FREEDOM HOUSE

  iii

We ended up back at the small motel we’d made plans to spend the night at earlier, and I told Ashleigh I needed a shower. Steve said he didn’t think it was a good idea staying at a motel that had been an All-White Establishment just a few short years ago; he said it might be better for all of us if he stayed somewhere else. I agreed, but I didn’t say anything because I could see Ashleigh didn’t fully understand. I think he saw it in my eyes though. Why rock the boat if you don’t have to? He asked me if I knew of another place he could go to, and I told him he should be able to find something in Niggertown; I felt the blood rushing to my face almost as soon as I said it.

“You don’t have to feel embarrassed, Missy,” Steve said with a wide grin. “Every place has one. It’s sorta like Chinatown in the big city, only they don’t like White folk knowing about them. Shantytown’s another name for them,” he laughed.

“But you shouldn’t have to leave,” Ashleigh said, and I looked at her with a slow shake of my head. Steve laughed again, turning to look at her, but I could see he wasn’t sincere. Ashleigh wasn’t laughing at all.

“I shouldn’t have to go? Why?” he asked, suddenly serious.

“You’ve got just as much right to be here as we do. It’s the law,” Ashleigh said stubbornly.

“Just ‘cause it’s da law doan make it right, Sissy,” he said with an aw-shucks smile. He looked almost apologetic. “After all, there’s the law for one set of folk, and then there’s an unwritten law everybody else lives by. That’s the one that rides underneath it all—just under the surface. There's a big difference.”

“What was the point in marching on Washington, then? What was the point of all those Freedom Rides? Or Freedom Summer? Or even her daddy dying?” she added with a nod in my direction. It was as if she realized what she’d said, and the way she looked at me, that made her say sorry; she looked like a kid standing beside the barn door trying to close it, knowing it was too late because the cows were all  ready out.

That’s okay. It was a long time ago, I told her. I’ve told myself a hundred different lies like that, but I’ve never really said them out loud to anyone before—or believed them. I wondered if she believed me.

Steve looked at me with a pained expression, and turned to look at Ashleigh again.

“How old were you then? Fourteen? Fifteen?”

“Fourteen.”

“Fourteen? I was twenty-two. We were both there,” and he nodded to me. “That’s where I met Missy for the first time. You’ve learned everything you know from watching the evening news. Do know what they were calling the March on Washington in New York back then? I mean the Muslims? Malcolm’s boys? ‘The Farce on Washington.’

“They were preaching how we should give up all that passive resistance bull shit King was trying to initiate. They wanted a race war. Us against them. You against me,” he said quickly. “Black against White is what they were saying. Racial cleansing. Do you know what that means? Racial cleansing? They did it to the Jews during the war. They’re doing it in South Africa right now—they do it everywhere they can.

“Well, it means the same thing down here, but they do something about it; it’s just that you don’t hear about it too much. If a Black man walked into a place like this twenty years ago, it meant that he was here either to clean the toilets, or to deliver something. If he said it was his right to stay the night, then he’d find himself on the end of a rope come morning. They’d kill you just for looking at a White woman. Ever heard of Emmett Till? Do you think that attitude has changed now that the law says you can’t do that? Do you want to take that chance? I don’t.”

He was right Ashleigh, I said. You don’t understand what it was like. Gaines is probably the last place I’d be trying to push an issue like that. We’ll never understand because we’re White. Steve’s had to deal with this sort of thing all his life.

“It’s no big deal. You go in and have your shower Missy,” he said to me. “And you try to relax, Sissy,” he said to Ashleigh. “Hey look, the sign says they have a pool. Maybe you can both have a swim or something like that?”

“You expect me to go swimming?” Ashleigh said.

“It doesn’t matter what you do,” he said as he opened the car door and sat down. He held his hand out for the keys. Ashleigh slapped them into his hand and walked away.

  He’s right, I told myself. She was way too young to understand how bad things were. It would be a long time before she did, too, and I hoped for her sake, that she never would.

“You’ll take care of her, won’t you Missy?” Steve asked me as he watched her walk away.

“She might be young, and maybe a little naive, but she’s probably the best piece of ass I’ve had in a long, long time,” he added with a laugh.

You’re such a whore; I laughed, and said that she’d be fine. She didn’t understand what a place like this could be like—or what it could do to you. She’d learn.

It takes time, I said. You have to change everyone’s attitude, not just a few; but you can only do it a few people at a time.

“Do you think I’ll ever see it in my lifetime?” he grinned up at me.

Civil Rights? Free choice? Free elections? In a place like this? One day, I said nodding. You’ll be a lot older though. It’ll be easier once the older generation dies off; once they start teaching racial tolerance in schools. I liked to think my Daddy died for those things, but I don’t think that was it at all.

“You don’t? What do you think it was then?”

I think it was personal.

“Personal? You mean, like murder? I’ve never heard you say that before. Is that why you wanted to come down here?”

That doesn’t mean I’m right, I said with a hard smile, and regretted having said it.

“What if you are? Are you going to find out who did it? Are you going to track him down?”

Do you mean am I going to take on the Klan?

“You’ve got a lot of friends back in Washington. I’m sure they’d support you.”

That’s how you find out who your friends really are, because the man I think is responsible is probably one of the more powerful men here.

“Do you know who it is?”

I said I had a suspect or two.

“Who?”

I couldn’t say right then.

“That’s no answer.”

It was for me.

“Maybe I can help you?”

Help? A Negro man in a town like this, I said with a weak smile. I shook my head. I don’t think that would be a good idea. You’d just end up getting yourself buried in

that development we saw on the way into town, I added.

“You mean ‘the New Boonesborough’?”

That’s where I’d hide a body if I had to hide one, I said.

“Does your mother know you think like this?”

I told him I didn’t think to ask her.

“You never talked about it?”

I told him she said a few things, but they were more her thinking we were here to use Daddy’s death as a rallying cry to get the Negro vote. I told him I wouldn’t do that.

“You wouldn’t?”

I looked at him for a moment before I asked if he thought we really needed to.

“No, I guess not.”

Things had changed a lot in the last dozen years, I said. That’s why I said he’d see a change in his lifetime. Some parts of the country would change faster; it would take a while longer for a place like Gaines, though. I closed the door and he started the car, backing out of the driveway slowly.

“Go have a swim,” he called out, and I thought maybe it wasn’t such a bad idea.