Spoken from the Heart (13 page)

For the rest of that day and the Monday following, I lay on the couch in our den and watched the entire presidential funeral ceremony, the inky mourning crepe looking somehow even blacker on the grain of the black-and-white TV. I was aching from Mike Douglas's death. Kennedy's assassination entwined itself with my own sense of tragedy until all I felt was a smothering sadness. I could never imagine meeting a president, but I had given Kennedy's book,
Profiles in Courage,
to my high school boyfriend for Christmas the previous year. Now I was watching President Kennedy's flag-draped coffin roll by.

My mother sat glued to the ceremonies as well. She would have seen Jackie Kennedy, her face obscured behind a voluminous black veil, and known that the first lady had already buried two babies, a stillborn girl and a premature boy, Patrick. That day, along with the country, she was burying her husband.

There is a story, told forty years later by one reporter, that at a single Midland restaurant, Luigi's, an Italian pizza and pasta place where the tables were covered in red and white checked cloths, lunchtime diners applauded when they heard the news of Kennedy's murder. I never heard that. Not at the time, not in the years afterward. Neither did any of my friends. The not so subtle implication behind the story was that Midland was fiercely conservative and more than a little racist, although many of the United States' greatest civil rights gains would come under a Texan, Lyndon Baines Johnson.

Certainly Midland in the early 1960s wasn't a racially integrated town. As in most of Texas, much of the South, and indeed the rest of the country, the schools were segregated, and there was an undercurrent of racism. The Midland of my early childhood had a few separate water fountains, each porcelain basin clearly marked "white" or "colored." But they were soon taken down. The prejudice that remained was subtler, a back-room or bridge-club type of prejudice, inflicted behind closed doors. No one burned crosses or scribbled epithets or deployed water cannons. And if some people spoke badly, most assuredly not everybody did. I never heard my parents talk in a racist way. When George once used a derogatory word that he had overheard, his mother smacked him for speaking "filth." In the early 1960s, there was a small African-American section in Midland but not yet a sizable Hispanic one. I didn't have any black friends, but I didn't have any way to make black friends, and they had no way to make friends with me.

And I always knew that on the horrible night of November 6, the first car that had stopped to help and the family that had come running up to wrap me in the protective cover of their arms was African-American.

Ultimately, it took federal intervention--starting with the 1954 Supreme Court ruling in
Brown v. Board of Education
and continuing through years of school closings, National Guard encounters, and federal marshals dispatched to open barred doors--to change the schools. Attitudes changed even more slowly, because this wasn't just how Midland was, it was how much of the United States was, even places that had once been bastions of abolition, like Boston. Change had to come from the top, not the bottom.

But little, isolated Midland was also more diverse than it appears to many of the people who find it so easy to condemn.

When it came to class, we were far more integrated than other parts of the country. Midland was a working-class town. Most of the people who made money in the oil business came from working-class roots. Quite a few of them had grown up with close to nothing. Even the men from wealthier families, like Mr. Bush or the Philadelphia-bred Mr. O'Neill, who had driven the car for my first "Daddy date" with his thirteen-year-old son, Kevin, had moved out to the West Texas plains determined to prove themselves. They didn't carry with them the trappings of moneyed East Coast homes. That kind of showmanship would not have sat well in midcentury Midland. The children of roughnecks and roustabouts went to the same schools and played on the same teams and were friends with the children of geologists and engineers and landmen and ranch owners, both those with oil leases on their properties and those with nothing but dry grassland. When people retract their noses ever so slightly at the mention of Midland, or West Texas more generally, I am reminded that there are many ways to denigrate a place or demean a person.

In the years that followed, my friends and I watched the civil rights movement unfold, and we embraced it. We had already learned not to judge a man or a woman based on the place that he or she called home.

And so, on those late November days, we watched and grieved in Midland as an Irish Catholic from Boston was buried at Arlington National Cemetery outside of Washington, D.C.

It cost twenty-five dollars a semester to attend the Texas College of Mines and Metallurgy when my mother enrolled, in the fall of 1936. She waited until the night before final registration to ask her father for the money. It was a bleak seven years into the Great Depression, and twenty-five dollars was a significant sum. There were women who took jobs making sandwiches in soup kitchens just so they could be guaranteed one meal a day. Education was a luxury. My mother barely worked up the nerve to say anything. In the morning, Hal Hawkins handed over the twenty-five dollars, likely counted out in part in quarters, nickels, and other small change. After that, his daughter never asked him for school fees again.

When my mother went off to college, she could no longer afford to live at home and ride the bus some fourteen miles from the upper valley down to El Paso and back each evening, so she boarded with a family in town, taking care of their daughter in return for a room and food. The father worked for the Royal Dutch Shell oil company. Mother once chaperoned the little girl, Charlotte, all the way to New York on the train and then down the length of the East Coast on an oil company tanker--"the biggest ship I had ever seen in my life," she recalled--to Aruba. Charlotte's parents insisted that Mother pay her own way to New York, and she had to "scrounge" to gather enough to cover train fare. By 1938, she had dropped out of school altogether to earn her way in the world. My father had long since quit his own college in Lubbock.

