Bridge of the Single Hair can be ordered from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or a local bookstore (distributor is Itasca Books).
Here's a review just released by Kirkus Review:
In Pugh’s debut novel, a young woman from California joins the Freedom Riders in 1961, gets arrested and jailed in Mississippi, and learns that not everyone appreciates a hero. Jeri Turner is a 17-year-old spitfire who lives with her cantankerous grandmother in Los Angeles in the early ’60s. As the Civil Rights movement sweeps the country, Jeri volunteers with the Congress of Racial Equality to fight segregation in the South via nonviolent protests. Upon arriving at the bus depot in Jackson, Miss., her group is assaulted, arrested and sent to Parchman Farm, the maximum-security unit of Mississippi’s State Prison.
Pugh’s evocative novel effectively encapsulates the physical and emotional volatility of the Civil Rights era. A former Freedom Rider, the author illustrates the frustration, anger, fear and idealism of youth in her spirited, sharp-tongued protagonist. Pugh writes without sentiment, yet her honest dialogue and insightful descriptions of people and places evoke the visceral sting of injustice. Her ability to create and hold tension is a consistent strength in this novel, and the novel’s tension parallels the tension generated during that era. Pugh also balances the external turbulence with inter-movement politics and personalities. Each character has his or her personal motivations for joining CORE, the validity of which are questioned and judged as much as any criminal’s—black or white. The result is a multilayered story that shows how prejudice and condemnation exist on many levels, across generations, races, genders and states.
A sharp coming-of-age story that makes history come alive.
See this review at
Below are the first three chapters:
~ 1 ~
Los Angeles
Summer 1961
Rosemary’s boyfriend changed my life. I never met him, but he changed the course of my personal history as carelessly as a smoker scars a meadow, oblivious to any connection between his stroll through the dry grass and the wildfire that follows. I never knew his name. Rosemary called him “my black boyfriend,” relishing the seismic activity this set off in people’s eyes.
She and I had crap jobs in the basement of McCullough Worthington, a huge legal chop shop for anyone with deep pockets to protect. The temperature down there careened between sub-zero and a steam bath, and the sole arteries linking us to our masters above were a pneumatic tube and a series of dumb waiters. Our orders arrived with a whoosh and a thump. After a day of steady whooshing and thumping—sending us repeatedly into the file room to retrieve or return manila folders—Rosemary flung herself at the tube, shrieking, “We’re seventeen, for Christ’s sake. We’re too young to die of boredom!”
I liked her. She made me laugh and she often told me I was pretty, which, of course, I never believed, not least of all because of the way she would tell me: “Your eyes might be on the small side but your nose is small too and that’s good. And, it could be your features only look small because your forehead’s wide. So chin up, girl, because all the parts go together pretty good.”
“Think I should cancel my audition with MGM?”
“C’mon, Jeri, you know you’re a fine looking woman. So go already! The worst they can do is turn you down,” she grinned.
If Rosemary had gone on the march with me, if she’d been sitting next to me in the church, things would’ve turned out different. Rosemary never permitted anyone to be serious about anything. She’d tickle you if you tried not to laugh. But instead of keeping our date, she let her boyfriend talk her into heading over to Griffith Park. “A loaf of bread, a jug of Thunderbird, and a cow,” she told me two days later. “Turns out, I was the cow.”
* * *
So I gave up waiting for her and went by myself. Under the noses of L.A.’s Finest, somewhere around two hundred marchers and I limped into the Sixth Street AME Zion Church. For several minutes, we did a lot of mumbling and shuffling, looking for an available place to squat. I’m fairly athletic but after two hours of dodging all those work boots and saddle shoes, I wanted a nap.
So I half-dozed until the pastor boomed, “God has his eye on the sparrow!” At that point Rosemary, I’m sure, would’ve snorted, “That’s why the planet’s so fucked up. God’s busy bird-watching.” A few moments later I was jolted into attentiveness again when he beseeched heaven: “Remove the scales from their eyes, dear Lord, that they shall see the paths of righteousness.”
“Turn left at Sanctimony and Tedium,” I mouthed to my AWOL buddy. But I hadn’t mouthed it, I’d spoken the words. Someone hissed, “Hush!” and somebody else clicked her tongue. A few rows ahead, a grim-faced woman turned around, seeking the offender. I pretended to look around too.
