Page 17 - Demo

Kendallville Mental School11%u201clet the nigger jump%u201d and %u201cwhy don%u2019t all three of you jump,%u201d he broke free of his friends and plummeted to the ground. Suddenly, the crowd was silent. The story quickly made its way around town via the word-ofmouth grapevine, and many residents were shocked that their little community could so blatantly display the same bigotry found in Ft. Wayne, Chicago, and Indianapolis. Lynn and I hadn%u2019t seen the incident ourselves, but we heard all the details from our students, and the local newspaper ran a front-page story in which a reporter, who was an actual witness, recounted her feelings: %u201cI%u2019m sick at heart tonight. I don%u2019t want to believe that that was Kendallville gawking without suffering this afternoon when a man needed help so desperately. But it was Kendallville...%u201d His name was Charles.%u2022%u2022%u2022%u2022%u2022By the time we%u2019d memorized all our students%u2019 names, Lynn and I were getting to be an item. Besides living next door to each other, she and I ran errands together, did laundry together, went grocery shopping together. We rode to school together in the morning, sat next to each other in teacher meetings, spent our prep-time together, even combined some classes and taught them together. After eating lunch together in the school cafeteria, we developed a routine of returning to our classrooms, locking the doors, and making out in the lumber storage room. There was also some regular canoodling going on in the evenings. So, it wasn%u2019t totally out-ofthe-blue when, several weeks after the hog roast, in a man-fromMars-sort-of-way, I asked, %u201cWhy don%u2019t we just get married?%u201d Lynn%u2019s reply was a casual, %u201cOK, why not.%u201d It wasn%u2019t a very romantic proposal, but we both remember it clearly.It was mid-October, we%u2019d only known each other for two months, and we%u2019d never really had a date %u2014 we just did everything together. And we%u2019d had no prior marriage discussions, but we both always made decisions quickly, and neither of us needed to think it over. For the event itself, we selected the day after Thanksgiving, so we could add our two personal-leave days to the long holiday week-