Page 63 of And Still Her Voice
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As the nation reeled over the death of Martin Luther King, Jr., River and I sobbed packing up our things as the police, FBI, and news people swarmed all around our hotel. We needed to vacate immediately. The assassination took me back to the assassination of our President, John F. Kennedy, only a few years ago. My whole family had been in shock and I was left terrified about the future. I couldn’t believe something like that could happen again. And now another great man of peace had been murdered. River was inconsolable about Martin Luther King, Jr., his grief compounded by the fact that he’d finally met his father. Sadly, things were left unfinished and unsaid before we moved on. There’d been no closure.
And then in June, the news about the assassination of Senator Robert Kennedy sent the nation reeling.
Love was just the fuel that hate needed to burn the world down to ashes.
CHAPTER 23
Commencing Countdown
July, 1969, we rolled through the city of Brotherly Love. I couldn’t believe we’d been on the road crisscrossing the country for almost two years. Lazarus Rising had a new live album climbing the charts and hopefully it would be as big as the Beatles’ “White Album” which by then was all the rage. Speaking of Beatles, Paul was still my favorite, with those big sad eyes. Grandma was happy I had River as a sort of chaperone. And, as it turned out, every once in a while, River was happy to be regaled by Grandma about her quaint history, i.e., her travels to India, and, get this, I did not know her French lover Guillome was a Black man.
All of the motels we’d checked into looked alike with their sparse lobbies, linoleum floors, potted plastic rubber plants, and stiff-looking furniture left over from the ’50s. But it did feel like I’d stayed here before. After the clerk at the Lazy Daze Motel handed me the key, I moseyed out into twilight where the temperature had dipped to something tolerable. Earlier, so hazy and humid, I thought I’d melt into the bus seat. The bus was parked toward the back of the lot where River, still more comfortable sleeping, stepped off to join me. After the tragedy in Memphis, the world seemed a little scarier, especially for River. Besides, I didn’t want to leave him alone. We headed toward the room.
Inside, over a green matted carpet, were the typical side-by-side beds with Amish rust-colored quilts. I flipped on a switch and smiled when I saw a lighthouse in a seascape—sort of out of place for this part of the country—light up above the headboard. When I get my own house near the ocean, I’m getting one just like that.Surprised, this was the first time I’d thought about settling down or even owning a home the same as normal people. That would never happen with Grandma still in residence.I dumped my suitcase on the floor, too tired to unpack.
We were like an old married couple on TV who didn’t sleep together—Lucy and Ricky without the matching pajamas who slept in twin beds. “Which side do you want?” I asked River.
“Do you mind if I take the one near the TV?Ice Station Zebrawith Rock Hudson is playing tonight.”
Closest to the bathroom on the dresser up against a dark wood-paneled wall was a Motorola television set. “Be my guest,” I said, kicking off my shoes and plopping onto the bed nearest the window.
“You know he’s a homosexual?” River said.
“Don’t you wish?”
He turned up the volume. The local news reported some trouble in the next town over. Race riots between white and Black gangs had raged now for a couple of days. There’d been tension all around the country for some time. Apparently, it all started when someone shot a Black boy in York and then a police officer was killed. As the heat rose in the city, more firebombs hit businesses, more rocks hit windows, and the toll of injured climbed in the emergency room. Liquor stores and taverns were closed. A state of emergency was declared with state police coming in to try and stop the violence. Curfews were being set in place. Anyone twenty-one or younger had to stay inside between nine p.m. and six a.m.
“I’m glad you’re not sleeping out on the bus.”
“Yeah, I’m much safer inside this hotel room with a white female.”
The race riots had become all too common, and yet I feared it would only get worse. I didn’t want to close my eyes to the problem, but I was having a hard time staying awake. I lay back on the pillow, hard as the sad truth about brotherly love, but not too hard to dream.
The next morning, I could see through my eyelids just how bright everything appeared to be on my outsides. River sang to me, “Sun is up, Dear Prudence—” How could he always be so cheerful? Since I was a little girl, even after a good night’s sleep, I tended to wake up on the wrong side of the bed. My whole life, I’d ended up on the outside side of things—not just on the fringe, but far out in outer space. And then I heard the scraping of the curtain rods as he pulled back the drapes. “Wakey, wakey. Eggs and bakey.”
As soon as I smelled the sweet aroma of coffee, I opened my eyes to a room swimming in a soft shade of morning light. He’d set down a couple cups at the small table near the window. I pulled back the covers, got up and took a seat. “Thank you, River.” I sipped my coffee as he adjusted the TV, and then I turned to gaze out the window.
The desolate, sparkling swimming pool looked inviting and yet so sad, and then I had a déjà vu moment. “The pool just reminds me of the plunge on Verdugo where we’d go swimming every summer,” I said, blowing into the cup of coffee, already cool by now.
“Sounds like someone’s missing her family,” he said, turning on the radio.
“Maybe, but I don’t miss all the chlorine and my eyes getting so red. Anyway, I figured the lifeguards could watch my sisters so they wouldn’t drown while I played Marco Polo with kids more my age.” I turned toward River.
“So, you were anormalkid, after all. I knew it.”
In the background, I heard the lyrics to “Space Oddity”.
“The pool was the one place I actually made friends every summer. It was a place where I didn’t feel like an alien or a space cadet.”
“Speaking of which, suit up,” River said. “We’ll take a dip and then come back to watch the moon landing.”
“Oh, is that today already?”
“Why do you think that Bowie song is playing?”
We listened to the rest of the song before stepping out for a swim.
