Ten Miles Past Normal

Chapter Sixteen


Freedom Riders





The backseat of the Bug is cramped with backpacks and various other paraphernalia, but I don’t care. Mr. Pritchard sits beside me, his head leaned back, eyes squinting at the sky, a huge smile plastered across his face. Emma has the top down, this being the sort of fall afternoon that requires you breathe in as much fresh air as humanly possible while driving across town in a 1964 VW Beetle convertible with the wind messing up your hair. Mr. Pritchard’s hair is white as snow and a little thin, and it’s blowing in all sorts of crazy directions, but he doesn’t seem to care.

Emma and Sarah ride up front, Emma taking long swigs from a tall paper cup of coffee and glancing every five seconds in the rearview mirror to check out Mr. Pritchard. Over the years, I’ve known Emma to be quiet, but I’ve never known her to be dumbstruck. Or starstruck maybe. Clearly she considers Mr. Pritchard a denizen of the upper echelons of Mount Olympus. She even called him “sir” when I introduced them to each other at Pine Manor.

“You just call me Harlan, honey,” Mr. Pritchard told her, and Emma’s cheeks turned splotchy red, but she shook his hand and said, “Okay, uh, Harlan.”

Sarah and I glanced at each other, eyebrows raised. Uh? Emma said uh?

We’re driving across town toward Mrs. Septima Brown’s house in Manneville Heights, a rickety subdivision populated by a large percentage of Manneville’s African-American senior citizens and home to the BTW Cultural Center, which used to be Booker T. Washington Elementary School, the only black elementary school in Manneville until all the public schools were integrated in the early sixties. For years, busloads of Manneville elementary students, black and white, have made the trek over to the BTW Cultural Center on the Tuesday after the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday to sing “This Little Light of Mine” and watch a film of the “I Have a Dream” speech.

Mrs. Brown’s house sits on a lawn so pristine that you have to wonder if she pays someone to stand under the trees on windy days to catch the leaves before they hit the ground. The house itself is tiny, with concrete steps leading up to a porch only big enough for a rocking chair, a small café table, and several potted mums.

Before Mr. Pritchard can ring the bell, the front door opens and a tall, slightly stooped woman bursts out, a bright orange and red shawl wrapped around her shoulders. She is smiling and moving at approximately a hundred miles per hour.

“Harlan!” she cries, practically leaping into Mr. Pritchard’s arms and wrapping him in an enormous hug. “They finally let you out of jail!”

“Only because these fine young ladies agreed to keep an eye on me,” Mr. Pritchard replies, waving to where Emma, Sarah, and I wait at the bottom of the steps. “They got rules and regulations over in the pokey, or hadn’t you heard?”

Mrs. Septima Brown laughs. “I never was much for jail-houses. I’m somewhat ashamed to admit that now. But I’m glad I’ve not yet had to retire to the old folks’ home.”

“Stay away as long as you can,” Mr. Pritchard advises. “The smell alone will take years off your life.”

Mrs. Brown steps past Mr. Pritchard and perches on the top step. A cool breeze stirs, and she pulls her shawl tightly across her chest. “It certainly is real fall weather we’re having here,” she says to us, adjusting her glasses as if to see us better. The lenses magnify her dark brown eyes so that they look slightly too large for her head. “And you girls driving around with your car top down! Why don’t you come in, and I’ll fix you some tea.”

We follow Mrs. Brown into her tiny house and take a seat in her tiny but immaculate living room. There is a distinct lack of grandmotherly clutter—no knickknacks, no lace doilies, no miniature teacups with depictions of the Seven Wonders of the World. Emma squeezes in next to Mr. Pritchard on the scratchy-looking couch, while Sarah sits on a delicate cane-backed chair. I make myself at home on an ottoman near the coffee table. We are only slightly less crammed than we were in the Bug.

“Can I help you with anything?” Emma calls to Mrs. Brown. “I can carry out the tea.”

“Oh, no, dear, I have it all here on a tray,” Mrs. Brown says, walking back into the living room. “I had everything prepared before you arrived.”

With Emma’s help, Mrs. Brown passes teacups, then offers around a plate of thin lemon cookies with crisp brown edges. When they finish serving, Mrs. Brown pats Emma on the arm and says, “Thank you for helping, dear. What lovely manners you have.”

Emma blushes. Emma, the Queen of Cool, blushes.

It occurs to me that I really don’t know her at all.

