“Are you up? Are you up now? Wake up so we can go swimming.” I opened my eyes to find Nattie standing over me, staring.
“Stop that! Don’t be a weirdo.” I turned over and listened for her to walk away. And she did.
But it was hot and I felt bad, so I got up anyway.
Nattie, already suited up, was gulping her cornflakes in the kitchen. I made my usual coffee, creamy and sugary.
Mother walked in from the main house. “Oh, good—you’re up.” She smoothed Nattie’s hair, which was a mess. “The society editor called in sick, so I’m covering a wedding on Stone Mountain. What do you say? Come along? It’ll be ten degrees cooler.”
“I’ll stay here. I want to swim,” Nattie said.
“Actually, it’s not a choice, honey. I want you both there,” Mother said. “Unpleasant things happen on Stone Mountain, and I want you to see it.”
“Where there’re lightings?” I asked. Stone Mountain was prominent in Mr. Hank’s news roundups.
“Lightings?” Mother said. “If you mean cross burnings, then yes—that exactly.”
The coffee sloshed around my tongue. “Lightings are supposedly a celebration of southern spirit—that’s what this girl Claudia says.”
“I sincerely hope Claudia is not a close friend,” Mother said.
“Oh, she’s not.”
“Are we going to see a cross on fire?” Nattie asked. “I don’t want to.”
“It’s good to see what happens even when it’s not happening.” Mother ran her fingers through Nattie’s hair, somehow wrangling it into a respectable braid. “And, Ruthie—bring your notebook. I could use you on the fashion aspect. You know I can’t tell organza from organdy.”
“Organdy is usually cotton,” I said, but Mother had ducked into the bathroom to put on her face.
Nattie and I changed into what I now thought of as tea dresses—soft of color and swingy of skirt. Soon we were off in the Savoy, lurching east, past the outskirts of Atlanta along a four-lane road, then a two-lane road—Mother driving, me front-seating with an eye on Nattie in the back. Nattie had brought along a pocketbook filled with rainbow index cards to make her precise notes; she was now organizing them by color.
A half hour later, we pulled into the parking lot, and I was surprised, for some reason, to see Stone Mountain was an honest-to-goodness mountain, an eerie, nearly naked hunk of granite erupting out of the ground. Even more surprising: On the side facing us was the start of a carving chiseled into the stone.
“Why’s there half a horse on the mountain?” Nattie asked.
“Let’s have a look,” Mother said. We walked to the edge of the lot and stared up.
The carving wasn’t so very big. Almost people-sized. And it wasn’t only horses or half horses—two half soldiers were atop them.
“Are there carvings on every side?” Nattie asked.
“Just the one,” Mother said. “From everywhere else, it looks like a gray egg of a mountain. Some call it the great southern Mount Rushmore.”
“Great?” I asked. Nothing about it seemed especially great.
“When I was Nattie’s age,” Mother said, “the Daughters of the Confederacy commissioned it to honor the Confederate troops. The group ran out of money after Robert E. Lee, but I hear they’re back on a fundraising tear and the state is set to buy the place. Stonewall Jackson and Jefferson Davis may make it yet.”
Jefferson Davis, Davis Jefferson—once I thought of Davis and his tribute name, transposed though it might be, I couldn’t forget the feeling of his fingers cradling the back of my neck. I held my hand on that spot and craned to get a better look.
The mountain sat against a perfect sky, a riot of wildflowers bloomed nearby, and the strong sun warmed our shoulders—it was a postcard for how gorgeous Atlanta could be. Except. Except: Carved Confederates were half blasted into the mountain, and beyond the wildflowers there were clearings used to host cross burnings once the strong sun went down.
“I can’t decide if it looks real or looks phony,” Nattie said.
“It’s real, honey,” Mother said. “But now let’s find the other reason we’re here. The more joyful reason.” We followed Mother to a fancy inn on the far side of the parking area. “Looks like a wedding setup to me,” she said without much oomph, pointing to a garden with a gazebo festooned with roses.
“Why’s this news?” Nattie asked, not caring that her Mary Janes were sinking into the red clay. I high-stepped it to avoid the same muddy fate.
Mother smiled. “It’s for the society page. All the vows that are fit to print.”
“What makes a wedding society-worthy?” I asked, but even as I said it, I bet the answer was in the pink booklet.
