(oh deep in my heart...I do believe...)
another song, the one they feel defines them most clearly. The faces lining the street and watching them are twisted with hate. The fists being shaken at them are callused. The mouths of the women who purse their lips to shoot the spit that will clabber their cheeks dirty their hair stain their shirts are paintless and their legs are without stockings and their shoes are nothing but runover lumps. There are men in overalls (Oshkosh-by-gosh, someone say hallelujah). There are teenage boys in clean white sweaters and flattop haircuts and one of them shouts at Odetta, carefully articulating each word:We Will Kill! Every! Goddam! Nigger! Who Steps Foot On The Campus Of Ole Miss!
And the camaraderie in spite of the fear.Because of the fear. The feeling that they are doing something incredibly important: something for the ages. They will change America, and if the price is blood, why then they will pay it. Say true, say hallelujah, praise God, give up your loud amen.
Then comes the white boy named Darryl, and at first he couldn't, he was limp and he couldn't, and then later on he could and Odetta's secret other - the screaming, laughing, ugly other - never came near. Darryl and Det lay together until morning, slept spoons until morning beneath the Mississippi moon. Listening to the crickets. Listening to the owls. Listening to the soft smooth hum of the Earth turning on its gimbals, turning and turning ever further into the twentieth century. They are young, their blood runs hot, and they never doubt their ability to change everything.
It's fare you well, my own true lover...
This is her song in the weeds behind the Blue Moon Motor Hotel; this is her song beneath the moon.
I'll never see your face again...
It's Odetta Holmes at the apotheosis of her life, and Mia isthere! She sees it, feels it, is lost in its glorious and some would say stupid hope (ah but I say hallelujah, we all say Gawd-bomb). She understands how being afraid all the time makes one's friends more precious; how it makes every bite of every meal sweet; how it stretches time until every day seems to last forever, leading on to velvet night, and theyknow James Cheney is dead
(say true)
theyknow Andrew Goodman is dead
(say hallelujah)
theyknow Michael Schwerner - oldest of them and still just a baby at twenty-four - is dead.
(Give up your loudest amen!)
They know that any of them is also eligible to wind up in the mud of Longdale or Philadelphia.At any time. The night after this particular hoot behind the Blue Moon, most of them, Odetta included, will be taken to jail and her time of humiliation will begin. But tonight she's with her friends, with her lover, and they are one, and Discordia has been banished. Tonight they sing swaying with their arms around each other.
The girls singmaid, the boys singman.
Mia is overwhelmed by their love for one another; she is exalted by the simplicity of what they believe.
At first, too stunned to laugh or to cry, she can only listen, amazed.
Nine
As the busker began the fourth verse, Susannah joined in, at first tentatively and then - at his encouraging smile - with a will, harmonizing above the young man's voice:
For breakfast we had bulldog gravy
For supper we had beans and bread
The miners don't have any dinner
And a tick of straw they call a bed...
Ten
The busker quit after that verse, looking at Susannah-Mia with happy surprise. "I thought I was the only one who knew that one," he said. "It's the way the Freedom Riders used to - "
"No," Susannah said quietly. "Not them. It was the voter-registration people who sang the bulldog-gravy verse. The folks who came down to Oxford in the summer of '64. When those three boys were killed."
"Schwerner and Goodman," he said. "I can't remember the name of the - "
"James Cheney," she said quietly. "He had the most beautifulhair. "
"You talk as though you knew him," he said, "but you can't be much over...thirty?"
Susannah had an idea she looked a good deal older than thirty, especially tonight, but of course this young man had fifty dollars more in his guitar case now than had been there a single song ago, and it had perhaps affected his eyesight.
"My mother spent the summer of '64 in Neshoba County," Susannah said, and with two spontaneously chosen words - my mother - did her captor more damage than she could have imagined. Those words flayed open Mia's heart.
"Cool on Mom!" the young man exclaimed, and smiled. Then the smile faded. He fished the fifty out of the guitar case and held it up to her. "Take it back. It was a pleasure just to sing with you, ma'am."