1965
That Tuesday, I took Brenda out to lunch at the Round Hill Sandwich Shop. It was a bribe of sorts, although I didn’t think Brenda realized it. Her mind was so consumed by the fact that she would be marrying Garner on Saturday that she seemed to have forgotten she’d promised to go with me to Turner’s Bend after lunch. I wanted to see Reverend Filburn, the minister who’d been quoted in the newspaper article about the SCOPE program. I tried my best to focus on Brenda’s chatter, though. I worried that we were already drifting apart. Brenda would return to UNC with me the Monday after her wedding—no honeymoon for her and Garner—and she’d finish out the year, keeping her marriage and pregnancy a secret so she didn’t get kicked out of the dorm. She was moving in a direction I wouldn’t be able to relate to.
I watched her now as she added another spoonful of sugar to her sweet tea. She still looked like a teenager: turned-up nose, rosebud lips, and a curly blond halo of hair that set off her big baby-blue eyes. We’d never really shared the same interests: I’d loved school and science and reading; Brenda had loved music and movie magazines and boys. Aunt Carol would tease her. Who’s your heartthrob this week, Brenda? But somehow, Brenda and I connected, even more so once we started dating Reed and Garner. We double-dated all through high school, even after the guys went off to college. These days, we saw them on the weekends when we came home or when they came to Chapel Hill to take us out to dinner. Brenda was really my best and oldest friend. I’d never had many.
Now she looked up from stirring her tea. “Promise me we’ll stay friends,” she said, as if reading my thoughts.
“Absolutely,” I promised.
“I don’t know what’ll happen to us—to you and me—when I’m married and a mother and you’re still a … a coed.”
“We’ll have to make an effort to stay connected,” I said. It wouldn’t be easy. My pharmacology program was five years, so I still had three more years to go. “And Brenda.” I put on my most serious expression. “I know you wish Reed and I were as serious as you and Garner, but we’re just not. We’ve never even talked about marriage, and honestly, until I finish school, I can’t imagine marrying anyone.”
“You always say that, but that’s going to change,” Brenda said with unnerving certainty. “You’ll see. Reed is so wonderful. He’s only twenty-two and he graduated early and already has that desk job at the bank. He’s going to be the manager someday and I just hope you wake up and realize what a catch he is before it’s too late.”
She didn’t have to convince me that Reed was a catch. He was as close to perfect as anyone I knew. Smart. Movie-star handsome. Well respected at the bank, where he seemed to get a raise every month or so. Still, the thought of marrying him—or anyone—held no appeal for me.
When we finished our sandwiches and I’d paid our bill, I looked at my watch. “You ready?” I asked.
Brenda wrinkled her nose at me. “Do we really have to do this?” she asked. “Go to Turner’s Bend?”
I nodded, getting to my feet. “Come on,” I said. “It won’t take long. Then I’ll drive you to Garner’s.”
Brenda stood up and followed me out of the restaurant, walking next to me once we reached the sidewalk. “What’s SCOPE stand for again?” she asked.
“Summer Community Organization and Political Education.”
“Sounds deadly dull.” She slipped her arm through mine. “I just don’t understand why you want to do this, honey,” she said. “The colored voting thing. I don’t get it.”
We’d reached my car and I opened the door for her. I’d gotten the red Ford when I started college so I could make that two-hour trip to Carolina on my own. The car was a junker for sure, but Buddy had fixed it up well enough that it did what I needed it to do. My brother was a mechanical genius who’d opened his own car-repair shop when he was barely nineteen years old.
I shrugged as I got in behind the steering wheel. “Because it’s the right thing to do.”
“I hoped you got it out of your system that time on Franklin Street. What did that get you? Holes in your stockings and a record for being arrested.”
“I was detained, not arrested. And anyhow, it wasn’t about what it got me. It made a difference. That café finally opened its doors to everybody, so it worked, right?”
“I suppose,” she admitted, but I could tell she wasn’t convinced.
I pulled out of the parking space. With the car closed up, I could smell the Aqua Net in Brenda’s curly hair. I’d been letting my strawberry-blond hair dry straight. It was nearly to my shoulders now and I liked how it swung around my face when I danced.
I glanced at Brenda’s beige slacks. I’d asked her to wear a skirt, since we were going into a church, but either she forgot or she hoped she could talk me out of going. I was wearing a cranberry-colored skirt, a white blouse, and my black flats. I looked like I was ready for a job interview.
I’d cut the article about the SCOPE program from the newspaper and taken it to bed with me the night after my father read it to us. I’d read it at least a dozen times since then. The students were all from the North or out west. Mama had been right. It was exactly the sort of thing Aunt Carol would have done as a student when she lived in New York. Would SCOPE take a Southerner? I couldn’t see why not, as long as I was committed to the cause. Plus, I knew Derby County better than any of those outsiders ever would.
