1965
There are moments in life when you suddenly see your future and it’s not at all what you expected. I was home from the University of North Carolina for spring break and we were all sitting in the living room. Daddy was reading the paper in his favorite chair, the leather so old it made cracking sounds each time he moved. Buddy was at the fold-down desk by the fireplace, tinkering with some small mechanical part from a car. And Mama sat between Brenda and me on the sofa, the Brides magazine open on her lap. Brenda had brought the magazine over and the three of us were admiring the dresses. I had to bite my tongue as Brenda paged through the magazine, though, and I wondered if Mama was biting hers, too. After all, Brenda would not be wearing one of those frothy white dresses, and I, as her maid of honor, would not be wearing one of the beautiful taffeta bridesmaid creations. Brenda’s wedding to Garner Cleveland, due to take place next Saturday, would be small and quiet and necessary, with no attendants other than Garner’s best friend, Reed—who happened to be my boyfriend—and me.
Brenda turned the page, and the photographs of dresses gave way to the headline of an article: “Sexual Harmony and How to Attain It.”
“Don’t need that one.” Brenda laughed, patting her still-flat belly. She turned the page and if my mother hadn’t been sitting next to me, I would have turned it back, curious. I knew next to nothing about sexual harmony. It wasn’t that I was a prude. It was just that Reed and I hadn’t gone that far, by mutual agreement. I wanted to wait until I was married and although Reed did give me a bit of an intellectual argument about it, he said he admired me for my decision. I hadn’t criticized Brenda for her decision, though. Every girl had to figure out what was right for herself when it came to that sort of thing. What had shocked me the most about Brenda’s pregnancy was that I’d had no idea she and Garner were intimate. I felt hurt that my longtime best friend and dorm mate had kept something so monumental from me.
When I told Mama about Brenda’s condition and that she had to marry Garner right away, she expressed sympathy. “That poor girl,” she said. “She just cut her freedom short,” followed by a stern, “Learn from this, Eleanor. This is what happens when you let things go too far. You and Reed better behave yourselves.”
“Mama,” I’d said, “I’m not stupid. And we’re not as serious as Garner and Brenda are.”
“I’d say Reed’s plenty serious about you,” she said. “That boy adores you.”
Reed was a real sweetheart and I’d known him most of my life. He finished college in three years and now worked at Round Hill’s biggest bank. He wore a suit and tie every day—a blue tie, to set off his sky-blue eyes and dark hair. He was handsome in a suit, no doubt about it, but now that I was surrounded by college guys in their chinos and madras shirts, Reed sometimes seemed a bit stuffy to me.
I was touched that Mama was sitting with Brenda and me now, kindly oohing and aahing over the bridal gowns as if Brenda might actually be able to select one and wear it to her wedding. Mama loved Brenda, sometimes referring to her as her “second daughter,” and Brenda had called her “Mama” for years. Brenda’s own chilly mother would never look through Brides magazine with her. She agreed to come to the “ceremony,” as she called it, even though Brenda’s father refused, but she wasn’t about to indulge Brenda’s fantasies of a fancy wedding when it would be anything but.
“I love this one.” Brenda pointed to the sparkly bodice of a beautiful, silver-hued white gown. “I keep coming back to it over and over again.”
Mama touched the back of Brenda’s hand. “It must be very hard to know you won’t be able to have the wedding of your dreams,” she said.
I glanced at Brenda. I could tell she was holding back tears. I knew she was happy, though. She and Garner were madly in love.
“Listen to this,” Daddy said suddenly, and I shifted my gaze from the magazine to my father. He stubbed out his cigarette in the ashtray on the table by his side and began to read. “‘Reverend Greg Filburn, pastor of the AME church in Turner’s Bend, announced today that several hundred white students from Northern and Western colleges will spend the summer in the Southern states registering Negroes to vote. Derby County is expected to host a number of those students. Only—’”
“Oh great,” Buddy interrupted him without taking his eyes off the metal part in his hands. “Just what we need. A bunch of Northern agitators.”
“‘Only thirty-four percent of Negroes in Derby County are now registered,’” Daddy continued reading, “‘compared to ninety-four percent of the white population, Reverend Filburn said. The voting rights bill, soon to be signed into law by President Lyndon Baines Johnson, will hopefully change that disparity, and we need to do all we can to make sure our folks can register. The program is called SCOPE, which stands for the Summer Community Organization and Political Education project—’” Daddy interrupted his own reading with a laugh. “That’s a mouthful,” he said, then continued, “‘—and it will send more than five hundred volunteers into seventy-five rural counties with the aim of removing racism from American politics.’”
