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Show An American dilemma A tall diin intense girl always leaning forward as if she had grown up in Texas preparing to buck the winds in Chicago, she went there at nineteen to die University, to a women's dorm facing the Midway, to her first refuge where she could be herself as much as she knew how and from which, feeling planted at last, she could lean out toward the world. She promptly took the ribbon out of her hair, bought a pair of tight careless jeans and shortened her name, Jessica May, to Jess. Everything amazed her. Dense trees and the green sweep of the Midway, all diat water in die Lake, the sheer numbers of drab people, and at first she was as mute as she had always been, listening widi an intense blue blaze in her eyes. She listened in the dorm, listened at the Red Door Bookstore, even listened to her professors. And in Reynolds Club she leaned avariciously over her coffee cup toward the talk, talking herself now, asking, asking, and by the end of her first year she had so many answers to what life was all about that she was spinningly confused. Looking closer, still listening passionately, she moved into a co-op on Kimbark where an interracial group was saying tilings she seemed to have borne her life thus far to hear, joyously startling ideas she in her Texas life hadn't believed were tolerated anywhere. Life opening: Field Museum, Goodman Theatre, Art Institute, Orchestra Hall. Eating food from around the world, drinking beer from what had once been Al Capone's brewery, smoking a reefer possibly grown in Texas. Swimming in the clear cold Lake off the rocks at the Point, picketing against segregated housing, drinking red wine in smoky basements and singing to a guitar, holding hands with young men in art movies and afterwards going to their cheap apartments, the young men intent upon getting her alone because as lean as she was she was a wildly pretty girl with long loose red hair and a look in her eyes which they knew was passion and hoped would be i passion for them. But alone with them she blazed so passionately about Art, Race, Religion, Life that the young men, who above all wanted passion, in the dilemma 165 |
