Anthem

by Deborah Wiles

  Drummer: Danny Seraphine

  Flo wore an apron over his gift — Norman’s Boy Scout shirt and sash with all its badges — and cooked breakfast for the monks. Oatmeal, apples, raisins, bananas, cheesy scrambled eggs (“my specialty!”), and buttered toast. Molly helped. She was dressed for the road: shorts, shirt, Keds, soft ponytail. She smiled at the smiling monks. They were easy to be with. They didn’t ask questions, not even when Molly screeched at Norman, “You sold your drums? What!”

  Flo dished up eggs for Flam. Eddie wore his porkpie hat and yesterday’s overalls under a red cardigan sweater. He helped organize the living space in the back of Multitudes.

  “And the amps! And the 6,435 extension cords!” said Molly.

  “Six thousand four hundred thirty-four,” said Norman. He wore Sweet Caroline’s ridiculously small Mickey Mouse T-shirt, an unzipped sweatshirt, his jeans, and his Converse sneakers.

  “Very funny.” Molly looked under the seats. “And Barry’s guitar!” As they worked, she kept checking, watching up and down the street as she waited for Barry to appear. Eight o’clock came and went. She sat on the curb and let sadness wash over her.

  Eddie brought out a box of food from the kitchen. “You all right, doll?”

  Molly sighed. “I can’t figure it out, Eddie. When Barry left us a year ago, I decided to stop feeling everything, because it was safer. It didn’t hurt so much. But all I do now is hurt. And feel things. I can’t figure out how not to hurt.”

  Eddie put down the box and sat next to Molly on the curb. He stroked his beard and finally said, “You will hurt for a long time. And then you won’t. The challenge is to live the hurt and not let it swallow you. Pain is a teacher.”

  “I don’t want to learn,” said Molly. She brushed an ant away from her sneaker. “I will miss you,” she whispered to Eddie.

  “And I you,” said Eddie. “I’m glad you happened on our little villa. We’ll head back there today, Flo and I, and see if we can stand the solitude.” He laughed.

  “I’m glad you were there,” said Molly. She stood up, smiled at Eddie, and pulled him to his feet.

  Flo appeared with Flam and another box. “Snacks!” he crowed. “Stop and get some ice for that cooler and something to drink.”

  “Ice!” Molly laughed in spite of how low she felt. Ice.

  Norman slammed the hood of the bus. “Ready to roll,” he said.

  Around the corner came a girl toting a fat cotton laundry bag. She was wearing sandals and a flowered dress, and her hair was a curtain of long brown hair that framed her face. She stopped at their bus. Flam came to her immediately, tail wagging, eyes shining, wiggling to be petted.

  Molly’s skin prickled. She knew who this was. “Isabella?”

  The girl’s face reddened. “Yes. Molly?”

  Norman came from the front of the bus. “Hi.”

  Molly’s heart fell. “Barry’s not coming. Not even to say good-bye.”

  Isabella dropped her laundry bag and shook her head. “He’s not coming. But I am … if you’ll have me.” Flam licked her hand. Isabella squatted and petted Flam. “Sweet doggie!” she whispered. Flam kissed her face and Isabella laughed.

  Molly blinked. This was the most animated she’d seen that dog.

  “Uh-oh,” said Flo.

  Norman raised his eyebrows. “Where are you headed?”

  “Wherever you’re going,” said Isabella. She stood up. “I want family.” She put a hand on her belly. “We want family.”

  Norman’s face colored and a tingle ran up his spine. He had no idea what to say, but Flo did. “Nobody move. I’ll pack some crackers. You know, for car sickness. Sometimes, when … I mean, delicate constitutions … no, I mean, it’s just that they calm the stomach in case of nausea, and —” Flo interrupted himself and changed course. “Get the crackers, Flo.” He disappeared.

  “Really?” said Molly.

  Isabella nodded. “If you don’t want to take me with you, I’ll understand. I thought I’d ask. I’d like to come.”

