Free Homeplace by Anne Rivers Siddons

them at the edge of the dock. It did not strike her as odd that in the dream they were the ages they were in life, or would have been, while she was still a small child. Looking down, she could see the tiny, stubby white sandals on her feet and thin white socks with flowers embroidered on their cuffs that she remembered from a photograph of her fourth birthday. She skipped and capered with joy and held out her hands to meet their outstretched ones, in the gently bobbing boat.
    But when she reached the edge of the dock and should have stepped into the boat, she stooped instead to the cleat around which the rope was knotted and deftly unlooped it. In an instant, the boat and the people in it slid swiftly away from the dock and out into the lake, with the telescoping rapidity of dreams, and soon were mere specks in all the dancing, sun-struck blue. She could still see their arms waving to her long after their faces were too small to distinguish. In her dream she smiled and smiled, but when she awoke, sitting soaked with sweat and bolt upright in the pale light from the streetlight outside, there were tears running down her face and into the corner of her mouth. She wiped them away and got up and padded down the hallto the big communal bathroom, and splashed her face, and brushed her teeth, and went back to bed and to sleep.
    She did not cry again for many years.
    For the next week or so, she spent her mornings in the downtown library, and in the afternoon she read library books in her room, or went to a rare movie. Sometimes she went to nearby Piedmont Park and sat in a swing and looked out over the dirty little lake. She seemed to live on a peaceful plain, walled away by mountains of heat and distance and the simmering city from the barely remembered fear and pain of the last day in Lytton. She was careful with the money in the belt, eating in drugstores and cafeterias, for she knew that when it was gone she would have to find another way to finish her education. She cared about only that, and about leaving the South.
    And she cared about the Civil Rights Movement. In those long, hot days it bloomed like a firestorm until it filled her entire consciousness, and she followed it obsessively in the newspapers and on the flickering black-and-white television set in the home’s scanty parlor. In this she might have been invisible, a ghost, for the other girls in the home who gathered to watch television did not seem to notice the flying shadow images of marchers and crowds and sometimes dogs and firehoses, did not seem to hear the endless, ageless choruses of “We Shall Overcome” and the guttural flatulence of mob anger. Mostly, they waited for the news to be over so they could tune in
Gunsmoke
. Something in the pulsing images spoke to Mike of a feeling she had first had in the jail in Atlanta, after the sit-in and her arrest, a new and slyly pervasive emotion that seemed to be forged and born out of the fear and outrage and simple astonishment of that night: a ringing and clarion sense of fellowship, an almost martial camaraderie. Somewherein those ghost dances on the church home’s old GE console was, for Mike, a place of her own.
    It was always the glamour of the movement, this demon charm of belonging, of kinship; the morality of the thing was self-evident and powerful, and the politics of it seductive, but it was the comrades-at-arms ties of danger and youth and violence, the sheer young animal strength of revolution, the frankly sexual excitement of riding a great hinge of history, that gave the Civil Rights Movement in the South its irresistible dark allure. When the Council of Federated Organizations sent the first busload of white college students rolling south into Mississippi that summer, Mike felt an abrupt, warm melting of the aspic that had held her immobile for weeks. She lifted her head and looked around her in the home’s parlor. One girl, a thin, intense, homely redhead from New Jersey who lived down the hall