Letter to My Daughter: A Novel - By George Bishop Page 0,51

of cocoa. Most surprising of all was when Traci Broussard, cheerleader and CHS-SHA homecoming queen, who we’d always considered the luckiest and most enviable girl in our class, arrived Friday morning with her own tattoo, a heart broken in two under a banner that said “Les blessures d’amour durent pour toujours”—love’s wounds last forever. She solemnly took her place in the circle with the charity cases, sitting knee-to-knee with them in her stadium coat, and quietly wept for much of the day, no one knew why.

Christy Lee declared it a sit-in and said they wouldn’t return to classes until the academic staff council allowed me back at school. Someone strung up a bed sheet in the oak tree, “Justice for Laura Jenkins!” Word spread, and more girls abandoned their books and pencils and streamed out onto the lawn, effectively canceling classes for the rest of the day. Anxious mothers of freshmen arrived by car to take their daughters home; they’d seen such things on TV and they never ended well. Boys from CHS began trickling over, and by Friday afternoon the crowd had grown to several dozen. A couple of boys with especially long hair strummed guitars and sang protest songs as they imagined the hippies did. They got up chants, girls made speeches, and the senior class president wrote a poem to commemorate the occasion, called “The Winter of Our Discontent.” Anne Harding told me that Sister Mary Margaret had been spotted at the window of her second-story classroom, watching the goings-on with a faint but unmistakable smile on her face. It was a wholly peaceful demonstration, marred only when a boy named Randy, who people said was high on marijuana, fell from a tree and broke his wrist. The sixties had come at last to Sacred Heart Academy.

My only regret is that I wasn’t there to see it, stuck as I was at home in Zachary. But “it was huge,” Anne assured me. A Channel 9 reporter came with a cameraman to cover the story, and it made the evening news that night, prompting my parents to cluck their tongues in disapproval. No wonder, they said, that I’d gone bad, considering the school I was in. What were those nuns thinking, letting the girls run wild like that? It only proved, my father said, what he suspected all along, that the pope was aligned with the Jews and hippies to hand the country over to the Communists.

But the sit-in worked. At their meeting Friday afternoon, the academic staff council found itself in a quandary. As much as they disapproved of the girls’ actions, the school couldn’t very well expel all the students who had tattoos now. Traci Broussard? Anne Harding? Soo Chee Chong? Impossible. So they voted to rescind my probation; I would be allowed to return to school on Monday morning and could graduate with my class after all. But they ordered that the school handbook be revised immediately to make explicit the policy regarding tattoos, clearly stating that, in line with its Catholic mission to provide a sound academic and moral education for young ladies, the school would henceforth bar any girl with a tattoo, visible or not, from attending Sacred Heart Academy.

“We won!” Christy Lee said over the phone that night. “Power to the people!” Sacred Heart would never be the same, she insisted. The administration could never again take the students for granted; they weren’t anybody’s slaves; from now on, their voices would have to be heard. In fact, Christy had already spoken to some of the other girls about starting a black student caucus at the campus. “It’s about time, don’t you think?” she asked.

• • •

Well. It wasn’t over yet. As you must know by now, Liz, such an upset to the accepted order of things can’t go unanswered. The next week there were angry visits and calls to the principal’s office, and letters to the editor of the local Morning Advocate deploring the shocking “tattoo incident” at one of the city’s most venerable institutes of secondary education. Psychologists weighed in with theories of sadomasochism and mass hysteria. The alumnae association got involved, the PTA got involved. A couple of fathers of students were prominent local attorneys, and they got involved. Three of the girls who’d gotten tattoos, it turned out, were under eighteen. The consensus among the parents and school administration was that someone, somewhere, had to pay. And as you must know, too, Liz, it’s easy enough to find a