The Summer We Came to Life

Chapter

28





(Transcript of conversation)

LYNETTE: We met when we were fifteen.

CORNELL: Dates, sweetie. Must’ve been 1962 about?

LYNETTE: Hmm, 1962–63. We were sophomores.

CORNELL: I integrated into her high school that year. That’s how we met.

SAMANTHA: But Brown versus Board of Education was in, like, the fifties, wasn’t it?

CORNELL: That’s right. But Virginia wasn’t in any hurry, I can tell you that. They were still betting their Massive Resistance Campaign would pan out and that the whole civil rights thing would blow over. They tried a hundred different ways to resist integration. Further south, one Virginian county closed all the public schools for four years rather than have black kids go to class with white kids. They paid for the white kids to go to private schools.

SAMANTHA: That is so—…strange. I never thought about the fact that you guys were around for segregated schools, and in the same town where I went to school.

ISABEL: But if African-American children were technically allowed to go to desegregated schools, why didn’t more go?

CORNELL: Well, one way the Virginia school system skirted the issue was to set it up as a choice, not a mandate, guessing correctly that the races would segregate themselves. Black folk weren’t in such a hurry to put their kids in schools where they weren’t wanted, even if the black schools were pitiful shacks in comparison.

SAMANTHA: So, why were you the one to do it? To integrate?

CORNELL: My family wasn’t your average black folk. My father was high up in the Virginia NAACP. My mother ran Sunday school and taught adults to read out of our house. They were everyday heroes. My father planned the integration for my sophomore year and prepared me for the worst. Or so he thought.

ISABEL: Why? It was worse?

CORNELL: It’s almost indescribable how bad it was. I’m ashamed to say, I begged to quit. The KKK shot up our house in the middle of the night. People cursed me with names I’d never even heard before, way more descriptive than the N-word. They tripped me in the hallway, left excrement and nooses in my locker. I never went on a single date with any girl in that school. I was never once invited to any white student’s house for dinner.

SAMANTHA: That’s awful. But then what about Lynette?

LYNETTE: Well, I was certainly aware of him. Segregation was a big deal to all the parents, like Cornell said. My parents didn’t tell me they disapproved in so many words. They were big churchgoers and preached the golden rule five times a day. (Pause.) There’s something you have to understand. It’s an embarrassing reality, but those times were totally different for white kids and black kids. Everything was so segregated I wasn’t aware of the really bad stuff. My friends and family didn’t have any black friends, but we didn’t do any of those horrible things. I spent all my time thinking about cheerleading and math class and dress patterns. It’s not an excuse, but—

SAMANTHA: But now I can see how the Holocaust happened right under people’s noses.

ISABEL: Sammy!

LYNETTE: Actually, that’s just what I was getting at. For you guys, it’ll be gay rights, global warming, and Sudan, when your kids ask—how could you not have known?

CORNELL: Sudan? Come on, now. I think I’d better point out it wasn’t all bad all the time for us black kids. I had plenty of good times growing up. I was a quiet kid that didn’t like to rock the boat. A disappointment to my father. Before high school, I didn’t much care about Colored Days at the park because I didn’t want to be around white folks anyway. It’s like this—at church, at home, with my friends—I wasn’t black. I wasn’t an oddity or intrinsically offensive. I was just my mama’s son. My best buddy’s pal. It was only around white people I stuck out like a fluorescent yellow beetle. (Pause.) That’s why I was drawn to Lynette. She was just nice to me, in a real way. Not mean and not uncomfortable nice. Just nice.

SAMANTHA: What was Lynette like in high school?

CORNELL: Gorgeous. Sassy. She was the most popular girl in school. Could do no wrong in that town’s eyes.

ISABEL: I can see that.

CORNELL: She was a cheerleader. Homecoming Queen. Lead actress in all the plays. Top grades. Those were pretty big deals in small-town Virginia. Did I mention she was gorgeous?

LYNETTE: Now stop it. I was preppy, naive, and spoiled. My parents treated me like a baby doll. Thank God I met this man.

