A group of hippies passes us. One of the men knocks me with his elbow by accident. He turns, sees me, and nods, his lip twitching with surprise. “Sorry about that, sister.”
“It’s all right.” I resist the urge to roll my eyes too. No one calls Diane “sister,” but I’ve gotten it a dozen times a day since we’ve been here. I think it’s because there are hardly any other Negro girls around.
No, not Negro girls. I’m supposed to say black women. It’s been nearly a year since I left Tennessee, but I’m still getting used to how people talk up north.
I learned most of it from Diane. She’s white, and from Ohio instead of the South, but she showed up on our first day at Barnard College just as green as me. She figured out how to fit in faster, though. Her dorm room was right next to mine on our freshman corridor, and we became best friends the day we moved in. There was something about the warm look in her green eyes that made it impossible not to trust her.
I was so nervous those first few weeks of college. I’d never seen that many white girls in cashmere in all my life. But by our second day there, Diane already knew everyone. She introduced me around, and soon after that she introduced me to the men she’d met at Columbia too.
Later on, as Diane and I spent more time together, there were other introductions. It turned out there were things more startling than a dormitory full of white girls in cashmere.
“Are we really supposed to march all the way to the Amphitheatre, though?” Floyd says as we trudge through the trees. “That’ll take for daggone ever. The convention will be over before we get there.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Diane says. “The pigs will never let us out of the park to begin with.”
“When did you get to be such a negative chick?” Floyd asks her as he loops his arm around my waist. Diane waits until his back is turned, then sticks out her tongue. I glance from side to side to make sure no one saw, even though I can’t help giggling.
Maybe I shouldn’t have linked up with Floyd as quickly as I did. I wouldn’t have done it at all if my father hadn’t decided to visit. He called me on the hall phone three weeks ago and said he hadn’t seen me since Christmas and he wasn’t going to wait any longer. He was driving all the way from Tennessee that very day, in his ancient Dodge with the brake lights taped up and the front bumper sagging. I knew he wouldn’t be happy to see me with a longhaired white man, but that day, all I could think was that he’d never forgive me if he knew I was with a girl. Even with my fancy New York clothes and my natural hair and my white boyfriend, he’d still see me as his baby girl. If he thought I was going against the word of the Lord God Himself, though, that would be another thing altogether.
My father raised me to stay away from the police but to be polite if there was no avoiding them. “Yes, sir.” “As you say, sir.” “Of course, Officer.” Daddy grew up in the height of Jim Crow, shuffling along in the street. In the world he knew, only whites walked on the sidewalk. If my father ever saw me running from a blue-helmeted police officer with his club held out to strike, he’d lock me in my old pink-ruffled bedroom until I was ninety.
I close my eyes and give my head a tiny shake. If Daddy knew where I was right now, he’d drive that old Dodge back up north again, charging straight over the curb and into the park. He’d throw open the passenger door, haul me into the car, and tear out of Chicago with the tires squealing.
The sun is fading fast. We’re near Columbus Drive, so we can see the protesters lined up in the street. There have got to be thousands of them there already, filling the street as far as we can see in both directions, but it doesn’t look like anyone’s actually marching. They’re all standing in rows, chanting.
“PEACE NOW!” most of them shout, holding up their fingers in the V sign. A new refrain is working its way back from the front of the line too: “DUMP THE HUMP! DUMP THE HUMP!”
The convention delegates are supposed to vote tonight on the Democratic nominee for president. Everyone knows it’s going to be Humphrey. President Johnson has already kept us in Vietnam for four years, but Vice President Humphrey will keep us there another ten if he gets his way. And he will, now that the delegates have voted down the peace plank.
The Democrats had a chance to stop the war today, but they decided to be cowards instead. Now they’re going to nominate a president who thinks peace is the same thing as weakness. We might as well just vote Republican.
I graduated high school last year in a class of fifty. Twenty-six girls and twenty-four boys. Since then, we’ve already lost three of those twenty-four boys to the war.
All three enlisted the first chance they got. Even before the war started, most of the boys in our town went straight into the military out of school; getting a scholarship to a faraway college was nothing but a crazy dream for most of us.