Free Pearl by Mary Gordon
Authors: Mary Gordon
nice girl you thought you were, the loving girl, the hopeful girl. It isn’t so long ago that you were a hopeful girl, maybe only five years, October of 1963.
Maria and her friends have to learn new words:
napalm, friendly fire
. Death is surrounded by lies. They do not know what to believe. The men they thought of as, if not their fathers, then something like their fathers, are lying to them again and again, and people like them, boys like them—or not like them, poorer boys, but boys their age—are dying because of those lies, and if they believe the lies they are with those men in the party of death. The men they thought of as their fathers, men like their fathers, Robert McNamara, McGeorge Bundy, cannot be believed. No one can be believed. Maria knows her father cannot be believed. He keeps using the word
communism
. She keeps telling him he doesn’t understand communism. The North Vietnamese, Mao and the Chinese he leads, she says, are agrarian idealists, heroes. In years to come, Maria and her friends will discover that they were wrong about the North Vietnamese and the Chinese, but their fathers were wrong too, and their inability to determine who was more wrong will hobble their minds—the parts of their minds that think about the larger world—for years and years.
Colored lights cut through the sickish air. They dance till they fall on their backs, fall in a group embrace; they sing, “Looking for fun and feeling groovy,” and a minute later they see a child running in napalm fire; and
Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
is the same time as the March on the Pentagon, where people like Maria and her friends for the first time cannot breathe because the police, who four years earlier they thought of as their friends, are not their friends; they tear-gas people like Maria, who then call them motherfuckers, although Maria and her friends had never heard the word three years before when the weather was different. So which is it, which is real, which is the truth: “I Get By with a Little Help from My Friends” or bayoneted children?
I am not a good enough historian to say whether or not there were other periods in history like those ten years, eleven maybe, 1962 to 1973, the year before the death of John Kennedy to the year of Watergate, years in which so easily, so quickly, you became a person you would not have recognized. The Maria of 1962 would not have recognized the Maria of 1968. The Maria of 1962 was a hopeful girl; the Maria of 1968 was not. Perhaps this uncertainty marks my failure as a chronicler. Nevertheless, this is the way I must tell the story of those times.
It is May 1970: Kent State. The girl, kneeling, outraged, shocked, beside her dead friend. Students like Maria and her friends, shot by the Ohio National Guard. People like Maria and her friends who did not believe that people in American uniforms would shoot people like them. People in uniform were their fathers in the good war. But not Maria’s father. Too frail. His eyesight.
A week after Kent State, Maria’s father calls her and asks her to come home. He says he’s been a bit ill but he didn’t want to worry her; she has seemed so absorbed in her studies.
She has not been absorbed in her studies. She sleeps through her classes. Everything important happens at night: she goes to meetings all night, night after night; that semester everything is pass/fail and nearly everybody passes everything doing the absolute minimum, one night spent doing a term’s work, another all-nighter after months of all-night meetings, shouting, raising their fists. They turn their attention to metaphysical poetry, the sonata form. They pass through the university, the university which, they think, perhaps should be burnt down because it can exist only if it takes money from defense contractors. Wasn’t napalm invented at a university, doesn’t the company that invented it support the university?
Yes, Papa, she says, I’ve been very
Maria and her friends have to learn new words:
napalm, friendly fire
. Death is surrounded by lies. They do not know what to believe. The men they thought of as, if not their fathers, then something like their fathers, are lying to them again and again, and people like them, boys like them—or not like them, poorer boys, but boys their age—are dying because of those lies, and if they believe the lies they are with those men in the party of death. The men they thought of as their fathers, men like their fathers, Robert McNamara, McGeorge Bundy, cannot be believed. No one can be believed. Maria knows her father cannot be believed. He keeps using the word
communism
. She keeps telling him he doesn’t understand communism. The North Vietnamese, Mao and the Chinese he leads, she says, are agrarian idealists, heroes. In years to come, Maria and her friends will discover that they were wrong about the North Vietnamese and the Chinese, but their fathers were wrong too, and their inability to determine who was more wrong will hobble their minds—the parts of their minds that think about the larger world—for years and years.
Colored lights cut through the sickish air. They dance till they fall on their backs, fall in a group embrace; they sing, “Looking for fun and feeling groovy,” and a minute later they see a child running in napalm fire; and
Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
is the same time as the March on the Pentagon, where people like Maria and her friends for the first time cannot breathe because the police, who four years earlier they thought of as their friends, are not their friends; they tear-gas people like Maria, who then call them motherfuckers, although Maria and her friends had never heard the word three years before when the weather was different. So which is it, which is real, which is the truth: “I Get By with a Little Help from My Friends” or bayoneted children?
I am not a good enough historian to say whether or not there were other periods in history like those ten years, eleven maybe, 1962 to 1973, the year before the death of John Kennedy to the year of Watergate, years in which so easily, so quickly, you became a person you would not have recognized. The Maria of 1962 would not have recognized the Maria of 1968. The Maria of 1962 was a hopeful girl; the Maria of 1968 was not. Perhaps this uncertainty marks my failure as a chronicler. Nevertheless, this is the way I must tell the story of those times.
It is May 1970: Kent State. The girl, kneeling, outraged, shocked, beside her dead friend. Students like Maria and her friends, shot by the Ohio National Guard. People like Maria and her friends who did not believe that people in American uniforms would shoot people like them. People in uniform were their fathers in the good war. But not Maria’s father. Too frail. His eyesight.
A week after Kent State, Maria’s father calls her and asks her to come home. He says he’s been a bit ill but he didn’t want to worry her; she has seemed so absorbed in her studies.
She has not been absorbed in her studies. She sleeps through her classes. Everything important happens at night: she goes to meetings all night, night after night; that semester everything is pass/fail and nearly everybody passes everything doing the absolute minimum, one night spent doing a term’s work, another all-nighter after months of all-night meetings, shouting, raising their fists. They turn their attention to metaphysical poetry, the sonata form. They pass through the university, the university which, they think, perhaps should be burnt down because it can exist only if it takes money from defense contractors. Wasn’t napalm invented at a university, doesn’t the company that invented it support the university?
Yes, Papa, she says, I’ve been very