“What do you think of this bridesmaid dress?” Brenda pointed to a page in the magazine, but neither my mother nor I even glanced at it. Both of us had our attention on my father. Especially me, even though I wasn’t yet certain why.
“Are you sure they don’t just mean deeper south?” Mama asked. “You know, Alabama and Mississippi where they have all the trouble? Not North Carolina.”
“Sounds like they mean here too,” Daddy said, “since this Filburn fella’s church is in Turner’s Bend.” Turner’s Bend was the town right next to Round Hill, where we lived.
“This sounds exactly like the sort of thing Carol would’ve done, doesn’t it?” Mama asked.
We all automatically turned our heads to look at the empty rocking chair by the fireplace, where Aunt Carol always sat. Cancer took her from us the year before and I don’t think anyone had sat in that chair since. I felt her loss every minute of every day. Aunt Carol was the only person in the family who seemed to understand me. Or, as she told me one time, I was the only person who seemed to understand her.
“Carol would’ve hopped right on that bandwagon,” Mama continued, and Daddy rolled his eyes.
“That woman never met an underdog she didn’t like,” he said.
Buddy set down the part he’d been fiddling with. “I don’t like the sound of that SCOPE thing one bit,” he said. “What gives anybody from the North the goddamned right to come down here and—”
“Buddy!” Mama said. “Your mouth!”
“Sorry, Mama, but this gets my goat,” he said. “Let them register if they want to, it’s no skin off my teeth, but we don’t need hundreds of crazy white kids from New York or wherever descending on Derby County.”
He and my parents kept up the conversation, but something happened to me in the few minutes it took Daddy to read the article. For the past two years, I’d been a reporter and photographer for the campus newspaper at UNC. I’d covered the protests as students tried to get the downtown restaurants and shops to desegregate. At first, I wrote my articles objectively, just reporting the facts, but when I proudly showed Aunt Carol one of them, she frowned. “I want you to think about what you’re writing, Ellie,” she said, in that New York accent she’d never lost despite her twenty years in the South. “Think about what you write not as a Southerner. Not as a Northerner, either. Think about it as a human being.”
I knew my beautiful blond aunt had long been a champion of civil rights. A year earlier, she’d taken part in the March on Washington, where she heard Martin Luther King, Jr., speak. It was all she could talk about for weeks afterward, making my mother roll her eyes and my father lay down the law, telling her that she could not go on and on about it at the dinner table. Only in the last couple of years had I begun to understand her passion, and talking to her about what was happening on campus changed my work on the newspaper. She made me dig deeper and I began to view events with my heart as well as my head. As I continued to interview the students, their passion and commitment—their belief in the rightness of what they were doing—made sense to me. Those students, white and Negro, put themselves on the line, body and soul. They were steadfastly nonviolent, not even fighting back when abused by passersby or dragged away by the police, and my articles about the protests grew more sympathetic toward them even without me realizing it.
Aunt Carol met Uncle Pete, my father’s brother, when she was an army nurse and he was a soldier. After the war they moved in with us. I was only a year old at the time, so she was always a part of my life. Sometimes, the best part. She left discipline to my parents, so I knew I could tell her anything—almost—without getting in trouble. Uncle Pete died when I was ten, but Aunt Carol remained with us. She was blunt; I never needed to guess what she was thinking. As I grew older and became aware of the prickly relationship she had with my parents—especially with my mother—I wondered why she didn’t move back to New York. Toward the end of her life, when cancer was stealing her away from us, I talked to her about it. “Why did you stay with us?” I asked as I wrapped her shawl tighter around her bony shoulders. She was always cold then, even in the summer. “You never loved North Carolina.”
“No, but I loved you,” she said. “And I think you needed me. I didn’t want you to turn into your mother.”
“What do you mean?” My mother was all right. She wasn’t particularly warm but she was smart. She was a librarian in the Round Hill library.
“She may spend her life around books, but her mind is shuttered closed,” Aunt Carol said. “Think about it. There’s a reason you share what you’re writing for the school paper with me and not with her, isn’t there?”
She was right. My mother would have been disgusted by the way I wrote about the protests. The way I now sided with the protesters.
