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God, President Kennedy, and Me by Tina Martin
Negotiating with God might work. But how? When? God only knows.
I remember what I was doing on November 22, 1963, not only at the time I heard that President Kennedy had been assassi-nated, but also in the days before it happened. Praying. Not just because I was chairman of Religious Emphasis Week at Columbia High School, but because there was a beauty con-test that night and, if it were God’s will, I was willing to win it. So I kept checking in with God, letting Him know that He was on my mind, and I sure hoped I was on His. I didn’t want Him to fix the contest. That wouldn’t be fair. I just wanted Him to help me do justice to whatever God-given beauty I might have so that I could honor the Future Teachers of America Club I was representing and serve as a good example for whoever needed one.
“Dear God,” I whispered, “tonight’s the night. If it be Thy will for me to wear the crown of Miss Columbian, Thy will be done, and”—I added with special emphasis—“I’ll give my first summer paycheck to CARE and the NAACP.”
Living in the South in 1964, I was (1) in the habit of praying in and out of school, and (2) in—and out of—beauty contests. We had them for everything, and at the urging of my prettier and older sister, Dana, who won the Miss Columbian Contest when she was only a sophomore, I’d decided to work on being prettier than me, if not prettier than her, and carrying on the family tradition of winning, even though it couldn’t be in my sophomore year. I was a senior. Last chance.
People sometimes told me that I looked like Natalie Wood, but Dana looked like Elizabeth Taylor. She had the same oval face, perfect nose and teeth, same-shaped eyebrows. Dana’s hair was really medium brown, but she was not about to be medium anything, so she’d started dying it jet black like Elizabeth Taylor in Raintree County in 1957, the year people started no-ticing the similarity. She’d also been dressing pretty much like Elizabeth Taylor in Raintree County. Not that she wore bonnets or anything. But when other girls were wearing match-ing cashmere sweaters and straight skirts, she was wearing full skirts and lots of crinolines more reminiscent of the War Be-tween the States, as Southerners called the Civil War back then.
In our family, we called the War Between the States the Civil War because, as my friend Sara cautioned people when she in-troduced me, “Tina’s not from here.” That’s why I was bribing God with my summer wages, promising to give my first pay-check to CARE and NAACP, which my Southern friends dis-missed as Communist and against State’s Rights. I thought my parents knew better than my peers because they were much older, closer to God’s age.
To help along bribe-induced divine intervention, Dana was going to come back to Columbia from Winthrop College in Greenville to help me win the contest. She knew just how to get my hair to look like Jackie Kennedy’s, and I knew I was lucky that she was doing this for me. But I wasn’t counting on luck or Dana. I was counting on God, which was why I was praying more than usual that day.
“Please, dear God, if it be Thy will.” The minimum wage had gone up to $1.15 an hour, and I would give all my first pay-check to these good causes if God would support my cause and let me win the crown. Of course, other girls prayed. This was the South, after all. But their prayers were shallow. Mine had depth because I had a social conscience. That was one of my advantages in the beauty contest. I had a better idea, I thought, of what God wanted, though it never occurred to me that He would want Negroes in the contest. Of course, there weren’t any Negroes at our school.
“It’s been a decade since Brown vs. Kansas,” my mother would say, “and there’s not a face that isn’t white at that school.”
“Or at any other,” I’d say. I knew that Columbia High School was no more prejudiced than any of the others. Most southerners thought the Supreme Court had been infiltrated by communists, and the government was going to take over and destroy our way of life. People in South Carolina were saying that President Kennedy and his brother had already gone to Mississippi and Alabama totally disregarding State’s Rights, and they’d probably be coming here, but until they did, it was going to be Separate But Equal. Separate water fountains. Sepa-rate parts of the bus. Separate schools and, of course, separate beauty contests for the whites and the coloreds, if they had beauty contests.
