Youner Than That Now

1. Jeff

Idle Hands

As you get older, you look back on how much you didn't know when you were a kid, and it makes you laugh. In some cases it makes you laugh till you cry.

In early 1969 Ruth Tuttle and I were seventeen-year-olds in far-flung corners of America -- different countries, really -- who thought we knew how things happen and why. There was at least some basis for these thoughts. We were reasonably intelligent, imaginative kids, comparatively well read and well schooled.

But your body, maturing so much faster than your mind and your emotions, deceives you as you begin to exit childhood. And one day the mirror shows your wondering eyes someone all too easily mistaken for an adult. What it doesn't tell you -- not that you'd listen anyway -- is that the act of growing up will take more time and inflict more pain than you can imagine, and that by the time it's done, you will be a patchwork of hidden scars and fractures.

Part of our flagrant hubris came of youth, the universal intoxicant. But it also came of membership in the nation's largest crop of children: the Baby Boomers. We were accustomed to society stretching and bending for us as we moved from coonskin caps and Ginny dolls to college, and we expected more of the same as our birthright. We were quite certain that this accommodation would be all for the better, and that we, the anointed ones, would bring about the flowering of all of humanity's fondest hopes.

Like most people, and certainly like millions of our postpubescent peers, Ruth and I were looking for love. And we found it with each other, except that it wasn't the kind we expected. But our mind-love, in many ways greater and better than the sweaty and transitory variety, helped sustain us through any number of dizzying amours, bitter disappointments, personal and generational delusions, divorce and death. All through this hard passage from youth to middle age, we wrote to each other and saved the letters, hundreds of them. We clung to them because we knew they contained something priceless -- the keys to our souls, the record of who we were and who we were becoming.

It has been said that the gods first make people crazy before they bring them low. But in the case of Ruth and me, it may be more true that they made us bored before they enlightened us. It all began with a silly prank.
It was a Friday afternoon in February of 1969, eighth period, and my usual crew -- Vinny Vito, Dave "Feldo" Feldman, Jerry Greenfield, Ben Cohen, Judy Vecchione, Sue Ball, Ronnie Bauch and a few others -- had assembled in the office of Hoofbeats, the student newspaper of Calhoun High School in Merrick, Long Island. We'd reached the winter doldrums of our senior year, and we were seriously bored.

Into this hotbed of ennui dropped a seed: the latest newspaper from a high school in Yazoo City, Mississippi. It was one of several exchange papers we received, and as each school sent us its latest issue, I'd scan it with gimlet eyes. The Yazooan was something of a joke around the office, not for its poor quality -- it was quite well written and edited -- but because it was from a place that had the nerve to call itself Yazoo City. The name in itself was enough for a laugh from us worldly "Noo Yawkas," and the fact that this jerkwater burg was located in Mississippi, the most backward state of the whole impossibly retro South, was also comical. But Ben pointed out two additional provocations in the latest issue.

As editor of Hoofbeats, I was most affronted by the first: The student featured as the "Senior Pic" on The Yazooan's front page was none other than its editor, Ruth Tuttle. But my outrage was tempered a bit by the fact that this miscreant Miss Tuttle seemed quite smashing, judging from her photo. The second crime occurred in an ad for the Toggery, a clothing store. The ad featured a smirking Yazoo football hero, Mike Bagwell, with an exhortation to "Be a stud like Mike Bagwell in your Toggery shirt, Higgins pants and Bostonian shoes." A stud like Mike Bagwell? Obviously, these Yazoo yahoos needed some acculturation.

I began a letter in mock indignation, and soon we were passing it around, each laughing and adding a section. We roasted Ruth, the improbable Yazoo City, its miserable high school and the insufferable Mike Bagwell -- not to mention the shit-kicking, night-riding South itself. Mississippi was, after all, the state that hadn't yet ratified the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery. It also was where three civil rights workers had been murdered only a few years before and where Medgar Evers had been shot down in sight of his family. Whites in Mississippi had a lot of grief coming, and we were only too happy to provide it. Scrawled over two sides of notebook paper, the letter contained every snide slam we could think of, plus tongue-in-cheek references to ourselves as despicable Jew Commies and self-righteous bastards and bitches.

