A few years before I arrived at the University of Missouri, the gay organization that I attended later, at the Ecumenical Center, had sued the university for the right to meet within the official borders of the campus. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court, which ultimately ruled in favor of the gays. On the night that the group made its first entrance into the Student Union, I was standing on the sidelines, not ready to march through the streets in front of my friends or have Jack Fleming pelt me with a beer can. I could not quite take in what I was seeing: Dozens of frat boys were throwing rocks, rotten food, and water balloons at the marchers. I watched in disbelief. Where were the police? A woman with a guitar led the gay procession, which was far outnumbered by the crowd who had gathered to disrespect and disparage them. The marchers were not the type I had glimpsed in photographs from Greenwich Village or the Castro. They were, with a few exceptions, neither beautiful, nor well dressed, nor those who might have easily blended into the world of their persecutors. It seemed that at this time, in this place, it was only the loneliest, the most alienated who craved acceptance or affirmation desperately enough to risk a public stoning.
Mary Maune, head of the Association of Women Students, had a tape recorder. A journalism student, she was covering the event for radio station KBIA. She looked astonished when she—a student leader, a well-groomed, achievement-oriented sorority member—was hit and bloodied with something sharp by a beefy frat boy in chinos from Mr. Guy.
The man in the wheelchair from the meeting, moving the most slowly, was an especially vulnerable target. The jaunty black beret atop his disbelieving, shattered face did not fare well. I noticed egg yolks dripping from his wheels. The boys on the sidelines were screaming something like, “Faggots die. Faggots die. Off this campus. Off this campus.”
I was shaking, but I had to help him. Together with one of the other onlookers, we carried the man in the wheelchair up the stairs and into the union. I was afraid I would drop my wheel. He recognized me, put his hand on my arm, but I ran.
. . .
Although my mother has been consistent when it comes to discussing, or actually not discussing, my life, other people have surprised me sometimes. As it happened, Evelyn Fleming was my friend as long as she lived. After my father died, when I was back in the city, she called me up to find out how I was doing. Everyone else asked after my mother. She asked about me, took the trouble to find my far-off number. There is kindness, people who never fail you. There are others who do.
A few years back, Betty and I stopped by the Flemings’ house when they were packing up to go to a senior community near Kansas City. Jack, who had married a born-again Christian from Oklahoma, would not as much as look in my direction. I tried not to feel I had been slapped in the face.
I don’t get many unfriendly or judgmental vibes here in Paris, though a woman from church never, ever responds when I say hello. Every time someone doesn’t speak or looks at me with an expression I cannot fathom, I think it is because of who I am. It has been this way forever; this kind of reaction feels to be bred in the bone, especially in territory where I feel isolated.
. . .
All through this afternoon, Betty coughs and coughs. When she dozes on the couch in the living room, glimpses of other women, her grandmother Anna, whose face I have seen in old photos; Bess; Nona; and perhaps others I never knew, drift across her face. The women she is from are there, in her chin, cheekbones, and slender nose. Mammy, though, is the one I see the most. Mammy is in her eyes. When my mother plays “His Eye Is on the Sparrow,” on the piano, she always reminds me that this was my grandmother’s favorite. “She couldn’t sing, but she liked it enough to listen when she heard it.” I see Mammy in her hat with one side dented in, that same old hat, sitting in a hot summer church, cooling herself with a paper fan with the image of Jesus rising on one side and the name Thompson-Mackler, the local funeral parlor, on the back. Clearing her throat—my mother’s family has waged a decades-long battle with phlegm—she looks about to doze.
. . .
Mammy’s family were farm people. Sometimes it is simple to imagine them, those who lived here once, all the good people, crossing the river, coming in from the country for church on Sunday mornings with clean, coerced hair and their best clothes. Think of wrinkled faces, mischievous eyes, hands in immaculate white gloves, wistfulness, innocence, worry over money, or crops, or sickness.
Think of the men, itchy to get back to work; mayors and merchants in their hard-pressed white shirts, tight collars, and stiff coats; lacy girls in ribbons; stoic boys, uncomfortable in their finery, confined in rarely worn shiny shoes; big-boned farm women with ample bosoms in dime-store brooches; old, milky-eyed codgers, freshly shaved with a few hairs still peeking out of their ears and noses; mothers with careful glances, pulling their kids away from puddles, holding their hands, smoothing their hair, and wiping their cheeks.
I picture them all moving across the land, the days, through time, crossing Main Street, clutching their crosses and Bibles, trying to stay pretty, trying to look pious, walking together, traveling in their snorting, hard-to-start cars, or heading toward town in their buggies or on horseback to bow their heads and pray together to Jesus, who, in the stories I read, stood for love, charity, and kindness offered every day to others, even those unlike ourselves. Kindness may be the most difficult of virtues, but when I have encountered it, it has meant everything to me.
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