Date: Tuesday, 11/4/69

Originally, Charles and I were to go to a lecture by this linguistics professor, Noam Chomsky. I promised him, I know. He’s right when he says I’m breaking my promise. I have my reasons. One is, I never read the essay by Chomsky called, “The Role of the Intellectual.”

I put off reading it until this past weekend. This past weekend I couldn’t do much of anything. I’ve been so tired. I still am. I don’t even go to Charles’ apartment so I can sleep alone, I’m so tired.

I don’t want to think about war right now either. Even though not going to hear Chomsky meant having another argument with Charles, I couldn’t go. It’s all too tiring. Why won’t everyone leave me alone so I can sleep?

I saw a poster last week that Adrienne Rich was coming here to give a reading. I had discovered her poetry recently. I like it very much. Lauren and I were talking about her poetry. I mentioned that Rich would be reading at the College and not noticing that her reading and Chomsky’s talk were on the same day, I invited Lauren to come with me to the reading. She got so excited. It made me feel that I was doing something for her for a change.

Having to then explain to Charles how I got confused took up so much energy that when after a couple of minutes he calmed down, I was just relieved. I have no energy to waste on anything right now.

I’m a slow learner when it comes to politics. I don’t think it’s because I don’t care about what’s going on in the world. I’m not angry at Charles for knowing more than I do. Or for pointing out that I wasn’t even paying attention when the Democratic Convention was held in Chicago or how the South Side burned and rioted when Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated. I know my nose was in my books and I ignored everything else that was going on.

These conversations don’t go well between us. He cares so much about what goes on in the world and talks about it with such passion that I end up feeling guilty.

I can’t listen to him when he is carrying on like that. He makes me feel like a defendant at a trial who has caused all these terrible things to happen. Then I really can’t concentrate on what he is talking about.

He asks me, Do you think war is necessary? My answer is: God only knows. When have I ever thought about that? There’s the plain truth. I’ve never given it a moment’s thought. Well, maybe when Dennis, a friend from grade school, began talking about going to college to avoid the draft, I thought, whew, thank God for being a girl and moved right along to my next class as if nothing had been said.

I felt invisible when any of these conversations were going on. I remember when Kennedy was assassinated. I remember my math teacher, Mr. Katz, told us to write down on a piece of paper our thoughts right at that very moment. We had been in class when over the loudspeaker, Mr. Phillips, the principal, told us that Kennedy had been assassinated and that we were going home. Everything was going to close down and we wouldn’t be back to school until after Thanksgiving.

While we waited for the school to let our parents know we were being sent home, Mr. Katz told us to write down everything we felt about that day. He told us that when we got home to seal it up in an envelope and put it somewhere to read years later. It would be like a time capsule. What was it like at that moment when we heard that the president had been shot?

I don’t remember where I put that envelope. I see the blue envelope I put the sheet of ruled paper from my notebook into. I wrote the date on the front of the envelope and licked the glue, closed it and then put tape over the sides of the seal so that I would have to think twice before opening it.

Did Kennedy being shot change my life? It definitely was sad. I cried as I watched the funeral procession on TV with Mama and Pops. They did too. Pops smoked a cigar in “solidarity,” he said with the president who also liked cigars. We bought Pops a rocking chair too.

Once we were back at school, I don’t remember anyone mentioning it again. Or when his brother, Bobby, was killed, I don’t remember much of that day at all. Certainly, I didn’t grasp the significance of the King assassination either. I didn’t even know that he had been in Memphis as Charles told me to support the sanitation workers or that he was planning a march to DC of poor people.

Charles yells at me: “Don’t you see that in our times it has become okay to kill people whose ideas will change the way we live? That the real people in power now pay assassins to take out these guys?”

Maybe Charles thinks there is something I can do. But truthfully, he frightens me when he gets that excited.

Sometimes I believe that Charles has inside information about how the world works. That because his world is so different from mine that he knows things most of us can never know. That he can find out these things because he lives among the very rich and powerful.

I could write more about this but I am too tired.