It is
difficult now to understand how one single subject could so preoccupy an
individual's mind as to exclude almost everything. Yet it did.
I was
in 11th grade, and when I should have been working for my high school diploma I
was actually working on my strategies to catch the attention of Caroline
Lanafeuille or Linny Goldbourne. Perhaps Linny had in some way replaced Sheryl
Rose Bogazzi in my dreams. Linny was all light and life and laughter. No-one
really knew a great deal about her, 'cept that her father was some heavy
political guy. She was always there at the center of things, always the one with
the wildest stories and the funniest jokes, and if Caroline represented all the
things I would want in a girl, then Linny represented all that I
could
want, but never have. She was dark-haired, hazel-eyed, her mouth full and
passionate, and when she laughed a sound came from those lips that could have
driven sailors to the rocks. She was as much a part of the world I wanted to
belong to as Sheryl Rose had been, but Linny possessed substance, something
tangible I suppose, yet something somehow unreachable. Had I known then that
both she and Caroline would play such a significant part in my future, perhaps
I would have forced myself to look away. But I didn't know. And thus I looked.
I was enchanted and entranced and mystified. I was old enough to believe that
everything one could ever wish for came with hips and thighs and breasts, and
young enough not to push my luck. They existed at the edges of my universe, and
though I imagined that perhaps one day I could reach Caroline, I also believed
that my fingers would forever stretch towards Linny.
For a
brief while I even believed they became friends. Perhaps not friends exactly,
more acquaintances, for they were so different. I recall a day at Benny's when
I saw them there together. The moment was unnerving beyond belief, for here I
was presented with the possibility that they would become close, that they
would share everything together, and this terrified me. I sat at a corner
table, they were seated at the counter, Linny vivacious, bold, full of herself,
and Caroline quiet, perhaps a little pensive. Each of them beautiful and
entrancing in their own way, and yet somehow opposites. It would only be years
later - when I had more than ample time to turn the significance of these
events over in my mind - that I would conjure up that image and see something I
found both haunting and somehow ironic. The butterfly and the moth. That's how
I would see them - the butterfly and the moth.
Nathan
had a different world. Nathan Verney was a handsome guy. Long gone were the
jug-handle ears and traffic-light eyes. His face was strong and well-defined,
full of character even at that early age it seemed, and the black girls that
lived over his side of Greenleaf spent their time working their strategies to
interest Nathan in what they might have to offer. Nathan, strangely enough, did
not see this. He saw the wrath of his father, the shrieks and hysterics of his
mother, for if Nathan had so much as touched a girl it would have been evidence
of Lucifer's presence in the bosom of the Verney family.
Perhaps
this was the reason he seemed blind to those girls. And they were pretty girls.
Beautiful girls. Girls who could possess a heart with a glance and a soul with
a kiss.
My
scene was not so clear-cut. I was not an ugly kid, more sort of nondescript,
neither one thing nor the other. I was neither too tall nor too short, too wide
or too narrow, too fat or too skinny. My hair was a medium brown, my eyes blue-gray,
and I seemed to excel at nothing in particular that would attract attention. I
figured that out early. It was not sex appeal, it wasn't even how good-looking
someone might be. It was
attention.
If you could garner attention you
became interesting, and if you were interesting then others were interested in
you.
Hence
the game: seeking attention.
And
thus - believing that Linny Goldbourne was somehow destined to be forever beyond
my grasp - I was consumed by Caroline Lanafeuille. Caroline seemed quiet upon
first impressions, but beneath that gentle exterior was a girl who possessed a
strength and self-belief that belied all I imagined her to be. She was pretty:
pretty beyond taste or preference. She would have been pretty despite anyone's
belief that brunettes or redheads or blondes were best. Her hair was fair,
multi-hued between amber and ochre and straw, and her slim figure, her delicate
fingers and hands, the way she would tilt her head and sort of half-smile at
me, were all indicative of deep currents flowing beneath a still surface.
And
yet Caroline was an enigma to me, a distant star, a universe all by herself.
She wore short skirts and tight tops, a tiny gold bracelet on her left wrist,
and when I sat near her in class I could smell something like that breeze
around Lake Marion - pecan pie and vanilla soda all rolled up in a basket of
new-mown grass. But there was something else, something that would have been
hormones or passion or love. Something that could never be described in a
language anyone but me would understand. When Caroline approached me my pulse
increased, my strong heart beat stronger, and when she opened her mouth to
speak I would hold my breath for fear of my own lungs obscuring the sound that
came forth.
Hi
Daniel,
she would say, and I would smile, and feel something warm around my
face, and I would nod and say
Hi
back. And then she might say
How's
it going?,
and I might say
Just fine there, Caroline, how's it going
with you?,
and she would make some small pleasantry and then be gone.
Incidents such as these occurred once, perhaps twice, a month, and the days in
between would be spent waiting.
Nothing
else.
Just
waiting.
Despite
her seeming unwillingness to share little more than a
Hi
or a
How's
it going?
with me, my teenage heart, big and red and as strong as a stirrup
pump, was for some time owned exclusively, and with no right of return, by
Caroline Lanafeuille.
And I
carried a secret.
And
the secret I carried was a picture.
