How My Family Was Touched by History

How My Family Has Been Touched by History—Preliminary Report  2012

for an assignment for ESL 150 Spring 2012

            I used to be really disappointed that my parents weren’t immigrants.  It seemed so boring that everybody in the family spoke only English and weren’t from anywhere interesting.  But I later realized that even my family was touched by history.

            Just a week ago, I got something my mother wrote in 1964, when she went back to college to finish getting the degree she stopped working towards in the 1940s, when she married my dad.  In fact, it was history--World War II-- that prompted them to get married.  My father was sure he was going to be killed in the war, so he wanted to leave behind a child to remember him by.  (He made it back, and they had five children together.)

            My parents grew up during the Depression, when everyone learned to ration, to value everything they had.  That made my father really frugal.  It filled my mother with guilt anytime she bought anything even though she never bought anything really expensive.  My father was from the South of the United States—South Carolina, where he was born and where he died.  He was “touched” by the conservatism and racism in the South—but in a way that made him want to rebel against it.  Many people in the South never leave, so there’s a lot of in-breeding, but my dad left after he graduated from the University of S.C., though he spent a year at Tulane University in Louisiana, where he also worked as a reporter.  Unfortunately for his career in journalism, he slept through the assassination of Huey Long, a famous Louisiana politician, so he left the newspaper business and came to California to get his PhD at UCLA, where my mother was a freshman.  They had the same political beliefs, and one of their concerns was the internment of Japanese-Americans.  Both of my parents were shocked that citizens of the United States lost their homes and their businesses just because the United States was at war with the country their ancestors came from.  It seemed a terrible injustice to them then—just as today basic rights are being taken away from some Americans just because they’re Muslims and therefore “suspect.” 

            The other way that history touched my family was in the Civil Rights movement.  We were living in the South during the 1950s and 1960s, and my parents spoke out  against a lot of the practices, like the separation of blacks and whites.  At my father’s memorial service, a black psychologist said that my father was really the person who integrated the University of South Carolina.  In those days there were separate schools, separate water fountains, separate lunch counters, and separate places to sit on the bus.   In the 1960s my dad taught a couple of postgraduate classes in psychology, and at that time there was a separate hospital for the blacks, but there weren’t any trained black psychologists.  My father created a special program for them at the University of South Carolina, so even though they didn’t go to campus in the usual way because there were laws against that, they met with my father and his white graduate students and got their degrees. 

            Our return to California from the South was also due to history.  In 1964 as part of the War on Poverty, the Job Corps was created, and my father was one of the directors of the Job Corps in Pleasanton, California.  Now there’s a Job Corps program on Treasure Island and some ESL students participate.  Every time students bring me a form to sign from the Job Corps I think about this. 

            Another historical event that definitely affected me was the creation of the United States Peace Corps fifty years ago.  It made it possible for me to train in Hawaii and live on a South Pacific island, Tonga, for two years! 

            My parents were also critical of what the United States was doing in Vietnam, so they spoke out against that, and we participated in marches together.  By coincidence, my mother and I both appear in newspaper pictures of marches—most recently in 2008, when we were at a peace demonstration to end the war against Iraq and in the 1980s, when we were protesting against the US intervention in Central America and against nuclear weapons.  I know that bit of history affected my son, too, because when he was still in his crib thirty years ago, I heard him chanting, “Two, four, six, eight.  We don’t want to radiate.”

            Just as history motivated my parents to get married, history also led to their divorce.  When the Feminist movement began in the late 1960s, my mother finally found the support she needed to end a marriage that really hadn’t been a very happy one even though it had lasted for twenty-five years.  I loved and admired both of my parents, but I loved them more when they were separated.  I’d always had a close relationship with my mother, but my father, like me, was a difficult person to live with.  After my parents’ divorce, my father and I became much closer, and I’m glad I had those years to really appreciate him.  My mother set up a home with a female companion, and they had almost forty years together—most of them very happy, but unfortunately Alzheimer’s was part of my mother’s personal history in her last years.  Maybe someone will make history by finding a cure for that terrible disease.  But when my mother was losing her short term memory, there’s a bit of history she repeated many, many times. 

            “I was watching a documentary on terrible, sadistic prisoner abuse, and I thought it was the Iraqis who were committing these crimes, but it turned out to be the American soldiers who were torturing the Iraqi prisoners!”  She was referring to the atrocities committed by the US military at Abu Ghraib, part of the latest chapter in the history that has touched our nation and our family. 

