Brother to a Dragonfly by Will D. Campbell

Author:Will D. Campbell [Campbell, Will D.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9781496816313
Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
Published: 2018-01-15T07:00:00+00:00

EVENING

If blue skies, lenient summer temperature, and an unruffling breeze moving in rhythmic and welcome spurts off the Louisiana Gulf make for beauty, then the day after my thirty-fifth birthday was a beautiful Sunday. All of us, including Webb—still in the womb—had checked into the Holiday Inn in Baton Rouge. Baton Rouge is just seventy miles from Liberty and we would drive up there on Monday. The folks were getting old and living alone and I felt both duty and desire to see them as often as I could. But for five years there had been increasing reasons why I should be somewhat discreet about visiting. Though no one was even talking at that point about integrating schools or churches anywhere in the state of Mississippi, everyone sensed the imminent storm. And everyone knew that I worked in “race relations.” Therefore, if integration came and I was in the county it would be perfect logic to assume that I had brought it. Until six months earlier, the urgency to visit outweighed the pressure to stay away.

Joe had bought out Uncle Luther’s old homeplace just down the road from our parents’ house. He, who could ill afford it, had purchased it so that the folks would not be so alone and so that our sister and her family would have a decent place to live. He was also feeling some of the agony of wanting to visit the home folks but, since he had so clearly identified with what he had begun to call “Will’s cause,” he sometimes felt it best to stay away. Since he had bought the place and Sister was next door, I did not feel uncomfortable in being so close and yet not there. Brenda and the children wanted to swim in the Holiday Inn pool and visit her sister, and I needed to see some people in Baton Rouge who were active in civil rights. It started out to be a day of work, fun, and relaxation.

Less than an hour after we had checked in Joe was on the phone. We were traveling by car from Houston to Nashville and how he found us from his pharmacy in Meridian I never got around to asking.

“Brother, I have some bad news.” His voice broke slightly as he rambled on about unrelated trivia, seeming never to get to the news which I somehow knew was bad as soon as the phone rang in a motel room no one except the room clerk knew we were in. He assured me that Daddy and Mamma were all right. So was he, Joey, and Julie. It was almost by elimination that he got around to who was not all right.

“Sister’s folks were going to church and some of the kids wanted to go early to Sunday School. They sent Will Edward up the highway to tell Daddy to pick up the rest of them when he passed going to the meetin.” Then there was silence except for a faint sobbing. (The “meetin” was an expression our Father had always used for the main church service.

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