“This is just so unlike you,” Brenda said as we drove down Main Street.
“What do you mean?”
“You … caring so much about Negroes all of a sudden.”
I shrugged. “I’ve always cared,” I said. “I just never really did anything about it until Franklin Street. Now I can see a real way to help.”
“Have you talked to Reed about it?” she asked.
I shook my head. “It doesn’t have anything to do with Reed,” I said. “And besides, I don’t even know if that minister’ll say I can do it, yet.” We drove past the Hockley Pharmacy, owned by my father and my grandfather before him. The prominent sign in the front window cried out PRESCRIPTIONS ARE OUR BUSINESS! We passed the butcher shop and the bakery and the movie theater, where Beach Blanket Bingo was showing. Then the shops gave way to the big white houses that belonged to Round Hill’s finest.
“Don’t you think everyone should have the right to vote?” I glanced at her. She’d opened the car window a few inches and her hair blew wildly around her face.
She shrugged. “They already do, really,” she said. “It’s not your fault or mine if they haven’t bothered to register.”
“I don’t think it’s that easy,” I said.
Brenda went quiet. “You’d have weekends off, right?” she asked after a moment. “You’d still get to go to the beach with me and Reed and Garner?”
“Maybe,” I said. “I don’t know how the program is set up, exactly.”
I drove for about a mile and a half to where the road made a right-hand turn, then dropped down a short slope landing us in Turner’s Bend, and Main Street became Zion Road, the street no white person ever had a reason to travel. We might as well have landed on another planet. Nobody who looked like us—two blue-eyed blonds—ever went to Turner’s Bend. I knew our long-ago maid, Louise Jenkins, lived down here somewhere. My parents would have known where, because they sometimes visited Louise, bringing her our old teapot or toaster, blankets and towels, things we didn’t need anymore that Louise could put to good use. Daddy brought her medicine when she had the flu last year, but I’d never had a reason to visit Louise myself.
We drove past houses on the tree-lined street and Brenda rolled her window up and pressed down the lock of her door, surreptitiously, as if she didn’t want me to notice. The houses were much smaller than those we’d passed in Round Hill, but they looked well cared for, and I wondered if the people living in them were registered to vote. They had to have jobs to keep their houses up so well. I saw women and children on the porches. Men mowing their lawns. We came to a string of shops—the little downtown area. Then, suddenly, the pavement ended and we were on a dirt road. There were more houses, not as nice as those at the west end of the road. Ahead of us on the right stood a brick church with a tall steeple.
“I bet that’s the AME church,” I said, but as we neared it, I saw that the sign out front read ZION BAPTIST, and I kept on driving.
“Don’t you have an address?” Brenda looked at her watch.
I shook my head. I knew the church was on Zion Road somewhere and I figured it wouldn’t be that hard to find, but we were soon in farmland, the houses far apart now, more ramshackle, and the dirt road was rutted and dusty. Dogs and chickens roamed the yards, and men and women were hunched over in every field.
“I think we should go back,” Brenda said. “We’re out in the middle of nowhere.”
She was right and I was losing heart. I should have checked the address, but even so, none of the houses we passed had street numbers on them. A voice in my head told me to turn around. But the stronger part of me kept my foot on the gas. And then, finally, I saw a small, low-slung, one-story white building, its windows clear rather than stained glass. The slender white steeple was topped by a cross no taller than my car’s antenna. On the building itself, next to the door, a hand-painted sign read TURNER’S BEND A.M.E. CHURCH.
There was one car in the parking lot, an older-model black Plymouth. Its tires were coated with a fine tan dust, but the rest of the car sparkled in the April sunlight. I pulled into the lot and turned off my car, wiping my sweaty hands on my skirt.
“I’ll stay here,” Brenda said.
“No, you won’t,” I said, opening my door. “Come on.”
“You’re not roping me in to spending the summer out here in…”
I got out and shut my door, not wanting to hear what Brenda was going to say. But I waited for her at the side of my car, and when she realized I wasn’t going in without her, she slowly opened her door and circled the car to join me. Together we walked across the packed earth toward the church.
The front door was unlocked and we stepped inside. Although the interior of the church was filled with dark wooden pews, much like the Baptist church I’d grown up in, that was the only similarity. The clear windows spread stark white light over the space, unlike the muted colors of the stained glass in Round Hill Baptist. And there was no choir loft, although there were risers in the front of the church behind the pulpit. The pulpit itself was spectacular, the only ostentatious thing in the building. Carved from a beautiful blond wood, it seemed to dwarf everything else in the building.
A man suddenly appeared from a doorway near the end of the risers. I saw the surprise on his face, most likely from finding two blonds in his church. His eyes widened behind dark-rimmed glasses and he stopped walking.
