March/April 2002
Writing Contest Winner
Rita
by Marcia Fine
In 1964 Florida State University was a pale campus with only a few dark faces. The football team was all white. Across town the segregated South sent people of color to Florida A & M.
I arrived at the bus station in Tallahassee
after a 14-hour trip from Miami (My mother wouldn't let me share
a ride) to see two sets of everything: male and female bathrooms
marked "White" and "Colored" and water fountains
labeled the same way.
Sobered by President Kennedy's assassination, we vowed to carry on his ideals. We talked about the Peace Corps but knew no one who joined. Racial equality made sense to us. But there were no pickets. Or feminists. Or Vietnam War protesters. Or hippies. FSU was a peaceful place about to explode.
That fall tri-mester in the basement of DeGraff Hall, affectionately called Giraffe, a group of sophomores dragged in trunks, stand-up hair dryers, Beatle albums and textbooks. The cloying humidity in an un-air-conditioned dorm meant most of us didn't care about anything except our limp hair. Percy Sledge moaned "When a Man Loves a Woman" from a radio perched on the windowsill.
Within a week our group was tight. Sheila and I hung out with our next-door neighbors, Devon, a bubbly buxom Army brat who loved animals, and her roommate, Linda, a townie from Leon High. In the room next to them were sophisticates from Jacksonville, Rita and Jo Ellen. How did I know they were sophisticated? Rita, the one with long, black hair, played guitar and sang folk songs. Jo Ellen, the redhead, wanted to be a stewardess. Everyone worked at the World's Fair the summer before in New York City, except me (My mother wouldn't let me).
Rita cut her hair into a Sassoon, an angular, radical cut considered avant-garde by the sorority crowd. She claimed to be part Indian, and the new hairdo accented her Cherokee-high cheekbones. While the rest of us studied, she sat in the hall and played Joan Baez songs like "Banks of the Ohio" and "Honest Lullaby."
"How is she ever going to make anything of herself?" we asked each other.
I buried myself in Shakespeare while Sheila, a speech pathology major, memorized strange sounds. Ffft. Ffft. Ba. Ba. Ba.
"I got a gig downtown at the local hotel
playing in the lounge," Rita announced. We were impressed.
Linda was the only one with a car. We piled into her 1948 serpentine
green Packard, and headed up the hill toward the Capitol. We
couldn't order drinks, but we sat and listened to Rita. Her soulful
voice was even better with the high ceiling, a microphone and
decent acoustics.
"She never does any homework," we said as we shook
our heads.
Musical club dates became more important than schoolwork. A few times I saw her sneak out of the window of our basement prison. She slept through her morning classes, then tried her best to catch up by creating art projects with Jo Ellen. They had posters, cardboard boxes, mock-ups of letterhead and business cards spread over the area we all passed to get to the bathroom (My mother wouldn't let me live off campus.) Time for a break? She'd grab her guitar and we'd have a hall hootenanny.
Through a damp winter of steaming rain we studied (some) and waited for warmer weather so we could swim at the lake and sinkholes outside of town.
Spring arrived and the azaleas bloomed in red, pink and white near Landis Green. The dogwoods and magnolias dropped fat blossoms on the sidewalks. Crape myrtles exploded along Tennessee Street. The semester ended with finals and summer plans. I stayed for summer school. (My mother wouldn't let me hang around the house.)
By the following year, some of us were off doing internships, busy with boyfriends and moving into sorority houses. Our tight group faded away, because, after all, college is just a transition.
I graduated a year early to take a job teaching English. In 1967 I got married and moved to Philadelphia. In Bamberger'sdepartment store one afternoon, flipping through record albums,
I saw "Rita Coolidge," long hair parted in the middle, sans make-up on the cover. All the memories of DeGraff enveloped me. She made it! Her talent took her to the top. Soon "Crazy Love" wailed from every radio. She married Kris Kristofferson and had a child.
In the late '70s Rita came to Phoenix, where we were living by then, for a concert. My husband and I went backstage. She greeted me warmly, introduced me to Kris and pulled up a chair so we could reminisce.
Years have passed, and her career may have waxed and waned, but I'll always remember our year in DeGraff with the sweet songs she sang.
|
BackCharlie BarnesNews NotesCompressionIn MemoriamFavorite Prof |
