Spoken from the Heart (14 page)

Having a chosen profession was a rather new concept for women in the South. Women had always worked, doing the backbreaking labor of running a home, cooking, cleaning, hefting piles of sopping wet laundry onto the line to dry. And many women did work in jobs before they married or if they were widowed young. A few in Midland, like Mary White, worked for most of their married lives, although the oilmen whose offices they ran rarely promoted them beyond the typewriter and steno pool. Most girls, though, were schooled to dream of being wives and mothers. Their curious minds were largely self-taught--my brick-laying grandmother with her intricate garden or my mother with a book open in her dishwater-dry hands. When Betty Friedan published
The Feminine Mystique,
in 1963, their lives, my life, and those of my friends were not upended. What I see now in retrospect is that so many of my friends broke barriers not by intention but simply by doing.

With the exception of my uncle Mark, who had gone to medical school, I was the first person in my family to earn a university degree. And even Mark had not technically finished college. When he was accepted to medical school in Arkansas, he just left Texas Tech rather than spend another semester's tuition during the Depression. Mine was not an immigrant story, aside from Eva Louise LaMaire, but simply the story of families who had moved beyond the bare-bones life of small Arkansas and before that Mississippi and Kentucky farms, where families made do with a cow, a garden, and a clutch of chickens.

But in the mid-1960s, the present quickly became all-consuming.

At SMU, we stayed up late at night smoking cigarettes and engaging in discussions about the larger meaning of life, great debates without any final resolution. They were our own private versions of the heated debates being waged around us, debates that we watched, but sometimes with a bit of remove. When I entered SMU, the Vietnam War was not yet raging. America's ground war in the jungles did not begin until the spring of 1965. Even as the conflict escalated, SMU was not an early hotbed of antiwar protests, although the school did briefly have a chapter of Students for a Democratic Society. And boys I knew in Midland or at SMU were among those who enlisted or were drafted. One of our friends, Buddy Hensley, spent hours shirtless in the steamy Southeast Asian heat, filling giant barrels with the chemical defoliant Agent Orange; another, Mike Proctor, was a helicopter pilot. Both survived the war and remain our close friends. The only casualty I knew from Midland was Bob Zonne, the big brother of one of my high school classmates, Bill Zonne. Among our friends who fought, he was the one who did not make it home. His name is inscribed on the Wall in Washington, D.C.

What we felt much more keenly in the mid-sixties was the civil rights movement. In 1961, when I was just a high school sophomore, SMU students had already picketed local barbershops and movie theaters that practiced segregation, and even though SMU had few African-American students, the student body as a whole had voted strongly in support of a completely integrated campus, where all admissions would be color-blind. I was proud that SMU had the first African-American football player in the Southwest Conference, Jerry LeVias. In two years, he went from being pummeled on the field by other players long after the whistle had blown to winning the Fort Worth Kiwanis Club Award for Sportsmanship and becoming an all-American player in his senior year. When LeVias came to SMU, fellow coaches had told Coach Hayden Fry that they "would never allow" a black player on their team.

The civil rights cause gave us the words to talk about the racial divide that still stubbornly clung to our cities and towns, even our own homes. At last, I had a language to understand what I had intuitively known, that naming Lee High School in 1960 for a man who a century before, in 1861, chose his state of Virginia and his slaveholder ties over abolition while Midland's black students were still assigned to George Washington Carver High School was wrong. Suddenly everything was open for question: why my father's black friends were the men who worked the stove and the grill at Johnny's Bar-B-Q or why the only black women the rest of us knew were the ones who cleaned homes.

I was not a placard-waving protester. But the scenes from the Alabama marches or the riots that left Detroit and Newark in flames cemented my desire to do what I could, and that was to teach in an inner-city, minority school. I wanted to work with children who had been left out and, too often, left behind, simply because of the color of their skin. When I taught, I always asked to be placed in what were called "minority schools."

In 1964, when I arrived on the SMU campus, panicked students would ask the student health center, located only a few doors down from my dorm, for amphetamines to stay awake late to study for exams. One of my girlfriends even experimented with a California turnaround, what truckers used to stay awake on the road. She didn't sleep for three days. It was perhaps a frail line separating that kind of officially sanctioned self-medicating from the other, illegal drugs that would start to creep onto college campuses. By 1968, marijuana had arrived at SMU, although none of my Midland friends ever smoked pot. And the few girls at school who did try it would never admit it, in the same way that they would never reveal private details about their boyfriends. These were considered deep secrets, which girls kept to themselves alone.

Even if there was no "Summer of Love" at SMU, we did know that there was another world being unleashed beyond our white columns and redbrick walls. A few students played tracks from the Beatles'
Sgt. Pepper
or "Light My Fire" by Jim Morrison and the Doors, although at parties we danced to the sounds of what is now Motown but was then called "soul music," the Supremes, the Isley Brothers, and Cookie and the Cupcakes. Once, during my senior year, I was curious to see what real hippies looked like. My roommate, Jane, and I dressed in jeans and bare feet and hung beads from our necks. Then we headed off to Lee Park, one of the largest parks in Dallas and named for Robert E. Lee, to look for the fabled hippies. But there were none--instead, everyone else in the park turned to stare at us, imagining that we were the hippies who had come to commune with nature in the middle of the city.