But it was perhaps less of a joke for Judy, a brilliant girl with long, dark hair and snapping brown eyes. Her reference to burning crosses came of her deep commitment to the Civil Rights movement, of which she was already a veteran. The daughter of activist parents, she had been to Washington to hear Martin Luther King, Jr., and the opportunity to lash out at the Deep South fired her up. (Twenty years later, working for WGBH in Boston, she would produce a segment of the award-winning Eyes on the Prize, a documentary of the movement.) For my main man, the ever thoughtful Vin, it wasn't a joke either; he'd studied Malcolm X in a sociology class, and though raised in the white working class, he strongly identified with Malcolm's philosophy.

The rest of us just skylarked through it, one-upping each other with puns, put-downs and in-jokes. We each signed it. Then eighth period ended, the laughter died down and it was time to go home. I made a show of addressing an envelope and putting a stamp on it, but I doubt anyone thought I'd actually put it in the mail.

I carried the letter around with me for several days, inwardly debating the pros and cons of sending it. What was the worst that could happen? Ruth Tuttle might be too stunned to reply, in which case there would be no further sport, but no downside, either. Of course, she might take it to her principal and demand redress of Yazoo's honor, not to mention her own and the South's. What might happen then? Would he call our principal, or fire off a nasty letter? If he did, who cared? We were the cream of our class; we all would be graduating soon anyway. At most, Mr. Jordan might make us write some sort of bogus apology, which could turn out to be nearly as much fun as the original.

Finally I found myself standing at the mailbox across from my house. I hesitated, thought, Aw, what the hell? and dropped the letter in. The faint "thunk" it made when it hit the bottom of the empty box hinted nothing of the awesome workings of fate, and I whistled as I went about my many adolescent offices afterward.

If anyone had told me that I'd just done something that would profoundly change the course of two lives, I would have thought they were at least as crazy as me and my friends.
2. Ruth

It Wasn't the Second Coming, But It Felt Like Salvation

While the Yankee North shivered and shook, getting no respite from winter, in February 1969 Mississippi already enjoyed the tight embrace of a seductive springtime. Tiny drops of moisture sparkled on budding azaleas, and a warming breeze made the daffodils, which had opened only that morning, bob beneath their blankets of cobwebs. Mississippi air rolls up in great waves from the Gulf of Mexico and is so pure that it can cause euphoria. So I lingered on my front porch, breathing it in for several long minutes before skipping down the front steps toward Yazoo City High School.

I was being seduced by a letter I thought was extraordinary: a gift from God, a miracle I had earned with tearful prayers and sleepless, long nights. Never mind that it was confrontational and offensive, from a group of high school seniors I had never met, who lived in the far-off ether of suburban New York City. The hunger of a starved mind is as acute as a bellyache, and this letter had somehow eased that pain for me.

I crossed the bayou that runs from Brickyard Hill to the Yazoo River, where Gypsies had camped in the early 1900s. But no one built fires or slept beside it any longer. Now it was dark and overgrown, frequented only by dogs and snakes. On the other side was Campbell Street, named by my great-grandfather, Tom Campbell, after himself, and the old Butler and Haverkamp houses. The elderly ladies who lived in them could often be seen rocking on their porches, pale, small, white-haired, watching. Today, only Mrs. Haverkamp was out, and I waved to her as I approached. She hoisted her lace handkerchief gaily from its nest in her lap and beckoned me onto the porch. "How's your momma?" she asked.

"She's fine," I answered, looking for the little flask that was usually tucked in a bag by her rocking chair. Its sterling silver skin winked at me as she rocked back and forth, from shadow to sunlight, shadow to sunlight, the cane chair clicking and creaking, her little feet tapping each time they gave another push.

I had first met her in 1963, right after we moved to Yazoo, where my mother had been raised from birth by her Aunt Ruth. The young president, John Kennedy, was alive then, planting the seeds of disastrous conflict in Vietnam, and Martin Luther King, Jr. was a respected Atlanta minister with a growing national following. My great-aunt Ruth's Victorian house on Jackson Avenue, where my family lived, had not been remodeled then. It had the faded wallpaper of my mother's childhood, and of her aunts' and uncles' before her, and the marks of their grimy, tiny hands.

But by 1969 all of those people and things had become history, except for Mrs. Haverkamp. She rocked placidly on her shady porch, her old-lady eyes turned expectantly up to mine.

