A Southern Girl: A Novel

8: Coleman

Confluence 65 Sarah and Josh, still waiting in the car, home while Coleman waited for Steven to be released. On my way to the parking lot, I offered a ride to my father-in-law, but he declined. j 8 i Coleman While I didn’t look forward to our time in Charleston, knowing the tempest that would ensue when we broke the news, I always enjoyed the trip itself. Holiday traffic in New Hampton receded as we crossed the wide expanse of the James River, cold and foreboding with choppy whitecaps stretching to the Chesapeake Bay. An hour later, as we entered North Carolina , the excitement of the trip gave way to fatigue, and I found myself the only one awake. I count the solitude of a long drive, unmarred by radios or conversation, among life’s simple pleasures. I glanced at Elizabeth, dozing against her headrest, remembering that my second view of her had been in profile, like this one. In a larger sense I had been attempting to profile her ever since. Beyond the complex chemistries that explain mutual attractions, I sensed in her certain strengths and sensitivities I felt I lacked. I told her as much on our honeymoon. “Yes?” she said. “Like what? Name them and don’t leave any out.” I hit her playfully with a pillow but she persisted. “I’m waiting.” We were in Barbados, still in bed at three in the afternoon. “You have . . . intuition,” I said. “You trust your instincts more than I trust mine. I’m too analytical.” “Are you saying I’m not analytical?” “You pay more attention to your passions. I wish I was more that way.” “You’ve been doing alright in the passion department for the past three days.” “You know what I mean.” We met, or re-met, as it turned out, in May 1970. She had been up all night, as had I. The month before, U.S. forces based in Vietnam had invaded Cambodia, seeking to destroy guerrilla bases in an area called the Parrot’s Beak. Four days later, amidst antiwar outrage, the Ohio National A Southern Girl 66 Guard shot and killed four students during a protest at Kent State. Riots swept campuses of the nation’s top universities. I was in my senior year at the University of Virginia. The very last thing we needed tossed into our academic bunker, a bunker filled with seniors worried about the draft, sophomores angry about everything, and wannabe revolutionaries who would eventually go to business school, was the hand grenade unpinned when William Kunstler, a New York attorney who had achieved national notoriety by his defense of the Chicago Seven, and Jerry Rubin, a Kunstler client and a platoon leader in the antiwar army, came to Charlottesville to give a speech. They packed University Hall, otherwise used for basketball, and worked the crowd into a maniacal froth. Rumors abounded that some building or feature of Mr. Jefferson’s academic village would that night be sacrificed on an altar of revolution; that only by fire could the righteousness of the peace movement be sanctified. Many opposed Kunstler, Rubin, their entourage, and their politics. Many more recoiled at the thought of torching the living history the Rotunda represented. A call went out for student volunteers to stand guard that night against any act of vandalism directed at university property. I volunteered. Like so many with whom I would soon stand on that same lawn to take our degrees, I cursed the war for its toll, its ineptitude, its strategic schizophrenia, its mushrooming divisiveness, its monumental waste. But the war was in Southeast Asia, and I was there, in lovely Charlottesville , where every student feels, in varying degrees, the presence of Mr. Jefferson. I listened to all the zealots spouting quotes from the great man himself, quotes that they insisted justified and even encouraged the kind of revolt they felt part of, the “tree of liberty” to be liberally watered with the “blood of tyrants” like LBJ. All well and good, I thought, but not at his university, on his grounds, at the cost of his magnificent architecture . And not on my watch. Perhaps, I reasoned, if approached by anarchists set on destruction, I could talk them down, distract them, convince them that a target more replaceable was somehow more suitable. They assigned me to one end of Cabell Hall’s portico. With another student I did not know, I manned my barricade, drinking black...