When he walked into her room, she invited her father to sit down. He had come to improve his offer to join the family firm. He said he didn’t want her joining one of the “troublemaking” firms she was interviewing with, but they were exactly what she wanted. She wasn’t interested in tax law and she thought that their family firm’s ideas were too antiquated.
“I hate to think of you going to work for one of those fly-by-night firms that handle discrimination suits. They’re all disreputable. I’d rather you work with us.” She was touched by his insistence but couldn’t do it, no matter what they’d pay her. She hadn’t gone to law school for that, and his frequent accusations that she was a crusader weren’t wrong.
“It really means a lot to me, Dad, that you want me,” she said gently, “but I can’t. I need to do what I’ve been trying to do since college. I want to help make it a better world.”
“It was a better world before things started to change ever since the war,” he said sadly. She wondered at what point he’d given up and become so rigid and hostile to any kind of change. This wasn’t the father she’d grown up with who’d gone to Nuremberg for the war crime trials, and it made her sad for him. He seemed like an old man now, even older than his father. Robert couldn’t stem the tides or stop progress, no matter how tightly he closed his eyes. The world would pry them open to the realities of all that needed to change now. His own father and daughter were the torchbearers of the future, trying to shine light into the darkness, while he was choosing to be left behind. They stood looking at each other for a long moment, across the distance that separated them, and he nodded and left her room without another word. In his own mind, he had lost her, and they both knew they would never be on the same side again. Everything he represented and believed in was what Merrie was dedicating her life to alter, and he was fighting just as hard to stop it from happening. The pull of the future was too strong for him. And she could almost see him weakening physically as the walls of his world were crumbling around him.
She called Claudia afterward to talk to her about it, and she agreed with Meredith about not joining the family law firm. It wasn’t even a remote possibility for her.
For the rest of the week, the ACLU was trying to figure out how to stave off the dangers and limit the damage in Mississippi if James Meredith enrolled at Ole Miss in September. It was going to be a long summer worrying about it.
She took the bar exam in July and waited anxiously for the results while working at her job at the ACLU, and continued to send her résumé to various law firms, looking for a job in the fall.
It was a quiet summer. Claudia moved into her new apartment, with a locked closet for Thaddeus’s things that her mother didn’t comment on when she visited the apartment. Claudia was trying to furnish it from secondhand stores because she wanted to pay for it herself. And unbeknownst to her mother, Thaddeus helped. He went back and forth to Los Angeles a lot that summer, working on a new documentary about discrimination and using his father’s editing facilities. His frequent trips gave the two girls time to spend together, and when they could, they went to Jones Beach for the day on the weekends, and Meredith spent the Fourth of July weekend with the Steinbergs on Long Island. Claudia’s mother was frantic getting ready for the wedding in August. They had replanted the gardens, and everything was going to happen in a series of enormous tents on the grounds. They were expecting three hundred guests, and their plans sounded lavish for their first daughter to be married.
By August, the ACLU office in New York was getting daily bulletins about James Meredith’s situation in Mississippi. Meredith listened to them intently and offered suggestions whenever she could. He was determined to be the first black student to attend Ole Miss. Governor Ross Barnett of Mississippi had flatly refused to obey the integration laws that applied, and said that as long as he was governor, there would be no Negroes at the university or any other university in the state. James Meredith, although qualified, had already been denied admission twice and had been applying for a year when he filed his suit in May.
The situation got heated in September when the court of appeals found the governor in civil contempt, and ordered him to be arrested and pay a $10,000 per day fine for each day he refused James Meredith’s admission to the university. The lieutenant governor was also arrested, and fined $5,000 per day under the same condition.
The president made a speech urging all educational institutions and citizens to follow the laws of integration. And his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, intervened and convinced Governor Barnett to allow James Meredith to enroll. Everyone who worked for the ACLU was on the edge of their seats by then, and Merrie among them. The attorney general ordered five hundred federal marshals to accompany James Meredith when he arrived at the university to enroll. They had long discussions at the ACLU office late into the night about whether or not to be on site when James Meredith entered the university, and on September 25, they asked Merrie her position on it. She only gave it a moment’s thought and then nodded.
“I’m in,” she said, knowing full well how her father would react if he knew about it. But these were life choices she was making for herself, whether he understood that or not. She left for Mississippi the next day and checked into a motel with several other members of the ACLU who had come from other cities to lend their support. She didn’t tell her parents where she was going, and said she was going to Chicago for an interview. Her father was in court the morning she left, and she was vague with her mother, who never questioned her as closely, and said she’d be back in a few days and would call then, since she didn’t know where she was staying. Chicago seemed like a benign destination to use as a cover. She didn’t even tell Claudia this time, who was working on her novel, and an article for the Herald Tribune Sunday magazine. She knew Claudia would say that she was crazy to go. But just as Claudia needed to carry the banners of the past that were meaningful to her, Meredith had to carry the flag of the future with just as much determination. She had taken very seriously the president’s message from his inaugural speech a year and a half before. This was what she could do for her country.