But they never doubted that I would attend college. When I was in the second grade, my father proudly announced that he had bought an insurance policy designed to pay for my college when the time came. He walked into our brick house on Estes Avenue and said, "I bought this college plan for you." When I actually went to college, that little plan was worth only enough to cover one semester, but my parents were always determined that I have a college education. That was what so many of our parents in Midland wanted, a future beyond the best of what theirs had been.

And it was all the more remarkable that my father kept his promise. By the time I left Midland for Dallas, in 1964, an oil bust had struck. Some 4,500 people ultimately left the city. Homes went unsold or were foreclosed. My father did not build a single new house the entire time I was away at school.

After traversing what seemed like half the state of Texas with my parents looking at schools--the sprawling University of Texas campus in Austin, Southwestern University in Georgetown, Texas, and all the way over to Sophie Newcomb in New Orleans--I chose Southern Methodist University in Dallas. By East Coast standards, it was a young school. The same year that it was founded, 1911, the venerable Yale University in Connecticut turned 210 years old. But SMU looked old. Its buildings were brick, and the centerpiece, Dallas Hall, had massive white columns that appeared to have stood in exactly that spot since the time of King George III. Unlike in the University of Texas system, many of SMU's students came from other states; it drew its applicants from up and down the corridors of the Midwest. And I liked the fact that it was in Dallas, home to my uncle Mark and city of innumerable visits, especially each fall to the Texas State Fair. I had first become enchanted with SMU in the seventh grade, when I read a biography of Doak Walker, SMU's legendary football running back--not at all an odd choice for a girl from Midland, where we breathed football each autumn. Walker won the Heisman Trophy in 1948; the Dallas Cotton Bowl used to be called "The House That Doak Built." But my girlish crush was not on the running back, it was on his campus, and I nurtured it for six years. I would also be going with a group of Midland girls, including Gwyne Smith, my friend from elementary school.

The fall of 1964 on college campuses around the country was not the spring of 1968 or 1969. Far from being hotbeds of radical activity, most schools were bastions of youthful irresponsibility, worlds of brimming punch bowls and the nervous social banter of night after night of sorority rush in antebellum-style houses that looked like backdrops for
Gone With the Wind
. In our dorm rooms and sororities, we had curfews, 10:00 p.m. on weekdays, midnight on weekends. House mothers came to do bed checks. Irresponsibility could occur only during preset hours. We dutifully followed the rules, having no sense of the seismic fault lines that trembled beneath our feet.

At SMU, the boys were clean-cut. The girls didn't wear pants, only dresses or skirts, which grazed the knee. The miniskirt was not invented until 1965, and it was worn in Great Britain first. I can still remember how daring it felt to wear jeans to class when I was a senior; I was the only one in denim in the entire seminar room. During my sophomore year, when I went to a Bob Dylan concert, I wore a little wool skirt suit that I had bought in El Paso the summer before with Mother at the Amen Wardy department store. My date wore a jacket and tie, and so did all the other boys around him. The crowd booed when, after the first half of the show, Dylan came back and reset the amplifiers to switch from folk music to hard rock 'n' roll. They wanted him to remain a folk singer. "The times they are a-changin'" didn't yet apply to North Texas.

I lived in the women's dorms in my first years and joined a sorority, Kappa Alpha Theta, in my second. My best friends were now a new orbit of girls, Jane Purucker and Bobbie Jo Ferguson from Kansas City, Janet Kinard from Abilene, Mary Brice from Snyder, Texas, a West Texas oil town far smaller than Midland, and Susan Englehart from Corpus Christi. I was only seventeen when I started college, at a time when many of the girls I knew aspired more to getting married than to attending their own university graduations. SMU was coed; it was not a suitcase school, like so many women's colleges of the time, where girls packed up and headed off each weekend to marathon excursions with boys, trying to make a good impression as the clock ticked down the seconds until Sunday afternoon. But we had girls who pined after loves on other campuses and hundreds of others who were searching for lifelong mates among the fraternity boys on our own.

In the beginning, I didn't know whether to be social or studious. I spent too many nights on dates at the El Toro Room, and my first-semester grades were embarrassing. Not since the fifth grade at Bowie Elementary, when I received a C in social studies, had I been so devastated. Back then, my pediatrician, Dr. Dorothy Wyvell, had ordered me to come home and lie down in the afternoons to recover from a bad cough. The result was that I missed weeks of social studies and ended up with a C. Worse than my own disappointment was the thought that I had failed Mother and Daddy. Now, eight years later, that failure was magnified. I called home, cried, and apologized. It was not just my own opportunity that I was squandering; it was theirs as well, the opportunity that they had given to their only daughter, out of love and without demands or strings. After that, I became, if not a model student, then certainly a very serious one. And I had one tremendous advantage. I had already studied many of the classics during my senior-year course in Western thought in Midland.

One of my favorite classes was a course in children's literature taught by Harryette Ehrhardt. Ironically, my mother had already studied children's literature in Midland when I was in junior high as part of the local college extension program. One night a week, while she headed off to discuss children's classics, I would fix dinner and silently roll my eyes. Now I saw that some of history's greatest writers had penned their best works for children. I was enchanted by the words of E. B. White, Madeleine L'Engle, the Brothers Grimm, and my childhood favorite, Laura Ingalls Wilder, and by the way Dr. Ehrhardt unraveled the layers upon layers of meaning in what others saw as merely whimsical turns of phrase. The class was demanding, and I was one of the few students to make an A. I already knew that I wanted to be a teacher.