Wonder Women Read Free Page B

by –
    An instant’s width of warmth disclosed
    And wealth, and company.’
    He nodded as if everything now made perfect sense.
    After a moment, Jo found her voice. ‘So – Emily Dickinson, famous, reclusive, morbid poet, and you’re going to set her poems to some little country and western ditty? Doesn’t that trivialise her work completely?’
    â€˜Except that it isn’t a little country and western ditty! It’s a song with a rich history, the story of a mulatto woman who helped win the battle of San Jacinto, the decisive battle in the Texas Revolution!’
    â€˜Okay …’ said Jo hesitantly. But Lee was on a roll.
    â€˜It says something profound about American history, about our expectations of women and people of colour, about our European reading of what looks like a trivialisation of culture.’ He was clearly happy to go on about it pretty much ad infinitum so Jo jumped in to try to understand what exactly he expected from her.
    â€˜So I sing Emily Dickinson poems to “The Yellow Rose of Texas” …?’
    â€˜While I draw interpretations of political cartoons from the time,’ he said, as if that was self-evident.
    â€˜And we do this – where?’
    â€˜In the quadrangle. I’ve got permission from the college. I’ve found two music students – one who plays steel-string guitar and one who can play a snare drum. It’ll be awesome!’ He continued to enthuse about the project and describe how they would incorporate the singing with his real-time drawing. Jo stared at him. He was okay-looking, she supposed, a little skinny and tall, and his huge cloud of hair made her want to laugh. As she’d assured Amelia, not her type, but his crazy, creative grasshopper brain was so exciting, she knew she wanted to get to know him a lot better.
    The Emily Dickinson project was met with mass indifference by the student body and the staff of the university. Jo wore a red-checked gingham dress and sang her heart out, accompanied by the musicians, while Lee, his mad hairbobbing, drew furiously in charcoal on big sheets of paper spread on the ground. People strolling past mostly ignored them, or glanced at the pictures and shrugged. A few of the music students stood listening to Jo sing for a moment, then sniffed as if she smelled bad before walking away. But Lee was completely undeterred.
    Later, in the pub, he enthused about the ‘slow drip-drip of impinging on people’s consciousness’, and how their next project would move things on another tiny step. Jo didn’t understand everything he said, but she guessed what he was getting at was that people were affected and changed by what they had seen, even if they didn’t know it. She didn’t really believe it, but she was willing to go along with it and be involved in whatever came next. Lee was a nice guy. And besides that, she was developing a serious crush on Adrian, the guy who played the guitar. He was shortish, muscular and moody with unruly blond hair, pronounced cheekbones and a long sweep of dark eyelashes that made Jo, a little tipsy after two pints of cider, want to kiss him and feel them flutter against her face.
    It was a Friday night and the cider was cheap and plentiful, so it was no big surprise that Jo found herself in Adrian’s bed that night, and for a lot of nights after that. It wasn’t every night though – Adrian was fanatical about his ‘space’. It took Jo until halfway through her second year to work out that the space he reserved away from her was regularly shared with at least three other women. At around the same time, Lee started going out with a petite dancer called Jean, who spelled her name Jeanne and annoyed Jo with her sulky demeanour and utter refusal to eat or talkto anyone who wasn’t Lee. After Adrian, Jo dated a drummer called Pete (it took her a few goes to get over her musician