I found the video on YouTube: Bobby Kennedy speaking to a rally of black people in Indianapolis in 1968, on the night Martin Luther King was shot. Bobby had been informed about King’s death by the mayor, who told him not to go to the black neighborhood because riots could break out. Bobby had replied, “Don’t tell me where I can and cannot go.”
In the darkness, standing on a flatbed truck, he spoke, unrehearsed, from his heart. “If you’re black, and you’re tempted to be filled with feelings of hatred and mistrust,” he told the crowd, “I would only say that I can also feel, in my own heart, (he pointed to his chest) the same kind of feeling. I had a member of my own family killed, but he was killed by a white man.
The crowd was silent.
Bobby continued: “What we need in the United States is not hatred. What we need in the United States is not violence or lawlessness, but is love, and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or whether they be black.”
I felt bereft. During our present racial crisis, who could speak as Bobby had, 48 years ago? It was not just his words, but his face and the sadness in his body that conveyed sincerity, humility, and, yes, love.
I grieved for how our world might have been different, if Bobby had lived to be president.
After watching the video, I ordered the new book, Bobby Kennedy, the Making of a Liberal Icon, by Larry Tye. It’s wonderful to read, (or listen to, as I’m doing) taking us back through the decades, showing us how Bobby evolved from an anti-Communist bully working for Joe McCarthy to the most impactful and courageous Attorney General we’ve had. We see his mistakes, his wrong turns, his gradual awakening, and how he was moved to act not by reason but by experience and feelings.
In 1961, when he watched news footage of Freedom Riders in Mississippi being beaten unconscious by white mobs, Bobby sent in federal marshals, and negotiated with Southern leaders for the protestors to gain safe passage to Montgomery, Ala. The night they completed that ride, Bobby was called back to the Justice Department, where he arrived, barefoot, wearing the briefs and dressing gown he’d had on when summoned. He poured Old Grand-Dad over rocks and talked with aides about his newfound understanding. “Race really is the story of America,” he said. “And these situations are something we’re going to have to live with. This is going on and on.”
Bobby was only 42 when he was murdered, but Larry Tye’s book brings him—and the hope he embodied—back to thrilling life.
* * *
For something completely different, I’m reading Scary Old Sex, a collection of stories by Arlene Heyman, a 74-year-old psychoanalyst who’s publishing her first book.
I don’t generally love short stories, because just as I’m getting involved with the characters and their world, the story stops, like coitus interruptus. There’s rarely a resolution or deeper understanding.
Heyman, however, is a gifted observer, whose images made me laugh aloud. A woman in her 60’s, contemplating her body and that of her husband, muses: “Aged flesh is so fertile, grows excrescences: papules, papilomas, skin tags, moles that have to be checked yearly; yet the hair thins out, underarm and pubic, as if the soil had changed to one that no longer supports that verdant shrubbery, but instead nourishes an astonishing variety of wild mushrooms.” (I see the skin doc twice a year to harvest those mushrooms.)
It’s such a pleasure to read someone writing daringly about sex as we age, that I was willing to overlook the few stories that didn’t hit the mark.
* * *
Now, for my highest recommendation. Next year will be the 200anniversary of Jane Austen’s death. To mark it, the Austen Project commissioned novelist Curtis Sittenfeld (Prep; American Wife) to write a contemporary version of Pride and Prejudice, titled Eligible.
I was curious to see how Sittenfeld would transmute this classic novel of mores in 19 century England to the present. Austen’s immortal first line reads: “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” That single line jump-starts the novel, as Mrs. Bennett, who has five daughters, becomes obsessed with securing the wealthy newcomer as a son-in-law.
How, I wondered, would Sittenfeld set up her story? She places the action in Cincinnati, of which Mark Twain wrote: “When the end of the world comes, I want to be in Cincinnati because it’s always twenty years behind the times.”
A new, Ivy League doctor from a wealthy family is coming to Cincinnati to work at the local hospital. When the news reaches Mrs. Bennett, mother of five girls, she’s determined that one should marry him. But how, one daughter asks, do we know he wants a wife?
They know because the newcomer, Bingley, starred in a reality TV show modeled after “The Bachelor,” and called, “Eligible.” In the series, he meets a troupe of gorgeous young women and each week, eliminates one, until it’s down to the final two. But in the climactic episode, when he’s supposed to choose his wife, he breaks down and cries. Both are lovely and have merits, he says, but he doesn’t feel the soulful connection with either of them that he desires with a wife.
So begins the fun, although it often devolves into soap opera. Unfortunately, I did not like Sittenfeld’s version of Elizabeth Bennet. She’s not the warm, vivacious, and witty Elizabeth of Pride and Prejudice, who lets no one cow her and who holds her independence dear.
But the update sent me running back to the original, which I hadn’t read in 30 years.
I was astonished. I hadn’t truly remembered the brilliance of the writing, the sarcastic humor of Mr. Bennet, the playful intelligence of Elizabeth, and her compelling repartee.
If you’ve never read it, or haven’t since college, I urge you to do so now.
And please leave a comment ― let me know how you experience it.
I’d also like to hear what books you’re most enjoying. As Austen herself said, “I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading.”
SIGN UP to receive future posts from Sara.