“Depends where you are. Here in Atlanta or thereabouts,” Mother said, gesturing to the grounds, “if you’re the bride, it’s a matter of what club your family belongs to, and what church you go to, and what your daddy does for a living or what his daddy before him did. And if you’re the groom, it’s a matter of where you were graduated from—University of Virginia, Duke, Ole Miss, Emory, more or less in that order, plus, of course, Georgia, not the most original choice, and the occasional Princeton for the real intellectuals.”
“Was your wedding in the paper?” Nattie asked. “In the society pages?”
“Your dad and I eloped.”
Which was something I had not known. I could picture their black-and-white wedding photo in a carved wooden frame, Mother beaming in a light suit and Dad looking at her adoringly, his mouth to her ear. It never occurred to me no one else was in the shot.
“What did Fontaine have to say about that?” I asked.
“Not a lot, and that was the point.” Mother spun a button of her blouse around until I thought it might fly right off.
I wondered if they eloped because of the Jewish situation, and the wondering made my stomach hurt.
“C’mon, let’s find a spot to observe,” Mother said. The up-front rows were filled with fetchingly dressed guests. We settled into chairs in the past-last row, and Mother gave Nattie and me assignments while we waited for the service to begin. Nattie had the job of recording little facts on her index cards. “And, Ruth, take in what people are wearing. Write fast,” Mother said. “We can make sense of the notes later.”
“I don’t write fast, though.” I thought fast but wrote slow.
“There’s a trick,” Mother said. “Find me a blank page in your notebook.”
I took my EZ-on-the-Eyes notebook out of my pocketbook and flipped past the list of clothes I’d wanted to buy and the books I’d wanted to read and the boys I’d wanted to like me (I’d have to add Davis) until I found a blank sheet, and handed the notebook over.
Mother scribbled. “What’s this say?”
“Let me see,” Nattie said, grabbing it first. She scanned the words. “Gibberish.”
I peered over her shoulder. Mother had written: Th KKK cn hld mtngs hr fr prptty.
“The Ku Klux Klan can hold meetings here for . . . pretty? For property?” I said. I’d heard more about the Klan—and what Mr. Hank called its riffraff ways, against not only Negroes but Jews and homosexuals—than I’d ever heard in the North.
“Perpetuity,” Mother said. “The Klan considers the mountain sacred ground. But that’s not my point at the moment. My point is: Leave out the vowels and you’ll write fast as a fox.”
“You know what else has no vowels?” Nattie said. “The Torah.”
I remembered that—the rabbi taught us that the Hebrew letters were the word’s body and the vowels were its soul. The reader had to add the vowels, the soul, to breathe life into every word.
“You always teach me something new.” Mother gave Nattie’s braid a tug.
As Mother started taking her vowel-less notes, I found myself twisting around in my chair to check the Stn Mntn summit for any inkling of crosses. Some of the trees tapered at the top in a way that made me think of pointy hoods, and I wondered if Davis, Mr. Naturalist, would know the species. I tried to imagine the summit dotted with actual white hoods poking up like bleached thorns.
I rubbed my arms, feeling those thorns poking right up through my skin.
A string quartet struck up something string-y, and a line of bridesmaids in sky-blue dresses walked down the aisle partnered with guys in gray suits. Later, one of the bridesmaids, who had on enough hair spray to asphyxiate the bridal party, told me the bride’s dress had seventy-seven buttons.
The musicians started up the wedding march, and the bride entered on the arm of her father. Her dress was an organza (not organdy) tea-length number with a sweetheart neckline and a short-sleeved organza jacket with a dramatic collar. Said another way: swthrt nck wth orgnz jckt.
The bride looked twenty, tops—about the same age as Sara, though there was no evidence Sara was of the marrying mind. Still, the back of Seventeen and Mademoiselle were filled with ads for china and silver patterns—Fontaine had been asking which ones I liked; “A girl should know her own taste,” she’d said—and it gave me a fizzy feeling in my throat to see this organza girl and think she could be Sara or, someday, me.
“Who gives this bride in marriage?” the minister asked.
“Her father does,” the man said. He placed a delicate kiss atop the bride’s veil.
I reached out for Nattie’s hand, and I saw she was holding her breath something fierce, her cheeks puffed out, her eyes fluttery.
“You want to take a walk?” I whispered, and she exhaled. “Or should we wait until they kiss—the bride and the boy?”
“Kiss?” she said. “Ew, let’s go now.”
