Things Too Huge to Fix by Saying Sorry by Susan Vaught

Author:Susan Vaught
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster/Paula Wiseman Books

14

UNDER ATTACK FROM EVERYWHERE

* * *

Excerpt from Night on Fire (1969), by Avadelle Richardson, page 361

Early on Saturday Morning, July 7, 1962, I woke to somebody pounding on my front door. My heart jumped straight to my throat, and I near about fell out of bed. Rain pattered on the tin roof as I pulled on my robe and slippers. It might be the police. The classes, helping with voter registration—I was going to jail.

Aunt Jessie and Abram and I hit the living room at the same time. Mama had stayed in bed, in too much pain to move. I grabbed my boy and pushed him at Aunt Jessie. “Take him to the kitchen. If it’s the police, you go out back with him, and you keep going, and you don’t stop until you get three states north, you hear me?”

Aunt Jessie set her mouth and nodded. She took hold of my son’s hand, and she towed him out of that room, leaving me to face the door alone.

Bang. Bang. Bang.

I didn’t hear anybody hollering for me to open up, but then, that’s how they did sometimes, sneaky-like and mean, so you couldn’t be ready or run. I straightened myself, tied my robe, and made my feet walk.

Hand shaking, I gripped the handle and pulled open the door, my eyes blinking so fast, my skin and bones already waiting to be grabbed and tackled and beaten. Instead, I found Leslie standing in the rain like a half-drowned puppy, bawling her eyes out.

I snatched hold of her and pulled her into my house, slamming the door quick behind her. “Are you out of your mind showing up here in daylight?”

“He had a heart attack, CiCi.” She sobbed, then covered her mouth. “It was a heart attack.”

“What are you even talking about?”

Leslie lowered her hand, but her eyes were barely focused. Her words sounded like so much crazy rambling. “At Byhalia. At the sanatorium where he goes, you know, after a run of drinking—Wright’s? I think that’s the name of it.”

Noises behind me let me know that Aunt Jessie had realized I wasn’t being arrested. She and Abram eased up beside me to face Leslie, and Aunt Jessie put a hand on my elbow.

Understanding began to dawn. I stepped back from Leslie, my breath leaving me like I’d been punched. My world got darker and sadder, and I would have cried if life had left me with any tears at all. “Oh. Oh, good Lord.”

Leslie nodded and sobbed again. “He’s gone, CiCi. William Faulkner died yesterday.”

“BY 1961,” MS. MANCHESTER SAID, “Southerners felt like they were under attack from everywhere because people were insisting that the races get mixed and treated equally. James Meredith applied to Ole Miss, and his application was denied due to his race. On September 10, 1962, the United States Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ordered the University of Mississippi to enroll James Meredith, effective immediately. Three days later, Governor Ross Barnett got on television and radio and stated,

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