These Dreams of You

~ ~ ~

At first she’s determined to remain in Los Angeles, but at the request of the campaign, purely for organizational purposes she accompanies the body on its flight back to New York to lie in Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, which she can remember walking by during the short time she lived there, never suspecting this. Four days after his murder the coffin is carried by train from New York to Washington and she tries to hide herself in one of the cars, hide from the widow he married after dating the actress who played his dead sister, hide from those who were part of the campaign, hide more than anything from the hundreds of thousands along the track, old men with flags saluting and boy scouts with caps over their hearts, homemade signs that urge GOODBYE GOODBYE GOODBYE to the train that only proceeds more slowly as the crowds swell. Those are the ones she can’t stand to look at — until finally she looks and it’s at the sight of wet black faces sobbing more for him than any white man in memory that she bursts into tears. When the train passes an anonymous young woman fallen to her knees in the grass holding her face in her hands, Jasmine wonders, Do I have the right, as a woman from another country who hasn’t borne what they have, to hold my face in my hands? and then thinks No, and holds her head anyway.