18.

In 1965, I can see Dr. Larry Stone, professor of religion, stapling posters to the trees on campus. They announced a trip in March to join a big civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama.

Be Part of the History of Your Time.
Join hands with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
END
Racial injustice in the South.
We SHALL Overcome

I had my first real girlfriend then, and sex got mixed up in my politics.

Jenny was a folksinger and always talked about how strict her father was and how he would be apoplectic if he discovered his daughter participating in left-wing causes, so she had to be careful, Jenny told me. She wouldn’t, therefore, be going to Selma, no—but when I mentioned that I was kind of, sort of thinking about going, her body became electric, and she sang “We Shall Overcome” softly in my ear and let me caress her inner thighs.

At this point, Mr. Cock became involved. While caressing a young lady’s thighs covered by the denim of blue jeans wasn’t, perhaps, exactly an admission to her inner sanctum, Mr. Cock reasoned that I was on my way.

At this point, Mr. Cock made the decision for me—he was sending himself to Jenny Gleason’s vagina via a voter registration program for Negroes in Selma, Alabama.

The information meeting drew a healthy crowd—maybe fifty or sixty students, including one of the conservatives, who sat in the back row holding up a poster that said SPONGE— Society for the Prevention of Negroes Getting Everything.

“This is,” Dr. Stone said, his voice turned into echoes and screeches by the bad PA system, “one of the profound moments of our time. Years from now, your grandchildren will ask you where you were when Dr. King and his followers joined hands and marched to Montgomery, Alabama. When the histories of the twentieth century are written, these days will have a prominent place. Your grandchildren will ask you where you were that fateful day.”

I picked up a schedule and a form I was to have my parents sign. Since I wasn’t yet twenty-one, I needed their permission to go. Now this was a problem. My parents—while basically good, kind people—were also white people of their times.

“Those Negroes,” my father once told me.

“Yes?”

“Those Negroes have to help themselves out, you know. We can’t do it for them.”

“This country has brutalized the Negroes,” I said, quoting Dr. Stone.

“Well, you’ll see. We can’t do it for them.”

What did that mean, I wondered. When I got angry with him, I yelled it out, “What does that mean? We have to help; it’s our duty!”

“You can’t sit this game out,” Dr. Stone said. “If you don’t help the Negro gain the basic rights of citizenship, then the blood of the Negro is on your hands. You are as guilty as some Klansman in a white sheet setting fire to a Negro church. Think about it.”

“The government is up to no good,” my dad said, picking up a flake of tobacco from his tongue. “No good at all.”

“Oh, baby” is what Jenny Gleason said when I told her I was going with Dr. Stone on the trip to Montgomery. Suddenly, in the middle of Iowa, I, who hadn’t been out of the Midwest in my life, slurred “Montgomery” as though I were a southerner.

Jenny leaned back on the couch and spread her legs, as if inviting me in, and I began stroking her crotch, which seemed to soften like melting ice cream. I was underneath the bra in no time. Her nipples were as erect as my cock.

“Oh, baby,” she said.

“Ryan. Rick Ryan,” I said to Dr. Stone the next morning, and he checked me off his list, which had thirty or forty names.

Three other people eventually showed up—Wade Leonard, Jeannie Farago, and Mary Rombauer.

We met in front of Lennox Hall, the men’s dormitory.

“Wait a minute,” Dr. Stone said. “I can’t believe we don’t have more students than you four. My meeting had ten times that many people, didn’t it?”

He said that to Mary Rombauer, who just giggled, unable to answer.

“Look at this. They signed up. Joe Everling, Dawn Moore, Everette Gordon . . . thirty-two people. They all signed up, gave me their parental permission sheets. They were all ready to take freedom south.”

He walked up and down the road as if his movement might bring the volunteers in.

“I suppose we won’t be needing the school bus,” Dr. Stone said after another half an hour. He sighed and then slowly walked over to a yellow Blue Bird bus. The bus drove away, and the five of us got into Wade Leonard’s 1959 Ford station wagon, which smelled vaguely like dirty jockstraps. It was a kind of testosterone odor. Wade was a varsity wrestler and wore the purple and white letterman’s jacket of the college.

Just as we were about to pull out, Steve Unger, my folk-singer roommate came clomping over in his engineer boots. He carried his big Gibson in a guitar case and wore oversized sunglasses. He looked like a celebrity.

