by Susan Vaught
I balled up my fists at my sides, waiting for the next explosion, but Avadelle just stood there staring at me. She went even paler. All the anger and meanness seemed to drain right out of her, and I realized her hands were shaking.
She pulled her cane toward her body and pressed the eagle head into her chest. “Read my book,” she said, then choked off. “Ruth’s articles . . .” She sputtered again. “They don’t—it’s not . . . well, do it. Go to the library, then. Read whatever you want. Just go!”
Then she burst into tears.
Before anybody could start talking, she wheeled around, barely balanced, and lurched toward the stairs. If Mac hadn’t dropped the display books he was holding, lunged forward, and grabbed her arm to steady her, Avadelle Richardson, Oxford, Mississippi’s, most famous living author, would have fallen headfirst down the Square Books stairs and broken her neck.
15
LOOK AT THIS MESS
* * *
Excerpt from Night on Fire (1969), by Avadelle Richardson, page 386
On September 13, 1962, my class crowded around a little black-and-white TV set in my classroom. Ed Simmons had brought it, and we all agreed to meet at the school and watch together. Leslie had her hand on the foil and rabbit ears to keep the connection. Her eyes looked about as wide as the moon.
The grainy face of Governor Ross Barnett stared back at us, solemn as a funeral director. This man, who was a member of the white supremacist Citizen’s Council. This man, who said Black people lived in Mississippi in such number because we loved segregation, and claimed that God was the original segregationist, never intending for the races to mix. Just the sight of him made me clench my fists.
His glasses shined in the studio lights. Reception blinked in and out as he rambled on, saying, “We must either submit to the unlawful dictates of the federal government or stand up like men and tell them no. . . . There is no case in history where the Caucasian race has survived social integration. We will not drink from the cup of genocide.”
“He’s calling for a riot rather than let James Meredith be admitted,” Leslie said.
Aunt Jessie stood. “People are gonna get dead over this, maybe a lot of them.”
“It’s worth it,” Leslie countered.
Aunt Jessie pointed a finger right at her nose. “You won’t be the one they lynch, little girl, so you just watch your mouth.”
I’M GOING TO THE LIBRARY and I’ll read your stupid book, and everything Ms. Manchester gave us, and anything I can find that my grandmother wrote about that night. . . .
Yeah. Wasn’t that a lot of big talk?
An hour after Dad dropped Indri, Mac, Dr. Harper, and me off at Ole Miss’s J.D. Williams Library, I realized just how big a boast I had made. Avadelle’s reaction and near-suicide-by-stairs had surprised Dad and Ms. Manchester, so Ms. Manchester dismissed Mac from babysitting and took her mother home. Dad agreed to let us stay with Dr. Harper without asking too many questions, but the way he eyed me, I was pretty sure he was getting suspicious that something was up—something he didn’t totally understand. That made me feel bad, since I still hadn’t told him about the key, or how much Grandma wrote to me, or what that key might open. He seemed to be in so much pain from that headache. I couldn’t help but wonder if I had caused it.
Mac stuck with Dr. Harper, Indri, and me. We didn’t talk much to him, but we didn’t take potshots, either. As soon as Dad was out of earshot, we had filled him in on the key and the lockbox, and what Grandma had written before she got too confused to keep going. He had volunteered to help us without any hesitation, even though we might find out something that made his life babysitting his grandmother harder. “I’d rather know,” he said. “That way, stuff can’t sneak up on me—and maybe I can figure out what else to keep her away from so she won’t freak out again.”
“Here.” Indri snapped me out of my increasing guilt trip about Dad and Mac having a hard time when she dumped about twenty books in my lap. They hit my knees and thighs and tumbled onto the tile floor, where I was sitting outside Dr. Harper’s library carrel. His spot wasn’t in the nice, blue-carpeted upstairs part with bright lights, wooden partitions, desks, computers, and Starbucks. Of course not.
