When
I graduated from Bainbridge High School fifty-five years ago, a banquet was
given in honor of the senior class. By today’s standards, it was drab.
All I remember were the frayed tablecloths, the crazed dinner plates, and
half a chicken that had to be eaten with a knife and fork.
Bainbridge was — and in many ways still is — a quintessential Georgia town: depressed and moribund. Its heroes were Franklin Roosevelt, Robert E. Lee, and Jesus Christ in that order. A "banquet" in the Stephen Decatur’s private dining room where the Rotary Club met on Tuesdays was, as far as Bainbridge High School was concerned, about as much honor as it was prudent to bestow on sixteen and seventeen year olds.
Today, with understatement, the event is called simply the Junior-Senior Prom. For over ten years I’ve photographed the overture to this prom, the taking of formal photographs in Willis Park followed by a promenade, which has become so extravagant that the dance afterwards seems almost like an afterthought. It begins at five thirty with the arrival of white stretch limos and a vintage Rolls-Royce bearing two to six couples per car. Some Seniors arrive less ostentatiously, but regardless of how they get there, they are young, beautiful, and at the epicenter of their innocence and vitality.
The girls, wearing evening gowns, makeup, and coiffures that have cost them the whole day and a great deal of money, show nervous excitement one minute, poise the next. They carry roses, orchids, or lilies across their tender, white forearms. The boys wear tuxedos or full-dress suits. Their hair has been moussed and combed, they are clean shaven, and obviously self-conscious, lest they should spoil the effect. Irrelevant as the cosmetics, hairdos, and finery are to the real splendor of these young gods and goddesses, the attention that has been lavished on their exteriors cries out for approval and admiration. It prompts me to ask myself if I were ever this animated and vain.
A few of the mothers have passed from excitement into agitation. They stand, cameras in hand, at the curb awaiting the arrival of their daughters, whom, when they come, they arrange in a row for snapshots, not realizing that they have set them on the green marble memorial to Decatur County’s war dead. No one notices. I move to catch it: In the slanting sunshine, these adolescents, full of life and excitement, juxtaposed against the names of men who died so that they might have this moment, are oblivious to the exquisite irony. I ask myself what those men would think if they could see this scene. Would they be offended by the desecration, or would they feel fulfilled that they had the decisive part in making this day? I, just an onlooker, am thrilled at having caught a glimpse of, if only for a split second, the underbelly of life before it disappears again below the surface of the afternoon.
The photographer has hung a sheet with plastic flowers across the entrance to the gazebo. A couple takes their place in front of it while an assistant straightens a boy’s tie and smoothes a girl’s hair. The assistant steps back, the photographer signals, the couple smiles, and the flash goes off. Another couple replaces them.
By six o’clock the line is long and the park so full of parents and grandparents that it is impossible to move. When all of the Seniors have had their pictures made, they form a line for the promenade. As each couple's name and the names of their parents is called, they step forward and circle the Confederate Soldier. When the last couple has promenaded, they go by whatever means they arrived, to dinner, the dance, and breakfast. I am told that the cost for such an evening can exceed six hundred dollars for a young man and his date, almost half a year’s after-school wages. The crowd in Willis Park disperses, and it is once more a deserted town square.
What will become of these boys and girls in whom I see myself and for whom I feel familiar anxieties? What will come between them and their muse? Which appetites will lift them, which will soil them? Tonight, wrapped in affection and pride, reality is out. Fantasy is in.
Except for a solid and unmoved sentry: the Confederate Soldier. He has witnessed on this very ground the suspension of other realities. He stands at parade rest, his marble face limned by the moonlight, his eyes fixed on the east where tomorrow will rise like the curtain on act two.