Excerpt from Night on Fire (1969), by Avadelle Richardson, page 403
We threw ourselves on the floorboards. I tasted dirt and my own sweat.
“What do we do?” Leslie shrilled from the back.
“Hush!”
Rat-tat. Rat-tat! Pop! Pop! It sounded like fireworks. People started shrieking. Horns blared. Somebody smashed into us from behind. The car lurched forward and crushed into the bumper ahead of us.
I banged my head on the glove box. Pain shot across my forehead and Leslie started to whimper. The car squealed as the other vehicle moved and towed ours with it. The impact had smashed the metal of the bumpers together.
We wouldn’t be driving away from Ole Miss tonight. My heart thundered in my chest, and all I could think about was my boy, my son, my poor, poor little boy about to be without a mother because his mother was a fool.
Outside, the yelling and hollering and popping and chants and slurs and cars revving blended into a mind-numbing roar. Somebody shot out campus lights one at a time, and with each bang, the world got darker.
The car rocked back and forth as people knocked against it. Somebody tried the passenger handle, but the door didn’t open. It was only a matter of time before that door did get yanked wide, and Leslie and I would get dragged into the middle of a full-on riot.
“We got to get out of here,” I shouted to Leslie. “Make for the Lyceum and get behind it; try to get to Jim’s office!”
“We’ll be killed if we go out there!” She sounded like the child she was now, and I cursed myself for being a fool twice over. When I died on this campus tonight, I’d orphan my son and leave this helpless bit of good intentions to her fate. What kind of a person was I?
A rock smashed against the back windshield, and I let out a shriek right along with Leslie. That seemed to decide things for her. I felt the car shimmy as she leaped toward the door. I pushed myself up and grabbed hold of the passenger handle.
We spilled onto the pavement together on our hands and knees.
Clouds billowed around us, thick and white and burning. Tear gas. I coughed and wheezed. My eyes watered and started to swell. A hand fumbled against mine, and I grabbed Leslie’s fingers. We huddled against the car, helping each other pull our shirt necks up around our mouths and noses.
When we got to our feet, tears streaming, a single spotlight illuminated the Circle flag—only it wasn’t the stars and bars of the United States, or even Mississippi’s standard. A starred blue X stood out against a red background as the Confederate flag flapped wildly above the rising clouds of gas.
“Move,” I told Leslie, and we ran into the clouds and the crowd, heads down, holding hands to stay together.
Bottles and bricks sailed past us. A rock clipped Leslie’s forearm. She cried out but kept running. The night turned into dark prisms as I squinted to see through my gas-induced flood of tears, mixed with real tears. I gasped out sobs, so terrified I couldn’t take a whole breath, tainted or not.
People jostled against us. Students. Uniforms. Suits. White T-shirts and jeans. People wrapped in Confederate flags. We ran and we ran and we ran. Bullets pinged off the Lyceum bricks as we ducked to the side, half-falling, half-scrambling toward the bushes and the back of the building.
We pelted around the back corner and I steered toward Bondurant and Jim Devon’s office. A minute, maybe two, and we’d be clear—
Leslie stopped dead and jerked my arm so hard my shoulder wrenched. Off balance, I spun into her and we went face-to-face, me swearing from the pain.
“What are you doing?” I yelled, but clamped my mouth shut at her flat, frozen look.
All of a sudden, I didn’t want to see what had made her pull us up short. I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to.
Slowly, keeping my arms flat against my body, ignoring my throbbing shoulder and my pounding head and my thumping heart and my swollen eyes and wheezing breath, I turned.
A line of men and boys faced us, holding bats and clubs and rifles and long, swinging socks crammed with God-only-knew-what.
One of them, a bearded old-timer wearing jeans and a Confederate-flag T-shirt, stepped forward and leveled his shotgun at my chest. He stared at us for a few seconds, then just at me.
“Well, well, well,” he said, deep-South accent heavy enough to make those words two syllables each. He spit tobacco juice to his left without shifting the rifle. “Boys, just look here at what we caught ourselves tonight.”
