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A Southern Look at the Sixties Sarah Colton’s “TILT 68”
At Pomegranate Books in Wilmington on October 9, 2007, Sarah Colton sported a white shirt, low waist jeans and a little scarf tied around the neck à la French. With cropped dark hair tousled in a sexy way, she looked more Parisian than Southern. Smiling a lot, Sarah gave an animated talk about her book, “Tilt 68” set in her native North Carolina in 1968. “Those were very exciting times,” she told an expectant group of twenty to twenty-five people in their fifties, mostly women. “Everything was exciting, the music, the clothes, the writing. The impact on society brought about a radical change.” “Radical change” was what Sarah experienced the most vividly as an eighteen year-old freshman at St Mary’s Junior College. Despite her failing the final French exam, she went on to marry a Frenchman, Pierre. She now lives in Paris with her husband and their three daughters. While raising her daughters in France, Sarah kept reminiscing the Sixties as a time when “what happened outside the classroom was challenging what happened inside the classroom.” She would go on talking about it all the time until eventually, a friend told her to write it down. She did just that and began with “short vignettes” of her memories, thus finding “the mood of the time.” Then, she went on typing it all. “Thanks, Dad!” she exclaimed with a big smile. “I never in my life wanted to take typing lessons,” she confessed. “Meanwhile, the characters started telling me their stories. I used their real names in the draft, then changed them all afterwards. And St Mary’s became ‘Holy Trinity.’ In the end, although based in my personal experience, it was a historical story that became a novel.” Spread over ten years, a family and assignments as a freelance journalist, her writing involved a lot of research. As a result, “the novel documents the nanoseconds before impact on society of the radical change, the revolution,” Sarah explained. There was “divisiveness” in the country about the Vietnam war and the anti-war movement, along with the violence of the 1967 riots in the South. “Every morning on the news we’d hear about sixty or sixty-five people killed,” Sarah commented. “Every morning, sixty or sixty-five people killed,” she repeated with emphasis. “Then there was the drug movement and the Pill on college campuses,” she continued. “The Pill demystified ‘the Cult of the Virgin’. It changed the way women thought about themselves. It gave women career and life choices. Women marched in Washington, whereas before, they were ‘colonized’ by the system and its stereotypes. All that went out the window,” Sarah declared with a large sweep of the arm. “To Louisa, an eighteen year-old freshman in an all-girl Southern college in 1968,” Sarah further explained, “it felt like the map was gone, the road was gone. She was left hacking through the under woods with a machete.” To illustrate her point, Sarah quoted her main character’s reaction to the news of Martin Luther King’s assassination: “What to do? What will happen? What to do? What will happen?” Many of us could relate to Louisa’s “thoughts tearing around in a frantic loop,” for “we’re again in the middle of a new radical change,” Sarah said. “In 1968, the baby boomers were eighteen years old, so the whole society became eighteen too. It created a surge of energy.” Throughout her talk, Sarah defined the Sixties as “a radical change of energy. We believed in everything, we believed we could do anything.” Although Sarah cautioned against the risk of “something chaotic, anarchic,” she affirmed: “the energy of an eighteen year-old can be accessed at any age. It is fabulous,” she added with excitement, “it is a trip!” Was the pun intended? Sarah did not say, but she did tell us that she wrote and completed her book because she had “the discipline and focus that come with being in your fifties.” The author then gracefully encouraged all of us “to take what we have learned and still remember our eighteen year-old hearts.” After her talk, Sarah read a passage of her novel when Louisa’s boyfriend, Simmons, was meeting her parents for dinner. They looked at him favorably from the very beginning, “because he was a fourth degree cousin,” Sarah told us in her introduction. “And that’s always good for Southern parents.” However, Simmons mentioned he might not go to law school depending on the draft. “I always thought I’d like to take some time off between college and law school, but because of the draft, I’ll either have to go straight to law school, or get shipped off to Vietnam- or go to Sweden.” (…) I glared hard at him across the table hoping to head off disaster. In vain. (…) “Sweden?” Daddy asked, truly curious. “What’s in Sweden?” “STOP! STOP!” I screamed with my eyes. (…) “That’s where a lot of people are going who don’t want to go to Vietnam, sir,” he said. (…) “You would go to Sweden in order not to fight for your country.” (…) “Yes, sir,” Simmons plunged ahead. “I believe the war is wrong, sir.” (…) Sarah’s reading was eloquent and dramatic. The word “sir” vibrated with mounting tension. Then, she invited our questions. The first one was obvious, the hard question burning on everybody’s lips: “Could the US war in Iraq repeat the tragedy of the Vietnam war?” “When I did my research,” Sarah answered, “I came across old newspaper articles that claimed the Vietnam war would be fast, twenty days to six months at the most. Didn’t we read the same things about the war in Iraq, five years ago?” Sarah asked. “There was a draft for the Vietnam war,” she added, “whereas