Greenleaf
Senior High published a monthly Journal. The Journal of Endeavor. In the
Journal were words and pictures demonstrating the attainments of students. In
the Journal of August 1962 there was a picture of Caroline standing on the
football field in her short-skirted cheerleader outfit, a pom-pom in her
outstretched right arm, her legs slightly apart, her head tilted a little to
the right, her long neck exposed. I cut out the picture. I covered it with
Scotch tape so it wouldn't spoil or crease irretrievably. I carried it well.
Like a professional.
The
outstretched arm was an invitation into the gates of Heaven. The long graceful
neck was a stairway to Paradise and all the gold of Eldorado. The skirt was the
work of the Devil.
I
yearned for Caroline. I pined for Caroline. I would have walked a thousand
miles to Hades with her schoolbooks if I could have held the same hand that
held that pom-pom.
For a
while she was my life.
Perhaps
I would never recover, I thought. Perhaps I would never love like that again.
For even now, these many years later, I can remember times I spent with
beautiful girls, passionate girls, girls another man might have loved the way I
loved Caroline, and yet to me they never quite reached that same Olympic height
of perfection that so effortlessly permeated everything she was.
And
then November came, Thanksgiving Day, the promise of Christmas, and where my
thoughts turned to some vain belief that Caroline Lanafeuille would find it in
her heart to look my way with more than just a passing glance, the nation
turned its eyes to Dallas and the passage of the King.
I was
upstairs lying on my bed beneath the window, which was open just a fraction.
Beside me, a small wireless carried sounds from KLMU in Augusta, Georgia, and I
was thinking of Caroline. I know I was thinking of her because it was during
that time that I thought of little else.
I
knew something was wrong, very wrong, when my father appeared in the doorway.
It was not how he looked. It was not the drawn expression, the bloodshot eyes,
it was that he was there at all. My father had never missed a day's work in his
life. Through influenza, a broken wrist, through colds and coughs and an eye
infection that blinded his right side for a week, he was ever present, ever
correct, to carry the folks of North Carolina on the railroads.
'They've
killed him,' he said.
I sat
up. For a heartbeat I believed he was speaking of Nathan.
'Who?'
I said. 'Killed who?'
'Mister
Kennedy,' he replied, and I heard the knot of emotion in his throat unravel.
He
reached up and placed his hand against the frame of the door, and then he
rested his face against his outstretched upper arm. His body seemed to tighten
and then slacken, and not a sound issued from him, and it was all I could do to
stand and walk towards him, a long walk, a walk of kings and queens and
princes, and I realized only then that I was an inch or more taller than he. He
seemed tiny, fragile, mere skin and bones, and as I neared him he turned
towards me.
He
held me then. I couldn't remember the last time my father had held me, and I
started to cry. I felt closer to him then than I ever had, or ever would again.
My
mother was there then. She paused at the top of the stairwell as if she wished
not to interrupt this moment.
Tears
streaked her face, her eyes were round and swollen and dark beneath. She looked
like a ghost.
She
came towards us, seemed to envelop us both. I could smell her, the hair
lacquer, and beneath that the haunt of washing soda and detergent.
We
stayed there for an eternity.
No-one
said a word.
There
was nothing to say.
I
think for a day, perhaps two, I didn't think of Caroline once.
Some time
later I left the house. People walked the streets aimlessly, broken like straw
dolls. I don't think I had ever appreciated the division that existed there in
Greenleaf. The path that I had so often taken with Nathan Verney down to the
Lake was actually a demarcation between the whites and the coloreds. They had
taken one side of Greenleaf, we had taken the other. But on that day it was
different.
Kennedy
had once said
There are no white or colored signs on the graveyards of
battle.
So it
seemed on November 22nd. No white or colored division in our grief.
I saw
Mrs. Chantry there. She stood beside Reverend Verney. And when a small boy came
running towards them they both held him, comforted him, watched and waited for
his mother who came running after him down the sidewalk.
And
even now I recall an image from that day; a single, clear image that stands
above all else.
Amidst
the confusion and grief, the crowds gathered outside the radio store on Hyland,
Benny Amundsen kneeling on the sidewalk outside his soda store as if in prayer,
there was a moment so bold it stands like a color snapshot amidst a wash of
monochrome: my Kodak moment.
A
small colored girl, no more than five or six, her hair tied up in wiry pigtails
with bright bows at the ends, as if she wore some strange exotic flowers with
sunshine yellow petals and black stems. Along Nine Mile Road she went, tears
running down her face, her eyes wide and hopeless. In her arms she clutched a
pile of newspapers too heavy for her frame, and as I watched she lost her
balance and tripped. She skidded sideways, newspapers spilling out ahead of
her, and then she just sat there, her knee grazed and bloody, and she looked up
at the sky, as if to God, and those tears came like a river in spring. Too
young even to understand the import of what had happened, she was caught in the
flood of anguish that tore America apart.
It
was Nathan Verney who rescued that child.
I saw
him appear from behind the Reverend. He went down there and he lifted her as if
she weighed nothing. He gathered the papers that had fallen and handed them to
a white man who stood expressionless and dazed at the side of the road. The man
took those papers without question.
And
then Nathan saw me.
He
nodded, walked towards me, and when he was a foot or two from me I held out my
arms for the child.
The
child reached back, I took her, and her slim arms enwrapped my neck.
She
pulled tight, I started walking, and I went to Mrs. Chantry.