The church was big enough to hold the crowd, but just barely, and the building had seen better days. The windows, overlaid with “stained-glass” contact paper, needed a good scrubbing. There were no cushions on the wooden seats, no rug on the scarred floor. Everything was dingy and cramped. Even the pews were small. Whichever way I twisted, the hymnal rack dug into my knees. I pulled out a torn green paper fan on a stick, imprinted with HARDY FUNERAL HOME, and used it to move the humidity around. When I shifted again, I scraped my knee and winced. I blamed my mother for my long legs. T.J., my grandmother, was practically a midget.
I longed to get out of there. After all, I’d gone on the march, I’d made my statement. God has his eye on the sparrow? Please. I looked up and down the row. With four people on one side and five on the other, there was no escaping without ruffling a lot of feathers. Since a majority of those feathers belonged to pious black people—I saw only a scattering of white faces—I could well picture the scene if I got up, bumping into knees, muttering, “Excuse me, excuse me,” until nearly every pair of brown eyes in the church glared at my white face.
The Reverend Wilcox finally took a seat in one of the high-backed chairs facing us. He looked rather disappointed, I thought. I hoped he hadn’t heard my blooper. A bony, bird-beaked woman who had been pecking the air at each chant of amen turned to beam at him. He gave her a distracted nod, his eyes scanning the audience. I scrunched down a bit.
Next to them on the dais sat an old man, bent over his cane, his misshapen hand moving back and forth over its smooth wood. One shoulder bulged under his shiny brown suit jacket. That bulge and the worn suit jacket made me wish I could put my arm around him and tell him everything would be okay.
In one of the last two chairs, a man of about thirty sat, looking uneasy. His clothes hung off him as if he’d lost a great deal of weight recently but, judging by the distant look in his eyes, it was more likely he’d never paid any attention to what he put on.
At the pulpit, a stocky fellow with wild gray hair signaled for us to stand and then led us through several choruses of Keep Your Eyes on the Prize. When I was a kid, my grandmother sometimes sang protest songs to me at bedtime. Lullabies might’ve been more restful but T.J. was never much into tranquility. I remember her belting out, “You Got to Go Down and Join the Union!” I’m pretty sure she didn’t know the melody had started life as a Negro spiritual.
When the singing was over, the stocky man said, “Now I have the pleasure to introduce to you Mr. Dasante Mitchell. Mr. Mitchell has come to us from the struggles down South and he has a great deal to share with us this afternoon. Please give him your full attention.” I wondered if he was directing this last request to me.
The dark young man in baggy clothes took the podium.
I have just come back from Monroe, North Carolina. It’s hot in Monroe. You could fry an egg on the sidewalk, that’s how hot it is. For Negro children, the heat don’t let up a single hour from June through September. White children get theyselves cool in the city swimming pool. Negro children has to turn a hose on each other, if they got a hose. If they don’t, they are welcome to swim in one of the filthy holes around town, swimming holes where a good number of their kinfolk have perished.
He paused to give us some time to locate those drowned bodies in our minds, small brown arms and legs that would never wiggle again. Somebody gulped back a sob. A few seats away a broad-faced woman, mopping her brow with a large yellow handkerchief, met my eyes. My smile faltered when she didn’t return it. She’d probably heard my wisecrack.
Everybody pays taxes in Monroe. The city fathers don’t say to a colored man, “Hey, boy, y’all ain’t getting the same services so it ain’t right for y’all to pay the same taxes.” No, sir. Doesn’t happen. Negroes pay the same income tax. The same property tax. They pay the same sales tax. Taxes. Now that’s one place you will see equal rights.
Groceries, too, they cost the same. Clothing and shoes cost just what a white family pays. Sometimes a little more, depending on how inclined the storekeeper might be to larceny.
Knowing laughter flitted through the church but ceased as the yellow handkerchief lady pivoted on her massive bottom and hissed, “Y’all be respectful now!” I tried to imagine watching a clerk ring up my groceries for more than was stamped on them, and I tried to imagine shutting my mouth about it because, if I complained, I’d be the one in trouble.
And so it is with public transportation. A worn-out old cleaning lady has to climb up onto the front of the bus so she can pay her fare. Then she has to climb down and go to the back door to climb up again and get her a seat. But even if she does find some place to rest her bones at the back of the bus, she will have to stand on her swolled-up feet if some white man come along and shoos her out of it. Nevertheless. Nevertheless. She’s going to pay the exact same fare he pays.
