CHAPTER EIGHT

I went through the lobby and out the door. Next to the entrance was a bench, and on it sat Jarmaine.

She wore a simple peach-colored dress and was eating a snack from a brown paper bag. I recognized the snack. It was peanut-butter crackers, the kind Lavender made for me. I imagined Lavender getting up early to fix Jarmaine’s lunch before she came to our house. I wondered what it would be like to run two households and juggle two lives.

I hesitated by the bench. “I just wanted to talk.”

Jarmaine eyed me warily. “About what?”

“You seemed mad when we talked at the spelling bee. You know, about the grocery.”

Jarmaine’s eyes flashed. “You were there. You could have said something.”

“Like what?”

“This is wrong. It isn’t fair.”

“Mr. Forsyth owns the grocery,” I said. “He wanted your friend to leave.”

“It’s a store! You can’t pick and choose your customers. You just open the doors and let people in.”

“He’s actually a very nice man,” I said.

There was that word again: nice. Was Mr. Forsyth nice? Was I?

“He’s a cracker,” said Jarmaine.

I’d heard the term at school, whispered in the hallways. A cracker was ignorant, like a redneck or poor white trash. I’d never heard a Negro say it before.

Jarmaine sighed and shook her head. “Mama doesn’t like me calling people names. She says if we do it, they’ll call us names too.”

I studied Jarmaine. She had her mother’s eyes, but there was a difference. When Lavender was angry or scared, her face was like a mask. You couldn’t tell what she was thinking. But something about Jarmaine’s face let you see right through. It made me nervous, and when I’m nervous, I talk. I needed something to say and remembered what Grant had told me after the spelling bee.

“Look, I know you’re upset,” I said. “After all, your father was in the war; then he came home and nothing had changed. Separate but equal. Colored only.”

“My father left when I was a baby,” Jarmaine said. “I never met him.”

I looked around for something to crawl under. Maybe the bench. Maybe I could just lift up the lawn and pull it over me.

I said, “Am I blushing? I do that sometimes. Do Negroes blush? How can you tell?”

I wanted to shut up but couldn’t. “Do you get sunburned? If you can’t see it, is it really a burn? What about zits? Can you stop me, please? Can you just grab my foot and pull it out of my mouth?”

She stared at me for the longest time. Then she laughed. Not giggles or chuckles, but big laughs. Finally, after a long time, she stopped.

“Yes. Yes. And yes,” she said.

“Pardon me?”

“We blush. We sunburn. And, I can personally tell you, we have zits.”

“I’m a jerk,” I said.

“My mother told me you have a good heart,” said Jarmaine. She offered me a cracker. I ate it in one big gulp, the way I always did.

“Those are my favorites,” I said. “She makes them for me too.”

“I don’t like sharing her,” said Jarmaine.

I don’t know why that surprised me. In a way it made sense. I didn’t like sharing my things or my friends. But sharing Lavender was different, like sharing the sun.

I said, “So, you’re an intern.”

She nodded. “They pick two of us at school each year. I was lucky.”

“Mr. McCall says you’re good.”

“He’s a good reporter,” she said. “I like helping him.”

“He lives next door to me.”

“I know,” said Jarmaine. “I know all about you.”

That made me feel funny, like there was some kind of shadow world next to mine, where Jarmaine lived and watched.

“There are some things you don’t know,” I said.

“Like what?”

“All kinds of things. My dreams.”

Jarmaine gazed off into the distance. “Let’s see. You dream of a house. A husband. Kids playing in the yard.”

I smiled. “Nope. I dream about going to Montgomery or maybe New York or Washington, DC. I’d meet new people, try new things. I’d do whatever I wanted to.”

“Such as?”

“Things. Big things. Be a writer.”

The idea just popped out. I hadn’t really thought about it, but it sounded good. I could work and learn at the same time, the way Mr. McCall did. I could write stories like Miss Harper Lee. I could dream, then try to catch the dreams on paper.

“My dream is a place,” said Jarmaine. “Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee.”

“A college?”

“I want to do something with my life. Be a journalist or a lawyer like Thurgood Marshall.”

“Who’s he?” I asked.

She looked at me as if I’d stepped off a flying saucer. “Brown versus the Board of Education? The Supreme Court decision? ‘Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.’ Thurgood Marshall was the lawyer. What do they teach you at your school?”

“Not that,” I said.

“Things are happening at Fisk. There’s a group called the Nashville Student Movement. They integrated the lunch counters last year. They met with the mayor, and he backed down. I’m going to join them.”

“The mayor backed down? To some students?”

Jarmaine nodded. “Their leader is a woman, Diane Nash. She’s a Fisk student. She led a demonstration at the capitol.”

“You couldn’t do that here,” I said.

“The demonstration?”

“Any of it. Not in Alabama.”

Jarmaine picked up a section from last week’s paper that was folded next to her on the bench and pointed to a small article.

Negro Group Sets Bus Mixing Tour

WASHINGTON (UPI) – More than a dozen Negroes and whites planned to board buses today and head south to break the color barrier on Dixie’s highways.

The travelers, picked and trained by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), will ride the commercial buses through Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi.

So Lavender had been right. It really was happening.

“I heard about that,” I said. “Your mother told me. She said they’re called Freedom Riders.”

Jarmaine nodded. “They’ve been trained in nonviolence, like Mahatma Gandhi. No matter what people do to them, they won’t strike back. They started their trip last Thursday in Washington, DC, and plan to finish in New Orleans. They’re coming through Anniston this Sunday. They’re making history, and I’ll be at the Greyhound station to see them.”

“Does Lavender know you’re going?” I asked.

“No,” said Jarmaine, “and you’re not telling her.”

I shook my head quickly. “Don’t worry. I won’t.”

Her eyes bored into me. She was strong, I could tell. But she was nervous. She was proud but not used to showing it.

I know because she blushed.