SAMANTHA: What do you mean?

LYNETTE: The day I met him was the day I woke up and realized there was a whole world I hadn’t even looked for.

ARSHAN: Bravo.

JESSE: So, you are listening.

ARSHAN: Of course. Fascinating to someone that still wasn’t an American citizen at that time. So, who fell in love with whom first?

LYNETTE: Well, it wasn’t that simple. Not back then.

ISABEL: Meaning Cornell liked you first! Who didn’t have a crush on Miss Homecoming Queen?

CORNELL: Touché. However, what I think my wife means is that it was still Virginia in 1963. Sit-ins had made some progress in lunch counters and buses, and technically, blacks and whites could be friends, even publicly. Technically. But dating was not in the realm of possibility. Not that I didn’t get a certain tingling down in—

LYNETTE: Cornell!

CORNELL: (Laughter.) In my belly, Lynette. Butterflies in my belly, my love. Anyway, I’m serious. Interracial dating just wasn’t done. Not even thought about. Okay, maybe we thought about it, but Lynette and I, we saw each other at school and that was it. There was the March on Washington that summer. I heard Dr. King’s speech in front of all those hundreds of thousands of Afro-Americans. It changed my life. Changed a lot of people’s lives. I went back to school armored with a sense of what I was a part of.

SAMANTHA: Did you go to the march, Lynette?

LYNETTE: Are you kidding? My mother would’ve had my hide. And back then, I hadn’t yet thought about disobeying.

CORNELL: So, the next school year we picked up where we left off. That November, Kennedy was shot. The whole world tilted off-kilter.

SAMANTHA: Like nine-eleven. Point of no return. (Pause.) And you guys still weren’t dating.

CORNELL: No way. We would find time to talk during school. Eventually, we started finding ways to walk together before or after school. But it wasn’t easy and we certainly didn’t voice any feelings beyond I like you.

LYNETTE: (Laughter.) Yeah. I remember. I sure do like you, Cornell. I am in deep like of you. However, I think they’re looking for something a little more titillating, dear. Let’s move on to the last summer.

CORNELL: Okay, okay. Skip over another summer when we hardly saw each other. Freedom Summer 1964. Johnson got Kennedy’s Civil Rights Act passed—outlawing segregation in public places. Not like it changed overnight, but at least with young people, attitudes were changing fast. So, senior year, Lynette and I were special friends and everybody knew it.

LYNETTE: You see, a very pretty classmate of mine started flirting with Cornell. It, uh, alerted me to new possibilities.

JESSE: Ah, yes. Jealousy works on us girls every time. Good thinkin’, Cornell.

CORNELL: (Laughter.) Lynette remembers that girl more than I do. I remember my daydreams being occupied by a certain cheerleader in her cheerleading skirt. Not to mention every boy was hung up on a lot of other awful shit going down, like the Vietnam War. The first big protest was in D.C. that April, just after Malcolm X was killed. My father wasn’t a fan, being such a devotee of Dr. King. But Malcolm’s death was a huge deal. Even if I wasn’t in much of a position to take on all the blue-eyed devils, being one of nineteen black kids in a white school. Plus, there was this one blue-eyed devil—

LYNETTE: That summer was our first kiss. Just once, in my father’s car. Well, I don’t mean just one kiss—just one night. We kissed and kissed and cried that night. He was off to Howard and I was bound for The College of William and Mary. It was the end of something that never had a chance to get started, we figured.

CORNELL: Little did we know.

LYNETTE: I wanted to be an actress, though I’d barely dared mention that fact to anyone but Cornell. William and Mary was a family tradition. I hadn’t even thought of rebelling against it. The rebellious gene was slow to kick in with me.

CORNELL: Though once she caught on—hell, I was glad to help.

LYNETTE: Hardy ha. So, obviously we kept in touch. With some pretty intense love letters.

