(C) 2013 M C McLemore
Anyone over the age of 6-years on this date in 1963 likely has some memory of where they were when JFK was shot.
I was in biology class, first class after lunch, at F. T. Nicholls Senior High in New Orleans, wondering where our teacher was. She was almost ten minutes late, and the class was getting restless, loud and unruly. When she came through the door, it was obvious she had been crying, was still crying. The class fell immediately quiet, uneasy.
"It is my sad duty," she said, "to tell you that the President has been shot."
Stunned, confused silence greeted her announcement.
A boy sitting behind me asked "What president?"
Our President, she blubbered. "John Fitzgerald Kennedy!"
Disbelief replaced confusion and several of us screamed out "NO!" The boy behind me said she lied, that Kennedy wasn't shot, it wasn't true, it couldn't be true.
We were the same class that had lived through the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis, practically at our front doors. We didn't believe anything could be scary after that.
Mr. Garland, the principal, came on the intercom a few seconds later, telling the teachers to close the doors to their rooms. He told everyone to remain calm, that he would speak again after the upcoming broadcast.
Somewhere in the front of the room a girl began to cry. Then it became real. Something was dreadfully wrong. Mr. Garland was crying, too.
Like in a roomful of babies, where one after another begins to cry (not knowing why exactly, but if the other babies are bawling then there must be something to cry about), sniffling and low moaning spread through the classroom. Even the most macho of the boys succumbed to the anxiety.
The next announcement came from the school secretary.
"The President is dead. Please remain in your seats." Her voiced cracked. The mike clicked off.
Fear, unnamed but near-palpable, raced its way from seat to seat, row to row.
Mr. Garland opened the mike. He said he was reading a statement from the Orleans Parish Superintendent of Schools.
"President John F. Kennedy was shot today in Dallas, Texas, around 12:30 this afternoon. He was rushed to a nearby hospital where he was pronounced dead just a few minutes ago."
A great roar went up in our classroom and those around us. Unbelievably, some were cheering. Not in our room.
Mr. Garland told the teachers to take attendance and for the students to prepare to leave, but to stay in their seats until he released us.
When we were released, we walked out of school into a world changed forever. We had left the cave, lost a measure of our innocence, and felt the heavy hand of adult responsibility touch our shoulders.
I didn't break down until later that evening, at home, while we were watching the arrival of Air Force One returning to Washington, DC. When I saw the First Lady standing at the back of the open bay, her face puffy from crying, her hair in disarray, I said to my mother that there were rose petals still on her suit.
"Those aren't rose petals, Martha."
My mother's voice was soft, kindly, tearful. I looked at her face, then knew.
There were many tears shed in our home over that mournful weekend and the week after, but none stung as bitterly as those shed for the blood rose-petals on Jackie's skirt.
"President John F. Kennedy was shot today in Dallas, Texas, around 12:30 this afternoon. He was rushed to a nearby hospital where he was pronounced dead just a few minutes ago."
A great roar went up in our classroom and those around us. Unbelievably, some were cheering. Not in our room.
Mr. Garland told the teachers to take attendance and for the students to prepare to leave, but to stay in their seats until he released us.
When we were released, we walked out of school into a world changed forever. We had left the cave, lost a measure of our innocence, and felt the heavy hand of adult responsibility touch our shoulders.
I didn't break down until later that evening, at home, while we were watching the arrival of Air Force One returning to Washington, DC. When I saw the First Lady standing at the back of the open bay, her face puffy from crying, her hair in disarray, I said to my mother that there were rose petals still on her suit.
"Those aren't rose petals, Martha."
My mother's voice was soft, kindly, tearful. I looked at her face, then knew.
There were many tears shed in our home over that mournful weekend and the week after, but none stung as bitterly as those shed for the blood rose-petals on Jackie's skirt.
13 comments:
Very vivid memory Martha and very touching. I remember I was in 10th grade but my memory of the tragedy is not nearly as good as yours.
There is nothing I can add to that. Thank you Martha.
I was too small to be aware of this day, not at the time. The assassination of a public figure, a president, was simply part of the world I grew up in. In a city known for it's murder rate.
Perhaps that was what the collective mind reacted to, that sea-change in how the world was seen before, and how those too young to remember would see it ever after.