Dr. Harper’s secret hideout was down where everything smelled like paint and old water. Pipes ran across the ceiling and crowded floor-to-ceiling metal shelves held dusty volumes of just about anything nobody ever wanted to study. Dim lights flickered every now and then, and the pipes gave off bumps and groans that echoed all across the cavernous space. The librarians rarely came to this crossroads of Creepy and Nowhere, which was probably a good thing, because they might have killed us over the mess. Technically, Indri, Mac, and I weren’t supposed to be here without our parents, but I figured Dr. Harper had to count for something.
Mac sat on the floor beside me, silently working his way through the books his aunt had loaned us, making notes on a legal pad Dr. Harper had given him. He seemed to be creating his own time line about the riot, but also writing down random facts that caught his attention.
Dr. Harper sat inside his carrel at a little desk, looking up stuff on his iPad, studying articles my grandmother wrote, and making his own notes. Indri had collected Avadelle’s books, and I was now buried in a stack of all the library’s copies of Night on Fire, because Indri was, by nature, overly thorough. “I thought you might like one better than the other,” she said as she plopped down beside me. “Besides, there are different editions. I don’t know if that matters.”
She started thumbing through Avadelle’s other works—about a dozen novels and ten collections of short stories. We had pads to take notes too.
The first hardback copy of Night on Fire I picked up looked shiny and new. It had a plastic protector, but the publisher’s cover had a gold label on the bottom that said, 50th Anniversary Edition. The picture on the front showed two women, one Black and one White, running through flames and looking terrified. I opened the book, turned past the card catalogue pocket with the check-out card, and read the dedication.
“For everyone who suffered, and everyone who suffers.”
Did she mean my grandmother? Somebody else? I wrote the line on my pad, along with those questions. The book was thick, maybe five hundred pages or more.
I read fast, but how was I ever going to get through all that mess, especially if it was boring? Dr. Harper said there were hundreds of papers and even a few books analyzing the novel, but he insisted I should read the actual text because I might see something new, since much of it related to my grandmother, and I’d have a different context.
The first line of the book was pretty simple.
“It was hot.”
Really?
All those prizes and awards, and the book started with three words about the weather? I frowned. I guess I expected all kinds of flowery sentences, tightly packed, telling some boring, rambling story with lots of metaphors. But the next lines were, “It was too hot to live, and too hot to die, but Death drove to Mississippi anyway. In fact, the old monster squealed into town on bald tires, and I think I saw him grinning as he tossed a flaming bottle on the grass and blew up the world.”
“Mom calls me dramatic,” I mumbled to myself. Drrraaaaammmmmaaa got entered into my notes next, along with a frowning circle and two lines underneath that was supposed to be a skull and crossbones to represent Death.
Mac muttered something about the riot being crazy, then said to Indri, “Bob Dylan wrote a song called “Oxford Town.” One of the verses says, Guns and clubs followed him down/All because his face was brown.”
“Put it in the notes,” Indri told him, then leaned her head back on the wall, eyes closed. “Avadelle’s so sarcastic about everything. Her short stories—they’re like listening to her talk, only lots meaner. I didn’t think that was possible.”
Mac snickered. “Dr. Harper said to look for themes, or mentions of the riot, or mentions of giving something to history.”
“Shhh,” Dr. Harp
er said from inside his carrel. “This is a library.”
“It probably has a thousand ghosts,” Indri whispered. As if obeying her whim, the lights flickered, and a pipe pinged as water rushed over our heads.
Mac made a face. “Somebody probably flushed somewhere. Ew.”
I put down the shiny new copy of Night on Fire and checked out some of the older ones. The pictures and type on the covers looked different. One had a shadowy building like the Lyceum with flames all around it. Another showed a crowd carrying signs emerging from smoke and fire. One had no picture at all, just the old-fashioned heavy library binding I remembered from books Mom used to bring home to study. I opened each edition and looked at the first few pages. Some had yellow highlighting where people had ignored library rules about writing in books. The fourth one had a typed note about who donated it. I made myself read all the way through the first chapter.