How Mom Was Touched by History

My students are now doing a unit that includes "How My Family Was Touched by History," so when I came across something Mom wrote for a composition course in 1964, it had special interest.  It was typed on a TYPWRITER, but I've retyped it on the computer.

The Love of God and the Love of Neighbor

Nadine Martin, Advanced Composition, Philosophy of Life Assignment, 1964

            My philosophy of life, the values I cherish and try to live by, are based principally on the teachings of Christ, specifically the commandment to love my neighbor.  Jewish friends have told me that the New Testament teachings, or at least the moral principles set forth by Christ, are essentially reworkings of Hebraic standards for the conduct of the good life—a life acceptable to God.  Perhaps I should be more at home in the synagogue than in the Christian Church, for many axioms of Christian belief, particularly the intransigence of Paul’s dictum on “faith,” leave me uneasy.  Often I feel I should not presume to say I am a Christian.  My “belief” is a sometime thing.

            I might find a place with the Unitarians who seem to have dispensed with problems of incarnation, the virgin, Mary, the Trinity, the resurrection.  But I cling to a meager hope that I may achieve some sort of religious experience—“revelation”—which will make the mystical element of Christianity meaningful.  I am reluctant to give up the emotional impact and influence of liturgy and creed.  Am I hoping to hypnotize myself with beauty and tradition so that the Fatherhood of god, the sacrificial Crucifixion, the miracle of Resurrection will be unified and serve as a truly “religious” basis for the day-to day effort to mold my thinking and my acting on the Christian ethic?

            As a child I was blessed by having a father whose life was governed by allegiance to the two commandments to love—first, his God and second, this neighbor.  My father’s years were filled with a bleak succession of failures, and although his faith in God’s omnipotence was not shaken, I believe his self-judgment was harsher than it needed to have been,  He may have felt that as an instrument of God’s will he was inadequate.  He was a shy and inarticulate man.  His position on applied Christian ethics was quite often either misunderstood in our family, or else found unacceptable--impractical—a position appropriate, maybe, to a man of wealth or a monk or mendicant.  His behavior was constantly challenged as being unfitting for a “family man” in daily battle for the material necessities of life.

            The stresses and moral conflicts within my home led me, I believe, to find it imperative to explore new points of view in a larger world.  I held my teachers in very high regard, and they had tremendous influence on me.

            When I was in my early teens the dispossessed of the dust-bowl began to come in numbers to the part of California in which we lived.  Looking back, I recall that the high school faculty seemed to be of roughly three differing responses.  The counselor was distraught and spoke gloomily of the teaching problems involved in absorbing a new, culturally deprived, unstable group into the community.  The physics teacher, herself a Roman Catholic, went each week with a group of Quakers to distribute food, clothing, aspirin, cough syrup, to the stranded share-croppers in the Imperial Valley.  Grapes of Wrath contains few scenes of anguish that this teacher did not witness.  Then my teacher of French, a middle-aged woman of European background, saw the sharecropper’s plight as only one of a hundred interlinking and inevitable horrors of a competitive economic system.  She was, she felt, working on the local problem by hazarding her job and her reputation by contributing financial support to the cause of the Spanish Loyalists in the Civil War then raging. 

            These teachers had supporters among the other faculty members.  The students, by and large, were indifferent.  Ours was a suburban community, more like the small town of the middle-west than like an extension of a large metropolitan city.  I am sure that the fact that I was backward socially, very insecure and unsuccessful I my dealings with those in my age-group, motivated me to develop a more-than-average interest in the dilemmas of the adult world.  The teachers were eager to share their concerns and to suggest reading material which placed, in print, their points-of-view.  Eager to find acceptance in their world, I read widely if not knowledgably.

            As open and willing as the teachers were to communicate with a young disciple about politics, economics, practical social institutions, they only rebuffed me when I tried to discuss my chronic (by then) problem of faith, my religious quest.  They seemed embarrassed or even openly contemptuous of my queries about prayer, the significance of the Bible, life after death.  I was given the distinct impression that these were the neurotic concerns of a young girl who was seeking escape from life in unwholesome preoccupations.  Nor was my minister able to aid me.  He suggested that I pray for faith.  If my prayer were sincere, I would find that my faith had only been misplaced—not irrevocably lost.  However, to pray required an initial act of faith and belief; I felt hypocritical in petitioning a God I suspected did not exist.

            During my sophomore year at the university, Poland was invaded.  My ethical problem seemed to settle about the implication of the injunction—“Love thy enemy.”  I felt that the “swords must become ploughshares;” I thought no true justice could be achieved by adopting unworthy means to the goal.  Had I been a man, I should have been a conscientious objector, I believe.

