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Show ?3- abstract, were starded by hers for the abstract: she leaned forward, mey drew back, terrified lest all that fire strike them. She knew each one drew back; she forgot about him and went on, always on, always leaning forward toward the experience which would reveal, at last, herself. Her childish life had been joy, diat early mindless joy as ephemeral as dew, and she had never ceased to miss it, had never ceased to yearn for it. But it had dissipated within her when she grew into self-consciousness and toward adolescence, homely and intelligent and abnormally sensitive about both; and it had no place outside her in her world, not with the white Souths sucking at black humanity. So joy turned to pain and quite early she rebelled against her world and for the rest of her young Texas life she suffered an agony of mute protest. It underlay die fight about Chicago, known but unspoken until her father goaded her into an explosion, a small one, the smallest splash of lava from a volcano, but enough to bring die family skies down upon her. But nodiing could stop her, for she had been freed by a small inheritance from her grandmother, and she packed grimly. Her father cursed and raged, her mother blinked and wept, the rest of her family grew tight and hostile. Jess left hating them all. But having grown into a tall, graceful, and, with that flaming mane of red hair, almost beautiful girl eased some of her pain; living in Chicago among people she could trust relieved much more. She studied for an M.A. degree in English and wrote tight twisted agonized poems which, had she been able to grace them with form, would have been good. She didn't know that. She knew that in her reading and writing she encountered no more than pieces of herself, in the rest of her life more pieces, few of which were discoveries, most already known, and she grew impatient. Having escaped from her past to an Eden-green campus world under free skies, now she wanted her future in the larger world and in that future her encounter with herself, and she leaned toward it. One evening in the University Tavem drinking beer and leaning intently across the table she realized that the young man was not drawing back but was meeting her passion like a swimmer meets a wave, head on and into it joyously, while there was a passion of his own for her to meet die same way but widi her own joy. His name was Milt Rosen and she loved the way he said Long Island, where he was from; she loved that he was taller than she; she loved his melancholy brown 1AA |
