For breakfast, George Jakes’s mother made him blueberry pancakes and bacon with grits on the side. “If I eat all this I’ll have to wrestle heavyweight,” he said. George weighed a hundred and seventy pounds and had been the welterweight star of the Harvard wrestling team.
“Eat hearty, and give up that wrestling,” she said. “I didn’t raise you to be a dumb jock.” She sat opposite him at the kitchen table and poured cornflakes into a dish.
George was not dumb, and she knew it. He was about to graduate from Harvard Law School. He had finished his final exams, and was as sure as he could be that he had passed. Now he was here at his mother’s modest suburban home in Prince George’s County, Maryland, outside Washington, DC. “I want to stay fit,” he said. “Maybe I’ll coach a high school wrestling team.”
“Now that would be worth doing.”
He looked at her fondly. Jacky Jakes had once been pretty, he knew: he had seen photographs of her as a teenager, when she had aspired to be a movie star. She still looked young: she had the kind of dark-chocolate-colored skin that did not wrinkle. “Good black don’t crack,” the Negro women said. But the wide mouth that smiled so broadly in those old photos was now turned down at the corners in an expression of grim determination. She had never become an actress. Perhaps she had never had a chance: the few roles for Negro women generally went to light-skinned beauties. Anyway, her career had ended before it began when, at the age of sixteen, she had become pregnant with George. She had gained that careworn face raising him alone for the first six years of his life, working as a waitress and living in a tiny house at the back of Union Station, and drilling him in the need for hard work and education and respectability.
He said: “I love you, Mom, but I’m still going on the Freedom Ride.”
She pressed her lips together disapprovingly. “You’re twenty-five years old,” she said. “You please yourself.”
“No, I don’t. Every important decision I’ve ever made, I’ve discussed with you. I probably always will.”
“You don’t do what I say.”
“Not always. But you’re still the smartest person I’ve ever met, and that includes everyone at Harvard.”
“Now you’re just buttering me up,” she said, but she was pleased, he could tell.
“Mom, the Supreme Court has ruled that segregation on interstate buses and bus stations is unconstitutional—but those Southerners just defy the law. We have to do something!”
“How do you think it’s going to help, this bus ride?”
“We’re going to board here in Washington and travel south. We’ll sit at the front, use the whites-only waiting rooms, and ask to be served in the whites-only diners; and when people object we’re going to tell them that the law is on our side, and they are the criminals and troublemakers.”
“Son, I know you’re right. You don’t have to tell me that. I understand the Constitution. But what do you think will happen?”
“I guess we’ll get arrested sooner or later. Then there’ll be a trial, and we’ll argue our case in front of the world.”
She shook her head. “I sure hope you get off that easy.”
“What do you mean?”
“You grew up privileged,” she said. “At least, you did after your white father came back into our lives when you were six years old. You don’t know what the world is like for most colored folk.”
“I wish you wouldn’t say that.” George was stung: he got this accusation from black activists, and it annoyed him. “Having a rich white grandfather pay for my education doesn’t make me blind. I know what goes on.”
“Then maybe you know that getting arrested might be the least bad thing that could happen to you. What if things get rough?”
George knew she was right. The Freedom Riders might be risking worse than jail. But he wanted to reassure his mother. “I’ve had lessons in passive resistance,” he said. All those chosen for the Freedom Ride were experienced civil rights activists, and they had been put through a special training program that included role-playing exercises. “A white man pretending to be a redneck called me nigger, pushed and shoved me, and dragged me out of the room by my heels—and I let him, even though I could have thrown him out the window with one arm.”
“Who was he?”
“A civil rights campaigner.”
“Not the real thing.”
“Of course not. He was acting a part.”
“Okay,” she said, and he knew from her tone that she meant the opposite.
“It’s going to be all right, Mom.”
“I’m not saying any more. Are you going to eat those pancakes?”
“Look at me,” George said. “Mohair suit, narrow tie, hair close-cropped, and shoes shined so bright I could use the toe caps for a shaving mirror.” He usually dressed smartly anyway, but the Riders had been instructed to look ultra-respectable.
“You look fine, except for that cauliflower ear.” George’s right ear was deformed from wrestling.
“Who would want to hurt such a nice colored boy?”
“You have no idea,” she said with sudden anger. “Those Southern whites, they—” To his dismay, tears came to her eyes. “Oh, God, I’m just so afraid they’ll kill you.”
He reached across the table and took her hand. “I’ll be careful, Mom, I promise.”
