Neither Mike nor anyone else in Lytton with the exception of Priss Comfort, who was the administrator of the essay contest at Lytton High, would have known the Civil Liberties Union from the Supreme Court of the United States, and so Mike felt few qualms about pursuing the essay. Its subject, “The South on Fire: The Civil Rights Movement at the Crossroads,” did give her a small, electric stab every now and then, especially when she imagined her father’s reaction to her victory, but she dismissed it, seeing in her mind’s eye his pride and awe when she presented him with the check for one thousand dollars. She went on with her research in the library, which was as Priss had said, virginally innocent of materials on the Civil Rights Movement; but Priss supplied good source material, and Mike’s own new convert’s zeal carried her high and fast.
She talked of her work to no one except, and perhaps not surprisingly, J.W. Cromie. To Bayard Sewell and her father, she said only of her immersion in the library and her upstairs bedroom, “I want it all to be a surprise.” And on the surface, this was true. Mike did not look any deeper than that. In the new momentum of her happiness, she had gratefully abandoned introspection. She might have spoken of her work to Priss, but Priss did not ask, and when Mike broached the subject, as she did once or twice at the beginning of the project, Priss had said, “We’ll talk about it when the contest is over. I don’t want to hear a word about it now. It’s very important that everything you do be totally and completely yours, Mike.”
But she talked to J.W. on many evenings, when she had finished working and Bayard had gone from his job at the drugstore straight into the Winship dining room to study at the huge, round oak table under the Searcy family chandelier. Later, around ten-thirty, they would meet briefly for cocoa in the kitchen, and John Winship would join them, and after that he would retreat to his monastic bedroom with elaborate tact and leave the living room to them and their greedy and desperate hands and mouths. But the blank hour or so between she had come to fill again with the renewed visits to J.W. in the little house behind the hedge.
J.W. said little during these visits, as was his habit, but he listened. Mike told him what her reference books and newspapers and magazines said, and what she heard on the radio and television, as if he had no access to them himself, and most important, she told him what she thought about all of it. What she thought was quixotic and idealistic in the extreme at the beginning of her work, borne impossibly high on the updraft of her revelatory fire, but gradually a lean and reasoned shape began to emerge from her exhortations, something very near a whole and viable theory about the struggle for racial equality in the South, and what might be done about it, and what might not. Though she had virtually no experience of the world outside the South and no perspective to speak of on the phenomenon of the movement, Mike had the longtime native Southerner’s almost subliminal knowledge of the day-to-day textures and realities of blacks living among whites. It lent her somewhat simplistic and passionate sentiments on the subject a convincing pragmatism.
And she had always had what Lytton would have called a way with words. She read her essay, in all its drafts and revisions, to J.W., and he said nothing, only nodded when she paused and looked at him, his face as solemn and apparently judicious as if it had been, in effect, he she was talking about. Mike’s long early years of feeling alone and exiled, of betrayal by her very birth, gave her words an urgency and homing precision that sometimes … very rarely … brought a quick smile of recognition to his face; if she had seen the smiles, she would have known that she had in J.W. a more receptive audience than any of the judges in their offices in Atlanta, but she seldom looked up from her papers when she was reading aloud to him.
She might have seen something else, too; the small flame of a newborn pride and commitment. She had no way of knowing that in her words, on those spring evenings, J.W. Cromie was seeing dancing possibilities he had never known existed. Between the two of them, the essay was conceived, nurtured, and born. In mid-March she retyped it one last time and mailed it off.
In May she learned that she had won the competition.
Mike ran grinning and hugging herself from the Lytton post office to Priss Comfort’s house. Priss looked at her a long moment, and then at the certified check for one thousand dollars, and smiled.
“Leave a copy of your piece for me when you go,” she said. “Now I’ll read it.”
“It’s a fine piece of work, Mike,” she said the next day. “It tells me a lot about where you might take your life, if you work hard and have enough courage. That’s the part I don’t know about yet. Have you shown this to your father? Does he know about the prize?”
