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Personas During high school vacations, my father began to take me on jaunts—to courthouses, to visit shut-in clients. As we traveled together in his new Volvo–”Quaker gray with sexy red interior,” he’d wink—I began to realize there was an unspoken assumption that in the absence of Geoff, I would carry the intellectual mantle of the Taylor legacy, maybe even be a lawyer. Doors were beginning to open for women in traditionally male professions and my father’s sister offered to introduce me to a law professor who was recruiting young women. Dutifully, I studied some legal torts from Civil Rights battles, debates over integration whose stories I knew. But after the first three pages of “Whereas”es and “Wherefore”s, I knew this use of the English language left me cold, drained the blood and emotion right out of these searing tales. My heart was in literature–the characters, images, and histories that had pushed the boundaries of my own understanding , showed me ways in which others loved, coped, fell, resurrected, endured in different times and cultures. Soon I was off to Smith College, drawn to my mother’s New England , interested in what a women’s community could be like, intrigued by the five-college consortium. On buses that wound through wide, flat tobacco fields and neatly lined orchards, then around the camel humps of the Holyoke mountain range, I traveled to art classes at Mt. Holyoke, a history course at Amherst, a literature class at U Mass. With a friend at Hampshire, I kayaked through the white waters of the winding, tree-lined Connecticut River. I found my friends at Smith 80 81 Personas in the co-op house, the art department, English seminars, and the Quaker community around Mt. Toby Meeting, high in the leafy hills northwest of the college. In the grand rooms of the old brick dorm I enjoyed the rituals of sherry and tea, of formal dinners and holiday parties where we composed poems or songs for each other–vestiges of an arcane but endearing concept of gracious living. And I liked the discipline of studying hard all week, undistracted by boys, even if at times I felt overwhelmed. One night during exams, I sat in the library holding the Norton Anthology of English Literature and I panicked as I tried to memorize, analyze, and interpret all of English literature. Suddenly I was certain I had made a big mistake; I was in way over my head here. I stared numbly at the words of Keats’s “To Autumn.” Slowly, as I reread for the tenth time, “Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun,” I began to hear my father’s voice reciting those lines, and the terror I was feeling dissipated as I was swept back to my childhood kitchen table when the words of a great writer were made living and human by the familiarity and affection my father gave them. I passed the exam, but I began to see that the English major was limiting–mostly male and British authors at the time. I would move on to American Studies, using the frames of history and sociology to understand American literatures of all kinds. In the distance, the war continued to rumble. One day, a friend showed up in my dorm after going AWOL from the Army in Texas. I had met Joel in the summer, working for my father’s friend, Tom Ambler . While he figured out what he was going to do, he put his stinking Army boots in the hall outside my door and I brought him leftovers gathered as I cleaned dishes for my job after dinner in our dorm’s kitchen. I knew eyebrows were raising up and down the hall. One girl had said recently, in a bemused, sweetly Southern accent, “Beth, I just don’t see how you can talk to me as nice as you do–I mean, my daddy being a General in the Army and you being a pacifist and all!” Now I worried how much she might intuit about Joel’s status. Finally Joel decided to go home to Pennsylvania and get help from Tom, who served as an official Quaker minister. Two weeks later my father called and said Joel had been arrested while hitchhiking. The police found a bit of marijuana on him, did a background search, found he was AWOL, [3.144.102.239] Project MUSE...

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