The Summer We Got Saved

by Pat Cunningham Devoto

  Awhile back, on their way out of Bainbridge, they had passed the billboard about Highlander. “COMMUNIST TRAINING SCHOOL” was the caption underneath a huge picture of Martin Luther King sitting with some white people at Highlander Folk School.

  Aunt Eugenia was pulling the car over to the side of the road. She parked beside a store that sold used clothing, Joyce Ann’s Fashions. A few cars and pickups were parked in the dirt drive. “There’s just one thing,” she said. “You probably won’t understand this, but there are some people who think Highlander Folk School is not . . . well, is not, would not be, the best influence on impressionable young girls.” She drummed her fingers on the steering wheel. “That, of course, is ridiculous. I know from personal experience that is not the case.” She adjusted the rearview mirror. “This will be a much-needed broadening experience for you both, a breath of fresh air. What I would have given when I was a child to have had an experience like this.” Now she paused, choosing her words carefully. “But I don’t think it is an experience that your parents, or any of the family, need to know about—not just yet.”

  The girls stared at her openmouthed, waiting for more. Surely there was more, some caveat that would absolve them of the responsibility of actually entering the enemy camp. There had to be some convoluted reasoning they could use that would, if tied in knots, make what she was asking them to do seem right. Was she expecting them to lie to their parents, to their grandparents? To keep quiet about where they had gone and never reveal that they had been into the very heart and soul of the one place that was dead set against everything they did in life and every way they did it?

  A big truck passed by, kicking puffs of dusty wind into their windows. Cicadas whined in the pine trees. Tina cleared her throat. “Are you saying that we should not tell, that we should never tell where we’ve been? That we should pretend when we get back that we really did go to see Miss Bebe?”

  “No, I don’t want you to lie. When we get back, I’ll explain everything to them: how the whole thing was imperative for both of you, to your understanding and growth. How I felt it was vital for you to begin to take your place in a new order of things down here. I’ll take full responsibility.”

  There was silence as a Ford pickup passed, loaded with hay bales, swirling straw wisps out in the breeze. Aunt Eugenia took her cat’s-eye sunglasses off and looked just beyond Tina, out into the tops of the pine trees. “I am saying that it would not be appropriate at this time—at this time.”

  “Wait a minute.” Tab was still rubbing her head. Maybe the bump was harder than she had thought. “Are you serious about this?”

  “Yes. When we return, I’ll explain the whole thing. I’m just saying that right now I think it’s very important for both of you—especially you, Tab—to develop some kind of perspective about things.”

  “I got perspective. Tell her, Tina. I got perspective.”

  Tina was not interested in perspective. Other thoughts were occurring to her. “What kind of people will we meet up there? Will they be our age—any of them?”

  “Why, yes, yes, there very well might be,” Aunt Eugenia said. “Young college boys, men, from up north often come down for the summer to help out.”

  “What does that have to do with my perspective, me, my perspective?” Tab was also beginning to see possibilities—of a different kind.

  Tina flipped up the door handle. “Just a minute, Aunt Eugenia. Tab and I need to talk about this. I’m sure it would be a lovely pleasure to go visit your place in the mountains, almost like we were going to Gatlinburg to see the sights, but instead we are going to”—she paused—“to that place. Listen, Aunt Eugenia, I need to have a word with Tab.” She got out, opened Tab’s door, then walked around to the back bumper.

  Tab, taking her time, got out and followed, a slow smirk building. “I’m telling.”

  “You are not. That would be so gross.”

  “Yeah, I’m telling.” She was so glad she had come. Opportunities like this didn’t come along every day.

  “She thinks she’s doing something nice for us. You know people in California think strange. It would be impolite to argue. Besides, who knows who we’ll meet up there. Maybe some Yankee college boys down for the summer to save us from segregation. Did you think of that?”

  “Did you think about that billboard out on the highway? It says it’s a Communist place. Did you think about Cousin John Lester?”

  “I don’t know what billboard you’re talking about and I don’t give a hoot for Cousin John Lester. Look, how bad could it be? I don’t know what the place is. I’ve just heard them mention it at the supper table. It couldn’t be all that bad.”

  Tab didn’t say anything, waiting.

  “Aunt Eugenia wouldn’t take us any place all that bad.” Tab looked out at the highway in front of them, following it with her eyes until it disappeared over the hill. She waited until she glimpsed Tina drumming her fingers, hands on both hips.

  “I get three of your lipsticks and two of your nail polishes and all that eye shadow you got in that purse.”

  “All the eye shadow? Forget it. Two lipsticks and one nail polish and no eye shadow. You’re too young for eye shadow anyway. Besides, it’s the only one I have.”

  Tab turned to look at Aunt Eugenia through the back window and smile at her. “The eye shadow. Hand it over.”

  Back in the car, Tab was charm come to call. “Aunt Eugenia, we’ve talked it over and we think it’s a lovely invitation and so sweet of you to think up alternate plans when Miss Bebe flaked—I mean, through no fault of her own, had to withdraw her invitation.”

  “Oh gravy,” Tina mumbled, sitting there with her elbow on the armrest, her chin in her palm, her purse devoid of eye shadow.

