You Can't Go Home Again

I met Gayle at the Martinique last summer. That's funny, now. She didn't belong there. Daytona's Number One Psychedelic Nite Spot draws some junior high kids whose parents belong to Oceanside Country Club and to the Palmetto Club Juniors. (Mom or Dad let off Flea and Susy about nine on Main Street, and pick 'em up in their Toronado halfway through the Johnny Carson show. They couldn't have done that when the bikies ran the "Q," but there haven't been any busted lips or broken chairs for a couple of years since the town started shooting speed away from the Speedway.) Gayle was nice, she was going to be editor of the school yearbook. Unlike the Steak 'n' Shake crowd, she wasn't dying the slow death known as hanging around. In many ways she was patently nice, she was a girl back home. But I never thought of her that way.

She was tall and her hair was long and smooth--a light shade of brown. She had French blood, but her soft voice whispered the South. It was slightly dry and fell mighty easy on the ear. Her walk was a little awkward; she was young and protected. I liked that, because I had reached the point where I could prize someone who didn't know what I was going to say before I said it, someone to talk to who would surprise with her reactions--because she was innocent. Maybe I could tell her a little of what was waiting for her in the next few years. (She was too gentle for me to more than touch her cheek when we said goodnight.) She said she didn't have imagination, and I knew she didn't lie. She laughed and listened well, but she was uneasy when I tried to get her to make up a story or pretend she was someone silly, just for a moment. She was a church worker, a service clubber. I was happy that she never tried to be something she was not and never did anything out of line. But she wouldn't ever think out of line, and that bothered me.

Late in September, just before I left for Cambridge, we went to hear Duke Ellington, and she enjoyed that. As usual for a black performer in Daytona Beach, there were few whites in the city auditorium that night. But she didn't seem uneasy, she opened up to the music.

I last saw Gayle a few weeks ago; and I know that I won't be writing her any more letters this year. And when I go home again it will be a visit--not a homecoming. She probably still feels the same curiosity for me--and may even glance now and then at the photograph of children in the North End that I gave her at Christmas. I know now that she will always think the picture is pleasant and she'll never find a meaning in it that would make her uncomfortable.

"You know things aren't ever going to be the same," she said, "now that they've stopped freedom of choice in the county. Seabreeze will be 25 per cent colored next year, and so will the faculty. And they're sending kids south of Broadway to Campbell; kids are circulating a petition at Seabreeze saying they won't go; it's just a mess."

Suddenly there was 1300 miles between us and "We won't go" meant something twisted.

"School will just be nothing. The kids at Campbell haven't scored over 300 on the Florida Placement tests in three years. They just have shop courses there. I can't see how anybody from there will make friends at Seabreeze. The police are even scared to patrol the Campbell parking lot after dark."

So much was left unsaid. I tried to explain that tests were geared to nice white people. I talked a long time trying to explain. About soul on ice.

"I don't see why everybody just can't stay where they are," she said. Again and again.

She'll go to Furman University in South Carolina next year.

Just after Christmas we went on a picnic. It was raining and grey and a perfect day for Volkswagens. I drove through Tomoka Park, down narrow roads with Spanish moss above, hiding the sky. We stopped and watched a silent group of pure white egrets perch high in some palm trees on an island in the marsh. Then we rode down a twisting, red clay road to the Bulow Sugar Mill Plantation ruins. Once there, we got out, and I jumped around for a while. Gayle followed, but she was always conscious of the fact that she was getting wet. I got my camera from the car and tried to get her to pretend the place was alive again, to yell and scream because no one else was there. But she felt uncomfortable pretending, and she couldn't be free when I pointed the camera at her. I told her the story of the plantation, but I guess it wasn't enough to make her stop and think for long.

Bulow was a slaveholder and he treated his slaves well. People who visited the plantation used to say how happy the place was. But sometime in the 1830's, Seminole Indians massacred Bulow and his happy slaves--destroying the coquina rock buildings. It's a national park now.Jeffrey B. Kahn.Main Street, Daytona Beach, Florida. December, 1968.