Page 164 of Jackie

This has drawn us together. Of course. The thought bitter. It would have to be this kind of price. I’ll go with him to Atlanta, but I’m afraid some terrible thing will happen.

“King was a tricky man,” I say.

“He fought for what was right.”

“You told me he was drunk the day of Jack’s funeral—”

“Hoover fed that to us. We’ve all learned since then, Hoover had his reasons.”

I don’t answer.

“So you’ll go,” he says, “for King’s widow’s sake?”

“And yours.”

…

I do not belong here.

—

The words rise in my mind as we walk through the narrow front entrance of the Ebenezer Baptist Church. The heat is stifling that April day in Atlanta. Two hundred thousand people have streamed into the city.

I clutch Bobby’s hand. He drives a path through the crowd. We find space in a pew. I barely hear the words. Even King’s voice playing over the loudspeaker—the last message he gave—is distorted, like it’s coming across a great distance. I can’t stop looking at the faces—devastated, oddly silent, no shock, just an awful resignation. They’ve seen this too many times before. This kind of violence has already taken husbands, fathers, sons.

When the service ends, I grip Bobby’s hand again, and we pass back through the sea of bodies toward the shaved rectangle of light that marks the exit. We’re adrift, just the two of us again, our lives and actions untethered from everyone else.

“People will be outraged for a while,” I say on the plane heading home. “They’ll feel sad, and guilty, but they hate feeling that way. It won’t last. Then they’ll turn.”

I know how harsh it sounds, but I can’t get out from under it.

“I don’t believe that,” Bobby says.

“I know.”

…

I do not belong here.

—

Those same words rising in me again, days later in Hyannis Port, as a stream of young men arrive in their dark-blue suits, their light-gray suits, loosening their ties. Some I know. Others seem familiar. I’ve seen these young men, or men like them, a thousand times before—fresh-faced aides pulling into the drive, stepping out of cars, hauling weekend bags to rooms upstairs, reappearing in loafers, polos, khaki shorts, golf sweaters. There’s iced tea, lemonade, sometimes an early daiquiri. There are cigarettes and ashtrays, and they sit around the room and talk about the challenges and opportunities created by King’s death, what needs to be considered, what can be capitalized on, shaped into rhetoric, and no matter how moral the cause is, the parsing of it into strategy feels predatory.

I sit in my corner and listen. Bobby asked me to come, so I’m here. When he speaks, his eyes blaze, more impassioned than the others. This is, after all, what drives him, this desire to set the world on a better, more just course, to lift those who’ve been pushed down, to give them voice in the world. This is what makes him more. This is what I believe in and will always love.

Sandwiches and more drinks are brought in. The talk shifts. A lightness restored to the room. So easy it makes my skin crawl.

I see it then—what I’ve known for too long. This is what those Black men and women in the Baptist Church will never have: the choice to turn away.

I stand up. Bobby glances at me. He must see something new on my face, because he stops talking, he’s on his feet, heading toward me as I head for the door.

“Jackie,” he says; he is close to me, that sweet, crushed hunger in his voice. I avert my eyes from him toward a photograph of Jack on the console, one I have not been able to look at head-on for over four years. I look at it squarely now as I walk out of that room. It is all distilled in a moment—intimate and beloved—a different time, a different life.

When I see Onassis again, I understand that he has simply been there. Waiting. The sense of him emerging. He’s been a shadow in my life—an outline, mythical.

I remember something Lee said once. “For Ari, everything is a chess game. His patience is enduring.”

He’s offered his plane to fly me and the children to Palm Beach for Easter. I wonder how he knew our plans. Does it matter? He’s on his way to meet his daughter in Nassau. He talks to the children as the plane heads south. John, seven now, loves anything in flight. Ari brings him up to the cockpit to sit with the captain and work the controls.

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