Essay on the Death of JFK (finalist in PNWA Literary Competition):

WHY AMERICA WEPT

By Brian Overland

When I was six months old, my mother wrote to her mother, in a letter I was never meant to see, that I was the happiest person she’d ever known—not the happiest child but the happiest person.

No doubt it helped that for four years I was the youngest of two brothers and the apple of everyone’s eye. But then my mother did the unthinkable: she went and had triplets.

For a long time thereafter, I became the forgotten child. Perhaps that’s why for the rest of my life, I could never get enough attention. I probably could have said “The house is burning down,” but if I didn’t shout it loudly, nobody would’ve heard.

The triplets consumed my mother’s attention and the guests’ attention as well. Meanwhile, my father was putting in 70 hour weeks at the law firm. So in my early years (with my older brother frequently off doing things with friends his own age), I was often in the company of our housekeeper, America Jones.

She looked nothing like my mother, who was a legendary beauty compared frequently to the first lady, Jackie Kennedy. Her soft, dulcet voice, like that of an angel, was even more beautiful. She spoke like a Lady. What I remember even more than her half Irish, half Anglo-Saxon features were her eyes, bluer than a blue sky on a cloudless day.

America had skin color I’d never seen up close before. Such people were not altogether real to me. I’d seen them only fleetingly, on television, playing maids and servants.

I know now, but didn’t know then, how much I hurt her when I said, “You’re not my mother.”

She knew that, but she tried to make up for it. She would often serve me Neapolitan ice cream: no one flavor, but a glorious blend of brown, white and strawberry.

She didn’t speak like my mother, either. Once, when my parents went out (which they often did), she said, “Now, Bradley, you momma and daddy are at a big fancy dinner, at the governor’s house. Before they left, they said you gots to eat your vegetables, so you can grow up healthy and strong.”

I didn’t know it at the time, but America left her own four children several times a week to drive out to the suburbs in her old Plymouth, so she could take care of five white kids and clean their house. She needed the money that much.

And yet, despite her small income, she would find a way to surprise me with little presents from the five-and-dime: a Superman comic book, for she knew that “The Adventures of Superman,” starring George Reeve, was my favorite show. Or perhaps a ten-cent magic trick. Those always fascinated me, although I never thanked her much.

Once she taught me an inadvertent lesson in Economics. Years later, at Princeton, I’d learn the Labor Theory of Value, a major influence on Karl Marx.

I’d been out playing in a muddy yard and the Pacific Northwest woods on a rainy afternoon. I ran into the house through the kitchen entrance, blithely unaware of what I was doing. America was there, holding a mop. She said: “Bradley! You tracked mud all over my nice clean floor.”

I stopped for a moment and thought about this, and then I said, quite logically, “It’s not your floor.”

“Oh yes it is,” she said. “Cuz’ I’s the one that cleaned it. And I worked so hard.”

I once asked her why she was named after a country, and she tried to explain. “You see, Bradley, long ago, they gave people names like that, same way they did to great big pieces of land.”

Later, I learned she was correct. For the tradition in English, I learned in college, was that continents, by tradition, take the Latin feminine form. Which is why they end in “a” and why “Amerigo” became “America.” Even Europe was originally “Europa,” after a goddess thought to represent Greece.

And then, a year or two later, November 30th, 1963, arrived. I was too young to remember where I was or what I was doing. I just remember that all the adults were very sad. The President had been shot, they said, even though I knew little about him. The next day we were sent home from school.

The funeral took place a few days later. My older brother was at a friend’s house. My mother and father had taken the triplets and went to commiserate at the home of a neighbor. America and I were once again thrown together, and that day we were sharing the downstairs black-and-white television, as the color set upstairs wasn’t working.

I had a daily ritual of watching my favorite cartoon shows at a certain time. If I’d been good, I always got to see them. But America, while folding laundry, was glued to the set.

I couldn’t understand why. On the small, black-and-white set, there was nothing but a gloomy procession of limos, cars, and people looking sad. This had been going on for hours. It wasn’t fair. I marched to the set and switched on my cartoons.

America said, “Don’t do that. Dat’s the President’s funeral.”

But I held my ground. I’d been good, and I had a right to my cartoons. I wouldn’t back down. America left the room.

After a few moments, I heard a sound I’d never heard before: an adult sobbing, crying out of the agony of her soul. I got up and found her in the hallway, looking away and hiding her face. 

I asked, “America, why are you crying?”

Speaking through her tears, still unable to face me, she answered: “Because President Kennedy died. And you won’t let me watch the funeral.”

I still felt I was right. I shouldn’t have had to back down. But I’d never heard an adult suffer like that. It was the suffering that got to my little five-year-old brain. So, I told her, “It’s okay. You can watch it.” Then I went to my bedroom and found a book of puzzles I really liked, which I’d been given on my last birthday.

I’ve always been glad of what I did that day. Thank goodness I changed my mind. Because if I hadn’t, I never could have gone back; I never could have made things right.

Yet I wondered about the depth of her reaction. Why had the assassination of a white man affected her so? Then, when I was in my thirties, I saw a retrospective on the Kennedy administration. This one showed a speech he’d made in the last few months of his life.

In this address to the country, he talked about how, in the hundred years since the Civil War, little had changed for millions of Americans… millions who’d been promised civil rights, the right to be treated as a human being. He planned to propose legislation that would, he said, finally make the promise of the Constitution, and the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments, real.

That’s when something clicked. How much it must have meant to America Jones to see this young man, an American prince, a man who had everything, dedicate himself to doing something for those who had nothing. How much hope it must have given to those who had to leave their children to take care of other people’s children.

To then see this man—yes, a white man—make such a promise, only to be struck down by an assassin’s bullet, must have been an earthquake. It must have seemed that God Almighty had turned his back on people who prayed to him every night for compassion and justice. How could the Ruler of the Universe offer so much and then take it away? It was worse than Moses not being able to enter the Promised Land, only getting to see it from afar.

Ever since I saw that broadcast and learned what President Kennedy had planned to do, I’ve wanted to go back in time and tell America Jones one thing, though it was now too late.

I understood. At long last, I understood.