I knew even back then that “whites and coloreds” sounded like socks. Black was not yet beautiful. But that night I would try to be. Though I occasionally tried to rise above such petty aspirations, that night, with God’s help, I would achieve them. Once I’d gotten being beautiful out of my system, I assured God and myself, I could spend my time praying for the outcast. I knew beauty was but skin deep, but tonight skin deep got crowned. Skin deep got a dozen long-stemmed roses. And most importantly, skin deep got two full pages in our high school yearbook.
I realize now that I didn’t really have to win that contest to take up more than my share of space in the high school year-book. Since entering high school I had excelled. I’d been a dis-mal failure in junior high school, where I’d gotten a bad reputa-tion for wearing red lipstick the first semester of seventh grade when all the good girls waited till the second semester and started with pink, not red. But Dana had told me that I needed color, so my bad reputation was her fault, and maybe also the fault of Nancy Todd, whose brother I’d let kiss me when I was working on a science project at her house, and she’d told people that I’d kissed back! People thought I was fast and cheap, but I never “went all the way” or even half of the way with Greg. We never even went steady. Greg was a local boy, and I was holding out for a foreigner, like Jean-Paul, the French exchange student at Dreher High. Foreigners were my idols. I regarded them as celebrities.
In fact, I had a fantasy of marrying three foreigners—a Chi-naman, a Frenchman, and a Mexican—and having a baby with each one. Then the children and I would travel around and spend four months in China learning Chinese and the Chinese culture, four months in France learning French and the French culture, and four months in Mexico, et cetera. That had been my fantasy until President Kennedy introduced the idea of the Peace Corps, a cross-culture dream that could come true.
The point, though, is that I had a bad reputation in junior high, so in high school I’d over-compensated. I’d learned that success consisted of being like everybody else, only better, and God willing, prettier. I’d learned how not to be weird, not to look too eager. I’d learned how not to dress. I’d learned when to help others and when to help my-self. I’d read Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and In-fluence People at Myrtle Beach the summer before I began high school, and I’d begun my negotiations with God.
Gradually I’d become socially acceptable—even decent. I was DAR Girl and Chairman of Religious Emphasis Week. I’d accumulated awards and been elected to school offices. Now I was a member of Executive Council and the Editor of the liter-ary yearbook, The Rebel. This was a big turn-about for a girl who’d been nominated for an office only once in junior high school, and that for Homeroom Coupon Chairman. I’d lost.
But now in my senior year of high school, I was president of two clubs, including Future Teachers of America, which was sponsoring me in the beauty contest that night. If I won, it would be a boon to American education. But I have to admit: it wasn’t just for that that I wanted to win. I wanted to win so that I’d have a permanent record of how I was before I started to grow old. Dana always said that from the age of sixteen, we start to die a little bit every year. I wanted a two-page spread of how I was before I started to wither and wilt.
Before I left for school that morning, I caught my mom read-ing when she was supposed to be working on my dress.
“What’s the Feminine Mystic about?” I’d asked her.
“It’s Feminine Mystique,” she’d corrected me. “It’s all about the sacred feminine ideal.”
I’d nodded. I had a sacred feminine ideal: God willing, I’d be the prettiest girl of all—please, dear God, just for one night. If mother ever finished the dress! Mother put down her book and told me to try on what she’d done so far.
My gown was long and straight—something like the one Jackie had worn when she’d gone to France with President Kennedy and he’d introduced himself as “the man who accom-panied Jacqueline Kennedy to Paris.” Jackie had spoken French with DeGaulle. Someday I’d know French, too. I’d join the Peace Corps right after I finished college, and I’d go to some French-speaking country and learn French while I did good deeds.
“Are you sure this is going to be ready by tonight?” I asked her.
“Don’t worry. It’ll be ready,” Mother said through the pins between her front teeth.
“Please God, please,” I prayed silently. “Let it be ready by tonight. Help Mother focus.”