On the night of September 29, state senator George Yarbrough called off the state highway police, who were working to contain crowds of protestors, and riots broke out. The National Guard was called in swiftly to bring things back into control. Two men were killed, many injured, university property was damaged, and rocks were thrown at the riot police. Merrie was on the campus that night, along with a dozen other ACLU workers, two from the New York office. She got hit on her temple with a rock thrown by a student, and subsequently clubbed by a member of the National Guard in the melee. She was removed from the campus while still unconscious and woke up in jail, with the side of her head caked with blood and a blinding headache. She struggled to her feet and asked what had happened, and was told by others in the holding pen that two men had died.
She remained in jail and didn’t call her father this time. She had brought the little money she had saved so she could pay her own bail if something went awry. And to resounding cheers as they watched it on TV in jail, on October 1, troops took control and James Meredith enrolled in the University of Mississippi and became its first black student, after battling his way through the legal system for a year and a half to achieve it. Merrie had tears running down her cheeks as she watched it on TV. The legal system of the United States had functioned, and the University of Mississippi had been integrated. Not easily and not without bloodshed, and the victory had been hard won, but she had no doubt whatsoever that it was worth it.
She paid her bail the next day after she was charged with disorderly conduct and resisting arrest, neither of which she had committed, but she didn’t oppose it. And she headed back to New York, after seeing a doctor at a local hospital emergency room. No one asked her how the bruises on her face had happened, and she assumed they knew. They refrained from comment, and told her
she had a mild concussion and to take it easy for a week. They put a gauze bandage on the superficial wound. She had a black eye, but the headache was better. As she left the emergency room, a nurse said under her breath, just loud enough for Merrie to hear her, “Nigger lover.” Meredith didn’t react, and left. She knew better than to argue with her. She had been trained not to respond or react during sit-ins and protests, and she was used to the insults of those wanting to uphold segregation. None of it mattered to her. They had won an important battle in the war. James Meredith was officially enrolled as a student at Ole Miss.
She took the train back to New York with four of her colleagues. Members of the ACLU had come from cities throughout the East. One of the others had a broken arm, and another had stitches on his head. But they were alive, they had survived it, and despite considerable damage to property, two deaths, and many minor injuries, they all knew it could have been a lot worse. Martin Luther King Jr. had made an impassioned speech about the rightness of what they’d done, and the bravery of all those who had supported James Meredith, including the attorney general and the president of the United States. He compared JFK to Abraham Lincoln.
The five ACLU workers who took the train back to New York slept most of the way. They were exhausted after what they’d seen and been through, the tension of many days, and the chaos in jail. A lot of others hadn’t been released yet. Merrie was exhausted when she caught a cab outside Penn Station and headed home to their Park Avenue apartment. She was grateful that only Adelaide was home when she got there. She had carefully removed the bandage, and let her hair fall over the wound on her face, and tried to cover her black eye with some powder she had in her purse. She looked ragtag and disheveled when she walked into the apartment, and wanted to take a bath before she saw her parents.
“My God, child, what happened to you? You look like you got hit by a train,” Addie said, and then she fell silent and stared at Merrie in anger and fear. “You were there, weren’t you? I’ve been watching on TV.” There was no point denying it. Adelaide knew her well enough to guess instantly, and she looked deeply upset as she pulled Merrie’s hair back and scrutinized the wound on her temple. It was sensitive when she touched it and a nasty scrape and bruise. “You’re crazy. You’re gonna get yourself killed. This isn’t your fight, you know. Let Reverend King and his friends fight those battles. You’re from up here, you’re not southern, you’re not black, you don’t belong there.”
“Yes, I do,” Meredith said quietly and sat down at the kitchen table. She still had a headache, and now that she was home, she realized how exhausted she was, and Addie could see it.
“I thought you were in Chicago,” she said, dismayed, and sat down across from her. “If they don’t want to ride on the back of the bus, let them come up north. They don’t have to burn down the world and kill people to get a seat on the bus. They just troublemakers,” she said in stern disapproval. Meredith already knew that a lot of older Negroes didn’t believe in the disruption the new generation was creating for change. They thought it was just going to get everyone mad at them, which was a situation they didn’t want or need, or even approve of.
“Everyone has a right to an education, Addie,” Merrie said gently. “If your kids want to go to Ole Miss or any other school, they have to be allowed to. Don’t you want that for them?”
“They can get a good education at a black school. They don’t have to fight their way into a school where they’re not wanted and get people killed to do it. They don’t need to be uppity. All they need is a good education.”
“Wherever they want,” Meredith emphasized, and Adelaide looked chagrined.