“No,” Mike said. “I was going to wait and surprise him … oh, sometime later. You know, right when we’re getting ready for the wedding and all, just say, ‘Oh, by the way, you don’t have to worry about school for me this year. This ought to cover it,’ and sort of hand it to him casually.”
Priss looked at her thoughtfully.
“What about Bayard?”
“I … well, no. He hasn’t read the essay. And he doesn’t know about this, yet. I just now got it, Priss; I came straight here …”
“I think you’re right, Mike, even though you may not know why you want to wait. I think you ought to wait, maybe until you’re married, if you’re absolutely certain that that’s what you want …”
“Oh Priss! Of course I’m certain; it’s what I’ve always—”
“All right, okay.” Priss held up a hand. “You can’t blame me for trying, though. I can see so clearly from this essay how valuable you might come to be to the South; I’d always hoped you might want to be a journalist, and I think, with a lot of work and a lot of dedication and all the courage you’ve got, you might, in time, be one of the important young voices in the new South. If, God help us, we can throttle the old one.”
“You can? You do? Well … gosh, Priss. Thanks. You never said … but why can’t I do that anyway? What does being married have to do with it? Why can’t I be both? I’d always planned to work; Bay always wanted me to do that …”
“I’ll bet he did,” Priss said. “I think you could be both, Mike. I just don’t think you will. All the fire you’d need to go into your work is going right straight into that young man of yours,” Priss said sadly. “You have the gift, and you have the fire, but I don’t think you have enough of either to go around, and I think maybe you haven’t built or found nearly enough courage yet.”
“Why do you say that?” Mike was stung.
“Because you haven’t shown that first-rate essay of yours to either your father or your fiancé, and you haven’t told either one that you won the contest. Surprise, nothing. I don’t know how that young man of yours feels about this race thing, but you and I both know how your father does.”
“Well, if you think that, then I’ll go home and show them both this check and this essay right this minute …”
“No. I think you’re right. I don’t think you should do that. I don’t think they are ready for it, and I don’t think you are, either. Wait until you’re married. Wait until you’re as good as enrolled in your classes at Georgia. Wait until after you are. It’ll be much harder to change plans then.”
“Why would plans change? You don’t think that just because I wrote a silly little essay, Daddy would change his mind about our living with him, or paying our way … besides, I’m paying my own way. He’ll be proud, Priss …”
Priss Comfort’s face softened, and she put her arms around Mike’s shoulder, a rare gesture. Priss was not much for touching.
“He certainly should be, Mike,” she said. “He really should be. Congratulations. I told you way back that you needed to put your muscle where your mouth was, and you’ve made a good start on it. Now keep going, Micah Winship. They’re going to hear that name outside Lytton one day, I’d bet on it.”
“Micah Sewell.” Mike smiled.
“Sewell,” Priss corrected herself. She did not smile.
Mike
took the check to the Lytton Bank and Trust and cashed it, swearing Lavinia Calhoun, the middle-aged teller, to secrecy. She put the money in the silver duck bank that Priss Comfort had brought when she was born. She took it out and counted it so often that the crisp newness of the ten $100 bills began to soften and fade, and then she put them away for good, but she kept the duck polished bright, and looked often at it. It seemed tangible proof of her worth.
8
GRADUATION CAME AND WENT, AND THE BLACK-ROBED, CANdlelit baccalaureate ceremonies. The capped and gowned, sweat-trickling graduation ceremonies in the stifling high school auditorium wheeled by in a blur. Mike watched and heard Bayard Sewell give the valedictory address through a sheen of tears and a high ringing of pride and love, and delivered her own salutatorian’s briefer address faultlessly, to steady, if more modest, applause. Both of them graduated with honors, he with the highest, she with a still-respectable magna. John Winship hugged her glancingly and pumped Bayard’s hand, and his mother mewled damply over both of them, and Priss gave her a long, hard, bourbon-fogged hug. DeeDee kissed her chastely and gave Bayard a giggling embrace. Her husband, Duck, gave Mike a rough, insinuating kiss on the mouth; Mike flinched in disgust at the wet lips and the seeking hardness of his groin as he ground it against her. He was always putting his hands on her, and calling her “little sis.” DeeDee glared at him. He grinned hugely back and gave Bayard a resounding thump on the back and a savage and genial knuckling on the biceps.