there is no draft with the war in Iraq. And if there were a draft, women would be drafted too. I think it would create riots. The power shift is in women’s hands.” “Why did you use the song title ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’ for a chapter of the book?” a lady asked. “Louisa became very fearful,” Sarah explained. “She chickened out at that time. So the song title seemed appropriate, ‘pale’ like when you’re fearful.” Louisa was fearful of the school authority “cracking down” on illegal behavior with drugs and sex, but also afraid of exploring her own sexual energy. “By the time Jackson picked me up on Saturday morning, I was terrified of everything again, and had the feeling of leaving the frying pan and jumping back into the fire. (…) As we burst through the door into the living room, the music from the hi-fi system came crashing into our ears, full blast. ‘You’re lost, little girl! You’re lost little girl! You’re lost, tell me who are you?’ (…) The living room was empty and only an acrid smell and a full ashtray on the coffee table indicated any recent activity. …but the music and the words continued to filter through the void, casting a suddenly eerie mood on the virtually quiet apartment.” “Music brought us onto higher levels,” Sarah said of the song by the Doors. As she autographed copies of her book, she played on a small boom box some of the 60’s music. We all smiled and hummed along. She’d made her point vivid and clear. Mingling in the crowd, I met three of Sarah’s old school mates who’d made the trip from all over North Carolina just for the book signing. They were all happy to see Sarah and revisit their memories. I was so enthralled by Sarah’s talk that I arranged for an interview with her the next day. We met at the beach for an intimate conversation by the sea. I was fascinated by Sarah who, in many ways, mirrored my own life, only in reverse. Sarah is American and lives in France. I am French and live in America. She wrote about growing up in the Sixties in the South as a work of fiction, a novel. I wrote about growing up in the Sixties in France as a work of non-fiction, a memoir. So I couldn’t help but discuss the book from a writer’s point of view. CM: “Sarah, what made you want to tell your story as a fictionalized novel?” SC: “I am a literary writer, a fiction writer. I am more interested in the story.” CM: “As a writer, I am impressed with your ability to create twists in the plot that illustrate the core issues of the era. For instance, you have Louisa’s first boy friend, Luke, enlisted for Vietnam, wounded and reported lost in action. Her roommate dates the black maid’s son who drops out of school after Martin Luther King’s assassination, to become an activist in the civil rights movement. Was any of that true to facts?” SC: “Yes, I did know people to whom all of this happened. But I changed the facts, I combined different persons’ traits into my characters. I manipulated the facts, but it is not untruthful. The novel is true to the spirit of the time.” CM: “The novel is basically a slice of Louisa’s life sandwiched between her high school and her college graduation parties. I love how you loop the story back to the beginning, two years earlier in her life.” SC: “Thank you! Yes, it’s a slice of the Sixties from a Southern perspective. We heard about what happened in California and elsewhere in the country where women were freer to come and go in a more open society. I thought it was important to write about how the energy of the time impacted women in the South, where the society was more closed. The girls in the book had upper middle class sheltered lives. They were the ones who would have profited the most from the old system. And yet, they rebelled against it. They couldn’t stand the hypocrisy, the double standards. There was a curfew only for the girls. The girls couldn’t go to unchaperoned parties, they were ‘campused.’ The girls were scared of sex, of pregnancy.” CM: “Louisa’s coming of age over those two years is punctuated by the dramatic events that seem to shake her friends’ world more than her own. For instance, her ‘goodie-two-shoes’ schoolmate Juliet gets pregnant and ends up giving herself an abortion. By contrast, Louisa is put on the Pill by her gynecologist to regulate her menstruation.” SC: “In the first part of the book, Louisa is innocent. She takes things straight. She is idealistic. But in the chapter ‘The End of Things,’ three major things happen that push her into fear and depression: Luke goes to Vietnam, Juliet gives herself an abortion and Simmons leaves the country to avoid the draft. Let me read for you the very last paragraph of ‘The End of Things.’ Louisa is in a phone booth trying to call Simmons before he leaves the country. She just missed his call. ‘There was a click, and the phone went dead. Everything was quiet, dead quiet, and I sat there in that basement room staring at the spread out coins on the little gray shelf with cigarette burns on it. Then, after a while I realized there was noise in the quiet. I felt it first and then heard it. Something like the rush of water through pipes somewhere in the darkness. And occasional faint creakings, as if the walls of the building were shifting, imperceptibly, in the heat.’ CM: “So for Louisa, ‘the end of things’ is the end of innocence. SC: “Yes, exactly. Nothing’s the same, everything’s different. But there is hope in the darkness. She can hear the water running in the pipes. It’s not dead. It’s life.” CM: “The second part of the book describes Louisa’s second year at Holy Trinity. What would you say becomes her priority?”
