Night on Fire (20 page)

There is no crowd at all around a Negro church where bloody rioting broke out last night, resulting in a proclamation of martial law by Gov. John Patterson.

The story went on to describe the events of the long night. Mr. McCall had been as good as his word, because at the top of the story were two names: Tom McCall and Jarmaine Jones. Beside it were Grant's photos. Seeing the pictures was like being there—hearing the crowd and ringing the bell.

“Want to toss the football?”

I looked up and saw Daddy, back from work early. He had loosened his tie and slung his coat over one shoulder. I tried to measure his mood but couldn't.

“Okay,” I said.

He dropped his coat on the swing and fetched the ball.

“Go long,” he said.

I dropped the paper and headed across the yard, running fast, the way Daddy had taught me. He waited, then sent the ball spinning in a long arc, over my shoulder and into my arms. Then he jogged across the front of the house, and I hit him with a spiral.

Later, we sat on the porch steps and drank some iced tea. I'd been thinking all afternoon about what to say. When I opened my mouth, it spilled out.

“Here's the thing,” I said. “Jarmaine's smart. She's strong. You should talk to her sometime.”

He sipped his tea and gazed out across the yard.

I said, “Her mother helped raise me, but you never set foot in her house. Don't you think that's strange?”

He took another sip of tea.

“You watched the bus burn and didn't do a thing,” I said.

He eyed me for a minute, then looked away. Mrs. Wilson, a neighbor, walked down the street with her dog, Buster, on a leash. She waved, and Daddy waved back.

“That's true,” he said.

“I watched too. It was wrong.”

“Some people in town would disagree,” said Daddy.

“They're crackers,” I said.

His head swiveled around, and he stared at me. “Where did you hear that word?”

“Different places.”

“Am I a cracker?” he asked.

“You're my father. You're good. Aren't you?”

“You tell me. You're the expert. You run away from home, and you come back talking like this.”

I set my iced tea on the porch. “That day at Forsyth's Grocery, people did terrible things. You watched, and so did I. That makes us part of it.”

He sighed and shook his head. There were lines around his eyes and mouth. Suddenly he looked older.

“We were wrong,” he said. “But they were wrong too.”

“The Freedom Riders?”

“So-called,” he said.

“Daddy, they just wanted to ride the bus.”

“They knew what would happen, and they came anyway. Of course they got hurt. When you stir up a hornet's nest, you get stung.”

I picked up my iced tea and took a gulp. I wanted it to make me strong.

“I'm a Freedom Rider,” I said.

I told him what Jarmaine and I had done on the bus and at the Birmingham Greyhound station. I expected him to be angry, but he surprised me.

“Oh, sweetheart,” he said.

When I was six, I decided one day that I would climb the big tree in our front yard. I shinnied up the trunk, edged out onto one of the big branches, and stood. It was beautiful up there. Then Daddy saw me and came running out of the house. The look on his face that day was the look I saw now.

“You could have been hurt,” he said.

“Maybe. It seemed like the right thing to do.”

“Look, Billie, I don't know what you think or what you did. Just be careful. I need you safe.”

“You love me,” I said.

“Of course I do.”

“Like Lavender loves Jarmaine.”

“Yes,” he said.

“Jarmaine doesn't believe in safe. She wants freedom.”

Daddy shrugged. “Don't we all.”

Maybe that was how it worked. You see things happen. You watch. You shrug. Then you move on. It seemed hopeless. But the Freedom Riders disagreed.

“Why are we like this?” I asked.

“Like what?”

“Scared of Negroes.”

“That's crazy.”

“We hold them down. We build separate schools. We send them to the back of the bus. What are we afraid of?”

He shook his head. “What did they tell you in that church?”

“Answer my question.”

He shot me a look. The last time I had talked back to him, he'd given me a whack and sent me to my room. This time he just watched me.

“Black and white don't mix,” he said. “Around here, they never have.”

“Why?”

“I don't know. Tradition. Culture. A way of life.”

I said, “Tradition is Mama's corn pudding. This is more than that. People suffer. You saw that mob at the church. Someone could have been killed.”

“It's the way things are.”

“That's not good enough.”

“What do you want me to say, Billie? It's wrong to have slaves. It's horrible. It's evil. But we did it. Haven't you ever done something you were ashamed of? You hide it, you push it down, and pretty soon it becomes part of you, like your arm or leg.”

I tried to think of what Jarmaine would say.

“Cut it off,” I told him.

“You have the answers, don't you? Cut it off. Repeal the law. Run away from home. Why did you leave?”

“I had to.”

“I was worried,” he said.

“I met Dr. King. I talked to a woman named Gus. They're just people.”

“Don't run away,” he said. “I want you safe.”

“It's not about me.”

But I was wrong. I saw it in his eyes and the hunch of his shoulders. He wanted to keep the world the way it was. For me. For Mama. The thing he was afraid of was the thing I dreamed of.

Change.

It was a road, and I wanted to take it. It scared me, but that was okay. I would change, and someday maybe Daddy would. Maybe the others would too.

A mosquito buzzed in my ear. Crickets chirped in the distance. I slipped my hand into Daddy's, and we sipped our iced tea.

After supper I went to Grant's house. His photos had run in the afternoon paper but there must have been more, because he was in his darkroom, working. Mrs. McCall led me back there, and I knocked.

“Grant, it's me.”

“Just a minute.”

A moment later he opened the door and motioned me inside. Closing it behind me, he switched off the light, and the room turned red.