One thing we did in our cute skirts and bubble hair, which we teased and sprayed and rolled on big, bristly rollers clamped tight with pins, was drink, even though we were underage. All the fraternity parties served alcohol, especially in lethal blends of spiked punch, and we drank, way too much, and smoked, even in class. By the early 1970s, our drinking would seem almost passe. By then, the drug culture had overwhelmed college life. Graduating in the South in 1968 put us just slightly ahead of the wave. But in time, alcohol would prove to be equally devastating for far too many of my friends.

At SMU, the wild boys were not the drunken fraternity brothers who would go on to become bankers and businessmen; they were the boys who drove motorcycles and who rebelled against anything that smacked of authority. Yet even they were not as freed from convention as it seemed. Chuck, the long-haired boy with the devil-may-care smile, who rode a motorcycle and dated Bobbie Jo, volunteered to go to Vietnam. Another of his biker friends once stole a suit, which he wore to his seminary interview for the Episcopal priesthood. He got in. But there was a James Dean-style restlessness that gripped our college years, a desire to throw off one by one the conventions of our parents and our grandparents. The gross injustices underpinning the need for the civil rights movement, the pat explanations that "certain groups had to earn their rights," in order to justify the sins of segregation, and subtle racism made many of the previous generations' values seem suspect and shallow. A few of the more vocal among us rejected everything.

Indeed, most of the class of 1968 had grown up during a period of unprecedented abundance. We had never known a great depression or a global war that ran hot rather than cold. Our parents' sacrifices had shielded us from these things. But now our own generational discontent had produced a highly combustible equation. I remember sitting in our sorority house on the last day of March 1968, when Lyndon Johnson announced that he would not run for reelection. We watched largely in silence; there was no collective gasp of regret.

At my commencement, just over a month after Martin Luther King was assassinated and a few weeks before another bullet felled Bobby Kennedy, SMU's president, Willis Tate, implored students not to abandon rational thought and judgment, saying, "We live in a day when contagious hysteria and social pressures can completely anesthetize a person's ability to reason," and adding, "In times of rapid change, the old may be destroyed along with the decayed. There are some time-tested, eternal values."

Not everyone participated in the upheaval of the late 1960s. Many of the girls I knew, including most of my Midland friends, were getting on with the next phase of their lives. They had become engaged or had already returned home to their childhood churches for their weddings. I fully expected to be married by the end of my senior year. I thought about it whenever I caught sight of a beaming bride preparing to walk down the aisle under the serene cream spire of Perkins Chapel at the center of the SMU campus. I even dated a young medical student at the start of my senior year and assumed for a while that I would settle down with him. But I graduated with no ring on my left hand and no immediate prospects for one.

For my graduation gift, I wanted to see Europe. Midland was still firmly in the grip of an oil bust, so my parents looked for something affordable. The answer came in the form of my uncle Mark, who was taking his family on a fourteen-day trip, stopping in ten different countries. He invited me to come along. My cousin Mary Mark and I saw a huge swath of the continent at a rapid clip. What captivated me was the age of all the places, stones that had been quarried, cut, and laid over a millennium ago, sculpture carved by hands that could not imagine a wild grassland where Indians had pitched animal skin tents and stalked buffalo. I would look up and see stained glass that had already survived multiple wars before Midland even had a name or an old railroad boxcar to hold its mail.

My first job, if you could call it that, was making coffee for my parents in the pot at home--I got a nickel if I made coffee for Mother and Daddy every morning. I also set the table and made my bed, and I kept a little chart of all the chores that I had done, a kind of grade-school time clock, I suppose. My other bits of gainful employment were teaching swimming at the Midland public pool and working as a counselor at summer camps. One summer, Jane Gray and I opened our own three-hour morning camp, advertising it on mimeographed flyers and holding it in her mother's Jack and Jill school. Now I was about to set foot in a fourth-grade classroom, with nothing more to prepare me than a few months of practice teaching at one of Dallas's most elite elementary schools. Bradfield Elementary, where aspiring SMU teaching students went to practice, wasn't even in the Dallas Independent School District; it was in the separate city of Highland Park. My second-grade practice classroom did contain one surprise: the football legend Doak Walker's seven-year-old son. He was a shy boy; his parents had been divorced for several years. His quiet presence was a reminder that not even childhood idols remained unchanged; Doak Walker was no longer a young man charging toward the end zone, and I was no longer dreaming of college from the shelter of the seventh grade.

I had decided to remain in Dallas, at least for the moment. Susan, Janet, Bobbie Jo, and I rented a little postwar-style garden apartment amid a cluster of two-story brick buildings with white trim and stairs. Our building sat at the end of the block, only a few hundred yards from the train tracks. Susan used to dash across the rails to go visit her boyfriend, Mike, who lived on the other side. All I needed was a job, preferably a job that didn't involve a long drive. Ever since the accident, I preferred to cede the driving to friends like Regan, who loved being behind the wheel. I did not want a long commute, and I turned down jobs at two Dallas schools because they were too far away. Finally, the personnel director for the school system called back and said, "Well, Miss Welch, how about the school on your street?" And I said, "Oh, good, that will be perfect." So every morning, I walked to Longfellow Elementary, two blocks from my apartment.

Longfellow had been built amid large, gracious two-story homes that sat back from the roads on acres of manicured green lawns, but very few of the local residents sent their children there. Many were older people whose children had long since grown. But the well-to-do also largely avoided the Dallas Independent School District. Those who didn't settle in places like Highland Park sent their children to private academies instead. The students at Longfellow, a solid two-story, tan brick school, were bused in from other neighborhoods, close to downtown. Most came from a predominantly African-American neighborhood near the new Parkland Hospital, which had replaced the old redbrick building where John F. Kennedy was rushed after he was shot.