            Some acquaintances formed a Marxist study-group while I was at the university.  The book selected for study was Das Kapital.  The group seemed to be concerned with a purer Marx—a “revealed” Marx.  It seemed to me that they were seeking in their close scrutiny of their messiah, just as I had been seeking, in my intense study of the Gospels.  To me they seemed to be the nuns, the monks, the unworldly order of visionary revolutionists.  They were not in the least concerned with social application of their study.  Perhaps they could have been properly termed “Parlor Reds.”  I think I left the group less as a gesture of disapproval of Marxian Communism than as a repudiation of study isolated from activity.

            When the Japanese truck famers were forced from their gardens on the pacific coast, I went with some Quakers to say good-bye, with some notion, I think, of making a token gesture of apology for the barbarity of their uprooting.  Some said that there were Communists among the Quaker group, but the Quakers, to me, have been admirably consistent in following the tenets of Christian fellowship.

            When the enormity of the Nazi extermination-camps was disclosed, I was unable to comprehend the acquiescence of the German people to the infamies.  I wondered if the Lutheran preoccupation with St. Paul’s “faith” as being a thing apart from “good works” could be in any way responsible for the callousness which seemed to have permeated the German society.  No longer was it possible to believe the millions had been murdered through the efforts of a small handful of sadistic criminals.

            My husband and I became members of the American Civil Liberties Union, and I faced the problem of the Union’s support of the “right” of the Nazis to march, to speak, to agitate for the support of all the horrors that so outraged me.  The argument on the political freedom principle was sound, I finally concluded, but implied a counterbalancing and ceaseless advocacy of the sanctity of the human life.  This, I felt, was a legitimate activity of the Christian church.  But the National Council of Churches was abused for its efforts in any area outside of the confines of the pulpit.

            When the bomb fell on Hiroshima, I was convinced that ours was a nation which could not call itself Godly or Christian, and no alteration of the Pledge to the Flag to include “one nation, under God,” could do more than mislead a people into a crisis of religious schizophrenia.

            When we moved to the South, the bus boycotts and counter sit-ins were just beginning.  The deep-South, with its statistically high proportion of church-going citizens, could not accept the concept that race-relations were a concern of the Church.  A businessman sat next to me in a café and boasted that he had told his clergyman that his support of the Church had ceased until the minister got back to old-time, “basic” religion and left controversial issues to the “outside world.”  On the afternoon of President Kennedy’s assassination, I was told by a grocery clerk that the incident was shameful, but that the President had just asked to be killed—trying to force radical notions down people’s throats.  (At that early hour both liberals and conservatives were assuming that the killing had been done by a segregationist.)

            The last two Popes have made clear statements of the stand the Roman Catholic Church should take with regard to race-relations.  Yet, our youngest teen-ager, attending parochial school, was asked why she was a “nigger-lover” and her effort to reply in terms of the brotherhood of all men was scorned and ridiculed.  The resistance of the laity of both Catholic and Protestant sects to the Church in the world” is apparent—though I find it encouraging that the clergy is not, for the most party, making the fatal split.

            Our current foreign policy, in Viet Nam for example, maybe be a practical policy—an expedient policy.  It is not a Christian policy.  In reading Dag Hammarskjold’s reflections, Markings, I have been re-stimulated to conviction that it is never enough to withdraw in despair, to wash one’s hands of that which arouses disgust and violates one’s moral principles.  It is necessary to take a public stand with respect to convictions and refuse to commit spiritual suicide.

            There is danger in assuming a moral position.  I think the danger is particularly threatening when the position involves interpreting the message of a spiritual leader—a Christ, for my example.  One may too easily become the victim of self-pride, vanity; contempt and condemnation follow predictably.  Self-examination and self-correction are correctives.  A sober evaluation of one’s motivations is essential to escape self-aggrandizement and a consequent invalidation of the very principles one has set out to defend.

            If I can conquer my own proud heart and see my own shortcomings in a clear and constant light, I may someday have the blessing of a religious peace which I crave.  As I stand today, incomplete and dissatisfied with m religious perplexities, I am clear about very little.  I do know that I may not retreat from the practice of what I conceive of as the basic teaching of Christ—the second commandment of the New Testament to love my neighbor as myself.  I must make myself more lovable and I must ever fail to interpret the word “neighbor” in the light of the other teachers of Christ.

Super Bowl 2012

Here's a collage I made of Sunday's Super Bowl gathering.  The New York Giants defeated the New England Patriots, and we kept eating!