“Did you bring a change of clothes along?” I asked, ever the boy from Janesville.

“I’m a troubadour, man. Got clean underwear and a tooth-brush in my guitar case.”

It was a tight fit, but all six of us got into the old Ford.

Wade’s car engine turned over slowly, as if it were worried about such a long trip. Once the engine caught, the engine and then the car body and then the six of us vibrated.

Just as we were pulling out of the parking lot, Steve began singing “We Shall Overcome.” Only Jenny was there to see us off, and her clear alto voice echoed back to our off-key harmony, and then we were on our way, to save the Negroes in Alabama.

Dr. Stone passed out copies of mimeographed materials with titles like “Tips for Dealing With Racists,” “What To Do If You Get Arrested,” and “Avoiding Injury and Death.”

“Ah, Dr. Stone,” Mary Rombauer said, “on the second page of ‘Avoiding Injury and Death,’ where the specific advice is supposed to be—well, it’s empty. I mean the page is blank.”

“Oh, my. I was in such a hurry, maybe I forgot.”

He began rummaging through a battered leather briefcase.

“Let’s see if I have a copy.”

I was only halfway listening to this, because I wondered when Dr. Stone would realize that he didn’t have an OK from my parents. While he had, as it turned out, forgotten the sheets on avoiding injury and death, he pretty quickly did remember that I hadn’t turned in my permission slip.

“Tell you what, Ryan, with so few people on our good pilgrimage, why don’t you try calling your parents. A verbal go-ahead would be enough for me.”

As Wade Leonard’s car drove south on 218, Dr. Stone said we should stop at the first phone booth we saw. It was beside a drive-in restaurant. I went into the phone booth and folded the door closed behind me. I laid out a stack of quarters on the little shelf in the booth, took a deep breath, and rehearsed what I was about to say. I figured my mother would answer.

“Mom,” I’d say, a little too brightly. “Mom, I’m going on this field trip.”

The phone at the other end kept buzzing, and no one answered.

“She’s not home,” I said when I came out of the phone booth. “Look. We can keep calling as we go.” Maybe we’d get there before I reached her.

“Mom,” I’d say, “you’ll just never guess where I am.”

Just before Mount Pleasant, in the middle of a discussion about how to roll yourself up into a ball if a policeman started whacking you with a billy club, Wade rear-ended a Cadillac. Truth be told, hearing these stories about the ferocity of Southern law enforcement officers had made us all nervous. The car crash seemed inevitable somehow.

The driver of the car we hit got out, carefully arranged a kind of Frank Sinatra straw businessman’s hat on his head, walked to the rear of his car, looked at the damage. The car bumpers of the old Ford and the new Cadillac were hooked together like two male deer racks. One of the Ford’s headlights was shattered.

The Cadillac driver leaned over the interlocked bumpers and opened his trunk. He pulled out a Speed Graphic camera and began photographing the damage. Done with that, he asked us to step out of the car and photographed all of us.

“Never know just what photographs you might need,” the man said with a smile.

Then he did a sketch of the accident on graph paper and told us that he was an insurance agent.

“I always travel equipped for moments like this. It’s a life of accidents, you know.”

Then we all sat on the bumper of the Ford and bounced it a few times. The two cars, as if done with their business together, pulled apart.

We started south again. The old Ford keep steering to the right, as if the accident had frightened it and now it wanted off the road.

At a gas station outside of Keokuk, just before we left Iowa, my uncle answered the phone at our house.

“Hi, Uncle Gene,” I said. “I’m calling about this school civil rights trip.”

He heard me out and then said, “Your father’s just been diagnosed with lung cancer. You don’t have time for civil rights.”

When I walked back to the old Ford, I suddenly saw the whole scene—Dr. Stone, Steve Unger, the old Ford, and all the rest—behind a cloudy scrim. I was on one side, and my old life was on the other. I tried to reach across, but my attempt bounced back, as if I had tried to punch a trampoline. The scrim kept me on my side, all by myself.

I hitchhiked back to my little college. When my ride, a retired farmer, heard about my bad news, he drove me all the way to the campus.

“I’m so sorry,” he said when he let me off.

That was what Jenny said and what my teachers said and what my uncle said when he came to get me.