Mrs. Brown takes a seat in a wingback chair and pulls a brightly colored quilt over her lap. After taking a sip of tea and pronouncing it much too hot to drink, she picks up some knitting from a basket by her feet. “I’m knitting an afghan for an Afghan, my church’s latest charity project,” she tells us, working the indigo blue yarn with a pair of metallic pink needles. She points to the TV, an old-fashioned model the size of an oven about six inches behind my head. “I watch the History Channel while I knit. It’s World War I week. I’ve decided that to truly understand World War II, you must have all the facts about World War I. And by tonight at ten o’clock, I shall.”

We all sit in silence for a minute while Mrs. Brown knits, taking careful sips of our tea. After peering into her cup for what seems like a long time, Emma looks up at Mrs. Brown and says, “I thought you did go to jail.”

Mrs. Brown looks at Emma thoughtfully and sets her knitting down on her lap. “Have you been doing research, dear?”

“I Googled you,” Emma says. “I mean,” she amends when Mrs. Brown looks confused, “I looked you up on the Internet. There was a civil rights site where it said you went to jail with a lot of other literacy teachers, in Mississippi.”

“Yes, I did, in the summer of 1964, in Greenville.” Mrs. Brown nods. “But only briefly. I allowed myself to be bailed out. Not everyone did. It was a badge of honor to refuse bail. But I just couldn’t abide the thought of spending the night in a jailhouse in Mississippi. I was sure we’d be dragged out in the middle of the night and taken somewhere to be shot. I was a coward, really.”

“Septima!” Mr. Pritchard exclaims, half rising from his seat on the couch. “You were no such thing. Why, you’re one of the bravest people I know.”

Mrs. Brown waves his praise away. “Not at all, Harlan, not at all. I’ve always sought comfort. It’s my great failing, I fear.”

Mr. Pritchard harrumphs.

“That really happened to some people,” Emma says. “They really did get taken out of jail and killed. It was a reasonable thing to be afraid of.”

“I thought so at the time,” Mrs. Brown says, returning to her knitting. “But now I see that my friends who spent long stretches of time in jail were practicing what Dr. King would have called ‘redemptive suffering.’ They were sacrificing themselves bodily for the better of the whole.”

Sarah pulls out a small notepad from her back pocket and begins scribbling notes. Suddenly I’m sorry I don’t have my dad’s recording equipment. Leaning forward, I ask, “Did you get arrested for starting a school? And what is a Citizenship School, exactly?”

A smile lights Mrs. Brown’s face. Clearly this is a subject dear to her heart. “Ah, the Freedom School! If only my dear Hazel were here to tell the story with me. But Harlan, you’ll help, won’t you?”

Mr. Pritchard nods. “I’ll do my best.”

“Well, you all know where Mason Farm Road is, don’t you?” Mrs. Brown asks, reaching for her cup of tea. “Off of Highway 15?”

“That’s where we played youth soccer,” Sarah informs her. “Over on the fields there, before you get to the Mason Farm subdivision.”

“Did you?” Mrs. Brown sounds delighted. “Then you know where Hazel and I ran our school. There’s an old farmhouse there, tucked back behind the creek. . . .”

We all lean forward to listen, Sarah, Emma, and me. Mr. Pritchard leans back and closes his eyes, as if anticipating a treat.

“This is a good story,” he says, then reaches over and pats Emma on the knee. “You’re going to love this story, just you wait and see. Septima and Hazel did amazing things.”

I glance at Emma, and the look on her face does, in fact, look like that of a girl falling in love. Her eyes are wide, her skin is flushed, her mouth is slightly open.

“Now, Harlan,” Mrs. Brown says, “you act like you only had a modest part in our school, but you played an important role.”

Mr. Pritchard grins. “That’s right. I kept the thugs away.”

“More than that!” Mrs. Brown protests. She looks at the rest of us. “Starting a school was my idea, but Harlan here’s the one who found a place for us to have it. In those days nobody wanted to get the Klan riled up. Oh, it wasn’t as bad here as it was in the Deep South, but we had our share of white boys who liked to dress up in robes and ride around like hoodlums. None of the black churches wanted us, not after all those churches were burned in Mississippi. But we had to have some place to hold our reading classes, and it was Harlan who found us our schoolhouse.”

“I helped you find an old abandoned farmhouse, if that’s what you mean,” Mr. Pritchard says. “I’m not sure I was doing you such a great favor. I thought that place might fall in on itself any minute.”

“Oh, but we had the best time fixing it up, didn’t we?” Mrs. Brown exclaims, leaning forward to take another lemon cookie from the plate on the coffee table. “Like an old-fashioned barn raising. Everybody came! Well, all the black folks came, and a few sympathetic whites, and we got it put back together. And then we started teaching. Hazel loved to teach handwriting, didn’t she?”