CORNELL: Now, I’d been involved in the struggle my whole life because of my daddy’s commitment to the movement. But nothing could have prepared me for Howard University. I came in right after a year of massive student protests. All of sudden black boys had a voice! Howard snapped me right out of any lingering “don’t rock the boat” tendencies. Of course, it’s easier to fight aboard a battleship full of compatriots than alone in enemy territory.

LYNETTE: He’s right. It was a whole new time. The baby boomers came of age all at once. Surprised the hell out of the old folks. I convinced my dad to buy me a car and I drove down to D.C. or Cornell took the bus to see me every weekend. I couldn’t have ‘gentlemen callers’ yet, of course. Feminism hadn’t touched down at William and Mary. But now Cornell and I could at least hold hands and dare people to say anything.

CORNELL: What a rush. Our relationship was more about agitating others than about each other.

LYNETTE: Cornell, that’s not very nice. Do you believe that? CORNELL: You don’t? I’m not trying to be mean, honey. I just meant that they were empowering times. Everything was about the cause. The antiwar movement. Civil rights. Flower power.

LYNETTE: I don’t think most people felt that way at William and Mary. Some girls watched the protest coverage on TV, but most were more concerned about the Beach Boys and Wham-O than the cause. I can’t even remember any black classmates at all, come to think of it. It was my trips to Howard that made me aware how dangerous it was to just be seen together.

CORNELL: Summer after freshman year we were inseparable. I had a tiny apartment in the city with some friends. We went to protests and organized marches in Southern cities. We drank and smoked and partied. At first, dating Lynette gave me bragging rights. We were the ultimate symbol of victory.

SAMANTHA: And then?

LYNETTE: And then the summer was over, and everything changed again.

CORNELL: Stokely Carmichael made a speech about Black Power. It changed the rules of the game. Black boys were dying every day in Vietnam. All my friends not in college were freaking out—either trying to dodge the draft or about to ship off. Plenty had already come home in flag-covered boxes. Only white kids got deferments. So, my first year at Howard, we protested mandatory ROTC. We’d had enough of the Uncle Toms in the administration. And we were losing faith that blacks and whites could ever live peacefully side by side. Or that they should. We were talking total revolution.

LYNETTE: So, needless to say, the next year, we wrote lots of letters but we saw less of each other. He didn’t fill me in very much on his developing views.

CORNELL: It was something I had to work out for myself, baby, but you were a huge wrench in my thinking, you can be sure. You remember those letters?

LYNETTE: My God, you’ll make me blush. We were inspired by the Haight Ashbury phenomenon, you could say. Summer of Love was coming up. Everything was happening at the same time. The free-love hippie stuff along with the war and Black Power. The rest of ’66, start of ’67 is a blur. I remember Janis Joplin. Truman Capote’s book. Star Trek. That movie, Faster, p-ssycat! Kill! Kill!

SAMANTHA: It was the same at Howard, Cornell?

CORNELL: It was mayhem. More intense and serious, maybe, but fantastic! I was growing an Afro and reading all about Third World politics and history.

LYNETTE: I was a flower child, with hair down to my waist.

CORNELL: We came home for another summer. June of 1967. Loving versus Virginia.

ISABEL: What was that one again?

LYNETTE: It made interracial marriage legal in Virginia and everywhere. Even still, Cornell and I had to sneak around behind our parents’ backs.

SAMANTHA: You hadn’t told your parents yet?!

JESSE: Lettin’ the cat outta the bag is a whole lot easier than puttin’ it back in, Sammy girl.

CORNELL: Well put, Jess. Next came the riots. And the war was still a bastard thing to have to think about every day you woke up. At home, my dad and I had clearly diverged in our views again. Lynette and I started to grow apart, too.

LYNETTE: By the end of the summer, yes. (Sigh.)

CORNELL: (Pause.) When I went back to school, my classmates had committed whole hog to Black Power. The time had come for liberation and payback. We were young and angry and fed up. But there were some wonderful, positive things, too. Black is Beautiful. The Black Arts movement. It was the first time we’d ever felt so proud of being black, proud of our African history and our looks. It wasn’t something I could exactly share with Lynette.

