My Extraordinary Ordinary Life by Sissy Spacek, Maryanne Vollers Page B

whole family had strawberry blond hair, like mine. When I cut off my pony-tail, that was the end of our romance; he broke up with me. When I was in tenth grade, I started dating Paul Low, a senior and the quarterback of the football team. He was a sweet guy. Paul would call me every night, and the conversations would go something like this:
    “Watchoo doin’?”
    “Nothing. Watchoo doin’?”
    “Nothing.”
    He would drive by in his gray Ford, a four-on-the-floor he called Old Gray, and we’d spend the evening cruising between the Dairy Queen and the Dairy Bar, or head down to Mineola to walk into movies halfway through and stay until we’d seen the whole thing. Sometimes we’d park by the oil derricks way out in the county. One night after a football game we drove to the derricks in his parents’ new Bonneville. My curfew was 10:30 sharp, so at about 10:15 when Paul turned the key in the ignition … and nothing happened, I had to be resourceful. I got out of the car, dressed in my majorette uniform and jingle tap boots, and pushed that Bonneville down the hill and through the dust till Paul could pop the clutch and get it started. I had some explaining to do when I finally got home that night.
    We dated for a while after he graduated, but our lives drifted in different directions. Paul went on to college, then volunteered for Vietnam. When I was in high school, a lot of boys from Wood County were shipping out to Southeast Asia, and some of them weren’t coming back. (Fortunately, Paul did.) All through the mid-to-late sixties, the war was like a faint rumbling in the distance, a reminder that a more precarious world existed beyond the safe cocoon of family and friends and the tranquil streets of Quitman.
    Like many Texans my age, I got my first dose of the real world in November 1963, when John F. Kennedy was shot in Dallas. I was in eighth grade, and our big tough junior high principal, Mr. Browning, was crying as he came around to each classroom to tell us that the President was dead and classes were dismissed for the day. My mother drove to school in Ed’s red Corvair to pick up Robbie and me. She was crying, too. We were too stunned to speak. It was like the world was coming to an end.
    With the rest of the country, my whole family sat transfixed in front of the television set watching the awful events unfold. We saw Lee Harvey Oswald gunned down on live TV, and watched as the President’s funeral procession rolled through Washington. I remember feeling so ashamed that the assassination had happened in Texas, and only ninety miles from our front door. I was shocked because I loved Texas so much and couldn’t have imagined something so ugly springing from such a wonderful place. But I had read the papers, and I’d seen the inflammatory full-page ad denouncing Kennedy—paid for by the business tycoons Bunker Hunt and Bum Bright—in the Dallas Morning News on the day the President was shot. It made me so angry that I wrote a letter to the editor. It was never published, but it was my first political act.
    Kennedy was hated by segregationists in Texas and across the South for his support of the Civil Rights Movement. Although the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court ruling had outlawed separate schools and other public facilities since the mid-1950s, integration came slowly to many parts of the country, including Wood County, Texas. Quitman schools were finally, quietly integrated in 1965. It took a few years before the black and white students started sitting together at the lunch table, but there was no serious trouble. And everybody danced to the same music at the prom.
    I think it was because blacks and whites all knew each other so well that we were spared the turmoil that beset so many communities, North and South. Having everybody in the same school seemed as natural as breathing to me. And it was a relief that the last, degrading symbols of Jim Crow were finally gone from my hometown.
    Beverly