Your experience was similar to mine, Martha. High school class, intercom from the principal, shock, dismay...little did we know it was just the start of the havoc of the next decade. MLK, RFK, Viet Nam, it became a way of life.
Yet, here we still are; we elected President Obama, and even if that didn't turn out as we hoped, it perhaps showed that we can climb back to the road to Camelot.
Hope, lady.
That's a powerful painting---so pretty and yet so horrifying when you realize what it is.
I was only 2, so don't recall the event, but was fascinated as a child by the magazine and newspaper articles my mother had saved from the time.
Just watched the movie "Parkland" about the people around the murder (Zapgruder, the hospital staff, the brother of Lee Harvey Oswald, etc)--very good, I thought: straightforward, with no added hysteria or conspiracies.
"Unbelievably, some were cheering." I had that experience, too. I was a sophomore in college, a school that was primarily a military college.There were a few of us young women there, but the majority of out fellow students were the male cadets in their smart, pressed, khaki uniforms. On that day two or three of them passed by me as I sat on a bench on campus, too sad and stunned to move -- and they were cheering. I've never forgotten it.
I must have walked on home -- lived in a mobile home (we called them trailers then) across from the campus. I turned on the TV and soon saw Walter Cronkite's agonizing announcement.
You've captured the sadness, the inability to understand how such a thing could happen.
Fourth grade for me. I vaguely recall an intercom broadcast,a teacher upset. Not until Life magazine came out with the Zapruder frames did I become truly interested. I'd never heard mention of anyone cheering until I read this post and comments.
I don't remember it, but I do remember when Bobby Kennedy was assassinated and my parents' very real shock and sadness, and being out in the street and my mother seeing it on a billboard.
Why were they cheering?
"Some were cheering".
Thirty-eight years later I picked up the phone to offer some general words of sympathy to a Massachusetts couple who'd been our best friends during our six-year stay in the USA. Only to discover my sympathy would not be general but specific. I had forgotten they had a direct link with a producer on the TV show Cheers, and he'd been in one of the first two planes.
Maggie, needless to say, was distraught. She'd seen some news footage of people dancing in the streets of (possibly) Iran. "What's with those guys?"
What could I tell her? Yesterday the Guardian devoted an obituary to an Irish priest; the accompanying photo showed him many years ago kneeling in the street over the dead body of a young man. A horrible uneasiness overtook me. I recalled an event in the Troubles that was so hideously personal. Two British soldiers in plain-clothes driving their car got lost in Belfast and found themselves in a Republican funeral parade. The mourners, hundreds of them, turned from their grief, pulled the soldiers from their car and beat them to death. It is on film. Both soldiers were carrying side-arms but, said some Army spokesman, neither used them. Dancing? Probably not, just the usual shoulder-shrugging quote from an IRA sympathiser, saying that the struggle legitimised the killing. That it was not murder because in war there is no such thing.
What could I tell those confused American school-children about their dead president? Only that they would grow up and learn to set their experience among other sorrows; not diminishing it but seeing it within a framework that they had managed to create. The product of becoming an adult. In the end grief has to be contained otherwise we would be forever lost.
Where was I? Watching a TV hospital soap (it was early evening in the UK) called Emergency Ward 10. At age 28 I was sufficiently grown up not to resent the fact that I never saw the end of that particular episode. Otherwise I was a long way away from Dallas, yet also right there.
Beautifully described, Martha. I and my classmates were in a large gymnasium just finishing a history exam when we saw the teachers reacting to the news being shared among them. Once the papers were collected we were told in much the same way as you. It was Canada and here there was no cheering.
I was in high school up in Canada. I don't remember details about what class I was in but do remember an announcement over the intercom, and the shock. I don't think we got the rest of the day off. I skipped school the day of JFK's funeral to watch it on TV.
It became for me a marker, a time of growing awareness of politics, violence, racial struggles, wars.... and it continues it's mad path as I see it.
I've often wondered how Jackie Kennedy stayed so composed. I know she was in shock, but I still can't imagine.
None of us can ever forget that day. I too was in school that day. It was the start of a very turbulent and confusing time in America, where it seemed like disaster was around every corner.
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