And All Our Wounds Forgiven Read Online Free PDF

chapel. He was surrounded by students but he saw me and stopped.
    “Students turned to see what had drawn his attention. ‘It’s Lisa,’ voices whispered.
    “’Stand back and let Lisa through,’ someone said. I wanted to run back up the stairs because I was afraid that if anyone saw us together they would think we were lovers. Such had been the extent of the intimacy we had exchanged without word or touch.”
    Elizabeth played idly with the diamond ring on the third finger of her left hand. When Gregory had proposed and offered it to her, she had been disappointed. Not by the ring. It was gorgeous. Her disappointment was that Gregory had needed to buy one so clearly beyond his means as a young dentist. He wanted to impress her, she who could afford whatever she wanted. She let him put the ring on her finger but made a silent decision to keep their finances separate. However, she had been embarrassed that wearing the ring had made her feel special and apart from all the women who did not wear this sign of chosenness.
    Such a silly little emotion, the need to feel special and apart. She wondered that the black girls at Fisk had not hated her.
    “We don’t have a choice about sitting-in,” Bobby explained one evening later that spring as they walked across campus. “You do and you chose to go to jail, risk getting beat up, cursed, spit at. That’s why we love you. That’s why you’re special to us.”
    She had been the white girl who crossed the color line. Her picture on the front page of the New York Times had given the protests legitimacy in the eyes of other whites. “Among those arrested was Lisa Adams, 20-year-old daughter of wealthy businessman and inventor, Phelps Adams.”
    “When the picture appeared in the paper,” she said aloud, “Jessica, my mother, called and wanted to know what did I think I was doing? Back then I got rattled pretty quickly when asked to explain myself and the more I tried the harder it was to think. This made me appear even more stupid, which frustrated and infuriated Jessica, and within two minutes I was crying hysterically. Swimming Niagara Falls and surviving would have been infinitely easier for Jessica than navigating through tears, especially those of her only child. To Jessica my tears were a negative commentary on her parenting. She was right about that. Never have tears been filled with as much anger and hatred as those I shed in her presence. She gave the phone to Daddy. For him, my tears were merely language in search of an alphabet.
    “He got on the phone and didn’t ask me how I was or what I was crying about. Instead, he asked, casually, ‘How was the train ride?’”
    “I wanted to yell at him, ‘What do you mean, how was the train ride? Don’t you see I’m upset? Didn’t you see my picture in the paper? Are you proud of me or are you angry, too? And, anyway, I told you right after I got here that the train ride was fine. What do you want?’
    “But I trusted Daddy not to ask an inconsequential question. So, I started talking about the cactus in Arizona and we reminisced about the Polo Club in Phoenix where I first started to learn golf and soon I wasn’t crying because I was back on the train coming to Nashville.
    “As I relived the ride I remembered looking out the window as the train brought me closer and closer to Nashville. I had no idea why I was on that train. The last place I belonged was on an exchange program to a small Negro college in the South. Only the social-conscious, political, liberal kids chose one of the Negro schools in the South. I had a reputation on campus as a beach bunny and a ski bunny, which was unfair. I was an athlete but, in those days, such status was too high to accord a woman. But my professors knew: when it was snowing in the mountains or the surf was up, expecting me in class was like telling a hawk not to soar. So, people were incredulous when they heard that not only was I going on exchange but I was going to a