“Are you doing black and white?” I asked.

He nodded and turned back to his work.

Pinned across the wall in front of him were strings with photos clipped to them. There was First Baptist Church. There was the mob. There was the overturned car, with people holding bats and bricks. There was the shot of us in front of the church—Mr. McCall and Lavender, Mama and Daddy, Jarmaine and me. In the dim red light, we appeared to be covered with blood.

I shivered. “What do you think about all that?”

He shrugged. “I think the world is a strange and beautiful place.”

“Were you scared?”

“Maybe at first. Then I got busy.”

I nodded. “It's what you were put on this earth to do.”

“Huh?”

“Taking pictures. Showing people the truth. You're only thirteen, but you've already got your life's work.”

He poured some chemicals into a tray. That's the thing about your life's work. When you're doing it, you're more or less oblivious to other people.

Looking around the room, I noticed a photo pinned to the wall. It seemed to be from another time. It was me, standing in front of the Anniston bus station.

The picture showed a girl with a determined grin. She didn't know where she was going or what her life's work would be. Wherever she went, she would try to do what was right. She would be hard on herself and learn to forgive others. She would welcome change. She would dream it, then build it.

Grant stood beside me, lost in his work, dreaming his own dreams, tongue sticking halfway out of his mouth. Watching him, I had a funny thought. Maybe he would build it with me.

In the darkroom, I could imagine anything I wanted. Hands touched. Images appeared, as if by magic. The world was developing right before my eyes.

If I thought about it, dreamed about it, worked on it, maybe I could get a picture I liked. The picture would show a better place—Anniston or Montgomery or a city in the sky. And I would be there.

There were more famous events in the history of the civil rights movement, many of which took place in Alabama—Selma, the Montgomery bus boycott, the bombing of a Birmingham church. But in some ways it all began in Anniston, in a bus, in the lives of misguided people who, building on years of resentment and hate, did awful things while good people, like Billie and her father, stood by and watched.

Billie Sims, Jarmaine Jones, Grant McCall, and their families are fictional, but the events against which their story is told are true. On Mother's Day 1961, the Freedom Riders came to Anniston. An angry crowd surrounded their bus at the Greyhound station, then followed it to Forsyth & Son Grocery outside of town, where they terrorized the riders and burned the bus. It seemed that the only person who tried to help the riders was little Janie Forsyth, who just a week earlier had won the state spelling bee.

A few days later, those same victims were confronted and beaten at the Birmingham and Montgomery bus stations, the latter of which is now a museum dedicated to the Freedom Riders. The following Sunday, the riders attended a meeting at Montgomery's First Baptist Church, along with the church's pastor, Ralph Abernathy; Birmingham civil rights leader Fred Shuttlesworth; CORE's James Farmer; and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. King spent much of the evening on the phone with Attorney General Robert Kennedy, trying to get the attention of an administration more interested in Moscow than Montgomery. Events in the story were taken from eyewitness accounts and film footage. A few church members really did bring guns but never used them.

I first learned of these events when I saw Stanley Nelson Jr.'s magnificent documentary
Freedom Riders
. I was riveted by the interview with Janie Forsyth McKinney, who recalled, “I went to the house and got a bucket of water and a stack of Dixie cups, and I walked right out into the middle of that crowd.” Stunned by Janie's bravery, I wondered what it would have been like to grow up in Anniston at that time and witness those events. It was the birth of Billie Sims.

Surprisingly little has been written about this important episode. The best book is Raymond Arsenault's
Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice
, which was later republished in an abridged version when the documentary film was shown on PBS's
American Experience
. Some of the Freedom Riders have written their own accounts, which give a more personal view.

One of the best sources of information is the
Anniston Star
, historically one of the South's outstanding newspapers. The day-by-day reporting described in this book is accurate and the articles quoted are real, though Tom McCall and his son, Grant, are fictional stand-ins for the heroic group of real-life reporters and photographers who covered the story.

As helpful as all these accounts were, the most inspiring was given to me by an elderly deacon at First Baptist Church one day in late February, when I had driven to Alabama to finish my research and see firsthand the places that would be in my story. I arrived at the church on a Saturday morning, hoping to snap a few pictures of the outside and, if I was lucky, to get a glimpse inside.

When I knocked on the back door, I was greeted by Benjamin E. Beasley, who, it turned out, was one of the church elders and saints. He and a few parishioners were busy mixing up pots of food for an event later that day, but he was generous enough to take nearly an hour and introduce me to his church, which he treated as an old friend.

He showed me the sanctuary with its stately organ pipes and stained-glass windows; the little office where Martin Luther King negotiated by phone with Robert Kennedy; and, most glorious of all, the tower and its beautiful old bell. He rang it for me, then told me proudly that his mother, Mildred Beasley, had been the organist that day at the Freedom Rider meeting, over fifty years earlier. She had started at three o'clock in the afternoon and had played off and on all night to inspire and comfort the congregation. I've tried to capture something of her spirit, as well as her son's, in the character of Gus.

I am grateful to Deacon Beasley, as well as to the librarians and researchers at the Anniston Public Library, the Freedom Rides Museum, the Alabama State Archives, and Vanderbilt University. I'm indebted to the students at Meigs Magnet School in Nashville, whose excitement when I told them about my Freedom Rider project was a constant source of inspiration.

Kristin Zelazko, my editor at Albert Whitman, caught the excitement and has been a champion for the book and for my writing ever since. Deepest gratitude to Kristin and the Albert Whitman team for their support and enthusiasm.