Since her freshman year had begun in
September, the Christmas holiday was the first time that
Kathryn had returned to her parents' home in Delaware. Most of the other students
went home to nearby towns every weekend because Middle Tennessee
State University was a suitcase college. Occasionally, Kathryn went
home with a friend on the weekend and enjoyed a home-cooked meal, but
more often she stayed on campus in a mostly empty dorm on a mostly
empty campus.
(Her only sibling, an older sister
Lynda had begun college at the University of Kentucky four years
earlier in 1963. On the day that Kathryn and their parents had taken
Lynda to her dorm on the Lexington campus, the fourteen-year-old
Kathryn went to hug her sister good-bye, and Lynda pushed her roughly
away. Stunned and deeply hurt, Kathryn had been confused by her
action. Even though there was usually little affection between them,
there had been nothing to signal such overt rejection.
After Kathryn had gone to college in 1967, Lynda moved back in with their parents in Delaware with her
two-year-old daughter. Depressed, she was going through a divorce
that she didn't want.
Though Kathryn didn't know why, she and
Lynda had never been close sisters. They were almost four years apart
in age and in school, but decades apart in knowing and loving one another. Perhaps
that was part of the reason Kathryn had been so affected by the
sorority sisters' rejecting her.)
But now back to the present, Christmas
1967. Living so far away from her home, Kathryn had not seen her parents since September. Because the MTSU dorms were closed
for the holidays, Kathryn flew to Delaware for the Christmas break between
semesters. Kathryn did not consider Delaware her home. Her parents had moved there with her father's job after Kathryn had graduated from high school in North Carolina.
In contrast to what one might expect
during the Christmas holidays, the mood around her home was tense and
gloomy. In one of his depressed bi-polar states, her father mostly
sat in his Lazyboy chair, falling sleep in front of the TV. Her mother seemed
unusually nervous and tired. The Christmas tree was up but not
decorated, and Kathryn's mother asked her to decorate it. She
discovered it was no fun to decorate a tree by herself. But still
Kathryn kept trying to make things happy for the holidays by playing
Christmas music and passing around the eggnog.
On Christmas afternoon, Kathryn, Lynda,
their mother, and two-year-old Shelley were in the green and yellow
kitchen, preparing a traditional Christmas dinner. Since early morning, the fragrance of
roasting turkey wafted through the house from the avocado green oven. The voice of
Johnny Mathis singing “Jingle Bells”and other Christmas carols floated into the kitchen
from the stereo in the formal living room, where stood the decorated
tree all lit up with opened presents still underneath.
In the
adjacent dining room, the dark mahogany dining room table with the ladder
back chairs around it was all set with her mother's best Desert Rose
china, the highly polished Candlelight silverware, and cloth napkins. Excited by all
of the unusual activities, little Shelley was dancing around the
kitchen.
Kathryn sat at the maple kitchen table,
peeling oranges for the ambrosia, wondering if she was getting enough
of the white part off when suddenly out of nowhere, Lynda told her
two-year-old daughter Shelley to tell Aunt Kathryn that she hated
her. And of course, not even knowing what she was saying, the little
girl began loudly to parrot her mother's voice, “I hate you, Aunt Kathryn! I hate you, Aunt Kathryn!”
Even then, Kathryn knew that these were
Lynda's words, not the child's. Uncharacteristically, Kathryn
physically lit into her sister and began to strike her, yelling,
“Tell her to stop! Tell her to stop!” What she really wanted to
say to Lynda was “Stop it—stop rejecting me. Stop hurting me.
Stop hating me.”
Kathryn honestly didn't remember the
rest of the holiday, but she was so affected by the incident that back at college for the
spring semester, she suffered from extreme worry and severe insomnia.
Night after ruthless night, she lay awake thinking about her family.
But keeping the family rule about “always looking good in front of
others,”she didn't confide in any of her friends.
Adding to her family troubles or
perhaps because of them, she felt overwhelmed by her school work that
semester. Her grades began to plummet. In a called-conference, her Western Civilization II professor, Dr. Crawford, known as
one of the toughest professors on campus, questioned her in his
rather condescending voice, “Why aren't you doing better on my
tests?”Apparently, as he told her, English majors usually did well
on his essay tests. Vowing to study harder, she cringed at his
remarks and blamed herself.
Then things got worse. Her Modern
Poetry class was taught by the wife of the English Department
chairman, the formidable Dr. Virgina Peck. Besides undergraduates,
the rather small class also included graduate students in English.
Kathryn felt intimidated by the subject matter, the professor, and
the other students. With little confidence in her own intellect, in
desperation one late night while explicating a modern poem, she
copied too many words from a library book without giving her source
directly after each paragraph.
At the next class, Dr. Peck said to
Kathryn, “See me in my office.” With her heart in her throat, she
found her way to the office and entered into a world of academia:
built in book shelves piled high to the ceiling with old and new
leather books of all colors and a huge old oak desk with piles of
student essays neatly stacked on top. Dr. Peck leaned back in her
swivel chair and told Kathryn to have a seat.
Then she slowly pulled out a book from
her desk drawer, one that Kathryn recognized immediately as the
library book that she had used to explicate that poem. Kathryn's eyes
opened wide, and she could feel the heat as her neck and face
flushed.
Dr. Peck asked, “Do you know what
plagiarism is?”
Kathryn stammered, “Not exactly. I'm
sorry. I didn't know. It was late, and I was so tired. Did I not
footnote enough to tell you where I had gotten the information?”
Ignoring her question, the professor
threatened, “Plagiarism is stealing, and you have stolen someone else's words and ideas and passed them off as your own. For such an offense, I can have you expelled from the English program and
possibly even from the college”
Humiliation and shame clung to her like
a dense fog as Kathryn made her way to the nearest restroom to cry in
a dark stall. She told no one about the incident.
There was one person whom Kathryn felt
that she could trust enough to confide in about her home life—a
kindly psychology professor, Mr. White. When she told him her story
about the Christmas incident, he told her the most freeing thing,
“You don't have to go home for the summer. It's not written in
stone that you have to go back to that environment.”
So began her journey away from her family--to independence and self-reliance.
When Kathryn told her parents that she
wasn't coming home that summer, they almost seemed relieved. They
didn't try to convince her otherwise; they didn't say “Are you
sure?” or “We are sorry,” or “We shall miss you.” Since
they had some business to take care of in Cincinnati concerning
Lynda's divorce, they drove down and helped Kathryn settle into
Nashville's downtown YWCA.
And there they left her at eighteen years of age to completely fend for herself. A summer which she would recall in vivid detail—a summer of
growing up.
to be continued . . .