“Main charcacters are CiCi Robinson and Leslie Marks,” I scrawled on my pad. “CiCi is a Black school teacher in Holly Springs.” Under that, I wrote, “Grandma was a schoolteacher, but over in Abbeville.” CiCi had some stuff in common with Grandma, like being obsessed with classic books and book quotes, and keeping herself very, very neat and fixed up in public. Avadelle didn’t mention her smelling good, though. Leslie Marks was Jewish and from up North, not born in Oxford or anything, like Avadelle. Plus, Avadelle described Leslie as “a tall thing with a big smile,” and “her thinking was all daisies and sunshine.”
Ha. Definitely NOT Avadelle-like.
“Interesting,” Dr. Harper said in a very quiet and library-like voice. “Ruth never mentioned the riot in her articles or papers. Not once. She touched on just about every major event in this state, especially pertaining to racial unrest—but never that crucial moment. Why did I never notice before?”
“I don’t think Avadelle ever wrote about the riot again either,” Indri said, shifting her pile of books around and picking up another novel. “All of these stories tell about other places and times.”
“They’re not in any of the pictures I’ve seen so far,” Mac said, “and the books don’t list Ruth Beans as one of the injured, either.”
Their voices faded away from me as I read Avadelle’s story, seeing 1960s Oxford line by line, description by description. Some of the stores and businesses Avadelle mentioned were still in town, like Neilson’s—“the South’s oldest store” since 1839. Other sites were long gone. Still, I could imagine myself walking around the places she discussed, because Oxford had always been my home. I bet Dad actually did walk around a lot of the spots.
My eyes drifted to my fingers, brown against the white pages. Guns and clubs followed him down/All because his face was brown. . . .
Then again, maybe Dad didn’t walk around a lot of them. When Dad was twelve like me, where was he allowed to go? Where would have been too dangerous, full of those guns and clubs? How did he even begin to figure that out, or live through it? I couldn’t quit looking at my fingers, trying to imagine that time, that world, so much like mine, and yet so different.
What would it have been like, not to be allowed near a library, or a public restroom, or a water fountain, just because of how I looked?
Dad’s face floated in my mind, eyes squinted, rubbing the sides of his head to make his headache go away, like he did in Square Books. It couldn’t be any fun, remembering bad times like the ones in Avadelle’s book. No wonder he didn’t want to talk about civil rights or his childhood much. I wouldn’t either.
I closed the copy of Night on Fire I was reading and put it down. Slowly, trying to shake off a growing sadness I couldn’t explain, I rifled through the rest of the copies Indri had dumped on top of me. When I opened the one with the library binding, I saw it had the original publication date. A typed note on the card catalogue page read, “Donated by Ruth Beans.”
My whole body went motionless. I stared at those typed words, surprise nearly making me dizzy. When I turned to the dedication page, just under the part about suffering, my grandmother’s handwriting waited for me.
Ruth Beans was here.
When she first told me about the key, she said something like that. I was there. You get that stuff out of my bag, you hear me? Give it to history. . . . I was there. . . . Get the key.
Ruth Beans was here.
Like something a little kid would write. But what did she mean? Where was here? In Oxford? In the library? In the book? She had dated it September 2, 1969—the day after the book was released. I showed the inscription to Indri, then to Mac. They both read the line quietly, then looked up at me, obviously as clueless as I was. When I took it to Dr. Harper, he nodded. “I suspect that’s the version you need to read.”
I frowned at him. “But why did she write that?”
“I have no idea,” he said.
* * *
Hours passed as I sat just outside Dr. Harper’s carrel door, submerged in Night on Fire. Some parts of some chapters seemed boring, so I skimmed, but mostly I read, and the chapters seem to go faster and faster. I sort of heard Indri and Mac talking sometimes, and Dr. Harper, but I didn’t pay any attention to what they said. At some point, Dr. Harper asked me to show him Grandma’s key. In a fog of darkness, fire, and people yelling horrible things all because a man with brown skin wanted to go to college, I slipped the key out of my pocket and held it out for him to compare against a picture on his iPad.
