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Authors: Anne Rivers Siddons
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University of Georgia. She paid her fees in cash. She did not contact anyone in Lytton, and she did not think they would come looking for her. She had moved outside the common kind. She did not think at all.
9
T HE MORNING AFTER SHE REGISTERED FOR HER FALL CLASSES , Mike took a city bus and went downtown to the main branch of the Carnegie Library. Walking into its somnolent green, cool dimness after the murderous white glare of the pavement was like slipping soundlessly into a cathedral, and she breathed fully and gratefully for the first time in two days and let herself sink, spinning slowly, into its cloistered hush. She went down the dingy stone steps to the basement, where the magazine and newspaper reference copies were kept, and ordered up everything she could find about the Civil Rights Movement in the years of its ascendancy. The Atlanta main library was a far richer trove than that in Lytton; it took Mike three full days to move from the movement’s infancy to its fevered present. She read slowly, from midmorning until late afternoon, as absorbed as she had been in the distant, underwater summer when she had holed up on the side porch of the Pomeroy Street house and read
War and Peace
straight through, and when she was done with her day’s reading and her spare Walgreen’s supper, she went back to her cubicle in the church’s home and stretched out on hersingle bed in the wash of a small fan she had bought and went immediately and dreamlessly to sleep.
When she reached the coverage of the previous week and the sit-in at Jojo’s Restaurant, she read it with no more and no less detached interest and absorption than she had read the rest of the material she had ordered. It seemed no more real than the slick paper of that week’s
Time
.
On her way home from the library the last day, Mike took a shortcut through the basement of Kresge’s Five and Ten Cent Store, and found herself drawn up in front of a display of billfolds. She was riveted to one, a lurid pink plastic item embossed in a snakeskin pattern, and all of a sudden wanted it as simply and totally as she wanted sleep and food. She opened and examined it. Its photo section had glossy, preening head shots of Rock Hudson and Doris Day and Anita Ekberg, and a group shot of the Cleaver family, with the Beaver twinkling impishly in front of his parents and brother Wally. She bought the billfold out of her day’s allotment from the duck bank, which left her nothing for supper, but she was not hungry. She fidgeted impatiently on the bus until she reached her stop, and ran in the long, hot twilight across the street and into the church’s home and up the diarrhea-brown stairs to her room, and dropped her purchase on the bed. Methodically, she switched the contents of her own wallet, a supple burgundy calfskin Priss had given her at Christmas, into the new flamingo-colored one, and threw the old wallet into the green tin trash can. She threw the photographs of her father and DeeDee and Bayard Sewell after it. In their places she put Rock and Doris and Anita and the Cleaver family.
The next morning, in the same five-and-dime store, she bought a money belt that fitted around her waist under her clothes, and after that she wore her eight-hundred-odd dollars against her sharpening ribs, evenon the hottest days. They were as comforting there as the clasp of a parent or a lover.
After she had been in the church’s home for a week, Mike had a dream. She dreamed that she stood on a wooden dock reaching out into a blue mountain lake, much like one she remembered from a trip she and DeeDee had made with John Winship up to Lake Burton in the north Georgia mountains, when she was very small. In a wooden rowboat tethered by a rope to a cleat in the dock were her father and sister, Bayard Sewell, Priss Comfort, Rusky, and a beautiful woman in dripping wet clothes whom she knew somehow to be her mother, Claudia. They smiled and beckoned to her, and she ran eagerly toward
9
T HE MORNING AFTER SHE REGISTERED FOR HER FALL CLASSES , Mike took a city bus and went downtown to the main branch of the Carnegie Library. Walking into its somnolent green, cool dimness after the murderous white glare of the pavement was like slipping soundlessly into a cathedral, and she breathed fully and gratefully for the first time in two days and let herself sink, spinning slowly, into its cloistered hush. She went down the dingy stone steps to the basement, where the magazine and newspaper reference copies were kept, and ordered up everything she could find about the Civil Rights Movement in the years of its ascendancy. The Atlanta main library was a far richer trove than that in Lytton; it took Mike three full days to move from the movement’s infancy to its fevered present. She read slowly, from midmorning until late afternoon, as absorbed as she had been in the distant, underwater summer when she had holed up on the side porch of the Pomeroy Street house and read
War and Peace
straight through, and when she was done with her day’s reading and her spare Walgreen’s supper, she went back to her cubicle in the church’s home and stretched out on hersingle bed in the wash of a small fan she had bought and went immediately and dreamlessly to sleep.
When she reached the coverage of the previous week and the sit-in at Jojo’s Restaurant, she read it with no more and no less detached interest and absorption than she had read the rest of the material she had ordered. It seemed no more real than the slick paper of that week’s
Time
.
On her way home from the library the last day, Mike took a shortcut through the basement of Kresge’s Five and Ten Cent Store, and found herself drawn up in front of a display of billfolds. She was riveted to one, a lurid pink plastic item embossed in a snakeskin pattern, and all of a sudden wanted it as simply and totally as she wanted sleep and food. She opened and examined it. Its photo section had glossy, preening head shots of Rock Hudson and Doris Day and Anita Ekberg, and a group shot of the Cleaver family, with the Beaver twinkling impishly in front of his parents and brother Wally. She bought the billfold out of her day’s allotment from the duck bank, which left her nothing for supper, but she was not hungry. She fidgeted impatiently on the bus until she reached her stop, and ran in the long, hot twilight across the street and into the church’s home and up the diarrhea-brown stairs to her room, and dropped her purchase on the bed. Methodically, she switched the contents of her own wallet, a supple burgundy calfskin Priss had given her at Christmas, into the new flamingo-colored one, and threw the old wallet into the green tin trash can. She threw the photographs of her father and DeeDee and Bayard Sewell after it. In their places she put Rock and Doris and Anita and the Cleaver family.
The next morning, in the same five-and-dime store, she bought a money belt that fitted around her waist under her clothes, and after that she wore her eight-hundred-odd dollars against her sharpening ribs, evenon the hottest days. They were as comforting there as the clasp of a parent or a lover.
After she had been in the church’s home for a week, Mike had a dream. She dreamed that she stood on a wooden dock reaching out into a blue mountain lake, much like one she remembered from a trip she and DeeDee had made with John Winship up to Lake Burton in the north Georgia mountains, when she was very small. In a wooden rowboat tethered by a rope to a cleat in the dock were her father and sister, Bayard Sewell, Priss Comfort, Rusky, and a beautiful woman in dripping wet clothes whom she knew somehow to be her mother, Claudia. They smiled and beckoned to her, and she ran eagerly toward
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