John Winship’s graduation present to them was a clean, seemly little two-year-old Ford coupe. He handed the keys to Bayard.
“Couldn’t I keep it?” Mike entreated. “I wanted to go into Atlanta and see if the Journal or Constitution had any summer work. You’ll be staying here at the drugstore, so I thought …”
“It’s in Bayard’s name, just to make things easier,” John Winship said. “If you want to work for a newspaper, why don’t you go see Carl Thigpen? He could use some help on the Observer, and you know he’d be glad to have you.”
“Well, Daddy, you know, it’s just a weekly,” Mike said. She did not know why it stung her so, to have their joint gift put in Bayard’s name. In three months they would be a legal unit anyway. “I’d really like to get some experience on a daily. It would help me a lot after college, when I look for a full-time job.”
“Maybe by that time you’ll be starting a full-time family, and it won’t amount to a hill of beans whether you work for a daily or a weekly this summer,” her father said. He almost twinkled it, a near-grotesque spasm.
She smiled. But often in those heat-jellied days of early summer, she remembered what Priss Comfort had said.
“Micah Winship. They’re going to hear that name outside Lytton one day.” And, “Put your muscle where your mouth is, Mike.”
In the first week of that July 1964, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee began a three-day sit-in at Jojo’s Restaurant in downtown Atlanta, and on the second morning Mike astounded herself by recruiting a willing and nearly ebullient J.W. Cromie, catching the 9:40 A.M. Greyhound bus to Atlanta, and joining them.
* * *
She could not have said, at the time, why she chose to upset the frail equilibrium that her engagement to Bayard Sewell had achieved at the Pomeroy Street house. Priss Comfort could have said why, but did not get the chance; much later Annie Cochran could say why, and did. By that time, Mike did not care about her reasons. Or so she said. She had taken the action and walked the road on which it set her, and pronounced herself glad that she had done so.
“Because otherwise I’d have no life of my own, and no career,” she told Annie.
“True enough,” Annie Cochran said. “But don’t give me that crap about being glad. You did it because you were forced to, not because you wanted to.”
“Nobody forced me,” Mike said.
“Everybody did,” Annie replied.
Mike took it for granted that Bayard Sewell would support her; he always had. But she knew in the deepest, unsearched heart of herself, knew without allowing herself to know, that her father would be outraged and that the townspeople of Lytton would disapprove almost as heartily.
As for Lytton, Mike would have said that she did not care. She had largely washed her hands of it sometime in the long dawn of her awakening, in the transition from young teenager to woman. Her reading and her sessions with Priss had showed her a wider world of books and arts and ideas, of grace and beauty and stimulation, and her revelation in that winter classroom had limned for her another country entirely, and a kinder one. Moreover, her triumph with the essay had given her a heady taste of power, the tumescent flexing of unfolded wings.
To Bayard Sewell, but only to him and occasionally J.W. Cromie, Mike voiced her new scorn for the narrowness, the banality and triviality, the meanness of style and substance that she perceived everywhere in Lytton, now that the scales had fallen from her eyes. She disliked the church-and-gossip-dominated, time-stopped existence in the little town. Nothing, she said, ever happened in Lytton. Nothing worthwhile could flourish in such stony ground. No one of substance and vision would choose to dwell among such Philistines. They would tolerate no one and nothing in the slightest degree different from themselves. Mike was quite eloquent in these diatribes to Bayard and J.W., but with everyone else, even Priss, she held her tongue. Priss would have understood, she thought, but Mike feared that she would infer criticism where none was intended. Priss had, after all, opted to cast her lot here. Mike planned to lead her life with Bayard, once college was behind them, in a much larger and vastly more exotic arena than Lytton, Georgia. In this he agreed with her. Bayard Sewell was quietly, efficiently, and savagely ambitious.