Mr. Pritchard laughs. “She’d get some kind of mad if someone wanted to use an X for their signature. ‘Write it out pretty!’ she’d tell ’em. Lot of them men, they thought she was crazy, but Hazel thought it was important, if you were going to risk your life registering to vote, that you write your name in a good, strong hand.”

“We taught a lot of people to read and write,” Mrs. Brown says. “Cletus Miller was ninety-two when he learned to read. As soon as he learned, he marched into the public library and demanded a card. The librarian gave it to him too.”

“Mary McConnelly,” Mr. Pritchard remembers. “She was on our side.”

Sarah stops her scribbling. “How did you and Mrs. Pritchard know each other?”

Mrs. Brown leans back in her chair and closes her eyes for a moment. “Let me see. When did I first meet Hazel? I believe it was when she came to speak at our church.”

“About civil rights?” Emma asks.

“About hydrangeas. Hazel often spoke to community groups on horticultural matters. I had a few questions for her afterward, as I’d never had any luck with hydrangeas, and we struck up a gardening friendship. This was around 1955, maybe 1956. It wasn’t long after that I had the idea to begin a Citizenship School to help folks learn to read and write so that they could register to vote. As soon as Hazel heard about it, she wanted to help.”

“I wish I’d been there,” Emma blurts, then blushes furiously. “I mean, I would’ve liked to help too.”

“Yes, I believe you would have,” Mrs. Brown says in a soothing voice. “I’m sure you would have been brave enough.”

Emma stares at her lap. “Maybe,” she says. “I hope so.”

Everyone is quiet for a moment. I don’t know about Emma and Sarah, but I’m wondering if I would have been brave enough to help. I think of the burnt cross in Mr. Pritchard’s front yard, and I imagine it burning in my yard. I imagine looking out from behind the living room curtains while the Klan stood in my front yard, wanting to teach me a lesson. I imagine flames and gunshots.

I close my eyes. I’m hardly brave enough to think about it, much less live it.

“Now, Harlan and Hazel weren’t afraid of anything,” Mrs. Brown says, breaking the silence. She picks up the teapot and stands to refill our cups. “They acted like nothing or nobody could hurt them.”

Mr. Pritchard laughs. “It was you and Hazel who had no fear. I remember driving y’all around to folks’ houses at night to get ’em to come to the school. Every time headlights showed up behind us, my blood ran cold. Farther we got out on back roads, the easier it got for someone to take a shot at us without getting caught.”

“The hardest thing was getting people to talk to us,” Mrs. Brown says, sitting down again. “It was exasperating! I couldn’t understand it, until one woman told me she’d lose her job if her employer found out she’d registered to vote.”

“Some folks didn’t want to admit they couldn’t read,” Mr. Pritchard adds. “It embarrassed ’em.”

Mrs. Brown nods. “Especially the men. It made them feel like children, not to be able to read or write.” She smiles a mischievous grin. “Then Hazel came up with the wonderful idea of paying people to come to school. We got a grant and paid them thirty dollars to come to school two nights a week for three months.”

“A lot of folks still stayed home,” Mr. Pritchard says. “But we got enough. Of course the first night the school opened, Marshall Logan shot out the windows, which didn’t help with student recruitment.”

A cold shock runs through me. “Someone shot at you? And you knew who it was?”

“Well, he shouted out a few choice epithets while he was shooting,” Mrs. Brown tells us. “Almost everybody in the room recognized his voice, since we all shopped at Logan’s Drug up on Franklin Street. So Hazel scooted out to the porch and told him she was going to tell his mother! ‘Come back in here! You’ll get shot!’ we all yelled at her, but she said she’d known that man since he was a baby, and she’d known his mama even longer, and she would not tolerate Marshall Logan shooting at her!”

“He gave us money later,” Mr. Pritchard says with a grin. “Helped pay for school supplies.”

“His mother made him.” Mrs. Brown shakes her head. “Hazel said Mrs. Logan was mortified when she heard that Logan had come after us.”

Mrs. Brown and Mr. Pritchard laugh together at this. I realize they’ve been laughing the whole time we’ve been here, that telling this story together has made them happy, even though the work they did was dangerous and hard.

I look at Sarah and Emma, and I know that’s what they want someday, to have an amazing story like this to tell, one where they faced obstacles but were brave, one where they made a difference in people’s lives.

And that’s when I feel the big feeling again—the one I felt the first time I picked up Monster’s bass—that strange sense that I’m becoming larger. Just by sitting here listening. Just by understanding how large a person’s life can be.