A cold smile dented his cheeks. Behind him on her perch, bird lady pecked vigorously. Rosemary would’ve done a riff on bird lady. I was starting to think it might be a good thing she hadn’t shown. If the two of us had been sitting there snickering, we would’ve been tossed out. And now I really wanted to stay.
That is the gracious Southern way of life the Klan has sworn to uphold.
He turned so that light coming through the windows mottled his honey-colored face. I loved him for caring about that old lady. Two Saturdays before, a snotty guy in a suit had shoved T.J. out of the way when we were boarding a downtown bus. He grabbed the last seat. Before my grandmother could tell him off herself—which she certainly would have—I stomped on his foot, telling him, “Get your butt out of my grandmother’s seat or I’ll take out your other Buster Brown.”
Two months ago a group of teenagers went over to the Monroe public pool. Public means that pool was part of their community and their folks had paid to build that pool, and their folks was paying still to maintain it. So those teenagers thought they might take a swim. Word went out that some nigras was getting uppity and a hundred or so upstanding white citizens ran down there, saying they was going to lynch those young ‘uns. But the children would not be moved. Things got ugly and some of those teenagers got their heads busted but they would not be moved. So the city fathers shut down that swimming pool. If that pool had to serve for colored children, well, it just wasn’t going to serve for anybody. That’s how much they abominate integration in North Carolina.
Indiana rushed into my memory, along with the only photograph I’d ever seen of my grandmother as a little girl. The picture had faded, her face almost a blur, but her sagging dress stood out and, behind her, a stretch of barren farmland. In my head, T.J.’s Indiana childhood was all mixed up with a hot December night in L.A. She and I were walking home from the corner store. Near our apartment building, I was half-blinded by a flashing police car light. When my eyes adjusted, I saw a black kid face down on the filthy sidewalk, a cop with his boot pressing on the kid’s back. When T.J. complained, the cop told her to “fuck off,” and we went inside, T.J. shaking with rage. She opened a beer and began to talk about something that had happened when she was a girl, something that had haunted her all her life.
And it’s not just in North Carolina. Y’all know what happened in Alabama this past May. Y’all might think I mean the very first Freedom Ride but you’d be wrong. The first Freedom Ride wasn’t called a Freedom Ride, it was called a Journey of Reconciliation and it took place in the year nineteen and forty-seven. Sixteen people—eight black, eight white—took a Greyhound into Dixie. First place they got in trouble—North Carolina. What made them go on that ride was something called the Irene Morgan Decision.
Dasante Mitchell’s light eyes darkened to granite.
In the summer of 1944, Miss Morgan—feeling something sick and no doubt sick and tired—was told to get up and give her seat to a white couple on a Greyhound passing through Virginia. The young lady, who was on her way to Baltimore to consult a doctor, said no, she wasn’t going to do it. And so the bus driver call in the sheriff. That peace officer try to take Miss Morgan into custody. Before he made the arrest, she kicked him in an indelicate locale. I expect she had not yet heard about nonviolent resistance.
Afterward she say she will plead guilty and pay a fine for committing an outrage on the person of the constable, which she acknowledged she had done, but she would not plead guilty and she would not pay a fine for refusing to give up the seat she had paid for. Her case went all the way up to the Supreme Court. Thurgood Marshall, a Negro, argued it and won. In a manner of speaking.
The Court did rule that whenever a bus come across a state border, the Constitution say you aren’t allowed to make some people sit in back because they the wrong color. Y’all might think that’s a strange thing in the law—segregation being perfectly all right inside the state but unconstitutional when it’s heading into some other state. Somebody much smarter than me one time said, “The law is an ass.” I don’t rightly recall who that was but that particular law sure do seem the work of an ass. Yet and still, even that particular law might be just a bit less of an ass than are at least a few of the people appointed to see that it gets carried out.
I felt as if all of us in that room breathed together. Not one of us coughed or shifted in the pews. The funeral home paper fan I had been waving hung in mid-air, momentarily forgotten.
Because in nineteen and forty-seven, as in nineteen and sixty-one, no one defended the right of a Negro to do what was legal to do. No officer of the law. No, sir. The Negroes that stood up for what was right have been the only ones obeying the law of the land. The only ones.
The old man on the dais closed his eyes. Bird lady placed a claw on his humped shoulder, her expression soft.