“What do you want?” Mike would ask him often. “What do you want for the rest of our lives?”
“To be out of here,” he said. “To be where things can happen. Then I’ll see.”
“Can they happen here?”
“No,” he said. “Not ever here, and nowhere like here.”
And she agreed.
So perhaps the flight to Atlanta to join the sit-in was the first step in that odyssey. Perhaps it was the first shot across John Winship’s bow. And perhaps it was, as it seemed to her later, the first strong beat of a newly naked heart. In any event, Mike took it without conscious thought of the consequences. They were swift and final.
Inevitably, she and J.W. were arrested, along with most of the other protestors, and spent the night in the Fulton County Jail on Decatur Street in Atlanta. Just as inevitably, the press was there in full cry. It was pure bad luck that the television cameras found and dwelled on Mike as she was led away, struggling in honest surprise and indignation (“I am Micah Winship!”) and in handcuffs. It was pure coincidence that the footage aired on the 6:00 P.M. local Atlanta newscast that almost every family in Lytton, including the Winships, watched at suppertime. It was the first time John Winship had seen Mike since breakfast that morning. He had thought nothing of her daylong absence; he had presumed her to be at Priss’s, or the library, as she so often was.
He would not speak to her when she telephoned home, asking timidly to be bailed out. He hung up when he heard her voice. She finally reached DeeDee, who took her request and her own copious tears over to the Pomeroy Street house and laid them before John Winship. By that time a white-faced Bayard Sewell had joined Mike’s father, but John would not allow him or DeeDee to speak with Mike, and forbade them to go and fetch her. He went to bed in silence, arose in silence the next morning, and closeted himself in silence at first light in his study. He would answer no knocks and calls from outside, and he would not open his door. In the end, it was Priss Comfort who went to Atlanta and bailed Mike and a bewildered J.W. out of jail and brought them home at dusk on that following day. Priss, who had been drinking steadily, was very nearly incoherent when she turned her car into the Winship driveway, but she parked it neatly. Even when she was drunk, Priss could always drive.
What she could not do was tal
k. And so she slumped into the wing chair that had been Claudia’s and dropped her head into her hands, and said no word in Mike’s defense when John Winship came into his twilit living room in the company of a red-eyed DeeDee and an ashen, drowned-looking Bayard Sewell, and looked at his youngest daughter and the drooping black boy behind her.
“I don’t blame you, J.W.,” he said finally to the terrified boy. “You’re stupid, but you’re not sorry. I know who made you go up there. But you, Micah … well. I guess we could start with whore, couldn’t we? And after that we could add criminal, and race-mixer, and mother-killer …”
The words coiled out of him, snake-cold, thick, murderous, eighteen years of unspat phlegm.
“Daddy …” Mike whispered. She put out her hand and then dropped it onto the back of Priss’s chair to steady herself. She thought that she would faint. There was a roaring in her ears, and her vision blurred whitely.
“I curse the day I earned that title,” the terrible stranger’s voice went on. “And I refuse to wear it any longer. You are not my daughter. I have only one daughter. The other one killed her mother and my wife, and then she died herself, in a jail full of nigger criminals.”
A grotesque sort of snort, a gibbous snicker, came from J.W., and Mike saw with foolish incomprehension that he was crying. Opaque silver tears made snail’s tracks down his black cheeks.
“I’m glad your mother is dead, J.W.,” John Winship said in the frozen snake’s voice. “Otherwise this day would have killed her for sure. Go on home now. As I said, no one can really blame you.”
J.W. fled, snuffling. DeeDee burst into loud wails. John Winship and Bayard Sewell were silent.
Mike turned to the dark-haired boy, standing in the gloom of the unlighted living room. His face shone white. From outside, the scent of the wisteria along the side porch, in full summer flood, perfumed the air as if it were not alive with pain and awfulness.
Homeplace Page 5
