Whenever I babysat for little dark-eyed PD, we’d click on the news. After a particularly informative program, PD later told her mama and her third-grade class that the people who did sit-ins for Civil Rights were “he-roic.” In turn, Miss Debbie called me and told me that the news was now banned in her house. I considered asking Miss Tanya May Rogerton if she knew someone who could make PD a little black-baby doll, but came to my senses.
Then the Freedom Riders came through the South in 1961—these brave folks, both colored and white, who vowed to break racial lines everywhere they went. But the deeper they went, the harder it got for the group, who were mostly Yankees. When they hit Burlington, Alabama, the Public Safety Commissioner there gave the KKK a full fifteen minutes to beat them before the police moved in. And when they did, they mostly arrested the Freedom Riders, many who had their faces broken before being thrown in jail, where they were tormented by the officers.
The Riders moved on to Montgomery, Alabama, where five more had to be hospitalized after two hours of rioting. Dozens of people were injured. There were little colored children walking around fearful they’d be spit on and hit on the back with ropes.
Children.
I couldn’t help but think of Huddie. How Huddie had managed to keep something as sweet and gentle as a dove safe inside his ribcage, despite the mental, emotional, physical, and, most certainly, spiritual beatings he took.
On the night the Riders made the news, rather than keep my odd, smoky pain to myself, I called Mrs. Tanya May Rogerton and asked her to come over. She didn’t ask me why; she just said she needed a minute to fluff her hair.
When she reached my screen door, her eyes concerned, she asked, “You all right?”
“Come sit with me,” I said.
She followed me to the couch. We sat, then I leaned over and moved the needle of my phonograph to start up an old record from the 1940s featuring “American Folk & Blues Singer Lead Belly.” I held up the album cover so she could read it.
“This man singing here is that old friend of mine named Huddie, who folks call Lead Belly. I’m playing him on this night, when those people are out there trying to change a world filled with so much hate—a world that hurts children for doing nothing more than being born and hurts adults for crossing imaginary lines. I’m playing it in memory of Huddie, and I wanted to share it with you.”
She leaned back. “Thank you.”
I closed my eyes and listened to Huddie’s voice pushing out from that tiny place he kept safe. I thought about him as a baby being rocked by his mother, and how a mother would feel knowing she’d brought a colored child into a world of such hate. Typically, folks feel joy at the news of a pregnancy, but did she?
With my eyes closed, sitting there in the moonlight coming in across my quiet home, I got lost in his music. I forgot that Mrs. Tanya May Rogerton had joined me, and I started crying. I cried for Huddie and for those people whose houses were being burned and churches blown up, and who rocked their dying babies as they were being ignored at the doors of hospitals. I cried for the Freedom Riders, some who might never make it back home to their safe places.
I cried for Eddie, and worried about her out dressed like a man. I prayed that she would never be arrested. I wondered if people had ever spit on her, and I was glad then that she could hide if she needed to—that she could pull her bobbed hair forward and slip on a skirt if she ever had to.
Under it all was the eternal question: why couldn’t folks just let people be who they are, with all the fairness entitled? I mean, God dammit.
Meanwhile, Mrs. Tanya May Rogerton scooted closer to me. She put her arms around me, and I let her hold me while I quietly cried and Huddie sang on. Her touch helped the hurt find its way out a little faster. Allowing this connection to someone I loved balanced the scales against hate, and I had a revelation that this small act—this love realized—would, in its very tiny way, make the world a better place.