  “Girl!” said Eddie. He opened his arms. Isabella came into them, with surprise and relief. “Willing to go on a journey into the unknown. Now that’s courage,” Eddie said. He turned to Molly. “That’s what you did, you know. Now go home. Hug your mother. Congratulate her. She’s going to be a grandmother.”

  “We can’t leave Barry,” Molly said in a rush. She knew she sounded desperate but she didn’t care. “I know him better than anyone! He’s not some kind of monster. He’s just mixed up. He’s afraid. Dad threw him out. It was a horrible fight. He’s lost, that’s all. We have to save him! I won’t leave San Francisco without him. I can’t bear it!”

  Isabella’s eyes filled with tears.

  “Give him time,” said Eddie, to both Molly and Isabella. “Only Barry can walk his path. No one saves us but ourselves.”

  “And the music,” said Norman. “It connects us. It gives us a family.”

  “Music is music,” Molly countered. “I love music! But it is not my family. My family has fallen apart!”

  Isabella sat on her overstuffed laundry bag and crisscrossed her legs on the sidewalk. Flam lay next to her, put his snout in her lap, and sighed. Isabella scratched behind his ears. Cars rolled past them on the quiet street. The morning was bright and cool. The fog was burning off. It would be a good day for a journey.

  “Music is the rhythm of our humanity,” said Eddie. “It’s the soundtrack of struggle and peace, birth and death, love and war, joy and pain. Music is the heart you open and the family you choose.”

  No one spoke. Molly lifted her chin to the sky, took a deep breath, and exhaled it into the morning air. Norman, who had been watching his cousin carefully, now caught her eye. “You okay?” he asked.

  Molly looked at the circles under his eyes, at his scruff of beard, his shock of unruly hair. He had suffered, too. “I’m okay,” she said. “You?”

  “I’m okay,” said Norman.

  A look passed between them and instantly she understood what she had been trying for so long to touch.

  “Can you do this?” Norman asked.

  She could.

  With a calm she hadn’t known she possessed, she answered him, clear-eyed and steady, with one word. “Yes.“

  Norman nodded. Then, like it was suddenly the most natural thing in the world to express, he said simply, “I love you.” Just like that.

  Molly’s face softened in surprise. “I love you, too,” she said. She smiled, and as she did, she opened her heart to the brokenness of the world.

  Flam scrambled aboard Multitudes. Flo appeared with a lighted stick of incense in one hand, “to wave you on your way!” and an entire box of saltine crackers in the other. He handed the box to Norman, who took it and offered it to Isabella.

  “So,” he said, by way of invitation. “Are you on the bus, or are you off the bus?”

  AMERICA

  Written by Paul Simon

  Performed by Simon and Garfunkel

  Recorded at Columbia Studios, New York, New York, 1968

  Drummer: Hal Blaine

  And so they journeyed home together.

  Norman taught Isabella how to drive Multitudes and they took turns eating up the miles. Norman wrote his cadences for band and Molly slept and Isabella drank in the sights from Multitudes’ windows.

  The route they chose home journeyed through Twentynine Palms, California; skirted Phoenix, Arizona; sped across lower New Mexico and through the deep heart of Texas; laced the tip of Louisiana; breathed deeply through Greenwood, Mississippi; exhaled past Alabama; looped south of Macon, Georgia; and sailed into Charleston, South Carolina, five days later.

  They drove into a summer when men would walk on the moon and kids would throng to a farm in Woodstock, New York, and Wavy would be there on a stage telling them, “What we have in mind is breakfast in bed for four hundred thousand!” and people of all shapes and colors and identities would march against injustice of all kinds, in an effort to bri
ng down the established old order and redefine the ideals of liberty and justice, equality and opportunity, safety and kindness for all.

  The future of America drove home. They were nineteen, seventeen, fourteen, and not yet born. They had their work cut out for them.

  Has it not always been so?

  While I was researching the many varied threads for this book, my friend Steve Farrell sent me a quote about the sixties by Hunter S. Thompson, from his book Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas:

  History is hard to know … but even without being sure of “history” it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time — and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened.

