pregnant wom
en, at least in bathing suits, much less teenage pregnant women, and the first time I’d seen black women with white women hanging out together. It was during a period when my mother was volunteering with a “maternity home” that helped young mothers, mostly unmarried, during and after pregnancies. Most were teens whose families either couldn’t support them or didn’t want to.
“You told me that it was why I should study really hard and do well in school.”
“I did not,” she said, laughing.
“You did. And I think I was probably in grad school before I realized if I got a lousy grade, I wouldn’t get pregnant.”
Ostensibly, the reason my parents built a pool was the serious problems my father was having with his back. My mother had read somewhere that JFK had helped his bad back with swimming and thought it might help my father. At least that’s what they told everybody at the time. Now I understood there were other reasons. It was a small statement against the insanity of Jackson’s closing public pools.
“If they had kept the pools open, would we have built a pool?” I asked.
“It was good for your father’s back,” my mother said. She was in the front seat. My dad was in the back.
“It made a big difference for me,” Dad said. “Really helped my back.”
“The way I figure it,” I said, sort of joking, “we had one of the first integrated pools in Jackson.”
A look of real sadness flashed over my mother’s face. “To close those pools so nobody could use them. Jackasses.”
I hadn’t thought about our old pool for years, but there was something that bothered me about its disappearance. It had been a place where so many hot afternoons and evenings had passed, endless games of Marco Polo with the neighborhood. The pregnant teenagers wouldn’t have come to the house if it hadn’t been for the pool.
It was at that pool that I remember feeling like something close to an adult for the first time. It was when I was home from boarding school, the spring of 1968. Somehow my mother had invited a bunch of college kids who were working for the Eugene McCarthy campaign to stay at the house. They were trying to organize delegates to the Democratic convention to commit to McCarthy in anticipation of a contested convention. My mother was a great collector of people, and when I got home for spring vacation and there was this group of college students sleeping in the basement and around the house, it didn’t seem odd.
Though they were only college students—all from Ivy League schools—they seemed much older, very cool, and the two women were beautiful. They listened to Peter, Paul, and Mary and seemed to be having a great time in Mississippi, even though they knew their candidate was headed to defeat.
They disappeared early and came back late and would sit out by the pool, drinking beer and smoking cigarettes and talking. I was out by the pool cleaning up one evening when they came out for a swim. I started to leave, but they asked me to stay and talk. To my astonishment, they seemed interested in what I thought, what I thought about Mississippi and whether it was changing. Did I think the race “situation”—that’s how a lot of people called things then, a “situation”—was getting better or worse? Did I think the war in Vietnam was winnable? It wasn’t as if they were just being nice to me; they seemed genuinely interested in what I had to say, which was completely unimaginable. It was like a peek into another, exciting world, of what life might become.
Now I understood the world better, and there was something about that pool being filled in that made me feel suddenly old. We got back in the car and drove to New Orleans.
8
My parents spent half the year in a funny old apartment building on St. Charles Avenue in New Orleans. The apartment was on the edge of the Garden District, across the street from the Pontchartrain hotel, where childhood visits for its famous “mile-high pie” were a big deal. It was a stacked combination of vanilla, strawberry, chocolate, and peppermint ice cream topped with meringue. I would look forward to that for days. My mother liked the apartment building because it was familiar, a place where parents of her friends had gravitated when they moved out of their family homes. It had history and context that help stave off the chaos of a changing world. It wasn’t a fancy building, but the comfort they sought wasn’t in the gimmicks real estate agents now love to market, the granite countertops or bathrooms big enough for a party. They found the building had a soothing continuity. There were people who had worked there for decades, even some second-generation employees. Within a couple of weeks of moving in, my parents were best friends with everyone who worked in the building. This was their way.
It was the idea that things didn’t change much in New Orleans that was its greatest appeal to so many but also its greatest curse. Once New Orleans had been the South’s most dynamic, innovative, evolving urban center, but somewhere that had stopped, and it had become a theme park. A couple of centuries of focus on creativity and vivacity had shifted to an obsession with “preservation.” Everybody talked about the problems of New Orleans, if only because they were impossible to ignore—the institutionalized corruption, the crime, the poverty—but always the solutions were about “restoring” New Orleans, the assumption that the answers lay in a greater appreciation of the past than an embrace of the future. It was as if New Orleans had chosen Miss Havisham’s room as the model home of the future.