It was a lockbox, with a key.
He nodded. “Etsy is a lifesaver. That’s definitely the key to the box I saw.” Barely paying attention, I lowered the key, moving it gently between my fingers as I absorbed more of the short, speedy chapters.
By page three hundred ninety-three, the moment of the riot was drawing closer, and I could feel the dread of it in my belly.
When Leslie said, “If we’re going to campus, we’d best hurry,” I wanted to scream NO and get her attention, but . . .
Leslie put her hand on the mailers I was sealing at my teacher’s desk. “Tomorrow, all hell’s gonna break loose.” She hesitated as I scooted my stack of envelopes to the side and got to my feet. “Or you could stay and keep working, and I could go without you.”
“Why?” I gave her a frown. “Because you’re White and won’t anybody bother you?”
She sighed.
I crossed my arms, wondering why it made me mad that she offered. She was right. Nobody would notice her at Ole Miss, and they might notice me.
“Yes, because I’m White and nobody will bother me,” she said. “Even if people are already making trouble, I can go in and come back out without getting involved.”
That made me laugh. “You can’t even buy ice cream without running your mouth and putting us all at risk for getting arrested.”
They were so different, CiCi and Leslie, but here they were, friends, doing dangerous things together. That fascinated me. As for looking at the South before civil rights, that horrified me. What it was like for CiCi and her family made me want to cry. People treated other people so badly. Ole Miss—my Ole Miss—my town, caught up in so much rage and hatred—so scary.
“I don’t like the looks of this.” I gripped the wheel of my old Chevrolet. Traffic snarled around us as we inched into the Circle—way too many cars and trucks. Was that a bus? The roads were lined with troopers, and those marked cars looked to be packed with uniforms.
They sat in their vehicles and ignored the stopped traffic and the bystanders.
Leslie sat in the backseat, hair up and fooling with her nails like some shallow, rich White woman. We had to keep up a maid-and-lady show to make it okay for us to be in the same car together.
“Are those students gathering on the sidewalk?” she asked.
“Some of them,” I muttered. But some were way too old to be college kids. And some had on military uniforms, but they didn’t look regular. More patched together, or like retired officers putting their colors back on for one last fight.
Everyone I looked at wore grim expressions.
Those closest showed slit-eyed, clench-jawed anger. I could almost taste their bitter rage on the evening breeze. And then—
Oh, God help me, those are white hoods and sheets.
“Why are so many people on campus now?” I heard fear in Leslie’s voice, which gave me the screaming willies, because Leslie usually didn’t have enough sense to be scared when she should have been.
“Those men over there have badges,” she went on, talking too fast. “The federal marshals are already here. And there are boys with guns in those trees beside them.”
She pointed.
Something popped. Again. Pop, pop, pop!
And then Leslie screamed.
“CiCi, they’re shooting at the marshals!”
“Look at this mess.” The voice cut into my consciousness, making me jump. Dr. Harper jumped almost as high as I did. Indri and Mac started scrambling around outside the carrel, and a few seconds later, Ms. Donalvan, one of the head librarians, filled up the carrel door, glaring at Dr. Harper.
“Fred, what on earth are you letting these children do? They have piles of books spread everywhere—and you—look at you with those newspaper and journal binders! You know the limit is three, not three thousand!”
“I’m sorry, Jessica.” He gave her his best bumbling professor smile. “We’re working on a joint project, you see, and—”
“What you’re working on is a suspension of your carrel privileges.” Ms. Donalvan wasn’t much taller than Dr. Harper, but she seemed to tower over the little space. She had to be about seventy, but like my grandmother, she didn’t have a single wrinkle, just crow’s feet at the corners of both eyes. She smoothed her hands against the sides of her head, patting down the dark hair she wore in a tight bun. She was dressed in black pants and a black shirt. Red colored both of her cheeks, and her mouth made a straight line across her face, just like Mom’s did when she was about to commit kid-i-cide over something I’d done.
