For a long time everything was colored by the public violence of that death. We saw it: Jackie, her pink suit splattered with blood, crawling across the back of the convertible. We saw it in photographs in the pages of Life magazine, and later on television, and we were children.
When Vietnam became the first televised war, the precedent had been set: We were going to see our tragedies unfold in what we now called real-time. I won’t say we were used to it, used to seeing people, young men, killed thousands of miles away, killed right on the screen of our television sets. But the precedent had been set. Jackie in her pink suit, the shots ringing out. It was now the way things were done. Death would never again be a private affair.
Unless you were Black. During that time the hidden killings, the killings that weren’t televised, weren’t broadcast publicly, were the killings around which the Civil Rights Movement coalesced. I think we were able to understand, even when we were young, how those killings were different somehow. The hidden nature of those murders was where the tragedy lay. And still, we were children. We were exposed to death in all kinds of new ways. It was no longer the world of our parents who had given their lives to stop Hitler. The idealism was gone and heroism was impossible. Brutality ruled the day. In Vietnam the distinction between civilian and soldier had been erased, and at home we were fighting a second civil war with no clear lines except the shady lines of color
Where was I when I learned about the fatal shots fired in Dallas? I was walking home from school. I’d gotten off the crosstown bus and was walking down Lexington Avenue when right outside the Catholic church where the kid once pulled a knife on me, some little kid practicing on any passerby, right there I noticed three cabbies huddled together, listening to a radio. They’d pulled their taxis over to the curb and parked right in front of the church, and their faces were grim and disbelieving and one of them, if I remember correctly, was crying.
At home my little sister was not yet three months old, a babe in arms. This event, this moment in history that shaped my life, does not belong to her and as we get older and have shared many other tragic historical moments, this seems less and less important. Yet at the time I remember looking at her in my mother’s arms, a baby swaddled, protected from the world, and I wished to be her.
We were sitting in the library in our apartment when we heard the words president and dead in the same sentence. Several announcers said those words but we heard them from Walter Cronkite. My mother let out a gasp. She shifted the baby in her arms and leaned forward toward the television set as if she needed to hear it again before she could believe it. After that it was days of news coverage, including the real-time coverage of Jack Ruby shooting Lee Harvey Oswald which earned the distinction of the first known human killing to be seen live on television. Over and over the networks played it, and I remember seeing the surprise on Oswald’s face as the bullet tore into him, the moment he must have known he was dead. We were children. I was ten years old, a sixth-grader whose teacher could only put her head down on her desk and weep while we followed the assignment on the blackboard: Write about freedom and what it means to you.
I have that little essay in a trunk somewhere. I’m tempted to go up into the attic and find it again. But I can imagine what it said, using vague words like independence, equality, and human rights. Or perhaps I underestimate my early abilities and the teachings I received. Perhaps I didn’t write in generalities but got right down to the specifics of freedom, which might be the story of Carmen crossing the Sonoran desert, traveling at night, three little children in tow, in order to give them a home in America free from violence, and a chance at an education. Or Rolando, her middle child, driving home to Mexico twenty years later to wait out the indecencies of the present administration. Freedom. To come and go. To speak. To obtain an education. But always a balancing act, a man on a wire, a loose, baggy, bendable word, a miserable topic for a sixth-grade writing assignment.
It was raining in New York City on November 22nd, 1963. A Friday. A light rain. And it continued to rain for a few days after that. The cabbies huddling by the church on Lexington Avenue barely felt the weather. But it was gloomy, especially as the days wore on. On television we saw the cortège, the horse-drawn wagon carrying the casket. We saw little John-John saluting as the procession rolled by. We were practically British in our ceremonial vigor but it was only the fourth presidential assassination our country had known, the third since Lincoln took the bullet. When it was over and the game shows were returned to their regular timeslot, and enough people had complained about missing their soap operas, we became ordinary Americans again, tired of one another, not so generous, holding grudges and churning out opinions. It was a relief, really, to get back to America, to business as usual, to our petty preoccupations and desires. The shadow of violence stayed with us. It has always been here in America and always will be. But we had a moment, a moment and a few days after that when most of us wished no harm to one another and made a promise in our hearts—quickly broken—to tolerate one another and build something beautiful, something like brotherhood, from the peculiarities of our time.
