FREEDOM HOUSE

A reading by the author

ii

I left after that, going out to the car where Steve and Ashleigh were waiting for me. What can you say after a meeting like that? We’d both grown so far apart — too far to meet on anything even resembling solid ground. I still liked Kennedy; she didn’t. She liked Nixon; I didn’t. I still believed in Civil Rights; she believed they died with King, if she ever believed in them at all.

Momma wasn’t the only one saying Civil Rights would die without King to steer the course, or else Kennedy to push the Bill through, and with the riots that criss-crossed the country after his death, it looked for a while that maybe they were right. I think people used King’s death as an excuse to say that they’d waited long enough; it was time to take what was theirs by right. It was the militant mentality of the SNCC come to light. I think Kennedy was willing to face up to Civil Rights, but he wasn’t able to do anything about it; at least not right away. His was a wait and see policy, just like everything else; problem was, nobody wanted to wait that long to see. He would’ve been running against Goldwater, and I’m pretty sure he would’ve won in a landslide. After he was dead though, it was too late. The country had waited long enough, and when the Black Militant faction woke up, they wanted to burn things down, especially the Government.

As much as Momma might have hated Kennedy and Johnson, I think that was more in hindsight. When Civil Rights came to the forefront — when they organized the bus boycott and the sit-ins, and the Freedom Riders — she was just as scornful as everyone else and said that no one would be able to solve it. And for a while it looked like she might be right.

I don’t remember her hating Kennedy when he died, though. She mourned right along with the rest of the country; and I don’t think the irony was lost on her when Johnson finally ended up signing the Civil Rights Bill — the fact that he was a Texan and all, I mean.

Steve reached into the back seat and popped the door open for me. I guess he was thinking I’d made some sort of headway with Momma, but I don’t think it surprised either one of them to see that I hadn’t. I asked Steve how it went, and Ashleigh said that they’d signed up most of the block as she backed up out of the driveway. Steve said only a few doors were slammed in his face. It’s a far cry from how it used to be, I thought. Ten years ago, we would’ve never been together in the same car with Steve, at least not in broad daylight — two white girls and a black man? This was still the White part of town, the part of town that made me look over my shoulder whenever we passed a pick-up truck, or a car that seemed to hesitate just that much before turning left, or right. Once we crossed Miller’s Road things would be different I knew — the houses, the yards, the whole look of the place — would remind you of some sharecropper’s house you saw in a T.V. documentary about the South rising again. I never knew if they meant the Negro South, or the White.

Ashleigh asked me how it went with Momma, and I shook my head slowly. I sank into the back seat, grateful to be out of there, looking out at the perfectly trimmed hedges and manicured lawns of the neighbours’ houses as we pulled out onto the street. They say you can never go back, and I suppose that’s true to some extent. I looked at the old house, and thought it looked smaller than I’d remembered it, older and more worn down — weather-beaten would be the word I guess — and as I remembered the last time I was here with such clarity, I closed my eyes against the memory, fighting the tears I expected to well up at any moment.

I saw the tire swing in the back yard still hanging off the tree as we passed the burned down Church. No one’s  touched it in all these years, I thought, but I knew that was because Momma would have nothing to do with it — like it was her choice to make. The years haven't been kind to the Churchyard either — the once manicured lawn was growing wild with weeds, and the worn out patch of grass under the tire swing was full and green as though Maggie and I never even played on it when we were kids. The bushes behind the house were gone, and there was a new development going up where the Edgerton place used to be.

I’d learned about the development as soon as we approached the edge of town; at least three different billboards laid claim to “the new Boonesborough — in three different phases.” I looked at the billboards as we drove by them, and they reminded me of all those billboards from when I was a kid. They even had the same, wholesome, Fifties looking families plastered on them, only now they were dressed in newer clothes, and I remember thinking how nobody looks like that.

I saw a corner of the small cemetery behind what was left of the Church as we rounded the corner. The fence around it had fallen over, and I thought: that would’ve never happened if Daddy was still alive. The grass had grown up between some of the older tombstones — Butler; McTavish; Miller — all five of them — Fielding; Owen; Barros; and I wondered how I still knew the names. The birth and death years were still sitting at the edge of my memory, but I told myself I didn’t want to play that game anymore.

Maggie and I used to test ourselves, trying to match the dates with the names. The Millers’ were the hardest, because there were two sets of twins in the family. The trick was that one set of twins was born over a period of two days, because their births spanned the midnight hour. Daddy had taken the time to explain it to me one lazy afternoon.

But no one had been buried in the cemetery since Root buried Daddy there twenty-two years ago. It seemed strange thinking how a cemetery could die like that, I thought. Just like a whisper; even stranger that a whole Church’s congregation would evaporate like that, too, but with Daddy gone, Root, and Reverend, it seemed that more than just Hope had gone up in flames that night.

  Momma’s from the “Old School” I told Steve and Ashleigh as soon as I’d settled into the back seat. She’s from the “Old” South — the “Deep” South: Birmingham — where lynchings and beatings were the backbone of the county, I added a little laconically. It wasn’t that she actually saw anyone being lynched or whipped, I explained, but she’d heard the sordid whispers about them from her father, and his friends. They were things she’d overheard, I clarified. She’s only ever witnessed one lynching in her life — two if you count Daddy’s — and I don’t think she ever really got over it. As near as I could tell from what she’s told me over the years, Grampa Remple was a bona fide member of the Klan, but it wasn’t something she liked to talk about. And certainly nothing she ever bragged about — especially since she grew up to marry a Northern Baptist Minister. She was born in a day and age where people toed the line like they were supposed to; you were told not to make waves, turn a blind eye, and never question your elders.

Being a girl, it meant she used to sit out on the porch drinking mint juleps, or home made iced tea with Gramma, she told me. Those were probably the happiest times for her though; she was real close to Gramma, I said.

I didn’t say it to either one of them in particular. I think I was just talking so that I could hear the sound of my own voice; I was trying to figure things out in my head — trying hard not to cry. I was trying to rationalize things, because that’s what I need to do when things don’t go the way I planned. I’d been close to Momma once — both Maggie and I were — but too much has come between us since then. Did it take something as horrific as Daddy’s dying to drive a wedge between all of us?

She’d be wearing her Sunday best back in those days —  and this was when they were living right smack-dab in the middle of the Depression, I went on. They went to Church every Sunday because they were good Christians, she told me. They had the ladies of the Church Auxiliary over for lunch one Sunday every month, and Gramma cooked most of the day then, even though Momma said they still had hired help. Momma would sing along with the radio — Gospel songs and Opera arias — but Momma said she mostly prayed to be forgiven for all of her trespasses — all the while hoping Grampa wouldn’t take her outside and whip her for whatever made-up reason he might have had.

Spare the rod and spoil the child, I said softly. That’s what her father used to tell her. And he lived and breathed that belief, too. Right to the bitter end. How she ever found the nerve to go up against her father, I’ll never know. Maybe the war coming when it did saved her, because that’s when she met Daddy, and shortly after that they were married.

And then I was born.