My Year with Eleanor by Noelle Hancock

Author:Noelle Hancock
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins

Chapter Eleven

The purpose of life is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear, for newer and richer experience.

—ELEANOR ROOSEVELT

As a kid I often dreamed about falling. It was never clear where I was falling from, but it was obvious where I was headed. During these dreams my body would jerk violently, waking me up before I hit the ground. (“You’re lucky,” my childhood best friend had said in a tone of deep certainty. “If you hit the ground in the dream, you die in real life. It’s a scientific fact.”) For twenty-nine years, skydiving had literally been my worst nightmare.

I thought about all the physical risks Eleanor faced in her lifetime. In 1933, she took a two-and-a-half-mile ride underground deep into an Ohio coal mine. Coal mines were dangerous places, vulnerable to roof cave-ins, explosions, and flooding. When these disasters occurred, rescuing the miners was a difficult and often impossible task. But Eleanor wanted to witness the miners’ working conditions for herself and ultimately deemed them “dark, dank and utterly terrifying.”

She later attended a meeting of the Southern Conference for Human Welfare in Birmingham, Alabama. Back in 1938, state law prohibited blacks and whites from sitting together at public gatherings. Eleanor strode into the racially divided auditorium and sat on the “black side” with her friend, civil rights leader Mary McLeod Bethune. When informed by the police that she was breaking the law and had to sit on the opposite side with the whites, she picked up her chair and placed it in the center aisle. She never stopped fighting for equal rights, even when threats were made on her life.

In 1958, she was about to fly to Tennessee to speak at a civil-rights workshop when she received a phone call from the FBI. “We can’t guarantee your safety,” they said. “The Klan’s put a $25,000 bounty on your head. We can’t protect you.”

“I didn’t ask for your protection,” the former First Lady retorted. “I have a commitment. I’m going.” At the Nashville airport she met up with a friend, a seventy-one-year-old white woman. They got into a car and drove off into the night alone, their only protection a loaded pistol placed on the front seat between them. If Eleanor could pack heat and face down a bunch of homicidal racists at the age of seventy-four, I could skydive. Though I knew my skydiving wouldn’t change the world, I did think it could change me. And if I could take this kind of risk, maybe then, if I had a chance to make a difference in someone’s life someday, I’d have the courage to do it.

Eleanor once said, “It is only by inducing others to go along that changes are accomplished and work is done.” She was referring to leaders like Lincoln, Gandhi, and Churchill, who had to have a following in order to bring about real reform. I’d decided to co-opt this principle and use it as an excuse to make Bill, Chris, and Jessica jump out of the plane with me.

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