H N Hirsch

Excerpt

I remember when my life took shape, when it became inevitable that I would study politics: three moments over five months in the spring and summer of my seventeenth year.

Much later I will think: what if I hadn’t turned sixteen in April, 1968? What if I had been a bit younger, or a bit older? Would I be a lawyer now? A psychologist? A professor of English? A drunk? Would I have taken shelter from the storm and made as much money as possible, stayed in the suburbs, as my older brother did? Or would it not have made any difference? What if I had turned twelve in 1968, or twenty?

Ah, but I did not. I turned sixteen the year everything in America changed forever.

April 5, just before my birthday. I turn on the radio while eating my morning cereal, as usual, and I hear that Martin Luther King Jr. has been assassinated. I stop eating and switch on the television. I tell my mother what has happened, yell to her through the bathroom door as she’s getting ready for work. She comes out of the bathroom looking stricken.

I catch the school bus feeling like I’m in some sort of altered state, which I do not like or understand . . . do not like at all. My first thought: why am I so upset, this has nothing to do with me. But I sense that’s not right, that something has happened, not just in the world but to me, and I feel an uncomfortable lurch beyond what I know. I am only dimly aware of Dr. King, but am aware of civil rights, of the tensions between white and black, so obvious in my home city of Chicago, even though our suburb is all white. Eeny meany miney mo, catch a tiger by the toe. . . . I was thirty, a professor, before I learned that there were those in America who said “catch a nigger by the toe,” not “tiger.” In 1968 I didn’t know anyone who didn’t say “tiger,” and I had only heard the word “nigger” in one old movie.

I arrive at school. First period, math, a relief, geometry, lines and planes.

Second period, honors social studies. The teacher, Mrs. Smith, is the first African American teacher in my suburban high school, a school with no African American students in 1968 . . . no students of color at all. Mrs. Smith comes in, sits down. She is wearing a yellow and orange suit, high heels; she is perfectly made up, as always, a tall, striking woman. I was excited in September when I walked into her classroom and saw that I would be in a class with the first African American teacher in the school, and I liked her, liked her a lot. She had a wry sense of humor and she seemed to like me back.

This April day Mrs. Smith sits down but she does not speak. She tries to speak but she cannot. There is perfect silence in the class; even the usual class clown is silent. We all notice the silence, and we look around at each other, uneasy. We have never heard such silence in a classroom, not even during a test. It is as if no one is breathing or moving. I look over at my friend Ira, our eyes meet briefly, then we look again at Mrs. Smith. Some look down at their desks.

Mrs. Smith does not speak. She puts her hands on her desk. Time passes but Mrs. Smith does not speak.

Someone is supposed to be giving a report, so, after a while, he just starts speaking. Everyone turns to him, listens, then we begin discussing, as we would if Mrs. Smith were leading the class. We ask each other questions. I say something, then call on someone who seems to want to respond. Mrs. Smith sits, watches, listens perhaps. She looks as if she could cry at any moment. She sits with her hands on the desk.

We discuss the Tudors. We keep the discussion going for the full forty-five minutes. By the end of the class period the grief on her face is now combined with something else, a bit of gratitude, perhaps, that we let her just sit there and be.

The bell rings, we leave, quietly, reverently. In the hall someone says that Mrs. Smith doesn’t have a class first period, so this was her first class of the day.

I assume I went through the rest of the school day as usual, although I cannot remember anything after second period. The look on Mrs. Smith’s face, her inability to speak, sear into my brain. Nothing like this has ever happened to me, to us. There was the JFK assassination but we were eleven, too young to really grasp the magnitude of what had happened or what it could mean.

The next day Mrs. Smith is her usual self. In a group of sixteen-year-olds who gossip about everything and everyone, every teacher’s foibles dissected constantly, no one ever mentions the class in which Mrs. Smith did not speak.

Two months later, the same second period social studies class. Early June, lovely weather in Chicago, lilacs blooming, a Wednesday morning. The night before Robert Kennedy was shot after winning the California primary.

My friend Ira has been an RFK enthusiast. I support McCarthy, along with our mutual friend Sharon, if “support” is an accurate description of what high school students do in suburban Chicago in a presidential campaign in 1968. Sharon and I went to a few meetings in downtown Chicago, where we were the only students not in college and felt completely out of place. We then do a bit of door-to-door canvassing in nearby suburbs. Ira does the same for RFK, and one day at a training session he meets young Ted, he tells us excitedly. Sharon and I support McCarthy because he seems more firmly opposed to the war, or he opposed it sooner than RFK. We did not understand the war in Vietnam, but we knew something was wrong. Even Walter Cronkite knew something was wrong. He told America so at the end of February.