“I can tell you one thing. It’s not worth you getting killed for. That boy would get his sorry ass into Ole Miss, if that’s what he wants to do, without you getting a black eye for him, or shot, or clubbed to death. He don’t need your help, and you’re gonna break your parents’ heart, and your brother’s, if you die for him. Did you go to jail?” she asked, and Merrie nodded. “I didn’t bring you up to be no jailbird, Meredith McKenzie,” she said sternly, which was her parents’ position too. “Are you going to tell them?” She looked worried.
“I haven’t decided,” but Meredith hadn’t called her father for bail money this time. She had taken care of it herself.
“Your daddy is going to be maaaddddd,” she said, and Meredith smiled. There was no question about that. She went to clean up then, thinking about Adelaide’s position. Meredith knew that elder members of the black community, particularly in the North where they didn’t have the same constraints, didn’t want the boat rocked, or to suffer retaliation for it, which they were afraid of. Adelaide didn’t see the value of what Meredith and the others were doing, fighting for the rights of blacks throughout the country. She just saw it as foolhardy and reckless and troublemaking. It wasn’t the first time Meredith had heard it. There were blacks in the South who felt that way too. They didn’t want to live with the fallout of riots and sit-ins, and the Ku Klux Klan seeking revenge and killing their children. There was a lot at stake here, on all sides.
Meredith managed to cover her injuries artfully before she saw her parents that evening at dinner. She used makeup to conceal them, and her hair was hanging down to cover her temple. Addie frowned severely as she served dinner. Meredith’s mother asked her how Chicago was, and Meredith dodged her with a bland answer. Her father was unusually silent but as they left the dining room he took her aside.
“I don’t know where you’ve been, Meredith, but I can guess, and it wasn’t Chicago. And I don’t want to know where you were or what you did there. You’ve embarked on a path that I don’t understand. And you have no reason to. It’s not your world or your problem, although you don’t see it that way. I can’t stop you. I see that now.”
He looked defeated as he said it, and she felt sorry for him. She knew that she would have been unhappy in his shoes too, with a daughter he didn’t understand, whom he could no longer control or subdue, who put herself in harm’s way for a cause she believed in.
“Just be careful. That’s all I ask. Your mother and I will be devastated if anything happens to you.”
She nodded, kissed him on the cheek, and went back to her room then. It marked a turning point in their relationship, and a hard one for him. But he had finally understood that he couldn’t stop her or change her, and she would never be the kind of woman he wanted her to be. She was a very different one. And no matter how much they loved her, she would never be her mother. She had to be who she was, whatever it cost her, and whatever it took. Robert McKenzie had finally understood it. She had come back alive from Mississippi. He had been praying for her safe return as he watched the riots on the news, and had sensed instantly that she was there. And even though she had come home in one piece, he understood fully now that he had lost her and they could no longer protect her. She had no idea what it had cost him to accept that. And as he went to his own room, there were tears rolling down his cheeks.
Chapter Twelve
After the riots at the University of Mississippi, Meredith learned that she had passed the bar exam. She was free to practice law in the state of New York, and in November, she accepted one of the jobs she’d been offered, in the most radical of the various firms she had applied to. They had other clients, though not many, but their specialty was discrimination suits of all kinds: race, color, gender, religion. They did a lot of pro bono work, and the salary they offered her was lower than some of the other firms, but it was exactly the kind of law she wanted to practice and it fit in with her ideals.
She had already given notice at the ACLU when her father called her early one morning. She could tell instantly from his voice that something grave had happened. Her grandmother had been failing from a serious heart condition, and she had died in her sleep during the night. She had gone peacefully and it wasn’t entirely unexpected, but it was a loss anyway. She had been a
quiet, mild, unobtrusive woman, without strong opinions or beliefs, but she had been the perfect mate for her powerful, determined husband and an important support system for him, and a loving mother and grandmother. Her grandchildren Meredith and Alex were going to miss her, and Robert sounded stricken on the phone. It was a week before Thanksgiving and they were going to make the arrangements for the funeral in the next few days.
Merrie called her grandfather as soon as she hung up, he was crying when he answered the phone. The funeral home had just taken her away. They were sending her body to New York for burial there, and he sounded distraught.
“I don’t know what I’m going to do without her, Merrie.” They had been married for sixty years. He couldn’t imagine his life without her, and for the first time, he suddenly sounded old. He was flying to New York that night, and Merrie was worried about him when she hung up.
Merrie took three days off from work to be with her family and do whatever she could to help. She stayed close to her grandfather. The funeral was dignified and well attended by their many friends and supporters from the various phases of Bill’s career, as attorney, judge, and now justice of the Supreme Court. They came to show their sympathy and respect for him and his loss of the woman that most of them barely knew. She had always been a behind-the-scenes person while he was the star of the show. It occurred to Meredith after the funeral that her father had married a woman very much like his mother and had expected the same quietly supportive, discreet presence from her, and her mother had filled that role for him. It was why Meredith was such a shock for him. She was the first woman in their family who had strong opinions and her own voice. Her grandfather had encouraged her to be that way.
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