LYNETTE: We lapsed into totally different, separate lives again. Ironic, after all we’d fought for. I went down in the fall of ’67 for the Stop the Draft Week March on the Pentagon. The difference was plain. His friends were cold to me. I saw Cornell being pulled in two directions and I knew I was losing. The march turned ugly. It was a terrible day for everybody.

CORNELL: It was a tough Christmas, too. My father and I fought like wolves and it broke my mama’s heart to watch. He sided with the older members of the movement who viewed the Black Panthers as thugs and criminals. Way he saw it, they were about to erode everything he’d fought for his whole life. And as for Lynette and me, we just—

LYNETTE: Talked and cried and made out passionately, freezing our butts off in Cornell’s old clunker.

SAMANTHA: It’s sad. Why does love have to be so hard?

LYNETTE: Sometimes you have to choose sides. Sometimes people choose your side for you. Cornell and I were through. I went back to school with a broken heart.

CORNELL: Me, too, you can believe that. But I wasn’t about to admit it to my brothers at Howard. Right away, my buddies and I started planning revolts against the administration. In March, well, you know.

ISABEL: What happened in March?

CORNELL: Damn, you guys don’t know anything. In March, Howard students closed down the school with an armed sit-in and forced the administration to install African and Eastern World History courses. We were damn proud of ourselves until—

JESSE: Martin Luther King.

ISABEL: The assassination.

LYNETTE: Yes. In April. On my dorm television, I watched Cornell’s neighborhood burn. I watched the National Guard go in with guns and tanks. I couldn’t reach him at his place and his family hadn’t heard from him either. He didn’t call me for weeks.

SAMANTHA: Why didn’t you call?

CORNELL: (Pause. Sigh.) You can’t imagine what it was like. Washington burned, Sam. Looters took everything. I got sucked into the horror and the rush of it. Young, angry, proud black men set loose in a vacuum of chaos. We poured all our anger, all our frustration into one big cauldron, and then we kicked it over. We were unchained dragons. It’s scary for any man to learn what he’s capable of. Afterward, you feel like there’s no turning back. In the course of a day, Lynette became a happy dream from my childhood.

(Long pause.)

SAMANTHA: What about your family?

CORNELL: I felt as if had a new family, a family of brothers and sisters and warriors that understood what I was going through—the good, the bad, and the ugly.

SAMANTHA: What about summer break? Did you guys get back together then?

LYNETTE: Nope. I stayed with my parents. Cornell stayed in D.C. I didn’t see him once, and I wouldn’t let anyone mention his name.

ISABEL: Yikes. And then what?

LYNETTE: Well, then it was our senior year. There was a guy at William and Mary who had pursued me for years. I went out on a few dates with him, just to pretend I was over Cornell. All he talked about was moving to California and going to med school. He was a hippie wannabe. You know, tie-dyed T-shirts with a designer label. I didn’t care. All I heard was Hollywood. So I married him.

ISABEL: Whoa. That’s right. I forgot you were married before. Cornell, did you try and stop it?

CORNELL: No, I went to law school.

LYNETTE: God, it seems so long ago.

CORNELL: It was, honey. Ages and ages ago. But talking about it makes it seem like yesterday, doesn’t it?

ISABEL: Hey, you guys wanna stop for a bit? I need a cocktail.

SAMANTHA: You’re drinking too much.

ISABEL: It’s genetic. Rum or vodka, mother?

SAMANTHA: Belly, I’m serious.

ISABEL: Lay off, Sam. I’m on vacation, six months after our best friend died. Four days after I lost my job. And the day after I found out my father was a drug lord. I’m at maximum capacity here for catastrophe.

CORNELL: Okay, you two. Enough. I wouldn’t mind a stiff one, myself. If that’s okay with Samantha. And I don’t believe this is a discussion for posterity, do you? Isabel, how do I turn this thing off?

ISABEL: Oh. Right. Gimme the iPod. I just have to push—