I usually stopped to visit. But that sunny February morning I walked on. I didn't want to waste time with someone whose surprises seemed all used up, especially when my own life was suddenly so full of potential. The act of being young is possible because inexperience wraps us like a hard shell. When we move on into life, the shell is stripped away by deaths, illnesses and missed opportunities, so we begin to feel pain almost in anticipation of a loss. But at seventeen, I was so calloused with innocence as I walked away from Mrs. Haverkamp's porch that I couldn't hear the rending of fragile ancestral ties with those women and men long dead, who began their lives in the nineteenth century and who handed down to me their unshakable childlike faith in God, their constancy, Scottish practicality, flawless social graces and their love.

No one was waiting for me at school -- no eager girlfriend ready to hear the latest gossip or amorous boyfriend wanting to hold my hand before the eight o'clock bell. My friends were, as usual, paired off with their beaux, letter jackets carelessly tossed over their shoulders like plunder. A few of them waved as I walked by. Dell Gotthelf, who spoke to everyone, trilled out a cheery "Hey!" Most Beautiful and Miss YHS, she had made it a vocation to be unflappably pleasant. She was the Ronald Reagan of Yazoo City High School.

I went inside the building. As editor of The Yazooan, I was allowed in before the bell. The Yazooan office was on the second floor, where it had been since Willie Morris was its editor in the fifties, behind Mrs. Omie Parker's former classroom. As time marched by for others, Mrs. Parker had seemed to stay the course, coloring her raven hair to hide the gray and returning like a swallow to her worn desk, year after year. She had continued working well past the time she could have retired, and I accepted it as a personal benediction that her last year as a teacher was my first in Yazoo City High School.

"Miss Tuttle," she had said to me one day, "I expect you to achieve greatness in your high school career, which is no less than your Aunt Ruth would expect, if she were alive today." Then she had ratcheted the challenge even higher by describing Willie and his transcendent rise to the aerie of publishing. Then editor of Harper's magazine, he was established early on as the giant against whom I would have to measure my own stature as a writer.

The Yazooan room couldn't have been more removed from the hormonal hustle of my peers. The gray-green cubicle had become a sanctuary on those occasions when I slipped out of class to write an article or meet a deadline, and it saved me from having to stand alone in the hallway between classes. That day, I carefully closed and locked the door before I pulled the letter out of my algebra book and sat by the window to read it again.

It had arrived the afternoon before, finding its way to me in physics class -- the purgatorial low point of another soporific day at Yazoo City High School. The school secretary had made an announcement over the school's PA system: "Ruth Tuttle, please come to the office and pick up your mail."

At the time I was morosely mulling the relationship of velocity to torque, not suspecting that a significant amount of emotional and mental torque was about to increase the velocity of my life. I marked the place in my textbook and stood up to go to the office. "Where do you think you're going?" the physics instructor, Mr. Richardson, asked, his voice low and threatening. The class, already quiet because no one dared talk in his classroom, now became deathly still as well.

He and I didn't like each other. Our problems had begun that fall, when I interviewed some of the school's new black students for an article in The Yazooan. They were the first voluntary pioneers of integration, before it became mandatory in 1970. Their dignity and desire to learn, despite being under constant surveillance, had gained my respect. Debbie Nicholas and I even went so far one day as to admit to each other that some of the colored students were "just like us," and that Pamela Harrison, who was the daughter of the black dentist, dressed better than we did. We marveled at these realizations.

In 1969, Yazoo City was beginning to bend toward the end of racial segregation, hoping not to break. There was fear, a certain sense of both races walking a fine line. And there were resentments that couldn't be spoken within hearing of federal lawyers, or the media, who would soon be picking the bones of my old town for signs of trouble.

I had submitted the interview to Coach Rush, the principal, for approval, like every story we published. So far, he'd never questioned anything, so I wasn't worried. But that same afternoon, Mr. Richardson -- who was also assistant principal -- came to fetch me from my fifth-period English class. When I joined him in the hall outside the classroom, he glowered at me, a cold, hard, come-to-Jesus look.

"What's going on?" I asked. But he just hunched his shoulders and silently marched down the hall, fists clenched in the spacious pockets of his worn khakis. I fell in a few paces behind, following him to the principal's office, my face burning with embarrassment. I, the teachers' pet, had somehow made a mess, and he had the air of a man who knew the best use of a newspaper.

In Coach Rush's office I found the paper's faculty adviser, JoAnne Prichard, waiting for us. Mr. Richardson came in, then closed the door. Mrs. Prichard sat facing Coach Rush, her classic profile outlined by the bright light from the window. Her mouth wa...