Message from Nam Read Free

beautiful, and the pride of his sunset years. She was everything he had ever dreamed of, warm and loving and giving and caring. She was everything he himself was, although he didn’t know it.
    And then, he was gone, and Paxton was alone with them, except for Queenie. She studied hard, and she read all the time. She wrote letters to her father, as though he were away on a trip, and she could mail the letters to him, except that she couldn’t. Sometimes she put the letters away, and sometimes she just tore them up. But it helped her to write them. It was a way of still “talking” to him, since she couldn’t talk to “them.” Her mother seemed to jump at everything she said, she disagreed with everything Paxton said, and sometimes Paxxie almost felt as though she’d come from another planet. They were so different in every way. And George was just like her. He would urge Paxton to “behave” and try to see things her mother’s way, to be “reasonable,” and remember who she was, which only confused her further. Who was she? Her father’s daughter, or theirs? Who was right? But in her heart of hearts, there was no confusion. She knew that his broader love of the world was the only way for her, and by the time George finished his residency at Grady Memorial, and she turned sixteen, she knew without a moment’s doubt that she wanted to get out of the South and go to Radcliffe. Her mother wanted her to go to Agnes Scott or Mary Baldwin, or Sweet Briar where she had gone herself, or even Bryn Mawr, but she thought it a ridiculous idea for Paxton to go to Radcliffe.
    “You don’t need to go to a northern school. We have everything you need right here. Look at your brother. He had every opportunity to go anywhere in the country, and he stayed right here in Georgia.” The very idea of it made Paxton feel claustrophobic. She wanted to get away from their narrow ideas, from her mother’s friends, from the things she heard about the “horrors of integration.” Civil rights were something she discussed with her friends, or with Queenie, sotto voce in the kitchen. But even Queenie clung to the old views and thought that black folks should stay where black folks belonged, and that ain’t the same place as white folks. The thought of mixing the two frightened her, and it was only her children and her grandchildren who wanted the same changes as Paxton. But Paxton thought the things she had grown up with were wrong, and she wasn’t afraid to say so, or write papers about it for school. She knew her father would have agreed with her too, he always had, and that added fuel to her fervor. It was a subject she had learned not to discuss with her mother and brother. But that fall, she had applied to half a dozen northern schools, and two in California. She had applied to Vassar, Wellesley, Radcliffe, Smith, and in the West, Stanford, and UC Berkeley. She didn’t really want to go to a girls’ school, and Radcliffe was the only one she really wanted. She had applied to the two western schools because her adviser thought she should, and she had finally applied halfheartedly to Sweet Briar, to appease her mother. And her mother’s friends kept telling her how happy she was going to be there, as though her going to Sweet Briar was a foregone conclusion.
    It was something she couldn’t even think of now, as her eyes clung to the clock. It was only two o’clock, half an hour after the President had been shot, ten minutes since they had been watching the television for news of him, as the entire nation prayed, and his family knew what Paxton had learned six years before when her father died … that it was over.
    At 2:01, Walter Cronkite looked into the camera with a defeated look and told the American people that their President was dead, and in the tiny room at Savannah High, there was a murmur of grief that became a wail, and the room was suddenly filled with the sound of sobbing. People were crying everywhere and teachers