This past May Freedom Riders set out once again for Dixie. When the bus carrying the first group of Freedom Riders reached Anniston, Alabama, the Klan was there—hiding, as befits the Klan. When that bus roll into the depot, those good old boys jump out of their hidey-holes and went at it with iron pipes. They slash its tires and smash its windows. They cave in its sides. They want to get on to bust some heads but the driver would not open the door. The local police is standing by, and they just watch. So that bus driver decide to get that bus out of there, but by the time he get a couple miles away, those flat tires made him to pull over. And now here come the Klan. One of those righteous white men throws a firebomb in through a broken window. Then they pin the doors shut with the Freedom Riders trapped inside. Those courageous freedom fighters would’ve been burnt alive but for one thing: The gas tank exploded. The Klan ran away like chaff flying out of a thresher. Klan cowardice saved those lives.
He paused and raked his gaze across the faces of his audience. The yellow handkerchief lady dabbed her eyes and when I looked over at her, she gave me a half-smile, maybe because my eyes were spilling over too.
Y’all need to remember that. The segregationists will run away. They will flee our sword of justice—each and every time y’all stand up to them. Might be they can bend us but they won’t never break us. And, in the end, the Klan and all who believe as they believe will bow down before our cause. Brothers and sisters, heed my words: We shall overcome. We shall overcome. Because we shall not be moved!
We leapt to our feet, shouting, our fists pumping the air:
Segregation, it shall be removed!
Segregation, it shall be removed!
Just like the garbage standing in the water,
It shall be removed!
Dasante Mitchell waited for us to settle down. He seemed to be listening to something we couldn’t hear, but when he looked up, I felt his eyes on me. He spoke directly to me.
We need bodies. Hundreds of bodies. We need them to fill those jails. We need them to empty out their coffers. We need bodies to drain the poison of their corruption. Hear me: We need bodies to seize this victory. And I tell you today we will be victorious. Nothing will turn us around. Nothing. Segregation is on its deathbed.
A wise man once said that all it takes for evil to triumph, brothers and sisters, is for good men to do nothing. With Freedom Riders inside that bus, their lungs burning up and their lives in sorest danger, our nation’s highest officer of the law did—nothing.
He slammed his fist on the podium and I felt my pulse throbbing in my arms and legs. It was difficult to sit still. I wanted to shout, to yell at those politicians in Washington, to make them see how wrong they were to act like injustice wasn’t their job to stop.
Don’t y’all be those good people who do nothing in the face of such wickedness. Y’all must not continue to endure what should never be endured. Y’all must not stand by and watch. Because, my brothers and sisters, if y’all won’t do it, ain’t nobody gonna fight for justice.
I saw people clapping but I couldn’t hear them over the roar in my head. I thought, this must be the way it feels to take your vows as a nun or to walk over hot coals without flinching. A hand reached down and pulled me onto the dais. Dasante Mitchell smiled.
“Thank you, sister,” he said. “Thank you for heeding the call.”
~ 2 ~
That evening I put together a meatloaf the way my grandmother liked it—half onion, half tomato sauce, with a pound or two of salt and pepper. And I oiled the skins of the Russets before roasting them so they would be crisp as November Winesaps. T.J. loved crunchy potato skins. When she hobbled in from her long day of overtime, I was slicing the green beans and the oven was playing bubbling-fat music.
“Oho,” she said with a craggy smile. “Somebody’s buttering me up.”
“Just the potato skins.”
“Perhaps you ought to cook dinner more often, if you want to slip something by me. What’s up?” She took a bottle of beer from the refrigerator and slumped into the captain’s chair at the head of the table. “C’mon. What’s going on, Jeri?”
I dumped the green beans into a pot, turned up the flame, and sat down. “It’s nothing. I mean, I’m not trying to get anything by you. I just hoped we’d have a nice dinner. It’s been a long week for you.”
“Hells bells, what do I have to do on a Saturday that’s more fun than fighting a broken down printing press?” She took a slug of beer and peered at me. “And?”
I went over and covered the beans. “I volunteered today.”
“For what?”
“The Freedom Rides.”
Reaching out with knobby ink-stained fingers, she drew the newspaper across the table toward herself. “Is that so?” she said, starting to read. Her deformed hands rested on either side of the paper. She wore cheap flashy rings and I remembered her telling a friend that for many years she wouldn’t wear rings or bracelets because she didn’t want to call attention to her arthritic knuckles. “But then I realized something,” she’d said. “I figured out rings and bracelets call attention to themselves. They take attention away from my hands.”
“It is so.” I turned down the flame on the beans. “I volunteered.”
“Smells like that meatloaf’s about done,” she said without looking up.