Mother gave us permission with a nod.
We didn’t have the right shoes for an actual walk, so we headed under the low canopy of a tree that might have been a willow. I held back a branch, delicate and swoopy, so Nattie could cross under, and we stood together amid leaves and tall grasses that left little bits of dew on our dresses.
“You okay?” I asked.
“Look at that.” Nattie pointed to a small brass plaque nailed into the tree, listing the mountain’s height and such. “No one would ever see that hiding here.”
I picked a leaf from the tree and started shredding it into skinny green matchsticks. “Why do you hold your breath?”
She shrugged, copying the wording of the plaque exactly on one of her index cards: “The carvings on Stone Mountain are three times as big as Mount Rushmore. On a clear day, you can see more than forty-five miles from the top of the mountain.”
“Don’t stop breathing, okay?” I said.
“That’s what happened to Dad.” Her fingers were inky. “He stopped breathing.”
My eyes instantly welled up. “He did.”
She nodded, slowly at first and then sort of frantically.
We stood together in the shelter of the willow, or whatever it was, watching the leaves sway, hiding us, then not-hiding us, then hiding us.
By the time we wound our way back to the roses, the ceremony was over, and the bride and groom were smiling for photos. The bride’s gown had collected twigs in its hem.
Mother was still scribbling. “Let’s see what you girls got,” she said, and we handed over our notes. She scanned quickly, a pencil behind her ear keeping company with a pearl earring that must have been Fontaine’s. “Good, good.”
“Dad won’t be here to walk any of us to our weddings.” Nattie held on to her braid.
Maybe Mother teared up, or maybe the sun was in her eyes. “I’ll be there.” She said it right away. “I’ll walk each of you down every single aisle we find.”
Nattie leaned into Mother the way Frooshka leaned into me.
Mother looped one arm around Nattie and scribbled away with the other. “That’s the other reason I wanted you to see this place.”
“Because you needed to cry?” Nattie asked.
“I cry every day, Natalie. No, I wanted you to see the beauty side by side with ugliness. If one of these nights you see a flicker on this mountain—not that you could really see it from Atlanta, but putting that aside for the moment—you need to know that along with organdy and happiness, there’s a hatred we can’t look away from. Two years ago, thirty-five hundred Knights of the Ku Klux Klan stood on this mountain, lit three large crosses, and declared that being white—not Negro, not Jewish—made you as solid as Stone Mountain.”
That sent a chill straight down my throat. “Can we go to the top?” I asked, shading my eyes and looking up. “Is there a trail?”
Mother put down her notebook. “There used to be, on the other side. I’d sometimes climb here with girlfriends on a sunny afternoon.”
“Did it seem strange?” I asked. “To hike among the half-carved Confederates?”
“We didn’t give it a second thought. But we’re not exactly dressed for an expedition today.”
You’d think I would have cared about that, but what I cared about was seeing the spot where the hate happened.
Back in the parking lot, we dropped our pocketbooks in the Savoy and found a wooden sign carved with yellow letters for the Walk-Up Trail—one mile to the summit.
We climbed single file—Nattie, then me, then Mother. The ascent was gentle to start, skipping over smooth stones, but the trail soon turned heart-thumpy. The ground was strewn with rocks, with tall grasses, their roots forced up through the stone, and with little yellow daisies that were impossible not to love. It was hard to keep our footing, Nattie in her slick-soled Mary Janes, and Mother and me in low-heeled pumps. I tried to imagine hauling a pine cross and a jug of kerosene up this path. I tried to imagine hating someone enough to strike a match.
Nattie hummed a ditty over and over and over, and Mother was silent for what must’ve been twenty minutes.
At the top, there were giant depressions in the stone, little ponds filled with water, filled with life, filled with shrimp—of all things to be filled with. The rest of the summit was moonlike. There were no signs of burnings. Maybe the ash had floated off the mountain into the ether of constellations.
Maybe, but I couldn’t really tell because it was foggy at the top. We stayed a few minutes, then reversed ourselves, silently sliding back to the security of the Savoy.
In the car, we took off our shoes; Mother drove back stocking-footed.
She filed the story from home, banging away on her Underwood portable typewriter, the carriage dinging every time she got to the end of a line, announcing her progress. My seventy-seven-buttons detail led off the piece, and Mother worked in Nattie’s best fact—about how very far you could see from the top of the mountain. Even though that day the promised view was nowhere in sight.