The Last House on the Street(37)

Before we took off, one of the SCOPE leaders, Dan, leaned in the car window to wish us a safe journey. When he saw me sitting next to Winston, he rearranged us, putting Winston up front with Paul, and Jocelyn in the back seat with me, so we wouldn’t have a Negro guy sitting next to a white girl in case anyone noticed us while we were on the road.

“You’re just asking for trouble if you get stopped with you next to Winston,” Dan said, once he was satisfied with the new seating arrangement. He told Winston to duck down if we passed too close to other cars until we were on the highway. Winston nodded, but looked unconcerned. He was tall and lanky, with dark eyes behind horn-rimmed glasses. I’d noticed him over the course of the week, as he seemed to like to sit near the front of the packed gym, like John and I did. He was hard to miss. While most of the boys wore tan chinos and plaid shirts, Winston always looked freshly pressed in dark slacks, a white shirt, and an occasional tie. He wore his hair close-cropped as if he’d just stepped out of a barber shop. The only time I saw him smile was when Reverend King took the microphone. He was there to work, not play. Not that the rest of us were playing, exactly, but we were energized and enthused, while Winston seemed to hold everything in, a tight spring. Only when we sang at the end of the night did he seem to relax.

“So,” Paul said, once we were underway, “I’m from New York State. Poli-sci major. What about you guys?”

“Tucson, Arizona,” Jocelyn said. “I go to UCLA. Majoring in library science.”

“I’m from Derby County, as y’all know,” I said. “I go to the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, majoring in pharmacology.”

“Wow!” Jocelyn said. “You must be a brainiac.”

I wasn’t a brainiac, but I was definitely starting to like Jocelyn.

“And you, Winston?” I leaned forward to look at him.

“Call me Win. I’m a junior at Shaw University in Raleigh, and I’m also from Derby County,” he said, surprising me. “They’re sending me up there because I know it. I know the people. I can help y’all to get a foot in the door.”

“I’m from Round Hill,” I said.

He nodded. “I know,” he said. “I saw it in the roster. I live in Darville, the other end of the county.”

I didn’t know a soul in Darville. “What are you studying?” I asked him.

“Education,” he said. “I want to teach.”

“So what’s Derby County like?” Paul asked, and Winston—Win—and I spent the next hour or so attempting to educate Paul and Jocelyn about Derby. It was quickly apparent that we were talking about two different counties: my lily-white Round Hill and Win’s mixed-sounding Darville. I knew nothing about the parts of the county we’d be working in. Nothing about the inequities, the farming communities, the sharecroppers. All I knew about those aspects of the South was what I’d learned this past week, which had been all theory and no reality. Listening to Win talk about how the sharecroppers suffered, how they were afraid to even attempt to register to vote because they might lose their income and their homes, I felt a blush creep up my neck at my ignorance. Win struck me as bright but humorless. There was a tense feeling about him, like if you scratched his calm, almost intellectual surface, you’d find a very angry man.

“I live in a little white vacuum,” I said, surprising myself when those words came out of my mouth.

“You had Black kids in Round Hill High School, though, right?” Win said, turning his head to look at me. I was jarred by his use of the word “black.”

“Yeah, sure,” I said, though I didn’t think I’d said two words to the few Negro students in my high school. They came in from other communities in the morning and returned to those communities in the afternoon. We had nothing in common. I was disappointed in myself for never reaching out to them.

“Hey!” Jocelyn said. “Paul looks like he’s falling asleep at the wheel already and we’re only an hour into our trip. We should sing!”

I laughed at her enthusiasm. “Are you a cheerleader at UCLA?” I asked.

“Do I look like a cheerleader?” she asked. It was too dark to see, but I imagined she was rolling her eyes. She looked nothing like a cheerleader.

“What song should we start with?” I asked.

Both of the boys grumbled with their lack of enthusiasm as I started singing my favorite, “I’ll Fly Away,” and Jocelyn quickly joined me. Paul, too, a moment later. I thought Win—serious, zipped-up-tight Win—was going to skip the singing, but he surprised me, and soon the four of us were swaying and clapping—except for Paul, who kept his hands on the wheel—and singing at the top of our lungs as we drove along Georgia’s dark highways.

We drove nearly straight through, Atlanta to Derby County, eleven long dark hazy hours with only a few stops for food and bathroom breaks. We picked up sandwiches for Win, who had to stay in the sweltering heat of the car, since he wouldn’t be welcome in the restaurants. And we had to pull over a few times to find a place wooded and isolated enough for him to relieve himself. We were very careful. We knew that the sort of people who were on the road in the middle of the night in Georgia and the Carolinas would not take kindly to seeing an interracial group traveling together and we didn’t want our SCOPE summer to end before it even began. Win accepted all of this as though it was nothing unusual, but it really bothered me. He was one of us. It was so wrong that he had to endure the humiliation of being treated like a third-rate citizen. This is what it’s all about, I thought to myself. This will never change without Negroes being able to vote. Everything made so much more sense to me now. I thought that was why Win seemed so serious. That was why the students in Chapel Hill had endured the ammonia poured over their heads and why, even though I hadn’t completely understood my motivation at the time, those of us kneeling on Franklin Street hadn’t budged when angry people drove their cars close enough to us to touch. As John had said, we had our eyes on the prize.