There were few occasions when I didn’t turn to God, and I prayed silently all the way to school. After our classroom prayer during homeroom period, I added my own silent P.S. “If it be Thy will…”
People came by me at my hall monitor post, and a lot of them said, “Good luck tonight.” I looked back at them quizzi-cally, as if the beauty contest were the furthest thing from my mind.
“Why don’t you get your hair fixed like Laura Petrie on The Dick Van Dyke Show?” someone asked. “You al-ready look a little bit like her.”
“But it wouldn’t be right to copy her,” I said, and I shrugged. “I just have to be myself.”
And my self was going to be Jackie Kennedy. Dick Van Dyke was cute, but I wasn’t settling for him. I was going to be the President’s Wife.
I walked by the auditorium where we’d be having the contest in just a few more hours. Tonight we’d hold crescent-shaped cards bearing our numbers, and “Moon River” would play as we walked across the stage—the same stage where Strom Thur-mond had stood while getting a standing ovation earlier in my high school career. I had stood and applauded, too, because even though I disagreed with everything Strom Thurmond stood for, I didn’t want to stand out by not standing. I knew I would proba-bly not have made President Kennedy’s Profiles in Cour-age, but how many of the men in that book had been re-jected for Homeroom Coupon Chairman? I didn’t want to alien-ate my Southern friends, and I knew their fears.
I don’t remember any of my morning classes; I assume I prayed my way through them. But I do remember Miss Pearl-stine’s Problems of American Democracy class after lunch that day because that was when the news came.
Miss Pearlstine was my favorite teacher. She was the sponsor of the International Relations Club, of which I was president. She was one of the few people outside my family who was en-thusiastic about my plans to join the Peace Corps as soon as I finished college, culminating a five-year plan that only began with tonight’s beauty contest.
Miss Pearlstine was the only Jew at our school. As chairman of Religious Emphasis Week, I thought of her and suggested that we drop the “in Jesus Christ we pray” part of our prayers so she wouldn’t feel left out. But Miss Webb, the sponsor of Religious Emphasis Week, said, “I’m sure she doesn’t mind if we pray our way when there are so many of us and so few of her.”
Close to the beginning of our 1:15 class, Mrs. Lindler, a math teacher who had an Algebra by TV class, came to the door.
“You know what?” she said. “They interrupted our Algebra lesson for a news bulletin. There’s been some shooting around President Kennedy’s motorcade in Dallas.”
“Oh, how awful!” Miss Pearlstine said. “I hope nobody’s been hurt.”
I dropped God a quick line.
“Dear God, let everyone be all right.”
But I felt sure that no one had been hurt—not seriously, if at all. I was so certain that President Kennedy was all right that I felt foolish wasting my prayers—prayers that should be directed towards the less certain outcome of the night’s beauty pag-eant.
We went back to our lesson about voting precincts. And then the principal came over the PA system.
“President Kennedy has been shot,” he said. “We have not yet received word on whether or not the shot was fatal.”
Fatal? Of course the shot hadn’t been fatal. Why was Mr. Kirkley being so melodramatic? Presidents didn’t get assassi-nated. Not in our country. Maybe he’d been shot at. I could picture him in a Dallas clinic now, charming the staff as nurses bandaged a nicked shoulder.
“I had hoped for a twenty-gun salute,” he might say, “but not directed at me.”
That night I was going to look like his wife. The time he took her to Paris.
A few minutes later Mr. Kirkely came over the PA system again.
“May I have your attention please?”
He had our attention.
“President Kennedy is dead.”
There were cries and gasps of disbelief. Jeanne Thigpen be-gan to cry. I turned to her.
“It’s not true,” I told her. “I know it’s not true.”
A couple of students cheered.
“He asked for it,” Sam Davidson said. “He was practically becoming a dictator.”
“I think he was a good president,” Miss Pearlstine and I said in unison. Was?
“This proves that God didn’t want a Catholic president,” Sam continued.
“Oh, shut up!” I said. And then I remembered my responsibil-ity as a possible future Miss Columbian, and I added, “Please.”