We ate in silence, T.J. leafing through the newspaper she never had time for in the morning before she went off to her lithographer’s job at six. She was justifiably, I thought, proud of being one of the few women to crack that union. Standing less than five feet tall, she nonetheless held her own with the men, hefting massive boxes of paper and tinkering with the mechanics of a balky multi-ton offset press. Although she had no talent for engineering, fear and pride kept her at it until she completed each job, mostly on time. Having stood all day on legs roped by varicose veins, she eased the pain every evening by drinking several beers. Still, I’d never seen her drunk.
“What about the Indians?”
I was staring out the kitchen window at a street lamp that had been flickering for at least a month. “Huh?”
“I said what about the Indians.”
“What about the Indians?”
“Aren’t you going to do something about the Indians?”
“What Indians?”
“The American Indians. Been cooped up on reservations, had their land stolen, had their kids kidnapped and put in Indian school a thousand miles away. Those kids got beat up for speaking Indian. What about them?”
“I hadn’t planned on doing anything about Sacco and Vanzetti either, T.J. And there’s no such language as Indian.”
“Don’t get smart with me, young lady.”
I stood up.
“Where you going?”
“I’m going to wash the dishes. And then I’m going to bed.”
“It’s only seven o’clock. You sick or something?”
“No, I’m not sick or something. I’m just going to bed.”
“Well.” She drummed on the table with her stubby nails. After a moment, she got up and turned off the water I’d been running to fill the sink. “Listen to me, Jeri. You’re still underage. I could stop you.”
I turned and met her eyes. “But you won’t.” I turned the water back on.
She sank back down at the table and resumed drumming. I went over to wipe the oilcloth. The newspaper was neatly stacked. I noticed that because T.J. is normally the world’s least tidy person.
I picked up the stack. “Through with this?”
“Huh? Oh, yeah. Yeah.”
I stuffed the paper into the garbage and finished wrapping up the meatloaf.
“That was good, Jeri,” she said. “A good dinner. Thank you.”
* * *
On Sunday I stayed in bed, pulling apart Oreos and drinking soda. T.J. knocked in the morning. I called out, “I’m reading,” and she went away. In the evening she knocked again and I said, “I’m not hungry.” She told me through the door that she was going out.
Half-empty bottles of flat root beer covered the nightstand. I’d stacked the cookies into towers, re-reading a deciduous copy of Red Badge of Courage and wondering which Henry Fleming I would turn into if they set fire to a bus I rode. When I’d had enough of that, I rolled onto my side, pulled my knees into my chest, and dozed.
Molly Whuppie skipped into my dreams. My hero when I was a child, Molly rescues her three sisters from an evil giant. I listened to her story on my 78 rpm record so many times, the record grew scratchy. Rita—which was what T.J. and I called my mother—smashed it during one of her spells. I’d bawled and kicked the wall until T.J. took me out for ice cream and told me Rita would be going back into the hospital.
Half-awake, in my head I replayed the breathless narrator’s voice: “And he ran and she ran and he ran and she ran and they both ran . . . until at last they came to the bridge of the single hair and Molly Whuppie ran across but the giant could not. . .”
At two in the morning I heard T.J. locking the door of the flat and considerately padding barefoot past my bedroom. But she must’ve spotted my light because again she knocked, and this time she opened the door.
“You awake?”
I lay on my side, my teeth gritty with cookie flecks, Red Badge of Courage face down on the floor.
“I need to ask you something,” she said. I just hoped she wouldn’t bring up the Indians again. “Can I sit down?”
I nodded and she plopped onto the bed.
“Have a good night?”
“Mmm hmm. Jeri?”
“Yes?”
“Have you thought this through? I mean, have you thought about what this will mean?”
“What will it mean?”
The corners of her mouth drew down. “What about college? I thought you were going to college.”
“What made you think that?”
“Your grades were always so good—”
I pulled myself up and stuck two pillows behind my back. “There’s no money.”
“Lots of people work their way through, missy.”
“Yeah, well, I suppose they have some idea of what they want to do with their education.”
“I thought you wanted to be a doctor.”
“What’re you talking about? When I was five?” I scrambled to my feet. “T.J., I’m going to do this. I have to do this. Frankly, I hoped you’d be proud of me. I really thought you would.”
“You did not.”
“Okay. I didn’t. But why can’t you? Won’t I be fighting for things you believe in—?”