  Aunt Eugenia nodded her head, knowing they were bound to see the light—not as quickly as she would have had she been in their place, had the same opportunity presented itself to her way back when. She adjusted her cat’s-eye sunglasses and flipped the chiffon scarf back over her shoulder. “These little details have to be attended to.” She shifted into first gear. They burned rubber back onto the highway.

  In just that time, that few minutes off the highway, the whole drift of the day had changed. In just that moment, what it would be like to ride the Incline and be served afternoon tea had changed to imagining what lay ahead in the wilds of the woods of Tennessee. The very air had turned sinister. The wind, whipping in through the windows, made the hair on Tab’s arms stand on end. She rested her hands on the back of the front seat and looked out at the road, which had turned into a winding black thing, laying a slithering path out before them. Dresses were out. Dark green shorts and a baseball cap, dirty tennis shoes. She did have one pair she would have to scuff up. That would have to do. She had left her dirty shoes at home, for fear of offending Miss Bebe.

  There would be guards at the entrance, spiraling razor wire on the top of the high fences that encircled the place, maybe machine guns. The car sped north.

  Aunt Eugenia was chattering on. “You will have a chance to interact with people of all racial and ethnic backgrounds. You lead such provincial lives. It’s time you were exposed to other things.”

  “Maudie May. I had a friend, Maudie May, and she was colored. We used to go down by the river and fish, and one time we almost drowned. She was this girl I used to play with before she got polio and had to leave town.”

  “That’s just my point.” Aunt Eugenia had interrupted her train of thought just long enough to hear Tab’s last few words. “You see, Tab? Why should she have had to leave town? She had polio, like so many other people, but she had to leave town to get treatment.”

  “She had to go down there to get cured. They were gonna cure her down at Tuskegee. They told me that, only they never told me what happened to her.”

  “They, they, they. My point exactly. ‘They’ seem to dictate the course of our lives, of your life—down here—and it is patently unfair.”

  “My parents?”


  “No, society at large—down here—don’t you see?”

  Tab didn’t see. She was thinking about Maudie May, wondering if she still had polio, if she was cured. Probably she was married by now and maybe had children. “They get married early, you know.”

  “What did you say? I couldn’t hear you back there.”

  “Oh, nothing.”

  “I’ve been active in raising money for Highlander for some time now,” Aunt Eugenia was saying. “I think because of that they asked me to come and help out with several sessions. I knew when I got the letter that it was a godsend for me, for you girls.”

  No one bothered to ask how long ago she had gotten the letter.

  CHAPTER 11

  The Word of Truth Missionary Baptist Church

  MAUDIE HAD AWAKENED ALONE, in a tiny unfamiliar room. It had taken a minute or so of staring at the blank walls to get her bearings.

  The Word of Truth Missionary Baptist Church had not been what she had expected, what she had thought she remembered. The church itself had turned out to be nothing more than a plain rectangle of a building made of rough-hewn wooden planks topped by a shingled roof and situated below road level. It sat in a small clearing, surrounded by woods on two sides and fields out back. She had hoped she remembered stained glass or a steeple. She had not.

  Singing had drifted out to them when they pulled in among the other cars and trucks parked around the front stoop. “Wednesday-night prayer meeting. Good crowd. Knowed we was coming,” Reverend Earl said.

  Maudie had said nothing. She had gotten out of the car and was concentrating on what she could see of the dark uneven ground, trying to gauge how high the front steps of the church might be. Reverend Earl had gone ahead of her to hold open the front door.

  The congregation was singing in the dim glow of three lightbulbs on long wires hanging from the middle of the ceiling and spaced out down the aisle. The light was not enough to read by, but enough to find the way to a seat. Forward of the ten or so pews on either side of the aisle, there was a raised platform and a single podium of white pine. Behind that and nailed to the back wall was a homemade pine cross that touched the ceiling.

  Reverend Earl walked down the aisle and shooed children out of the first pew. The congregation was on the last verse: “Ain’t but one train runs this track . . .” Reverend Earl’s friendly large hands motioned her to the empty seat. She began to walk, listening to the singing slow as members touched one another, signaling to look.

  An older woman at the piano ruffled up and down the keys one last time as the final verse died out. Maudie had unlocked her leg brace and taken a seat. Reverend Earl walked to the podium and nodded a thank-you to the piano player.

  He looked different to her now, more commanding as he stood there before his people. His black suit coat, already wet-ringed under the arms, had been a long time too tight across the belly. Pull creases from the front buttons were permanent.

  Reverend Earl had begun with the business of Wednesday-night prayer meeting: a new baby at the Brown house; “Miss Randa sick again and everybody need to bring some little food by to help her get along.” And finally, the roof-repair collection was still hurting.

  Paper fans were out and pushing around the scents of the congregation. She hadn’t needed to turn and look to know them. There were men who had spent the day in hot fields, red clay still caked to their shoes, women who had scrubbed someone else’s house with Old Dutch cleanser and come home to coat their hands in Vaseline, babies still being breast-fed, and little children who had earlier played outside the church door in the fresh-cut grass around the front steps.

  Ushers passed collection plates and some few coins could be heard dropping.