I still couldn’t believe that President Kennedy was dead. Re-porters made mistakes. They were almost always wrong about the weather.
“Dear God,” I prayed silently. “Let President Kennedy really be alive. Make this news a false report, and I will give up being Miss Columbian.”
I paused for a moment. I knew I had to go further still.
“I’ll even give up being among the finalists,” I added si-lently.
In sync with my prayers, Mr. Kirkley continued.
“There have been some questions about tonight’s beauty contest. If this were a frivolous affair, we would cancel it. But it’s been planned for a long time, and the publication of the yearbook depends on the money we raise tonight. So the contest will go on as planned.”
I convinced myself—sort of—that since I was representing the Future Teachers of America Club, it was my duty to partici-pate in the contest. I decided I would go on, but I wouldn’t smile—not unless the news was false and Kennedy was really still alive. Then I would go on and I would smile but, in keeping with my vow to God, I wouldn’t win. I wouldn’t even be among the finalists.
It was while Dana was teasing my hair to make it look like Jackie’s that we received a phone call from the school secretary.
“Some of the judges don’t feel like coming,” the secretary said. “So the beauty contest will have to be postponed.”
Mother stopped working on my dress, and Dana stopped working on my hair, and we all sat down in front of the TV and watched a disheveled Jacqueline Kennedy stand beside Lyndon Johnson as he was sworn in as our next president. She had a dark smear on her dress, and even though we didn’t have a col-ored television, we knew it was blood. She’d taken his head in her lap, and then she’d crawled over the open limousine to get help.
“Now you look more like her than she does,” Dana told me.
We spent the weekend right there in the living room, watch-ing all the Kennedys. Caroline, who’d once come to her father’s press conference in her mother’s high-heeled shoes, was now crying as she held her mother’s hand. John John, sometimes photographed romping around in his father’s office, was now saluting our dead president’s flag-draped coffin. But the biggest change was in what they were saying about Jacqueline Ken-nedy. No one was talking about her sable underwear or who had designed the dress she was wearing or how much it had cost. All anyone noticed about her dress was that it wasn’t the pink suit with the bloodstains on it. It was all black. A black mantilla replaced the pillbox hat. They were using words like courage and dignity. Everything had changed, and I knew I had, too.
As Dana was getting ready to drive back to Winthrop, she said, “I came home for nothing.”
“Well, you were here to watch President Kennedy’s funeral with us,” I said.
“But that’s not something only I could do,” she replied, as if she were a fairy godmother without a mission. “Well, when they reschedule the beauty contest, let me know the new date, and I’ll see if I can come up.”
“Thank you, Dana,” I said, “But I’m not sure I have my heart in things like beauty contests anymore.”
“Oh, that’s right. Now all you care about is the Highest Pos-sible Moral Standards Award.”
On Monday morning, Mr. Kirkely came over the PA system once again. He gave us the new date for the beauty contest.
“And now, let’s have a moment of silent prayer,” he said, “for our country and in memory of President Kennedy.”
That’s when I realized that in spite of what had happened, I still cared about the contest, and even though my silent prayer was all about Kennedy and his family and the nation (I was, af-ter all, DAR Girl), I had to add a little P.S. about the contest. I was too ashamed to ask God to help me win it, with President Kennedy up there within earshot. Still, I had to ask God for something. It was my tradition.
“Dear God,” I told Him silently, “I guess, the way we left it, I could ask You to help me win this contest because I only of-fered not to win if Kennedy didn’t die. But, even though we’re back where we began, I’d like to move forward and do some-thing to honor Kennedy.” I didn’t mention anything about meet-ing foreign men and seeing foreign lands and learning foreign languages. I didn’t want God to think I had ulterior motives.
“When the time comes and I’ve finished Winthrop College and have my B.A. in English, could you and President Kennedy help me get into the Peace Corps?”
When the time came, God and President Kennedy got me in.
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