The Last House on the Street(33)

“You may be right,” he said. “Your accent’s nice, but it does make you more … vulnerable. You’ll have to work harder to let people know you’re on their side.”

“I’m nervous,” I admitted.

“I understand,” he said.

“Were you nervous? Last summer, knowing other workers had been killed? And in the march, knowing—”

“Yes, of course.” He smiled at me with sympathy. “By the end of this week, you’ll feel less jittery, but you need to keep some of those nerves. Don’t let your guard down. There are people down here who’d just as soon kill a civil rights worker than look at one. The trick is to stay focused on the goal. Keep your eyes on the prize, like they say in the song. That’s all you can do, Ellie May.”

I hated when people called me “Ellie May,” after the dumb-blonde character Elly May Clampett on The Beverly Hillbillies, but coming from John, who I liked a lot even though I’d known him mere minutes, the name made me smile.



* * *



John sat next to me for that morning’s session, which was about nonviolence. There was a lot of talk of Jesus and Gandhi and I imagined John was remembering that peaceful, powerful march from Selma to Montgomery. “Nonviolence is healing,” the speaker said.

One young man in the audience raised his hand and the speaker called on him.

“I was in the march from Selma to Montgomery,” he said, “and there wasn’t nothin’ those troopers in Selma could’ve done to me that would make me act as ugly as they did.”

I found myself shivering although the air in the gym was hot and thick and sticky. How did you do it? How did you not fight back when you were being attacked? How did you not want to kill someone when they were killing you? How did you sing that “I Love Everybody” song when someone was pouring ammonia over your face?

During a break, I told John about the protests in Chapel Hill. “I was covering them for the campus newspaper,” I explained. “First I thought they were kind of stupid and then … I began to understand why they were doing it. And one day, I joined a protest. The police came and I didn’t fight them but I didn’t go limp, like a lot of the protesters did. I couldn’t make myself be so vulnerable.”

“It’s more than just ‘going limp,’ Ellie May,” John said. “It’s more about focusing on that feeling of love for everybody. Like the song.” He winked at me. He made it sound so easy. John had a little Gandhi in him, I thought. I was glad to be sitting next to him. He made me feel safe and strong. I knew, though, that I was going to have to learn to find those feelings inside myself.

John became my buddy for the rest of the week. The long days and evenings were exhausting in the most wonderful way, with each day ending the same way as we broke into our enormous circle, crossing arms, holding hands with our neighbors, and singing our hearts out. I was glad I no longer had a roommate and I’d walk back to my dorm room, brush my teeth, strip off my clothes, fall onto my bed, and be unconscious before I had the chance to notice the lumps in the mattress.

On Thursday evening, Martin Luther King, Jr., came to speak to us. Oh, how I wished Aunt Carol could have been with me! I’d seen grainy images of Dr. King on the TV news and recent pictures of him in the paper after the Selma march, but to see him in person, close up—I was in the fifth row of that huge space—was truly thrilling. We’d had good speakers that week, but this was different. Dr. King seemed to speak in waves, almost chanting at times. I stopped taking notes and just listened to him. I didn’t need to write down his words to remember them. He was frustrated that President Johnson hadn’t yet signed the Voting Rights Act. “A state that has denied opportunity for quality education for Negroes has no right to demand literacy as a prerequisite for voting,” he said in that mesmerizing voice that touched my soul. “The fact that the Voting Rights Act is not yet the law of the land will make your work harder,” he said, turning his head left and right to take us all in, “but I know you’re not here because the work is easy.” I glanced up at John and saw tears in his eyes. Only then did I realize I had tears in my own.

That night, I dreamed about Mattie Jenkins. We were together, deep in the frigid water of the lake at the end of Hockley Road, and I was trying to pull her to the surface. I struggled to grip her in my frozen fingers, but she kept slipping through them.

I woke up choking, gasping for air. I needed to walk outside in the thick, dark Georgia humidity before I could shake the dream from my mind. It wasn’t the first time I was tortured by that dream. I only wished it could be the last.

On Friday night, we were split into two groups: male and female. A handsome man named Andrew Young talked to us—the white girls—and he was kind but very firm.

“Avoid being seen in integrated cars or walking in integrated groups whenever possible,” he said. I’m sure I wasn’t the only girl in the group who wondered how we’d be able to follow that rule, since most of us white canvassers would be working side by side with our Negro partners.

“Be aware of your surroundings at all times,” he continued. “If you see white men in a truck while you’re canvassing with a Negro partner, get to safety immediately.”

I thought of Reed and “Mildred,” his white and blue 1955 Ford truck. It was weird to think that I should be afraid of a guy like Reed.