Throughout my youth, I always believed that while I had mentally developed sooner than my peers, thanks to the emptiness that being an only child reserved in my life which I filled with books and knowledge, that my physical development progressed at a slower pace. I imagined that my mental leverage took up so much space in my body that there wasn't enough room left to thirst for the things that other girls my age thirsted for. This wasn't to say that I was conceited about my intelligence. I was much humbler about my intellect than my nonintellectual peers.
I had watched from the outside as girls in middle school started talking about boys. Since most people thought Greg and I were going together, the pressure to find a boy just for the sake of seeming eligible enough to date by the popular crowd was lifted from my focus. I had no interest in boys, and honestly, I had no interest in romance at all.
My awareness of sexual orientation was limited to the boy-girl couples in high school up until I found out about Greg and Roger. To be honest, I didn't really think gay people even existed. I thought the words were just insults that straight people created themselves. I had never known a gay person before—until I realized I had known one my entire life.
There was not enough time for me to truly ponder on this aspect of human life before Greg was murdered because of it. In an instant, my view on the matter changed. I started paying more attention to what people said about gay people. I started looking more closely at people on the street of New Orleans and wondering if they were gay or straight, and if they were ashamed or proud. I heard that in the bigger cities, there were some areas where people could live more freely, like in New York or California. They operated like an underground organization. There were symbols and codes. There were bars made for them that operated under a guise to deflect suspicion and protect them from the people who were not so willing to just let a gay person live freely in their own space.
And then some other things started to dawn on me. I never had female friends, and I always felt a little scared and nervous around other girls in my class. I thought it was because Greg was my only friend, and he was a boy, and because of that I had no idea how to interact with another girl my age. It just wasn't as easy to realize these things back then.
That night with Georgia after the party broke open something inside me. Never before had I felt romantic passion. Never before had I wanted to touch another person. What I realized that night was something that had always lived inside me. Coming back after Christmas break to see Georgia's name scratched from the door forced me to close that cracked eggshell within me once again.
The next three and a half years went by rather quickly. When Georgia was around, I thought maybe it was possible for me to make friends. Now that her extroverted touch was gone from my life, there was no hope for me. I continued to put all my focus into my studies.
The world started to change. The Civil Rights Movement was sweeping the nation and sweeping New Orleans. Lunch counter protests were taking place on Canal Street. My senior year of college had just begun when I watched Martin Luther King Jr.'s speech on the television in the lobby of the dormitory. An integrated university, I still remember the immense passion I felt in my body when I sat in the group of white and black girls all crowded on the floor around the TV, watching with watery eyes. Then, barely three months later, we watched news anchor Walter Cronkite announce that President John F. Kennedy had been assassinated.
The popular opinion on Lyndon B. Johnson was mixed, but most Americans had the general idea that tensions in Vietnam were coming to their head. At home, the people polarized. Conservatives and liberals alike radicalized, but the prospect for equality among race and sex were progressing faster than they ever had. I took notice in the way that when the gay community was targeted, it now struck back. Organizations for minorities' rights were formulating every other day, and America was growing unsettled.
While I continued my college education, I still worked at the candy shop in the summers. It felt different now—coming back home, though it was only a matter of miles away from the university. The stark contrast between the heart of the city and the country suburbs was evident. I found that I still needed a job during the semester to pay my tuition, and funnily enough, I found myself working at Café Lafitte, a bar on Bourbon Street that was discreetly welcoming to gay people.
It is quite an understatement to say that working at this establishment changed my life. While the general public opinion on gay people was still negative, this bar was a little corner of the world where the general public opinion did not matter. I saw all sorts of people while I worked at this bar, and for the first time in my life, women were hitting on me. I was still too young and too shy to accept any of the women who offered to take me out, but I gained a sense of confidence about myself. I also gained financial stability, and I was able to start paying my tuition.
There was one woman I met at this bar. She was older than my mother, and she only dressed in formal gowns with big feathery sun hats. She always sat alone on the weekend nights I worked, and she always insisted that I was the one to serve her. Her name was Vionette Boudreaux, whom we called Madame Vionette, and she was a Cajun who claimed to have descent from the Acadians who migrated to Louisiana during Le Grand Dérangement. She also claimed to be a psychic, and when she got very drunk at the end of the night, she would hold conversations with a supposed resident ghost named Mr. Bubbly. She refused to ever conversate with Mr. Bubbly again after he supposedly pinched her rear end.
There was one late Saturday night when Madame Vionette was the last customer in the bar. After the long shift, my arms ached as I wiped down the bar counter. She was almost done finishing what I hoped to be her last drink when she suddenly spoke in her drawled Cajun accent, "The energy around you has always piqued my interest, demoiselle."
Hearing the nickname she always called me, I stopped swiping the counter with the dirty rag and looked over at her near the end of the bar. "What did you say, Madame?"
She did not speak for a moment, bringing her glass to her lips and taking a long, measured sip. Her dark pink lipstick stained the glass, and I dreaded how much of a pain it would be to clean it off, as it always was. She set the drink down slowly and looked steadily at me with her heavily mascaraed eyes shadowed by the wide rim of her pink hat. "Viens ici, demoiselle."