She dried her eyes on her apron. George ate some bacon, to please her, but he had little appetite. He was more anxious than he pretended. His mother was not exaggerating. Some civil rights activists had argued against the Freedom Ride idea on the grounds that it would provoke violence.
“You’re going to be a long time on that bus,” she said.
“Thirteen days, here to New Orleans. We’re stopping every night for meetings and rallies.”
“What have you got to read?”
“The autobiography of Mahatma Gandhi.” George felt he ought to know more about Gandhi, whose philosophy had inspired the civil rights movement’s nonviolent protest tactics.
She took a book from on top of the refrigerator. “You might find this a little more entertaining. It’s a bestseller.”
They had always shared books. Her father had been a literature professor at a Negro college, and she had been a reader from childhood. When George was a boy he and his mother had read the Bobbsey Twins and the Hardy Boys together, even though all the heroes were white. Now they regularly passed each other books they had enjoyed. He looked at the volume in his hand. Its transparent plastic cover told him it was borrowed from the local public library. “To Kill a Mockingbird,” he read. “This just won a Pulitzer Prize, didn’t it?”
“And it’s set in Alabama, where you’re going.”
“Thanks.”
A few minutes later he kissed his mother good-bye, left the house with a small suitcase in his hand, and caught a bus to Washington. He got off at the downtown Greyhound station. A small group of civil rights activists had gathered in the coffee shop. George knew some of them from the training sessions. They were a mixture of black and white, male and female, old and young. As well as a dozen or so Riders, there were some organizers from the Congress of Racial Equality, a couple of journalists from the Negro press, and a few supporters. CORE had decided to split the group in two, and half would leave from the Trailways bus station across the street. There were no placards and no television cameras: it was all reassuringly low-key.
George greeted Joseph Hugo, a fellow law student, a white guy with prominent blue eyes. Together they had organized a boycott of the Woolworth’s lunch counter in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Woolworth’s was integrated in most states but segregated in the South, like the bus service. But Joe had a way of disappearing just before a confrontation, and George had him pegged as a well-meaning coward. “Are you coming with us, Joe?” he asked, trying to keep the skepticism out of his voice.
Joe shook his head. “I just came by to say good luck.” He smoked long mentholated cigarettes with white filter tips, and he was twitchily tapping one on the edge of a tin ashtray.
“Pity. You’re from the South, aren’t you?”
“They’re going to call us outside agitators. It would have been useful to have a Southerner on the bus to prove them wrong.”
“I can’t, I have stuff to do.”
George did not press Joe. He was scared enough himself. If he started to discuss the dangers he might talk himself out of going. He looked around the group. He was pleased to see John Lewis, a quietly impressive theology student who was a founding member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the most radical of the civil rights groups.
Their leader called for attention and began a short statement to the press. While he was speaking George saw, slipping into the coffee shop, a tall white man of forty in a crumpled linen suit. He was handsome though heavy, his face showing the flush of a drinker. He looked like a bus passenger, and no one paid him any attention. He sat next to George and, putting one arm around his shoulders, gave him a brief hug.
This was Senator Greg Peshkov, George’s father.
Their relationship was an open secret, known to Washington insiders but never publicly acknowledged. Greg was not the only politician to have such a secret. Senator Strom Thurmond had paid for the college education of a daughter of his family’s maid: the girl was rumored to be his child—which did not stop Thurmond being a rabid segregationist. When Greg had appeared, a total stranger to his six-year-old son, he had asked George to call him Uncle Greg, and they had never found a better euphemism.
Greg was selfish and unreliable but, in his own way, he cared for George. As a teenager George had gone through a long phase of anger with his father, but then he had come to accept him for what he was, figuring that half a father was better than none.
“George,” Greg said now in a low voice, “I’m worried.”
“You and Mom too.”
“What did she say?”
“She thinks those Southern racists are going to kill us all.”
“I don’t think that’ll happen, but you could lose your job.”
“Has Mr. Renshaw said something?”
“Heck, no, he doesn’t know anything about this, yet. But he’ll find out soon enough if you get arrested.”
Renshaw, who was from Buffalo, was a childhood friend of Greg’s, and senior partner in a prestigious Washington law firm, Fawcett Renshaw. Last summer Greg had got George a vacation job as a law clerk at the firm and, as they both had hoped, the temporary post had led to the offer of a full-time job after graduation. It was a coup: George would be the first Negro to work there as anything other than a cleaner.
George said with a touch of irritation: “The Freedom Riders are not lawbreakers. We’re trying to get the law enforced. The segregationists are the criminals. I would have expected a lawyer such as Renshaw to understand that.”
