And All Our Wounds Forgiven Read Online Free

entirely, she said. i agreed, but reluctantly. it was a decision i always regretted. by not having children we broke faith with the future. we also broke faith with each other.
    around this time i saw a picture of jackie kennedy in the newspaper or a magazine. she was still the wife of the senator from massachusetts then but this was no ordinary politician’s wife. she was young and she was beautiful and she was smiling a smile that had confidence in tomorrow. after that i looked for pictures of her in the paper and periodicals. jackie’s smile gave me hope the world didn’t have to be the way it was, that the world couldn’t remain as it was in the face of that smile and confidence in what i didn’t know but it gave me confidence too and i don’t know if any of what happened in the sixties would have if not for jfk and the kennedy hair blowing in the wind on a sailing boat off nantucket, the spiral of a football in the autumn air on the white house lawn, the easy self-mocking sense of humor (something harvard men do better than anyone) and jackie’s smile.
    we are taught that history is powered by ideals and men and women of vision and greatness. not at all. what we remember is the jut of fdr’s jaw, the uptilt of his cigarette in its holder, the air of command and easy confidence even from a wheelchair. what we remember of jack and bobby are the unruly hair, the free, open and boyish grins, the insouciant shine in the eyes giving them the sheen of eternal youth. camelot it was called because we all felt young and because we did, we partook of immortality and the surety we could do no wrong. it was a dangerous time.
    i liked but never trusted either of the kennedy brothers. but we needed their exuberance and playfulness after the shock of the cold war, eisenhower, joe mccarthy.
    social change does not occur when people suffer most acutely. totalitarianism works as long as a government has the stomach to impose terror every hour on the hour. a terrorized people can do nothing more than focus their attentions on recognizing and seizing an unguarded moment during the day. the psychological terror of segregation in the south was a totalitarianism that succeeded until jackie’s smile and jfk’s wit gave us hope that things could be different.
    i remember my phone ringing early the evening of february 1, 1960. it was a monday. (in a few years I would look back with longing to that time when i could answer my own telephone.) it was a colleague from greensboro, north Carolina, telling me that four black students from north Carolina had sat down on lunch-counter stools at a variety store that afternoon and did not move when they were refused service. they had just been arrested.
    (that was no spontaneous act, i learned later. a white professor at the college had been looking for students to challenge segregation by sitting in. Finally, history produced four.)
    my greensboro caller wondered if i would make some calls to see if demonstrations to support the students could be organized in a few cities like atlanta and nashville, cities with a number of negro and white colleges and universities and therefore prone to be more liberal in their racial attitudes if not in law.
    by the following wednesday, sit-ins were underway in fifteen cities in five states across the south. let me hasten to add that i take no credit. when i called a colleague at fisk in nashville, they were planning sit-ins of their own, an action that went far beyond a sympathy demonstration.
    we think an individual can sit astride hi-story and direct it to the right or left as if it were a tennessee walking horse. that is not so. (people talk as if i made the civil rights movement by myself. what did they think they were accomplishing by making a holiday of my birthday or putting my face on a stamp? what surer way to rob my life of value, integrity and meaning than turn me into a monument.)
    i did not act as much as i made myself available to be used by forces