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SC: “She must survive her last year in school and graduate. So she comes up with a strategy: study, stay away from the other girls, the trouble makers.” CM: “Did that work?” SC: “No, mainly because of the arrival of the Pill. The availability of the Pill on campus made women safer, but it also made them angry. Even as it gave them more freedom, it made them realize that women had been colonized all along. So Louisa and her friends want to rebel against ‘the Cult of the Virgin,’ against the whole system. They form ‘TNT,’ a girls’ club whose purpose is to destroy the system.” CM: “What kind of actions do they take?” SC: “They take everybody’s toothbrushes, hide them in the closet. Little things like that, more disruptive than destructive.” CM: “Until the very end, a week before graduation. Louisa and her friends get drunk and throw an old sofa out the window. You don’t tell us whether they just did it out of drunkenness or as a symbolic gesture of throwing the old system out the window.” SC: “No, I want the readers to figure it out for themselves.” CM: “Sarah, why did you title your book ‘Tilt 68?’ SC: “It’s about the pin ball machines that Louisa and her friends played in college. If you push too hard, it all stops. The game’s over and it flashes ‘Tilt.’ I think that’s what happened in 1968. The pressure from the radical change made the old society come to a stop and tilt.” CM: “What did you integrate from that ‘radical change’ of society?” SC: “A need to be free.” CM: “What would you tell today’s women about freedom?” SC: “I think we need to continue asking ‘How can we best use the freedom we have?’ Otherwise, it can take you over the edge of something very destructive.” CM: “Sarah, in your book’s ‘Acknowledgements’ you state: ‘When writing this novel, I was often walking a razor thin path strewn with sudden and unexpected sink holes...’ So, what advice would you give writers, especially women?” SC: “Write about something you care about, and be honest about it. Have confidence in your own process, and read a lot about what you like writing about.” CM: “You also concluded: ‘Amazingly, I also appreciate the fact that while writing this novel I worked full time as a free-lance writer.’ CM: “Was it because of the structure it provided?” SC: “Yes. I want to emphasize the importance of structuring your time. Write everyday, even if it’s for ten minutes at first.” CM: “How many hours a day did you write for your first novel?” SC: “Two hours a day in the beginning, up to twelve, thirteen hours a day toward the end. It’s like having ‘a secret garden.’ Visit your secret garden every day. Weed it, water it, pull out the rocks. Feed it, then it starts feeding you.” CM: “Any new seeds for literary flowers, in your secret garden?” SC: “A novel on families and belongings, and something real short, ironic. Like a children’s book for adults. But I can’t tell you about it!” CM: “Thank you so much, Sarah, for making time between airplanes to share your creative process with us so generously.” SC: “Thank you, Christine. It’s been a real pleasure.” While writing this article, I kept wondering about something Sarah said at her book signing: “we’re again in the middle of a new radical change.” And so, we could rekindle the flame of our eighteen year-old hearts and believe with Louisa’s friend that “we might have reached a turning point. I really believe we have! We could change the system.”
Christine Moughamian is a writer and photographer from France, residing in Wilmington, N.C.
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