“I’m dying, Ellie,” Aunt Carol said, matter-of-factly. “But keep talking to me after I’m gone, all right?” She smiled. “Pretend I’m here. You’re a wonderful young woman. Keep writing about injustice. Act on your convictions. Don’t let those shutters close your mind. Not ever.”
Around that time, I’d been assigned to work on a project with Gloria, the lone Negro student in my pharmacology class. I suggested we talk about our project at the local sandwich shop, but she shook her head. Let’s meet in the library, instead, she said. I’m not hungry. Only in bed that night did I realize that Gloria wouldn’t have been allowed to eat in the sandwich shop with me and I felt embarrassed that I’d suggested it and angry on her behalf.
Then last spring, only a few miserable days after Aunt Carol’s funeral, Brenda was with me when I was assigned to cover an extraordinary protest for the paper. Students and professors and even some townspeople knelt side by side across Franklin Street, blocking traffic. They held protest signs against their chests, their expressions solemn and sincere. I snapped pictures and felt moved by their quiet courage. Some of the girls wore skirts and I knew the asphalt had to be killing their knees and wrecking their nylons. I could tell from their stoic expressions that they didn’t care. Their stockings were the last thing on their minds. They weren’t thinking about themselves at all. They were thinking about the segregated shops and restaurants. They were thinking about the segregated grocery store where the owner poured ammonia over the heads of peaceful demonstrators, sending some of them to the hospital with second-degree burns. Aunt Carol had cried when I told her about that.
Gloria was one of the protesters in the street that day. She knelt at the end of the line closest to us next to a young white man, and I made sure to get her in some of my photographs.
Brenda shook her head as I snapped pictures. “This is stupid,” she said. “They’re all going to end up getting arrested, and what for? It’s not going to change anything.”
Her words were nothing more than a whine in my ear. Impulsively, before I had a chance to change my mind, I handed her my camera, slung my purse over my shoulder, and stepped into the street myself.
“What are you doing?” Brenda shouted from behind me.
I took my place at the end of the line—which was in the gutter—and got down on my knees next to Gloria. She didn’t look at me but kept her eyes straight ahead and I did the same. Pain settled into my knees almost instantly and I felt the stocking on my right leg run clear up my thigh. A young man moved toward me and handed me a sign. I didn’t know what it said, but I held it in front of me, as my fellow protesters were doing. My heart pounded but my breathing felt steady. My breathing felt right.
There was commotion all around us. Cars and angry drivers. A group of protesters marching on the other side of the street. Townspeople taking our picture. Through the cacophony, I heard Brenda yell, “What the hell, Ellie! Get out of the damn gutter!” I tuned her out. I tuned all of it out. I heard Aunt Carol’s voice in my head: Act on your convictions. Although the physical pain had slipped to the background, I felt tears sting my eyes. Roll down my cheeks.
The police came in a white truck everyone called the paddy wagon.
“Go limp!” someone in the line yelled. I knew that’s what you were supposed to do. Don’t fight the police, but don’t make it easy on them either. I felt the temptation to get up. Walk back to Brenda and disappear into the crowd of onlookers. But the stronger part of me held my ground. The cops began dragging and carrying my fellow protesters toward the paddy wagon. One cop pulled the sign from my hands, lifted me to my feet, and pushed me toward the truck, his hands gripping my shoulders. I couldn’t make myself go limp like some of the others. Like Gloria did. She made them carry her, her skirt hiked up to her garters. It frightened me, the thought of being that helpless. Instead, I let myself be prodded along until the gaping rear of the truck was in front of me, and that’s when reality began to sink in. I could still hear Brenda shouting to me from the other side of the street as I climbed into the truck, though I didn’t know what she was saying. Was I being arrested? How would I explain to my parents that I felt as though I had to do what I did?
We were detained at the police station and later set free without arrest, and although Brenda told Garner and Reed and they both chewed me out for taking such a “stupid risk,” my parents still had no idea what I’d done.
Now, Daddy reached the end of the newspaper article. I was only vaguely aware of Buddy saying, They let that many bleedin’-heart white beatniks into Derby County, they’re just askin’ for trouble, and Mama saying, Only thirty-four percent of Negroes are registered? Sheer laziness. Why don’t they just get themselves to the courthouse and take care of it?, and Brenda saying, Do you think the neckline on this dress is too revealing?, because I knew … I knew in a way I couldn’t explain even to myself … that I was going to be one of those white students working to register Negro voters.
I knew it the way I knew my own name.