“You lost?” he asked. He was fairly young, no more than thirty or thirty-five, but his voice had the deeper tone of an older man.
Brenda and I hung back by the door. “I don’t think so … sir.” I licked my lips, which had gone very dry. “Are you the minister they quoted in that article about the students coming to register voters?” I asked. “SCOPE?”
“Yes, I’m Reverend Filburn.” He made no move toward us and we made no move toward him. The sea of dark pews stretched out between us. “Can I help you?” he asked.
“I read that article and I’d like to help,” I said.
The minister studied me for what seemed like a full minute, unsmiling. “Come forward and have a seat,” he said finally, motioning to the pews nearest him. Our footsteps made little sound on the old bare wood as we walked toward the front of the church. After we sat down in the second pew, he took a seat in the first, turning to face us.
“What are your names?” he asked.
“I’m Ellie,” I said. “Eleanor Hockley.”
Reverend Filburn turned his attention to Brenda. “And you are?”
“Brenda Kane, but I’m just here for…” She glanced at me, clearly at a loss for words, but Reverend Filburn helped her out.
“Moral support,” he suggested with a hint of a smile. I was relieved to finally see some lightness in his expression.
“Yeah.” She smiled back at him. “Moral support.”
He returned his attention to me. “Well, Miss Hockley,” he said, “I admire you for wanting to help, if that’s truly why you’re here, but SCOPE isn’t looking for Southern students. Just from the North. And some from out west.”
I’d expected him to say that, given the information in the newspaper article, but it made no sense to me. “But why not, if I’m willing to help?” I asked.
He knitted his eyebrows together. “Why do you want to do this?”
“Because I think everyone should have the right to vote.”
“Do you now?”
He didn’t trust me. It was disconcerting. “Yes,” I said. “Sincerely.”
“Are you working?” he asked.
“No, I’m in school,” I said. “Finishing up my sophomore year. I’m studying pharmacology at Carolina. At UNC.”
His brows finally unknit and he nodded. I thought I’d impressed him.
He turned to Brenda. “You a student too?” he asked.
She nodded. “Yes.”
He studied her another moment before returning his attention to me. “Where do you live?” he asked.
“In Round Hill.” I motioned north of where we sat. “So, you see, I know the area well, and—”
“You may know Round Hill well, but I’d bet my church you don’t know the parts of Derby County where SCOPE’ll be working.”
“Well … what I mean is, I know it better than any Northerners would. And you wouldn’t have to put me up anywhere. I could just go home at the end of the day and—”
“No.” He cut me off again, this time sharply. “You’d be treated the same as all the other students. No runnin’ home when things got hard. You’d be put up in local homes like everyone else.”
That stopped me. I actually felt the muscles of my chest contract with the shock of his words, and next to me, I thought Brenda caught her breath. I remembered the dilapidated little houses we’d passed by on the drive to the church. “You mean … to sleep?”
“To sleep. To eat. To get to know the folks you’d be aimin’ to help.”
Living with strangers was not what I’d imagined and it was a moment before I nodded. “I understand.” I thought of backing out right then. I didn’t need to do this. Put myself through this. Yet I stayed seated. “I’d want to be treated like everyone else,” I said.
He shook his head as if he knew perfectly well how he’d just stunned me. “Tell me about your people,” he said, folding his arms across his chest.
I shifted on the hard pew. “Well, we go back a few generations in Derby County,” I said. “I live on Hockley Street in Round Hill in the same house my father and grandfather were born in. My father’s a pharmacist and he owns—”
“Hockley?” He interrupted me. “Your daddy owns Hockley Pharmacy?”
“Yes.”
His whole countenance softened. He unfolded his arms, stretching his left arm along the back of the pew and turning more fully toward us. I hadn’t realized how tightly wound he’d been until he relaxed, and for the first time I thought his smile was genuine.
“Your daddy’s a good man,” he said. “Sometimes our own pharmacy can’t get what we need and Doc Hockley comes through for us. A real good man.”
“He is,” I said. My father wasn’t a doctor, but I knew a lot of people referred to him as “Doc Hockley.” I hadn’t known, though, that he helped out the folks in Turner’s Bend. Maybe Daddy might understand why I wanted to work for SCOPE.
“He helped my own little daughter one time when she came down with something,” Reverend Filburn continued. “Carried a special cough syrup all the way down here for her.”
“That sounds like him,” I said, touched and proud.
“You have to understand something … Eleanor, is it?” Reverend Filburn asked.
“Ellie. Yes.”
“I’ll tell you plain,” he said. “I didn’t trust you when you walked in here. Not sure I trust you even now. White girl, walking into a Negro church asking to help folk vote? Not an everyday occurrence.”
I nodded.
