Free Cybill Disobedience by Cybill Shepherd Page B

Main Street. Local news reports portrayed King as an irresponsible agitator who had goaded the rabble to violence. Shops were vandalized, and we heard that the train from Chicago to New Orleans passed through Memphis without stopping. The National Guard was called out in armored tanks that moved through the streets on rubber tracks--my friend Jane and I went driving around to see them rerouting traffic, sending people home. Some of the locals acted as if the turmoil was a huge personal inconvenience, but others treated the presence of armed guards in our midst with a comically misplaced sense of southern hospitality, pressing sandwiches and doughnuts on them. Rubbish in sacks and cartons was piled everywhere, and delicate ladies swooned at the mention of rats. The Mississippi River and the network of open drainage ditches in the city combined to host a sizable rodent population--it was said that a rat could traverse the city more quickly by ditch than a person could by car. And they were big enough to mount and ride. I once went to a “Sunset Symphony” picnic near the river and remarked on a cute little cat wandering near the water. “Not a cat,” I was told.
    I was standing with friends on the colonnaded veranda of my high school in the late afternoon of April 4, just weeks before our graduation, when we heard that Dr. King had been shot, and within a few hours, the world way beyond Memphis knew that he was dead. The Lorraine Motel was a few miles away, too far to hear the firecracker blast of the assassin’s bullet or to see Dr. King’s friends trying to scrape his blood from the balcony, but too close for comfort to my family and a large part of the city’s white population. My father made sure his luger was loaded, and Moma called to say that Da-Dee had moved a shotgun down to the front hall.
    There was a pall over the city for weeks, a sense of fear and chaos, with stringent early curfews and the intensified presence of militia. High school proms were canceled by municipal decree, as was Cotton Carnival, and I was not displeased to be a princess in absentia. When I passed a black person on the street, I averted my eyes with a searing flash of shame. I felt absolutely responsible for the murder. I knew the expression “If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem,” although I was not to assuage my guilt with action for another twenty years. But after the initial shock, nobody in my little microcosm talked about the shooting. It became unmentionable. Palm Sunday fell three days after Dr. King died, and there were green fronds decorating the white pillars of our church but no sermon from the pastor about healing the wounds of race relations in our community. Commencement exercises proceeded on schedule but I recalled no mention of the assassination.
    As a graduation present, my grandparents gave me a trip to Europe: the beginner’s three-week tour with a group of students from the local high schools, through London, Geneva, Madrid, Lisbon. We had to skip Paris because of the student riots against U.S. involvement in Vietnam, but that meant extra time in Italy and my first exposure to its masterly painting, sculpture, and architecture. I had inexhaustible energy for museums and basilicas, panoramas and piazzas, never-drying underwear hung on Juliet balconies and dark-haired boys who flirted in charmingly accented English limited to “Hello, beautiful.” And the trip occasioned an epiphany. Looking up into the vaulted ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, I was overwhelmed by the power of those frescoes--the creation of Adam with God’s outstretched hand and the last judgment of Christ--but my eyes drifted to the image of a half-clothed female.
    “Excuse me,” I asked the guide, “who’s that big ol’ muscular woman reading a scroll?”
    “That is the Delphic Sibyl,” he answered. My name, a name I’d hated and heard mispronounced all my life, was known to Michelangelo (albeit with the