  This sentiment seems true of any cataclysmic or momentous period in history, and especially of a decade as divisive and at the same time as coalescent as the 1960s.

  In 1969, thunderheads formed on every American horizon, and storms broke over families and institutions, often splitting them apart and forever changing the lives of individuals who were clinging to the established, customary norm, as well as those trying hard to break away from it.

  Music soothed the transition. The music of the sixties saturated, permeated, buoyed, and informed Everything — politics, passion, fashion, movements, changing cultural and social mores. So much was being born, and music gave a voice to it: to war, to peace, to life and death.

  Debate and protest over the Vietnam War cleaved the country. You’ll find those who went to war within these pages, as well as those left behind and the counterculture that rose from the careful, ordered, material days of the post–World War II 1950s. Also in these pages are those who did not benefit from the boom of those post-war years and instead struggled mightily for their civil rights and freedoms.

  America’s push to the moon takes the stage here, as well as America’s love affair with the open road, and seeing this country with fresh eyes from new interstate highways.

  Anthem also explores the idea of who gets to tell the story of America. The only story my many characters can tell is the one they are living and learning about, and they have only the lens they can see through at that particular time.

  So, for instance, the young people trying to create a utopia on the mesas in New Mexico in the late sixties are largely ignorant of how their actions can be seen as disrespectful of or unwelcome to native cultures, although some may be beginning to understand. Some characters’ views are overly determined by their idealism, age, and lack of awareness. Some are deeply affected — and afflicted — by their own damage, or blinded by their privilege.

  Taken together, they represent some of the stories of 1969. There are as many stories, places of entry, and points of view as there are people and cultures to tell them. We will collect them forever. We need all American voices to make up the whole of who we were, in order to make sense of who we’ve become, and to chart an indivisible course to who we will be, with liberty and justice for all.

  I was sixteen years old in 1969. I lived in Charleston, South Carolina, where teenagers drove school buses and public schools were just beginning a challenging integration. Boys were sent home if their hair touched their shirt collars, and girls’ dress lengths were measured from the wearer’s kneecap to the dress hem by homeroom teachers at St. Andrew’s Parish High School. I knew the lyrics to every Top Forty song on the radio and was in love with the boy who played the sousaphone in the marching band.

  Listed below are some timeline notes. I offer them here for purists, or completists, like my friend Charlie Young, who will know that the then-unknown Allman Brothers Band played free concerts in Piedmont Park in Atlanta, Georgia, in May 1969, but I have them there again in June, for my story’s purposes. Also, a few songs listed at chapter heads have release dates after June 1969 but were recorded before then.

  We reeled from catastrophe to catastrophe in the sixties. I stood in line for hours with my family, freezing in November’s dark wind, to walk past John F. Kennedy’s casket in the Capitol Rotunda in 1963. I sat in stunned silence with my family watching the news coverage about the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination in Memphis, Tennessee, in April 1968. I sat up all night two months later to see if Robert Kennedy had survived being shot in the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, having just declared his victory in the California Democratic presidential primary. I was fifteen years old and afraid for my country, afraid for my future.

  Then I watched, in July 1969, late into the night, a grainy black-and-white image of a man walking on the moon and felt some of the exhilaration of the space age and the limitless future and possibility ahead.

  There was a sense in the sixties, held by so many young people, that there was a psychic shift happening, that the Age of Aquarius was coming through, that harmony and understanding were indeed on the horizon, that we might throw off the bondage of the old social norms and embrace a truly egalitarian future full of common human hopes and dreams and sensual, cultural, sexual, gender, and racial freedom, and the abolishment of hate and bigotry.

  My friend Steve, who was for a time a student of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, summed it up when he wrote me, “It was an amazingly beautiful reality that materialized, lasted briefly, and then disappeared into the past — and, tragically in my mind, ninety-nine percent of the people had absolutely no idea of what had happened and what was lost. And, it’s something that was very subtle and difficult to communicate, even if someone is interested in understanding.”

  I hope you are interested in understanding. I hope this story can convey some of how it felt to be alive in 1969, on the cusp of the beginning of Everything.