Second period, social studies again, a few weeks before the end of the school year. The look on Ira’s face perfectly matches the look on Mrs. Smith’s face two months prior, and the similarity does something to my stomach. I try to comfort him before class starts, he is near tears, but I cannot think of what to say. What is the appropriate remark to a friend after a political assassination? They haven’t taught us that yet in honors social studies.

Later that evening I call my friend, ask if he is ok, and he will mumble something, get off the phone quickly. I feel awful, dreadful, when I get off the phone, and I do not know what to do. I go out into the back yard and try to brush off the day, but the perfect spring weather feels jarring, out of place.

I do not understand what is happening in America, the neat and orderly and good America in which I grew up, the fifties America, when we moved to the suburbs and parents in our neighborhood let their children walk to school without worrying about their safety. The clean America, where everything worked out for the best and everyone went to college and got married and the girls did not get pregnant in high school, at least not in our school.

A few months later, after the Democratic convention in my hometown of Chicago, after the demonstrators are attacked by the police, after blood flows in the streets and parks I know so well, after my large and extended family divides into pro-Mayor Daley and anti-Mayor Daley factions—the same Mayor Daley for whom my Aunt Sylvia once worked—after that third earthquake, in just a few short months, I will begin to see. I will begin to see dimly.

I will begin to see or feel or sense that there is an official story, the story with which I grew up, was taught in school, the story I read every day in the Chicago Daily News, and then there is something else entirely: the real story.

I will begin to want the real story.

When they talk about it at all, our teachers and parents in 1968 and 1969 and 1970 will not tell us the real story, they do not know what it is. They grope. They struggle to shove what is happening into the familiar frame of that which is true and good, but their explanations fall flat, and we will see, some of us will see, or feel, or sense, that the frame cannot contain the picture, that this movie does not have a happy ending.

So at the age of sixteen, when the frame no longer fits, when the movie spins out of control, my life will acquire some shape, although I could not have told this to you if we had sat down and talked about it at the time. I could only have told you that some famous people who gave good speeches seemed to be getting shot for no apparent reason, that soldiers were dying in a far off place, and that no one could explain why they had to die, even when I started to ask.

It made people angry when I started to ask. It made them angry when I suggested an editorial in the high school newspaper about the war and the draft.

I could have told you if we had talked when I was sixteen that a political party to which my family had pledged undying loyalty was being pulled apart at the seams. I could have told you about the look on the face of a teacher I admired and a friend I loved in the spring of 1968, I could have told you about the day we taught our own class in second period social studies.

I could have told you about a college jock who lived nearby, who organized touch football games in the street when he was home—just like the Kennedys, he said, laughing—I could have told you how he came home bleeding and coughing one muggy summer night a few months after the two assassinations. Tear gas, he said, in Grant Park. My stomach lurched again. Grant Park.

Grant Park was the same park my grandmother would take me to after she visited our doctor on Jackson Street, the same park where my grade school class had eaten box lunches after visiting the Art Institute on a field trip.

Later, much later, in November 2008, I will think of the tear gas on the night Barack Obama won the presidency and spoke in Grant Park in front of a huge adoring crowd, the night I received an email with his name on it between the moment he was declared the winner and the moment he spoke in Grant Park, an email thanking me for my support, because I had given him money over and over again, like so many others who were 16 or 17 or 18 in 1968. “I have to get to Grant Park,” the email said.

And I will think that in 1968 Obama was only seven years old. And on that night he won the election with 53 percent of the vote, when I cried because I was happy and proud, because I received an email message that some smart political operative decided to send out to still-gullible people like me, I wondered if he would have become president if he had been sixteen instead of seven in 1968. Would he have been able to stand it, I wondered, Dr. King’s assassination and the riots that followed, the travesty of so many black soldiers in Viet Nam coming home in a box or returning to broken limbs or nerves shattered by Agent Orange? Would he still have gone to the Harvard Law School, married someone like Michelle, traversed the line between the establishment and disgust, the disgust he heard at Revered Wright’s church on the South side, a church very close to a dry goods store once owned by my great-grandparents, would he have been able to walk that line with so much finesse and grace if he had been sixteen instead of seven in 1968? Might he, like someone else from my neighborhood, have dropped out of college and then fled to Canada to avoid the draft, and become a carpenter after his stint in rehab?

I thought about all that on the night Obama spoke in Grant Park, I thought about Ira and Bob, I thought about being sixteen in 1968. I didn’t go to my friends Eve and Sandy’s election night party, I wanted to be alone because I knew I would cry. I knew I would want to remember the moment, the moment before the inevitable mistakes and disappointments, compromises and disasters of a presidency. I knew I would again be the sixteen-year-old boy who had honors social studies, second period, with Mrs. Smith.