“He understands it. But all the same he can’t hire a man who has been in trouble with the police. Believe me, it would be the same if you were white.”
“But we’re on the side of the law!”
“Life is unfair. Student days are over—welcome to the real world.”
The leader called out: “Everybody, get your tickets and check your bags, please.”
George stood up.
Greg said: “I can’t talk you out of this, can I?”
He looked so forlorn that George longed to be able to give in, but he could not. “No, I’ve made up my mind,” he said.
“Then please just try to be careful.”
George was touched. “I’m lucky to have people who worry about me,” he said. “I know that.”
Greg squeezed his arm and left quietly.
George stood in line with the others at the window and bought a ticket to New Orleans. He walked to the blue-and-gray bus and handed over his bag to be loaded in the luggage compartment. Painted on the side of the bus were a large greyhound and the slogan: IT’S SUCH A COMFORT TO TAKE THE BUS . . . AND LEAVE THE DRIVING TO US. George got on board.
An organizer directed him to a seat near the front. Others were told to sit in interracial pairs. The driver paid no attention to the Riders, and the regular passengers seemed no more than mildly curious. George opened the book his mother had given him and read the first line.
A moment later the organizer directed one of the women to sit next to George. He nodded to her, pleased. He had met her a couple of times before and liked her. Her name was Maria Summers. She was demurely dressed in a pale gray cotton frock with a high neckline and a full skirt. She had skin the deep, dark color of George’s mother’s, a cute flat nose, and lips that made him think about kissing. He knew she was at the University of Chicago Law School, and like him was about to graduate, so they were probably the same age. He guessed she was not only smart but determined: she would have to be, to get into Chicago Law with two strikes against her, being both female and black.
He closed his book as the driver started the engine and pulled away. Maria looked down and said: “To Kill a Mockingbird. I was in Montgomery, Alabama, last summer.”
Montgomery was the state capital. “What were you doing there?” George said.
“My father’s a lawyer, and he had a client who sued the state. I was working for Daddy during the vacation.”
“Did you win?”
“No. But don’t let me keep you from reading.”
“Are you kidding? I can read anytime. How often does a guy on a bus have a girl as pretty as you sit down next to him?”
“Oh, my,” she said. “Someone warned me you were a smooth talker.”
“I’ll tell you my secret, if you want.”
“Okay, what is it?”
“I’m sincere.”
She laughed.
He said: “But please don’t spread that around. It would spoil my reputation.”
The bus crossed the Potomac and headed into Virginia on Route 1. “You’re in the South, now, George,” said Maria. “Are you scared yet?”
“You bet I am.”
“Me, too.”
The highway was a straight, narrow slash across miles of spring-green forest. They passed through small towns where the men had so little to do that they stopped to watch the bus go by. George did not look out of the window much. He learned that Maria had been brought up in a strict churchgoing family, her grandfather a preacher. George said he went to church mainly to please his mother, and Maria confessed that she was the same. They talked all the way to Fredericksburg, fifty miles along the route.
The Riders went quiet as the bus entered the small historic town, where white supremacy still reigned. The Greyhound terminal was between two red-brick churches with white doors, but Christianity was not necessarily a good indication in the South. As the bus came to a halt, George saw the restrooms, and was surprised that there were no signs over the doors saying WHITES ONLY and COLORED ONLY.
The passengers got off the bus and stood blinking in the sunshine. Looking more closely, George saw light-colored patches over the toilet doors, and deduced that the segregation signs had been removed recently.
The Riders put their plan into operation anyway. First, a white organizer went into the scruffy restroom at the back, clearly intended for Negroes. He came out unharmed, but that was the easier part. George had already volunteered to be the black person who defied the rules. “Here goes,” he said to Maria, and he walked into the clean, freshly painted restroom that had undoubtedly just had its WHITES ONLY sign removed.
There was a young white man inside, combing his pompadour. He glanced at George in the mirror, but said nothing. George was too scared to pee, but he could not just walk out again, so he washed his hands. The young man left and an older man came in and entered a cubicle. George dried his hands on the roller towel. Then there was nothing else to do, so he went out.
The others were waiting. He shrugged and said: “Nothing. Nobody tried to stop me, no one said anything.”
Maria said: “I asked for a Coke at the counter and the waitress sold me one. I think someone here has decided to avoid trouble.”
“Is this how it’s going to be, all the way to New Orleans?” said George. “Will they just act as if nothing has happened? Then, when we’ve gone, impose segregation again? That would kind of cut the ground from under our feet!”
“Don’t worry,” said Maria. “I’ve met the people who run Alabama. Believe me, they’re not that smart.”