Like almost everyone who encounters New Orleans, I had gone through a period of enchantment, had roamed through the clubs, greeted many dawns over beignets at the French Market, read A Confederacy of Dunces like it was some sacred text. I’d gone along with the glib assumptions about the city—the food was great, the culture rich—and my only defense can be that I never really believed it.
It was as if New Orleans had conducted an experiment of what the outcome would be if a society placed the greatest value on eating and drinking and made hard work a social negative. It wasn’t the poor African Americans of the Ninth Ward who didn’t like to work; it was the rich white people. At uptown New Orleans dinner parties, it was more socially acceptable to admit to loving McDonald’s than confessing how much you enjoyed working. Before Katrina, New Orleans had faced a catastrophic disaster for over a century. In Holland, they built locks and dams. In New Orleans, they got drunk and threw beads at each other. My mother never liked it when I went off on New Orleans, and truth was, I still had a soft spot for it, maybe the way the French loved Jerry Lewis; it didn’t make sense, but there was still a little pleasurable tingle.
But mostly the point of living in New Orleans was to escape being exposed to the need to do anything new and to still feel good about that, even superior. That’s why I almost fell out of my chair when my father said, “I want us to do something we’ve never done before.” We were having breakfast in their apartment. Across Canal Street, just down from the Pontchartrain hotel, a couple of bars had stayed open late into the night, and I’d slept poorly, waking up to shouts of the drunken hilarity. Rampaging crowds of drunks were to New Orleans what rain was to Seattle, more noticeable in the absence.
“Never done before?” I asked. “In New Orleans?” I’d been coming to New Orleans since that first Sugar Bowl a whole bunch of years earlier. There wasn’t anything new to do. At least I didn’t think so.
“The World War II museum,” my father said. “You haven’t been yet, have you?”
“No.” I liked the way he included “yet,” as if it were inevitable, just a matter of time.
“We’ll fix that,” he said.
—
“Thank you for your service,” the forty-something man said, shaking my father’s hand.
My father nodded, the way he did when he was slightly embarrassed. Then the man hugged him. My father looked over his shoulder and raised his eyebrows. Off to the side, a British couple in their twenties with a young son stood by with an iPhone, waiting to take a photograph with my dad.
This was happening because my dad was a World War II vet and the museum gives vets a large hangtag to wear, like a credential. It
was done up nicely in red, white, and blue and said in large, block letters, simply, WORLD WAR II VETERAN. My dad slipped it around his neck as his entry pass into the museum. He wasn’t expecting it to attract a lot of attention.
“You were in the South Pacific?” the Englishwoman asked, after I took a photograph of her and her husband and young son posing by my father. In the background was a Pearl Harbor exhibit.
“Yes,” he said, still a little taken aback by the attention.
“Were you over there very long?” her husband asked.
“I spent twenty-eight months on ship without a night ashore,” he said. “But a lot of others had it much worse. They had to stay onshore.” It was sort of a joke, but the couple seemed too startled to get it.
“Where were you?” the man asked.
A small group had gathered around my dad. He hesitated for a moment, then said, “I’ll show you.” He turned and took a few steps to a map of the South Pacific island.
“I had orders to report to LST Flotilla 7 somewhere in the South Pacific. No one knew exactly where it was. I started in San Francisco. An aircraft carrier dumped me on the northern shore of Australia, and then I got a ride on a passenger ship the Australian navy had commandeered over to New Guinea. They let me out on a beach, and I was greeted by fierce-looking New Guinea natives whose only English was the worst kind of profanity imaginable that the Australians had taught them. I’d come halfway around the world to hear curses I’d never imagined.”
He traced the journey on the map, smiling slightly at the memory. “They took me to some Australians and Americans there, and nobody had heard of Flotilla 7, but they told me to keep going up the coast. So I got another ride and eventually found LST Flotilla 7.” He was doing what so many veterans did when they talked about the war, focusing on the absurdity of it and grabbing the bits of humor.
“I’m sorry, sir,” the Englishwoman asked, “but what is an LST?”
This had taken on the feel of an impromptu lecture, and the volunteer guides of the museum drew closer. This entire wing was dedicated to the South Pacific, arranged in chronological order. “We called them Large, Slow Targets,” my father said. “But their real names were Landing Ships, Tanks. They were longer than the length of a football field and used to land troops ashore. That’s what we did. We went from island to island.”
The Last Season Page 13