  Reverend Earl mopped sweat off his face with a handkerchief retrieved from his suit pocket and began. “Got somebody new among us tonight. Girl had a choice to come here or not, and you got a choice to welcome her or not.” He took off his glasses and looked at his congregation, one eye closed and the other one staring directly at them, as if he were watching through a microscope. He began telling them where he had met Maudie—“at the Highlander Folk School up there in Tennessee, and everybody good, from Mrs. Rosa Parks to Dr. King hisself, been up there. Somebody famous as Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt visit up there. It’s that good a place. A place where coloreds and whites live together without no fuss.” So although they might make her out to be just a child, she had already taken two years’ worth of college courses down at Tuskegee. “All that time at the polio hospital wasn’t for no reason, ’cause she spent that time getting educated.” He pointed a finger at his audience. “The Lord works in mysterious ways, His wonders to perform,” he had said. “So don’t you go thinking we ain’t been sent the best, ’cause we have.” Reverend Earl droned on, praising her long enough to wipe out any good that might have come from it. When he appeared to be nearing the end of his sermon, the woman at the old upright piano next to the wall had begun softly playing chords that wound into the melody of the final hymn just as Reverend Earl announced its singing. Some few members had already started humming and swaying before the whole joined in.

  When it was over, Reverend Earl had rushed down to her and waved others over to greet her. They seemed to stay back, hesitant to come forward.

  An older woman brought her son up to speak to Reverend Earl. “Edward want to have a word with you, Reverend.” He looked like he was in his late teens, a body grown into an adult, but a face absent any lines of experience. His mother elbowed Edward.

  “I just wanta say, Reverend . . .” He glanced at Maudie and hesitated until his mother took his arm. “Much obliged for the shoes. Couldn’ta got the job without no work boots.”

  “It was bounty from the Lord, Edward, bounty from the Lord.” He slapped Edward on the shoulder. “Now you’re a working man, I’m gonna ’spect to see some of that bounty in the collection plate.”

  “Yes, sir.” He had backed away, his mother satisfied.

  Reverend Earl turned Maudie around to meet an older lady in a dark dress, her hat and gloves kept on for the introduction. “This Miss Laura, our music master, head of the church welcoming committee. Ladies been working night and day getting ready for you coming. She be a friend of your aunt Carrie ’fore she pass.”

  The piano player, perhaps in her seventies, came forward. “Mighty happy to have you, child. Seems like I remember Carrie having some little ones stay with her one summer, but I never woulda knowed you grown.” She looked Maudie straight in the face, eyes never straying. “You gonna like it here. Lots a good peoples here. Been telling Earl we need somebody like you.”

  “I enjoyed your piano playing,” Maudie said.

  “I try my best what with half them keys sticking.” She took off her glasses to clean them with a small lace handkerchief retrieved from her pocket. “Don’t need these ’cept to read what songs we gonna sing; otherwise, they a nuisance.”

  “They a nuisance less she wanta see where it is she’s going.” Another woman, about the same age had walked up behind Miss Laura.

  “Hush up there, Viola.” Miss Laura didn’t even turn to look at a voice all too familiar. “Who was it couldn’t thread that needle at Sewing Club the other day?”

  “Wasn’t ’cause I couldn’t see it,” Viola said. “Needle head too small. Ain’t that right, Dottie Sue?” She nodded her head to a third woman standing beside her. “She seen how small it was, didn’t you?” Dottie Sue was the same age but slight, not as overgrown as Misses Laura and Viola.

  She smiled and shook her head. “Needles too small nowdays.”

  “Dottie Sue, you’d take Viola’s side if she say the moon’s purple.”

  “Now ladies, you gonna have Miss Maudie here thinking you mean all that bad-mouthing. Viola and Dottie Sue and Laura been knowing each other since—how long is it now, ladies?”

  “Lord, longer than I wanna think about.” Miss Laura was readjusting her glasses. “Since cotton-picking season and I was three years ol
d and riding on my mama’s picking sack, her pulling me through the fields.”

  “Wasn’t neither. It was the first day of school when we was all eight. Ain’t that right, Dottie Sue? Down at Crossroad school.”

  “I wasn’t eight; I was ten.”

  “Now ladies, why don’t we tell Maudie here what you done for her, since you the ones been wanting her here for so long?” Reverend Earl put his arm around two of the women, steering them to the back of the church.

  “I appreciate y’all putting me up,” Maudie said. “Hope I won’t be trouble to you.”

  “Oh now honey.” Miss Laura stopped. “You ain’t gonna be no trouble to me. I, we—my committee—been thinking you rather have a place of your own.” She glanced at the floor. They walked on into a room that Maudie guessed must serve as Reverend Earl’s office. There was a metal desk and chair, dusty from disuse. A picture of Jesus praying hung lopsided on the wall. “This here is what I call my office, but I don’t spend no time here. You know, I got two more churches to tend to,” he said.

  “Right this way.” Miss Laura was holding out her hand and pointing to what looked like a closet door. “Better than staying with old ladies like us. We done fixed you up a place right here at the church.” When the others hesitated, Miss Laura walked over and opened the door.