“Maybe you haven’t noticed, Jeri, but we don’t have much in the way of justice and equal rights here in L.A., either. Of course, that wouldn’t be as exciting as going two thousand miles away to wave your mighty sword around.”
“Oh, brother.”
“Well, it sure seems awful spur-of-the-moment.”
“It’s not,” I lied.
“Okay. Just tell me this: How will integrating bus stations change things for colored people? Most of them don’t have the money to take a bus across state lines anyway.”
“You have a better idea?”
“Jobs. That’s what Negroes need. Good jobs and good wages.”
“You’re kidding.”
She squinted hard at me. “You do know how important jobs are, right? This isn’t just about you wanting to get away from that basement and have a little adventure?”
I ran my fingers through my chopped hair. “You don’t get it.”
“I get it, all right. You signed up because somebody spoke some mumbo jumbo and you got swept away.”
I huffed, “You think Negroes need good jobs? Fine. But I don’t see you lifting a finger—why don’t you do something for a change?”
She closed her eyes. “You’ve got a smart mouth on you, Jeri Turner.”
“Yeah, and I know where I got it.”
“I’ve done things,” she muttered. “I’ve done plenty of things you know nothing about.”
I sat next to her and put my arm around her shoulders. She stiffened. T.J. never liked to be touched. “That was a bad thing to say—and it’s wrong. I’m sorry I lost my temper. I know about the stuff from the fifties, McCarthy and HUAC, and you’re the bravest woman I ever knew. It had to be awful scary when you risked losing your job, when you had me and Rita to look after. You’re a good person.” She sniffed, as if rejecting the compliment, but I felt her body soften. “But, T.J., please—give me a break. I want to be like that, to stand up for what’s right the way you have. And I want you to be on my side.”
“Damn it to hell, I should never have told you that story.”
“I hope you’re not thinking if something happens to me, it’s going to be your fault because you told me.”
“If something happens to you, it doesn’t matter whose fault it is.”
“Okay. But, just so you know, your story has nothing to do with me going.” I reached into the drawer of my nightstand and drew out a slip of paper. “Will you sign this for me?”
T.J. scanned it. “This says you’re eighteen.”
“I know what it says.”
She shook her head, but she held out her hand for the pen. After she signed it, she dropped the piece of paper in my lap as if she didn’t want any more to do with it. She stood up and looked down at me grimly. “You’re Rita’s child so I can’t tell you one damned thing.”
I got up and kissed her lined cheek. “No, T.J. I’m your granddaughter. And that’s the reason you can’t tell me one damned thing.”
~ 3 ~
Room B of the Sixth Street church held a heavy wooden table, some chairs, and not much else. The walls were decorated with crayoned Jesuses—scraggly beards and long washboard faces. Some of the Sunday school kids had used a single crayon to color both Jesus’s beard and his complexion. The result looked something like the Hunchback of Notre Dame.
Two black women and two white guys were in the room when I got there, a bit late. One of the white guys introduced himself as Paul Warren, our organizer from the Congress of Racial Equality. He was probably about twenty-three or -four. He blinked so much, I wondered whether he had recently gotten contact lenses, but I decided it was nerves. T.J. must’ve been his barber just as she’d been mine all my life, because cowlicks of different lengths jutted out of his scalp. While we waited for the last two volunteers, he paced the tight space at the end of the room, his thumbs hooked through the belt loops of his jeans.
When the last two Freedom Riders showed up, Paul launched into his speech. I only half-listened. It had all been said at the church, I was sure. For a while, I studied the faces of the other Freedom Riders. Except for one, they looked older than me, but none of them looked more than thirty.
I checked my cuticles, wondered what Rosemary would be doing later, and mentally added up my small savings and the last paycheck I’d be getting on Friday. I thought I should give the money to T.J., just keep a few dollars for myself. I wasn’t going to need much until I came home. Maybe I could talk her into using it for the appointment with the doctor she was supposed to make.
Paul was winding down. “We’ll spend this week practicing techniques for dealing with violence. But tonight I’d like you to introduce yourselves and say a few words about why you’re here.” He jingled the change in his pocket. “Dorothy, why don’t you start?”
Her hair had been crimped into a small bun tacked to the nape of her neck. Dorothy’s best feature was her eyes, almost yellow, unsettling in her cocoa brown face. “I’m an opera singer,” she said with a flash of those catlike eyes, as if she feared one of us might deny it.
Paul stood at the window, his back to us. “How did you come to volunteer?” he said to the garbage cans outside.
