The Last House on the Street(3)

“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.