Best Kept Secrets by Gwen Florio

Author:Gwen Florio [Gwen Florio]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Severn House
Published: 2021-05-06T16:00:00+00:00

TWENTY-EIGHT

1967

The Morgan State students – a dozen of them – boarded with black people all over town.

Despite the Evanses’ deep ties in Chateau, it had taken all of Grace and Bobby’s powers of persuasion – weeks of visiting, writing follow-up letters and even a few long-distance phone calls from Baltimore – to find enough people willing to take in strangers coming to town for the express purpose of making life difficult.

Because as bad as things were, they could get worse. People could lose their jobs. Their homes – most black people in Chateau rented. Even their lives. Paranoid? Hardly. Nobody had to mention Medgar Evers, shot on his doorstep in Mississippi just a few weeks earlier. Change was coming, yes, but the cost was terrible. Wasn’t there the slightest chance that Chateau might follow the rest of the world, years later but at least peacefully?

Grace sat at kitchen tables and drank lemonade in tall, cold glasses set before her by shaking hands; tried to catch downcast gazes, listened hard to whispered excuses. ‘I want to, I surely do. But …’

‘We’ll pay our way.’ There’d been a collection on campus, funded by students and professors who wished they could take part, but for various reasons – jobs, families and the equally reasonable one of soul-shaking fear – could not. ‘It’s not much, but it’ll cover the cost of food and a little more for your trouble.’

She’d offered once, afraid of how it might be received, and saw those fears realized.

Of course, it had been taken as an insult. The woman had stiffened. Her trembling hands stilled. ‘Like I’d take money to do the right thing.’

Grace started to apologize, but the woman spoke over her. ‘You send one of those children here. I’ll talk to some other people for you.’

For their part, the members of the group respected the danger they’d posed their hosts, slipping in and out of homes via alleys and back doors, heading off to early-morning organizing meetings at AME Zion clutching paper sacks packed with sandwiches wrapped in waxed paper and a piece of fruit picked from a backyard tree, often sent on their way with a hug and a ‘God bless.’

Grace had hoped to share a home with Bobby, but the group divvied up the few available rooms by gender, Grace sharing a double bed with a girl named June who snored and kicked her way through each night, giving Grace an excuse to slip out early each morning to stand hidden behind an ancient oak as Bobby emerged from his own lodgings and trail him unobtrusively to the church. Evenings, she followed a similar ritual, lingering outside the white frame church while those inside reviewed the day’s events and planned the next day’s action, then tiptoeing through yards and ducking behind buildings as she followed him home, her actions an uncomfortable reminder of the way she’d tried to avoid catching the eye of Todd Burris, her high school nemesis.

Then, she’d been trying to protect herself. Now, she was honoring her promise to her mother to protect her brother.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.