She said, “I know somebody who was on the burning bus.”
Snapshots of the bus flipped through my mind. I tried to imagine myself inside it. Was I screaming? I shuddered. Maybe I was being a fool, just like Rosemary and T.J. said. Maybe I couldn’t do this.
Dorothy touched her hair. I couldn’t read her expression. “My husband’s down there already,” she said. I thought she sounded unhappy, but not scared.
I told myself again that the difference between a coward and a brave man was the brave man only dies once. Yeah, Rosemary retorted, but that’s just because the brave man doesn’t have any imagination.
I heard Paul say, “Do they call you Tommie?” He was speaking to an elfin girl in half-glasses.
“Not if I can help it, they don’t. My name is Thomasine.” She was the only Freedom Rider close to my age, or at least she looked it. The frizzy halo of her hair—the first Afro I ever saw—sparked like black lightning where the sun touched it.
Paul said, “Please tell me you’re older than thirteen.” I wondered if he was trying to flirt with her.
Thomasine said curtly, “I’m nineteen.”
Paul let out a nervous giggle and turned back to the view. I suspected he imagined staring into the distance made him seem imperial. Of course, since he stood two feet from a row of trash cans, there wasn’t a great deal of distance for him to stare into.
“Well, you know.” Thomasine shrugged. “I graduated high school and a lot of my friends been talking about the Freedom Rides.”
“But what made you sign up?”
She looked hopefully toward the door. I thought she might be considering how much she’d like to walk through it. But something changed in her face. “Any of you ever hear of Emmett Till?”
A cute blond guy with startling blue eyes said, “Of course.” The other white guy, skinny and hunched, said, “You talking about that kid that was lynched a few years ago?” The skinny guy had been biting his nails ever since I came in. He probably wasn’t too relaxed with the burning bus either.
Thomasine twisted a large ring. “Emmett was fourteen. They said he whistled at a white lady.” She spoke in almost a sing-song voice. It sounded like reciting. I guess she was trying to keep herself from hearing what she was saying. “They put out his eye. They put out all his teeth except for two. They did things to him for hours and hours and, when they finished, they threw him in the river with something around his neck.” She took in a long draught of air and focused on the ring. It didn’t help me that she’d rushed through these facts. Emmett Till’s mangled face was as vivid in my mind as it had been on the first day the paper published his photograph. “Emmett was sort of a half-cousin of mine. My mama went out there to be with his family at the funeral. His mama made them keep the coffin open. She didn’t want anybody covering up what they did to that little boy.” She pressed her lips together then and fell silent.
Paul waited, as if he hoped she might change the subject and say something to lift the gloom that had settled over us. But Thomasine was through talking. “Thank you,” he said finally, and turned to me. “Your name’s Geraldine?”
I dragged my eyes away from her sad face, reflecting that only moments before she’d seemed cheerful. “I go by Jeri.”
“So what brings you into the Movement?”
I’d been dreading having to answer this question from the moment he put it to Dorothy. Even though Dasante Mitchell’s speech inspired me to stand up when I did, I couldn’t admit that. Paul might believe I was as rash as T.J. said I was. Of course, I could have talked about Emmett Till. When he was murdered, I was only two years younger than he was and I felt that if the grownups in Mississippi could kill a small boy, they could kill me. But, if I went back to his story, I’d only look like I was copying Thomasine and Paul would start thinking I didn’t have any good reason to be in that room. T.J.’s story had been on my mind since the rally at the church, but I couldn’t talk about it. I wasn’t ever going to tell anybody that story.
So I started feeling my way into an answer: “My grandmother was a Red back in the fifties—”
Paul turned and looked at me sharply. “Your grandmother’s a Communist?”
“Not anymore. The Party threw her out. T.J.’s never been much of a follower.”
He crossed his arms and leaned back against the wall under a particularly grotesque Jesus. “You understand CORE doesn’t take Reds, right? You don’t have any affiliations with leftist groups yourself, do you?”
“I’ve never been much of a follower either.”
“Oh?” His brows went up and I saw my mistake.
“Don’t worry, I can follow if I have to.”
“If you go on the Rides, you’ll have to.” He dismissed me, gesturing to the skinny guy. “Ned?”
“I wasn’t saying I volunteered because my grandmother used to be a Communist. That would be silly.”
He turned back toward me. “I’m sorry. You weren’t finished?”
“I only meant she talked to me about prejudice and Negroes. Because that’s one of the things the Communists I used to know worry about.”