I tossed the rag over my shoulder and walked towards her, standing on the other side of the bar stiffly, curious as to what she was going to tell me.
"Give me your hands." She laid her manicured hands palm-up on the counter, and I hesitated before placing mine into hers, feeling her soft, aged hands. Gently, she turned my hands over so that my palms were exposed. "Oui," she whispered to herself, leaning down to look closely at my hands. "You are émotionnelle."
My cheeks flustered as she ran her thumbs over the lines in my palms, pressing down on a few places while being incredibly gentle.
"Oh, demoiselle," Madame Vionette suddenly gasped, looking up at me with her eyes which I could now see were a clouded blue. She opened her mouth but then closed it again, a dimple forming in her cheeks as she smiled. She was shaking a little, either from her old age or from the liquor.
I never believed much in the voodoo culture. I never believed in spirits or ghosts, or Mr. Bubbly. I had come to the realization not long before that I did not believe in God. I believed in humans and science and literature and art. I believed in history and culture. While I had respect for Madame Vionette, mostly because her wise and refined presence demanded it from everyone she met, I never believed in her claims of being psychic.
That night, it was only Madame Vionette and I in the bar. Everyone else had gone home, even the other bartenders. It was late and quiet. Madame Vionette was looking at me with the sort of disbelief and bedazzlement that I had only seen in the eyes of Hollywood actors in the movies—I always thought she would've made a great drama actress.
She leaned even closer to me. "You will find great, great love." She sort of gasped at the end of her sentence, and as her eyes started to dart all around my figure, her eyebrows creased together. Her head tilted, and the dim lights of the bar shined upon the feather on her pink hat. "But you will also find great pain."
Tears glazed over Madame Vionette's eyes, and for some reason, tears glazed over mine, too. She squeezed my hands with the gentle yet firm grip of a mother.
"You are made of love, my cher. Yet, you are also made of pain." She turned my hand back over and let her fingers trickle over my palm. "There are tears on your skin. You have the pain of an old woman like me."
The feeling of hot tears flushing down my cheeks invaded me again.
"You have a love coming to you. It will consume you. It will..." She trailed, closing her lips into a tight smile and tucking my fingers into my palm, looking back up at me again. "You are lucky."
I didn't feel quite lucky. Madame Vionette patted my hands lovingly before setting them down on the counter. She finished her drink and tipped me more money than I had ever seen all at once. She trailed out of the bar, and I stayed frozen there for a while. I wasn't sure what Madame Vionette saw in my hands that night, but it touched me deeply. After several minutes of staring into the void, I finished cleaning the bar and closed up shop, her words running over and over in my mind.
As I turned off all the lights and went to walk out of the bar, my intense thoughts were interrupted by a sharp, pinching feeling right on my behind. I squeaked with shock and jumped, quickly turning around, frightened that some strange man had discreetly stayed behind and hid while I was alone in the bar. To my surprise, I saw no one. The bar was entirely silent and empty. In a flash, my mind thought of the time when Madame Vionette said that Mr. Bubbly had pinched her behind. I bolted out of that bar as fast as I could and sprinted back to campus.
Madame Vionette's words appeared in my memory from time to time throughout the rest of my college life. I could never estimate exactly what she meant from the sparse information she had told me, but I had a heightened awareness ever since that night.
In the spring of 1964, I graduated with my teaching degree in French. Mama came to the graduation ceremony, and as I sat in the row of other graduates and waited for my name to be called, I searched for her face in the crowd. When, after several minutes went by and I still could not find her, I started to grow worried that she was not there. I was already reeling with anxiety about walking across the stage, and the only comfort I had clung to leading up to this dreaded day was the fact that Mama would be there in the audience watching me the entire time. How was I supposed to go on without her?
By the time that I was fully prepared to sprint out of the auditorium, my eyes spotted a pink polka dotted dress in the crowd—her best dress that she always wore on Easter. There she was. Mama was sitting somewhere directly in the middle, watching the graduates walk onto the stage. I could tell that she was also searching for me, and in that candid moment of looking at her, something in my heart budged at the sight of seeing my Mama in the crowd of strangers with such excitement in her eyes to watch her daughter graduate.
Even in my time away at college, I was still close to Mama. Though my newfound political sense was different from hers, I still loved her more than anyone. It wasn't that Mama was incredibly conservative. She was just wary of all politics in general. She believed that politics and opinions led to war, and that was what took her husband away. She liked the idea of a small life in a small world, and she deeply feared the big world outside of it. The world takes, as she told me the day she left for college. In that moment looking at her, I realized that there was an empty seat beside her. She had saved it for my father.
"Rebecca Hayes," the man on the stage called, and I snapped out of my contemplative moment, stumbling to my feet and walking past the row of other waiting graduates and onto the stage. The bright lights blinded me, and my heart was beating faster than I could breathe as the man said something else that I don't remember and handed me my diploma. He shook my hand, and I smiled out of habit, glancing out to the crowd and finding that pink polka dotted dress more easily now.
Mama was standing up in the middle of the seated audience, clapping as hard as she could and cheering as loud as she could. Even from that far away, I could see the tears in her eyes. It was the third time I've ever seen Mama cry, and this time, it made me feel warm and complete inside.