I just made contact with an old college classmate whom I have only heard from once in all the years since, when she sent me a letter to tell me she was going to medical school, something neither of us had ever anticipated her doing. Last week, I suddenly thought of her and thought, I miss Johnnie, what is she up to now? So I tracked her down through the Internet (it wasnt easy!) and send her an email. I remembered her as a beautiful and angry young woman, a passionate revolutionary, at my all female college, with its mostly white, mostly rich, mostly privileged, mostly detached students. Johnnie was like a tornado bearing down on a peaceful landscape. She absolutely fascinated me, and I wasnt easy to fascinate, even then. Johnnie was privileged too, her father was a doctor in a wealthy enclave of Houston, but she was black in a primarily white society, was the only black student at her high school, and by the time she came to college, she was absolutely ferocious, primed for battle. She hasnt changed, despite as she says, having acquired the polite trappings of society. She still lives in Houston. She went to medical school and dropped out after three years, graduated law school but never practiced, then married a Nigerian engineer and had two sons, one of whom is autistic and still at home. Her life has been curtailed by his needs, she is always at home with him, but her mind is still flying free. She said she wasnt surprised to hear from me, since she had been thinking of me the week before, just as I had been thinking of her. We picked up our conversation right where we had ended it last, on the steps of our college dormitory, 41 years ago. Neither of us has changed at all, Not really.
Posted on: Sat, 07 Jun 2014 01:39:22 +0000
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