Super Bowl 2012

This was my contribution to yesterday's Super Bowl at which two people, Javier and Walter, rooted for different teams (Javier the NY Giants and Walter the New England Patriots) without beating each other up.

Sample Chapter of Even the Smallest Crab Has Teeth

I just this hour found out that my contribution to the Peace Corps Volume Even the Smallest Crab Has Teeth is given as the sample chapter in its sales pitch online.  I didn't even know the book was available until another contributor, friend and colleague Karen Batchelor, told me.  I read Karen's contribution with great interest and read mine, noting that the first line had been edited in a way that seemed unnecessary but the editor had left a big error that I had typed:  1964 for 1963!  Still, I enjoyed this not-fictionalized version of my account of my hours spent bribing God for a win in the high school beauty contest that was scheduled for November 22, 1963.  (For some reason, some words have dashes where there shouldn't be dashes.  But that doesn't bother me as much as the phrase "Living in the South in 1964..."  for "Living in the South in 1963" or even "the 1960's."  I mustn't get ahead of myself--or ahead of President Kennedy's assassination.

Sample chapter

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.

* * * Tina Martin (Tonga 1969-71) applied to the Peace Corps, specifying any French- or Spanish-speaking country, and was sent to Tonga, where they speak a Polynesian language in no way re-lated to French or Spanish. She teaches ESL students at City Col-lege of San Francisco. Her other writings include 28 Peace Corps journals, three plays, three novels, and numerous short stories which she keeps in a trunk for her son to inherit. Two stories “Crash Course in Spanish: Getting Robbed in Chile” and “An Algerian Wedding” appear in I Should Have Just Stayed Home and I Should Have Gone Home.

How My Family Was Touched by History

Here I've done an assignment my students are asked to do:

How My Family Has Been Touched by History—Preliminary Report  2003

            I used to be really disappointed that my parents weren’t immigrants.  It seemed so boring that everybody in the family spoke only English and weren’t from anywhere interesting.  But I later realized that even my family was touched by history.

            I can’t interview my dad now.  He died in 1999.  However, my mother is still alive, and at the age of 83, her long-term memory is better than her short-term memory. 

So yesterday I spoke to her about our upcoming reports, and she reminded me of some of the things I’d heard about before.

            She and my father grew up during the Depression, when everyone learned to ration, to value everything they had.  That made my father really frugal.  It filled my mother with guilt anytime she bought anything even though she never bought anything really expensive.  My father was from the South of the United States—South Carolina, where he was born and where he died.  He was “touched” by the conservatism and racism in the South—but in a way that made him want to rebel against it.  Many people in the South never leave, so there’s a lot of in-breeding, but my dad left after he graduated from the University of S.C., and he came to California to get his PhD at UCLA, where my mother was a freshman.  Mother says he was “touched” by World War II in a couple of ways.  He spent a long time in graduate school, but when WWII broke out, he knew he would have to complete his studies, so he finally wrote his dissertation.   Also he was sure he was going to get killed, so he wanted to become a father right away, and he did, in 1943.  Of course, WWII took him away from the family, but before he left, he and my mother had been touched by another event:  The internment of Japanese-Americans.  Both of my parents were shocked that citizens of the United States lost their homes and their businesses just because the United States was at war with the country their ancestors came from.  It seemed a terrible injustice to them then—just as today we’re all so upset about Muslims and Arabs been locked up just because they’re Muslims and Arabs and therefore “suspect.”  Mother says they used to take them special things to eat just to show their support for them and to let them know that they disagreed with the US government’s order to put them in camps. 

            The other way that history touched my family was in the Civil Rights movement.  Even though we were living in the South during the 1950s and 1960s, my parents spoke out  against a lot of the practices, like the separation of blacks and whites.  At my father’s memorial service, a black psychologist said that my father was really the person who integrated the University of South Carolina.  In those days there were separate schools, separate water fountains, separate lunch counters, and separate places to sit on the bus.   In the 1960s my dad taught a couple of postgraduate classes in psychology, and at that time there was a separate hospital for the blacks, but there weren’t any trained black psychologists.  My father created a special program for them at the University of South Carolina, so even though they didn’t go to campus in the usual way because there were laws against that, they met with my father and his white graduate students and got their degrees. 

            I’m sure there are other ways that my family has been touched by history, but these are the ways that I’m most aware of after talking to my mother. Of course, this wasn’t the first time that I heard about these events, but it’s the first time I tried to write them down for a preliminary report on “How My Family Has Been Touched by History.”