WHEN I GOT HOME, MOM and Dad didn’t seem to know we were all persona non grata in the library system for seventy-two hours, so I wasn’t grounded. Yet. In fact, my parents seemed to be impressed that I was finally reading Night on Fire. Or maybe they were shocked stupid. It was hard to tell.
After we fed Grandma, I hugged them and went to bed early, without even taking off my clothes. I just wanted to read.
When Leslie stepped in front of me, I was so surprised I almost fell down. I tried to grab the fool girl and pull her back, but she wouldn’t budge. Before I could stop her, she held up both hands.
“We don’t want any trouble,” Leslie said, doing a fair job of a cultured Southern accent.
“What you want don’t matter, girl.” The man with the shotgun kept his aim steady even though he’d have to shoot Leslie to get at me. “You got trouble, right here and right now, comin’ onto this campus with the likes of that filth behind you.” He spat again, then drawled a string of racial slurs that made my stomach heave.
Leslie didn’t give ground. “I’ll thank you to watch your language,” she said, smooth as any high-dollar society lady, with just the right touch of cold Southern politeness. And then, somehow, she lied better than I ever had in my entire life. “We didn’t know there would be so much happening tonight. This woman is my maid, and I need her help to carry the books Dr. Devon bought for my Sunday School class.”
A few of the boys behind the gunman shifted uncomfortably and glanced at each other. One of them spoke up to the man with the rifle, saying, “Look here, Curtis—”
“Shut up,” Curtis growled.
I shook all over, waiting for the shotgun blast.
“Sarah Jane,” Leslie said to me, reaching back and grabbing my wrist even as she pulled that made-up name straight out of the air. “Come on with me. We’re going to Bondurant right this minute. This is no place for ladies, and I need to wash my face before that horrid gas ruins my complexion.”
Curtis gaped at her. “You seriously think I’m lettin’ you pass by me, woman?”
“Oh, you won’t shoot me, Curtis.” Leslie walked toward him, dragging me along behind her. “Because if you did, one of these fine young men would tell my husband and the police your name.” She stuck out her chin as she drew almost even with the barrel of his rifle. “In Oxford, people respect ladies with God’s work to do.”
As we passed the dumbfounded Curtis, Leslie pulled me around her so I was in front, and she stayed between me and any aimed guns. “This violence isn’t God’s work, gentlemen,” she called back over her shoulder, her accent falling away just enough to scare me into next week. “I can’t believe you’d tear down our beautiful campus like this. You should be ashamed of yourselves!”
It was later, around midnight, when I finally closed Night on Fire. My notepad was pretty empty because I hadn’t stopped to take notes. Notes just didn’t seem that important when people were getting shot at and firebombed on the Ole Miss campus.
I was so relieved that they got away. Did Avadelle really do that for my grandmother? And if they escaped the mob like that, how did my grandmother get hurt? Answers leading to more questions—so frustrating!
I knew Mac still had books to read, and Dr. Harper was going over Grandma’s articles again, and Indri had planned to research Avadelle’s short stories online, using her mom’s library account. Had they found something I didn’t know?
And before we got jumped by the librarian, Dr. Harper had been looking up lockboxes to be sure the key really did go to the one he saw, and—
Oh.
Sweat broke across the back of my neck as I jumped all the way out of my bed. My heart hammered as I crammed my hands in my jeans pockets.
They were empty.
“No,” I said out loud. I ran to the chair where I’d dropped my pack, grabbed it, unzipped the big pocket and the front pocket and fished around.
Nothing.
I dumped the pack on the bed and examined everything. Grandma’s envelope was there, but it held only papers.
I squeezed my eyes shut.
I couldn’t have been that stupid. I couldn’t have been! I checked my pockets again, and the pack, and my covers, and all around the room, even though I knew the truth.
No key.
I didn’t have Grandma’s key, because in all the confusion, I’d left it on the floor of the library carrel.