I was starved and desperate for a cup of coffee. At the drive-through window of a donut shop, I ordered a dozen donuts and coffee. Alma demanded milk. Still no “please,” and no offer of money. Full of donuts and milk, she lay down in the seat as we pulled away.
I headed southwest down the North Carolina piedmont toward Charlotte. From there I would move through the South Carolina upcountry and the northern Georgia hills to Atlanta. There was no cloud in the sky, and the air was already warm. Jackie tuned the radio to Junior Walker and his All-Stars. He tapped time on the red leather seat between us as the saxophone trilled and the backups sang “Shotgun. Shoot ’em ’fore they run now. . . .”
“Damn it, turn that off!” Alma said in a shriek.
I should have stopped the car right then and had it out with her. But I was chickenshit. Jackie shook his head, either as intimidated by her as I was, or unwilling to offend the sexy woman with whom he was spending the summer. Jackie would have all summer to woo Alma or be terrified of her: she had persuaded him to help her teach at a “freedom school,” a special school for black kids from segregated schools in a small Alabama town not that far from my home in Eden Rise. Alma was Duke’s leading civil rights activist.
Jackie wanted me to join them at the freedom school, and I had said I would think about it, which was why she sat up in the back seat after two hours of sleep and said “Well, are you going to work with us or not?”
I shook my head. “I don’t think so.”
“Why not?” There was a challenge in her tone. “What you got better to do?”
“That’s just not what I want to do.” In fact I didn’t know what I wanted to do that summer except to eat my mother’s cooking and visit my sick grandmother. The idea of teaching at a freedom school made me nervous. Out of the corner of my eye, I caught the disappointment on Jackie’s face.
“Anything’s better than trying to help a few little niggers, huh?”
Jackie jerked around to face her. “Leave him alone or we’ll be walking to Alabama.”
Why was she so hostile to me? I hardly knew her and could count on one hand the number of sentences we had exchanged before our ride that morning. I had never said or done a contrary thing toward her. I figured she had to dislike me for what I was, a white Southerner, or what she assumed I was from my accent, my haircut, and my button-down shirt and penny loafers—a bigot in training.
When she fell asleep again, Jackie and I talked in low tones. “Is she always like this?”
Jackie groaned. “Man, I knew she liked to run things, but I thought that was because she was older, not ’cause she’s a bitch. I dread being with her in that little-assed town.”
“You could bail out too and go home with me.”
Jackie squinted at me. “What about your parents?”
I said, acting my most confident, they would be fine with it. Jackie and I had never talked about my parents, and I wondered if he also thought I was a typical Alabama bigot like the ones who appeared in the newspaper jeering at black people marching for the right to vote.
“You sure?”
“Yeah, I’m sure.” I was, of course, lying out my ass. Mama and Daddy would be startled that I brought home a colored guy, but Mama probably would recover quickly. If it turned out to be uncomfortable in Eden Rise, we’d just jump in the car and head back to Jackie’s home in the Virginia tidewater. We could be longshoremen or paint ships, or something.
Jackie nodded. “Don’t say nothin’ till we get there.”
It felt like a late July sun on the boring new interstate through the piedmont of South Carolina. The outcroppings of clay might have been heaps of hickory wood on fire, and the signs offering the premature peaches of the season—sadly enough, the most interesting sight in my vision on this ride—glared back at me in orange and black. The white rays boiled me the whole way, though some of the heat emanated from within, so intensely did I dread the scene I imagined would take place at the freedom school.
After Atlanta, spindly pines monopolized the roadside to Newnan, past LaGrange, and on into Alabama. As we drove on, the sun hovered over the horizon in front of us. It now cast a light much easier to use, and its angle threw multilateral shadows across the pastures that covered much of this part of the Alabama Black Belt. When I was no longer driving directly into the orange mass on the horizon, I could appreciate the delicate shades of white in the Queen Anne’s lace and the brilliant yellow of the Brown-Eyed Susans that decorated the roadsides. But to remind you that these beautiful ladies didn’t rule the roads unchallenged, sprinkled among them were the tall, prickly stems of the noxious rusty weed my daddy called “dock.”
Herds of cattle had wandered away from the lonesome pecan trees and now they munched their supper of fescue and clover, swinging their tails to swat away the horseflies that tortured them. A yearling steer, the black and white scion of an Angus-Hereford intermarriage, had backed his rump against a cedar fence post and was scratching himself in a furious war against lice, sending shimmers for hundreds of feet down the barbed-wire fence line. The air had cooled off a lot, which always made it easier for me to appreciate the beauty of Alabama farmland—the jades and olives and emeralds among the crops and grass and leaves and of the accents of gold and ginger and bronze from the soil and trees and animals. The bitter odor of herbicides recently applied to the young crops of cotton and soybeans bore through the open car windows. But I also got the sweetness of honeysuckle and the fecund stink of cow manure.
I liked all the smells, even the cow shit, because they reminded me of Eden Rise and being a boy there who watched and helped things grow that I would harvest, knowing I had participated in a cycle of nature God had ordained. That cycle, I knew from my father and mother, was what we were here to partake of. I grew up in Eden Rise believing I knew why God made us and why He placed us here, as stewards of His soil.
I turned the radio up louder, needing the sound to keep me awake. I was listening to “1-2-3,” in which Len Barry declared that finding love was as easy as taking candy from a baby. I didn’t share his confidence. Love had not come easy for me this year at Duke, or ever. Beth, my college girlfriend for a time, had enticed me into the sweet excitement of sex and then cast me off like a wool cardigan in a heat wave. I was still smarting.
“I gotta go to the bathroom.”
Alma could have said so in Montgomery, through which we had just passed and where there were plenty of gas stations and drive-ins with bathrooms. But now there was none in sight, and I stayed silent.
“I said I need to stop.”
“You wanta go on the side of the road?”
“No, damn it, find a bathroom.”
We were several miles farther down the barren county road when she pointed over the seat. “There’s a gas station up there.”
It was actually a country store, signaled by a faded sign and surrounded by three or four junk cars and two dilapidated outbuildings. I doubted that it had public bathrooms. But I stopped anyway just to shut her up. I pulled up to the gas pump, topped with a glass Esso sign. The store’s unpainted plank walls were faded to a dull gray. Red tin signs advertising Pepsi-Cola and Prince Albert smoking tobacco looked like they had been new when Granddaddy was a boy. The screen-wire door hung partly open when I went inside to pay for the gas.
Empty boxes cluttered the tongue-and-groove pine floor, which needed sweeping. Dusty cans of Del Monte corn, Van Camp’s pork-and-beans, and Possum sardines and faded boxes of saltines only partly filled the two rows of shelving. I inhaled dust and mold—there had to be a leak in the roof or a broken window somewhere. At the front of the store, adjacent to the pay counter, a glass case held a few loaves of Velveeta and some bright red tubes of baloney. A drink box was pushed against a nearby wall, and I went to it and fished out