“We’ve already had threats and SCOPE hasn’t even started,” he said. “My church has had threats. I’ve had threats. My wife and children have had threats. I saw you walk in and I wondered if you’re here to plant a bomb in a pew. Understand?”
“Wow,” I said.
“For all I knew when you walked in here, you could have been part of the Klan, or—”
“The Klan!” I laughed.
“Not as improbable as it sounds,” he said. “The Civil Rights Act brought them out of the woodwork last year, and a Voting Rights Act is only going to make them double their efforts. Right now, North Carolina has more Klan members than all the other states put together.”
“I didn’t know that.” I’d been startled last summer to see a small procession of Klan members, both men and women, dressed in their white satin robes and tall pointed hats, strolling—unmasked, proudly—on the sidewalk through downtown Round Hill. An anomaly, I’d thought then, and when I mentioned them to my mother, she said, “Oh, it’s more of a social club these days, honey. People like to belong to something.” To me, the group had looked silly. To a Negro person, I imagined there was nothing at all silly in the sight of them.
“They’re not as … violent here, though, right?” I asked.
“Don’t bet your life on that.” It sounded like a warning. He glanced at Brenda, then back at me. “If you work for SCOPE, you’ll have to be watchful. Every place you go. Everything you do,” he said. “The thing the Klan hates more than a Negro is a white person who tries to help a Negro. Have you really thought this through?” he asked.
“I … I think so,” I stammered.
“I don’t think you have. You thought you’d be able to sleep at home with Mama and Daddy every night. You need to understand what you’ll be doing. You might have to walk five, ten miles a day canvassing, trying to get people to come out to vote when they have twenty good reasons not to.”
“I’ll do anything you need,” I promised. I felt Brenda’s eyes on me. She probably thought I’d lost my mind.
“The other thing.” He shifted his position on the pew again till he was facing me more directly. “The way I distrusted you when you walked in here? No one’ll trust you. Not the people you’ll be trying to help and not even the other students. The Northern students. They’ll be suspicious of you.”
“You could put me in an office if you need to hide me away,” I said. “But let me help. Please.”
“You need to take some time to think it over.”
“Maybe that’s a good idea.” Brenda spoke up for the first time, nudging my arm. I ignored her, but she continued, speaking to the minister. “I don’t understand why you’d bring in white Northern students to do this,” she said. “It doesn’t make any sense.”
Reverend Filburn nodded as though he’d been asked the question a dozen times before. “Do y’all remember the three civil rights workers who were killed in Mississippi last summer?” he asked.
I nodded. Beside me, Brenda gave a noncommittal shrug. The pictures of the three young men had been everywhere after it happened. There was so much on the news about them that I even recalled their names: Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner. I remembered how Aunt Carol wept about their fate.
“You wouldn’t remember them at all if they’d all been Negro,” Reverend Filburn said. “Two were white. That’s why it made the news. That’s … unfortunately … why so many people cared. White SCOPE workers … they’ll get the attention from the press. But Negro folk won’t trust Southern whites, so we’ll bring these bright, motivated students down from up north.”
“I understand,” I said.
He tilted his head, looking at me from behind his thick glasses. “Why do you feel so strongly about this?” he asked.
“I know it’s unjust that so many people—have a hard time registering,” I said. “I can sit home and gripe about it or I can … act on my convictions.” I imagined Aunt Carol sitting beside me on the pew. “I … I see the dirt road we drove in on.” I gestured toward the road. “The awful condition of some of the houses and buildings. The fact that your pharmacy can’t get everything it needs. And I know voting makes a difference in getting those things taken care of.”
He looked at me wordlessly for a moment. “Yes, it does,” he said finally, getting to his feet. “Leave me your address. I’ll make a call.”
Back in my car, Brenda turned to look at me. “You’re not seriously thinking of doing this, are you?” she asked.
“I am,” I said, turning the key in the ignition.
“It’s crazy, Ellie! You’d have to sleep in colored homes! Do you really want to do that?”
I hesitated. “It’s hard to picture sleeping in any stranger’s home,” I admitted. I turned onto the dirt road, my car bouncing in and out of a deep rut. “But sounds like it comes with the job. I’d want to be treated like the other students.”
“If God had meant us all to live together, he wouldn’t have made us different colors,” Brenda said.
I looked at her in exasperation. “That’s the most ignorant comment I’ve ever heard you make,” I said. But I suddenly remembered back to the year before, when two Negro girls moved into our dorm. We all had to share one large bathroom, and Brenda suggested we put a COLORED sign on one of the stalls so Dora and Midge would only use that one. I thought she’d been making a bad joke. Right now I wondered. We rarely talked about race. We were white girls who’d grown up in a mostly white town. Race didn’t come up much in our conversations.
Even if it came up often in my thoughts.