His gaze held mine for a moment. It wasn’t friendly. “So is that it?”
“Not really. I wanted to say something about a fairy tale. Yeah, I know, it’s really immature to talk about a kid’s book. But this one meant a lot to me. It’s about a little girl, Molly Whuppie.” Ned snickered. “Okay, it’s a funny name, but she’s the only little girl hero I ever came across. See, she single-handedly rescues her sisters from an evil giant. The thing is, she can get away from him over the bridge of the single hair because she’s light but he—”
“Is Molly Whuppie your role model?” asked Ned, trying without success to keep the sneer out of his voice. “Because it’s going to be tough to lose enough weight to get over that bridge yourself.”
“Yeah, that’s right, Ned. Thanks. What was I thinking?” I stood up. “Excuse me.” Paul frowned. “The bathroom?”
“Down the hall.”
I splashed my face with cold water and peered into the murky mirror. “Hello, dimwit,” I said to my reflection. “Maybe tomorrow you should bring a stuffed teddy bear, huh? I bet that cute guy was impressed.”
When I got back, the cute guy with the incredible blue eyes was speaking. “So I have the bad luck to be good at something that doesn’t interest me very much and to be very interested in things—such as this—that don’t pay the rent. That’s about it.” He shrugged.
“Thanks, Chris.” Paul cast a scathing look in my direction and then turned a radiant smile on the final speaker. “Sheila. Please go ahead.”
The woman sitting next to Chris, the woman he came in with and who was probably his girlfriend, introduced herself. Sheila wasn’t beautiful but she was one of those women who got away with not being beautiful. She was beautifully put together in all the ways I was not.
“So why am I here?” Sheila smiled but her eyes didn’t smile with her. “My real father took off before I was born. My mother married Harold when I was still a baby. Harold was a Negro. And he was my real real father.” She fidgeted with her watch. “When I was ten, my mother planned a trip to see her sister in Alabama.” She tucked her hair behind her ears. “My dad said he couldn’t go but I told my mother I wasn’t going if he didn’t.” She hesitated. This was hard, I could see. “When he explained why he couldn’t, I called him a liar. I screamed at him.” She looked down and tears spilled onto the table. She raised her face to us and I realized I’d been wrong. She was beautiful. “My dad died last year. He would’ve been proud, I think. I know I owe it to him to—to join this movement.”
Paul, who’d been standing in the glare at the window, moved to the head of the table. “Thanks to each of you for your stories. I think that’s enough for one session. Tomorrow night we’ll talk about the philosophy of non-violence and we’ll run through some techniques for protecting yourselves. See you all back here tomorrow evening.”
We got up and filed out of the room. On the church steps I felt a hand on my arm. I turned around and my heart rate sped up.
“I liked your story.” Chris looked sincere. I was still stinging from Ned’s remark. “Molly Whuppie. It was cool. I never heard of it before.”
I tried to think of something witty to say, something that might stay with Chris all the way home. Instead I blurted like a little kid, “I think Paul hates me.”
A crooked smile dimpled his cheek. “Don’t sweat it. Paul’s one of those guys who takes himself way too seriously.”
I nodded. It was an opinion I shared. I glanced around. “So where’s Sheila?”
“I think she caught the bus. Why?”
“Oh. Nothing. I was just wondering.” He looked like he was starting to lose interest in talking to me. “That was quite a story she told. It got to me.”
“Yeah, me too.”
“I’m sorry I missed your speech. What was all that stuff about being good at something you don’t like?”
“I’m a civil engineer.” He patted his shirt pocket. It was empty. “I wanted to be a poet laureate or a great concert pianist, but it turns out you need talent.”
“I know what you mean. I was thinking of going into archaeology myself, but they told me I had to have some sort of training. Looking for a cigarette?”
“Yeah, why? You have one?”
“Sorry. Don’t smoke.” We started down the steps. “So tell me—if I don’t sound too much like Paul—why did you volunteer?”
“I’m not sure. Ah. Here they are.” He took a pack of Camels from his jacket pocket. “Probably my high-minded upbringing. My dad’s a Unitarian minister.”
“Well, that trumps my Communist grandmother.” He gave me a funny look. “I mean, they’re ethical people, those Unitarians, but they don’t have any dogma, do they?”
“I guess you don’t know any Unitarians. Well, I’ll see you tomorrow.” He started away and then turned around. “Hey, don’t worry about Paul. After this week, we’ll probably never see him again.”
