Free The Last Holiday by Gil Scott Heron Page B

I just
knew I didn’t belong there. That perhaps nobody did. I thought during those times that I belonged in Jackson.
    Arriving back in Jackson felt curious, a revelation I needed. After following the Smoky Mountains down, past the point where Bristol, Virginia, bellies up to Bristol, Tennessee, we came into
Jackson on Interstate 70, which now cut a five-hundred-mile, eight-lane diagonal route across Tennessee. The completion of Route 70 had brought about major change in Jackson: there had been growth
I could see from the highway. Industry, jobs, money.
    We pulled in to the house of a friend of my grandmother after midnight. I hardly slept before I was up at what the Amish would call early. I bathed and was dressed to go out immediately. I was
anxious to walk on my streets and breathe my air . It was midweek, a school day, and I made my way out to Merry High School, the Black high school, and arrived just after the opening
bell.
    All of my old gang was there. Even Glover, my best friend and lifelong rival, the guy who had integrated Tigrett Junior High School with me and Madeline, was there. I found that he was king of
the hallways. I had grown in the eighteen months since I’d left, but he was still an inch taller and about ten pounds heavier. And now he wore a social maturity that made me feel like I had
been left way behind. Perhaps I had been. Glover said he’d had sex. I still had only ambition. But what I really envied was how loose and comfortable he was. They all were. They were home. I
hadn’t been comfortable since I left. I wanted to feel that way again.
    The real joy, what I thought I missed most, was seeing and talking to girls. They felt good even without touching. In New York I spoke to girls with a mouth full of doubt, trying to see the
words I spoke and sap the drawl off of them. This morning all the girls were as pretty and soft as I remembered, but now with added bulges in their blouses and hips that made skirts dance as they
walked. I used a month’s worth of New York smiles as we strutted around and I threw “Hey” and “Hi’ya doing” every which way like a politician.
    I went back to join Aunt Sammy and my mother for dinner and eagerly reported on my day as a celebrity from New York City. After dinner I got cleaned up and dressed up to go back out to Merry
High for the Southern Serenaders, a school-wide talent show with students singing the latest tunes. I knew I would have been doing something solo or with a group if I had still been around. I
wasn’t doing any singing at Clinton.
    Something strange happened. Somewhere near the end of the show, it all got tired. Jackson. Merry High. The Southern Serenading. Even the girls. They were still soft and cute, yes, but that was
what was wrong with it. They were the same. I imagined that in twenty years I could walk in and nothing would have changed at all. Without leaving my seat and while the music played and somebody
sang, I imagined myself back up the highway in the Bronx. And I wasn’t called “country” anymore—or not without a smile. And everything I could imagine in the world was a
subway ride away.
    I would be all right when these few days were over and I was back in New York. I didn’t live in Jackson anymore. You can go home again, I thought, but only to visit.

 
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    The tinny school P.A. system at Clinton made voices sound like they were talking from the bottom of a well, and I can still remember the principal coming on there as I walked
into history one afternoon in November 1963, still damp from swimming class. He was saying something about a terrible event in Texas. “The president and some other people have been shot . . .
not yet clear about the extent of the injuries . . . awful thing to have happened . . .”
    The history teacher was watery-eyed and red-faced, blowing her nose, not saying anything, not taking attendance. I edged sideways around some folks to my seat in the crowded room. Hell, I
thought to