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The Awakening, A Memoir by Davyne Verstandig
There was a moment, once, when all things changed; the
sun became the moon, day night, truth a lie, the future the
dark lost present. Allatonce jumbling, tumbling, stumbling,
juggling, trembling, a screaming timelesseternity, a
neverending second, reality nightmare, clarity blindness —
a moment suspended and extended, a moment multiplied
and divided, squared and reduced to No Thing. What I knew
became ignorance, what had been whole was shattered.
Was it the dream we all fear yet dream, was it a nightmare,
an illusion — could time wind and unwind like a watch. Is
time outside the frame that defines the infinite.... destiny
discovered me.... was it cause or effect....
The grass was June green, past the innocence of spring, a filling out green was growing that would ripen dark in August. The sky was childhood blue and yet it seemed like a wide south-west sky, expansive beyond thought. The earth rolled its hills and Mennonite and Amish farms throughout the land of Pennsylvania.
It was early June, 1968. That spring Knoxville had seen gas cans filled with rage in the back of pick-up trucks, outfitted with loaded rifles to fire the bullets of insanity after Martin Luther King was shot down in Memphis. Two months later Robert Kennedy was felled in a hotel in California in that nightmare way America has of silencing the voices of the courageous. That spring I was finished with the South, finished with its bigotry, it's white and colored restrooms, white and colored water fountains, white and colored, colored became Black and Black became Afro-American but only the names changed, the bridge wasn't really crossed, nor the wounds healed. There was progress in the Panthers, progress but not quick enough, not deep enough. That spring I was finished with the South.
The grass was June green, past the innocence of spring, a filling out green was growing that would ripen dark in August. The sky was childhood blue and yet it seemed like a wide south-west sky, expansive beyond thought. The earth rolled its hills and Mennonite and Amish farms throughout the land of Pennsylvania.
It was early June, 1968. That spring Knoxville had seen gas cans filled with rage in the back of pick-up trucks, outfitted with loaded rifles to fire the bullets of insanity after Martin Luther King was shot down in Memphis. Two months later Robert Kennedy was felled in a hotel in California in that nightmare way America has of silencing the voices of the courageous. That spring I was finished with the South, finished with its bigotry, it's white and colored restrooms, white and colored water fountains, white and colored, colored became Black and Black became Afro-American but only the names changed, the bridge wasn't really crossed, nor the wounds healed. There was progress in the Panthers, progress but not quick enough, not deep enough. That spring I was finished with the South.
America was coming apart. I had just passed my oral
exams and my thesis had been accepted. I would
receive my M.A. in English by mail. I wanted out of the
South. I had been there from 1962-1968, the sixties in
the south. They had been hard years for a rebellious,
white, free-thinking Yankee woman. I was twenty-two
years old and I was going home, back to Connecticut
to figure out the next step. I was tired of the South,
and just as tired of Academia with its analysis of every
word written. There was a senselessness everywhere;
assassination, prejudice, violence, red-faced,
red-necked hatred suffocated me. I was ready for a
change.
My mother flew down to Knoxville to help me pack and make the drive north. She was sixty-two years old. Hers was not a happy marriage. She had been a nurse when she met my father. She helped put him through medical school at the University of Tennessee. She had five pregnancies; two children survived, my brother and me. There had been one miscarriage, one child stillborn and one infant crib death. My father became a successful radiologist and my mother became the doctor's wife. When I was twelve or thirteen she began to paint. She loved it. It was hers alone but he always signed her paintings, printing her name on the canvas. She told me once that she had written poetry, quite a bit of it, but that my father found it and burned it all years ago. My mother — who had been orphaned at the age of six with her brother, their parents having died within one year of each other, her mother of T.B. and her father in a train wreck — was Catholic. My father was a non-practicing agnostic Jew of immigrant parents. His father died when he was eleven years old and left his mother with five children to raise, and run an East Boston grocery store.
My mother flew down to Knoxville to help me pack and make the drive north. She was sixty-two years old. Hers was not a happy marriage. She had been a nurse when she met my father. She helped put him through medical school at the University of Tennessee. She had five pregnancies; two children survived, my brother and me. There had been one miscarriage, one child stillborn and one infant crib death. My father became a successful radiologist and my mother became the doctor's wife. When I was twelve or thirteen she began to paint. She loved it. It was hers alone but he always signed her paintings, printing her name on the canvas. She told me once that she had written poetry, quite a bit of it, but that my father found it and burned it all years ago. My mother — who had been orphaned at the age of six with her brother, their parents having died within one year of each other, her mother of T.B. and her father in a train wreck — was Catholic. My father was a non-practicing agnostic Jew of immigrant parents. His father died when he was eleven years old and left his mother with five children to raise, and run an East Boston grocery store.