Home in the Morning by Mary Glickman

Author:Mary Glickman
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Jews, Jewish, Civil Rights, Triangles (Interpersonal Relations), Fiction, Literary, Civil Rights Movements, Southern States, Political Science, Historical, Cultural Heritage, Political Freedom & Security
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2010-11-09T05:00:00+00:00

EIGHT

Spring, 1964

AT SPRING BREAK, JACKSON AND Stella drove south for her premiere encounter with the Sassaport family. It was uncertain whether Jackson’s car could make the trip. Stella itched to take the most favorable seat in a Southern bus or railroad car then give it to the first old black woman she saw and plant her own ass in the back. This was a desire her fiancé determined to thwart at any cost. We’ll take the Renault, he told her. There’s federal law and then there’s custom, and I’d like to see us arrive in Guilford without unanticipated detours. Besides, he continued in what he considered a cajoling tone, freedom rides are old hat. Mama tells me people are startin’ in to set wherever they feel they should, and you know all the white Freedom Riders anyway were released from custody before you and I ever met. The very second they were let go, they mostly scurried back north to hold forth in coffee shops and lecture halls. Freedom schools are the thing this year. If you want, we can stop by some of the churches around Guilford where you can sign up to spend time this summer improving the reading skills of those who need it to register to vote. Why, I’ll bet you could become a canvasser and register folks door to door. When her eyes developed a kind of misty shine at the thought, he added: Of course, I’ll be staying up north to finish school during the summer session. We’d have to be separated. That dulled her gaze right quick, an event that pleased Jackson enormously. He chuckled inside for days and days over it.

He’d figured out something about Stella. He’d figured out that he could manipulate her iron will if he tried hard enough, which he did without guilt if the occasion at hand was truly important. Not that there were many of those. He loved his Stella just the way she was. He had no plan to tame or subvert her in any substantial manner. He honored her remarkable spirit, her intelligence, her goodness. When it came to introducing her to his family and getting her in and out of Guilford unharmed, expediency ruled supreme over adoration or respect. The part that tickled him was that her Achilles’ heel appeared to be her devotion to him, which struck him as a most felicitous miracle. If he’d been wiser, he’d have realized that this heel would begin to grow calloused directly after the wedding, at which time the process would advance with such alarming speed that Stella could jig over cut glass without injury before their fifth anniversary. But that spring, Jackson Sassaport was nowhere near as wise as he should have been, neither about Stella nor his family nor the township of Guilford, Mississippi.

He did not, for example, imagine that once they got beyond Washington, DC. Stella would spend the trip plastered to the passenger window, hands up against the glass, marking it with round puffs of breath.

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