  — Members of the newly-formed Allman Brothers Band moved from Florida to Macon, Georgia, in spring 1969. They played free concerts in Macon’s Central City Park and in Piedmont Park in Atlanta before recording their first album. “Mountain Jam” was recorded at Fillmore East in 1971, but there is a recording of it in Central City Park in 1969 and it was played that summer in both Atlanta and Macon.

  — “Mama” Louise Hudson owned the H&H Restaurant in Macon, Georgia, with her cousin, Inez Hill. One day two members of what would become the Allman Brothers Band came in to eat with money enough for just one plate of food. Mama Louise, who called most everyone “baby” or “darlin’,” began feeding the band for free until they had the money to pay her.

  — The Strip was an area about eight blocks in length along Peachtree Street in Atlanta, concentrated between Tenth and Fourteenth Streets, a derelict and decaying part of town in the late 1960s that the area hippies took over for its cheap rent and proximity to Piedmont Park. It provided a gathering place for like minds until redevelopment took over in the early 1970s. Today, steel and concrete buildings pack the skyline, and what was once the Strip is the epicenter of business in Midtown Atlanta.

  — The Catacombs, on the Strip in Atlanta, closed in 1968.

  — The Twelfth Gate, on Tenth Street in Atlanta, just off the Strip, became more than a coffeehouse in 1970 when Joe Roman turned it into a jazz and blues club as well. I’m debuting jazz one year earlier.

  — Cannonball Adderley never played the Twelfth Gate, but he did play Paris in March 1969. Bill Evans, McCoy Tyner, Mose Allison, Weather Report, and Little Feat did play the Twelfth Gate.

  — Wilson Pickett recorded “Hey, Jude” at FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, on January 4, 1969. Duane Allman accompanied him. He also accompanied Clarence Carter in “The Road of Love,” and for a short time he lived in a cabin on Wilson Lake in Muscle Shoals.

  — The Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section split with Rick Hall at FAME Studios sometime in 1969 and started Muscle Shoals Sound Studio. They got their name, the Swampers, from Leon Russell’s producer, Denny Cordell. They are mentioned in Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Sweet Home Alabama” lyrics, “Now Muscle Shoals has got the Swampers …”

  — Estelle Axton of Stax Records close
d her record store in late 1968/early 1969 and moved it across the street when new Stax owner Al Bell wanted her space for offices. It quickly went out of business.

  — The debate continues over which Hammond organ —the B-3 or the M-3 — Booker T. Jones used when he recorded “Green Onions.” Booker T. himself says it was an M-3.

  — Elvis Presley did record at American Sound Studio, and did play Las Vegas from late July to late August 1969.

  — Titan missiles were occasionally test launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base in the sixties.

  — Merle Haggard recorded the album Okie From Muskogee at the Muskogee Civic Center in October 1969. It was released in December 1969. The single was recorded and released earlier, and charted the same week as the concert.

  — “Do the Funky Chicken” was released in November 1969 performed by Rufus Thomas, recorded at Stax Records in Memphis, Tennessee.

  — Mary Beal was a real person, a self-taught, pioneering botanist who moved to the dry climate of the Mojave Desert in the early 1900s to relieve a respiratory condition. She fell in love with the solitude and strength of the land, and wandered the desert with her camera, seeking out rare plant species, documenting them, and writing about them for Desert Magazine for many years.

  — Hal Blaine was one of the most prolific drummers in rock and roll history. As a studio/session musician, he wasn’t as widely known to teenagers who listened to their favorite bands’ records, but he probably played on most of them, including forty number-one singles.

  — The Association formed as a band in 1965 and got their start (as part of The Inner Tubes and then The Men) at the Troubadour. They were touring in March and July 1969. I bring them to the hoot at the Troubadour in June.

  — JoAnn Dean Killingsworth was the first Snow White at Disneyland. She left home at fifteen to join a skating troupe and ended up in Los Angeles, but she did not leave behind a young daughter. Sweet Caroline’s mother is fictional.