Free Homeplace by Anne Rivers Siddons Page A

from Mike, lifted her own head and met Mike’s eyes. Mike got up off the Naugahyde sofa and sat down in a butterfly chair beside the girl. The next morning, they left Atlanta in the redhead’s car and drove south and west, through Alabama toward Mississippi and Freedom Summer.
    They caught up with the buses in Hattiesburg, where nothing much at all seemed to be happening. They encountered no guns, dogs, firehoses, angry mobs, Ku Klux Klansmen. What they did encounter was a wet, relentless, juggernaut heat, a vast and feral army of mosquitoes, and empty, sleepy, one-gas-pump towns where they alit stickily from the buses long after dark and trudged wearily into identical rural Negro shanties at the end of dirt roads in cotton fields and pastures, to sleep on pallets and quilts in the endless heat, wash at hand pumps, use privies, and eat greens and grits and pork gravy for days on end. To Mike, who had done the same thing on countless nights in Rusky and J.W.’s cabin back in Lytton—eaten the same food, smelled the same ashen smell—there was nothing remarkable at allabout these thick, rank Mississippi nights, and she felt a small, flat itch to get on to the real business at hand, which she assumed to be the much-anticipated guns, dogs, and firehoses. But she stifled her impatience out of natural politeness and a desire not to spoil her compatriots’ excitement. For they, most of them Northerners, were riding an incandescent crest of ebullience and nervy exhilaration, and she realized that to them, the miserable cabins of the silent, deferential Negroes were exotica of the highest order.
    Oh, well, Mike thought, surely we’ll get into it by Greenville.
    And she sang with the others on the bus, “Yes, we are the Freedom Riders and we ride a long Greyhound, white or black, we know no difference, Lord, for we are glory bound,” and she railed and howled with the others when the bodies of the three missing Summer Project workers were found buried in an earthen dam near Philadelphia, Mississippi, but still she saw, firsthand, none of the moral combat she had come seeking.
    “Just wait till Greenville,” the older heads on the bus counseled.
    But she never made Greenville; never made even the edge of the vast, fecund, and the dangerous Delta. For on her bus was a saturnine young man from Fairfax County, Connecticut, named Richard Singer, a young Jew of a certain melancholy beauty and mordant wit, between quarters at Harvard Law School. He was struck and held, as were many of the young Northerners on the bus, by the flame that seemed to dance around the slender, ash-gilt girl from the Deep South (for the great and electric sense of belonging and imminent peril and high resolve had lit in Mike the old, dead fire of her father, and she burned steadily in that dangerous air), and her conviction excited him as perversely as if she had been a spy against her own country, working deep behind enemy lines. RichardSinger was, in truth, a hopeless and untried romantic beneath the cultivated cynicism.
    As for Mike, she found this lounging, sardonic Ivy Leaguer as unlike her father, or Bayard Sewell, or any other man that she had ever known, as an entirely new species. And in the hot, endless, identical nights, under the twin urgings of danger and proximity, she found that she wanted very much indeed to go to bed with him, and one evening outside Dooleyville, Mississippi, a scant fifty miles from the poisoned grail of the Delta, did just that, in a shed shared by a homemade tractor and a couple of roosting Dominecker hens, with a steaming, inexorable rain pounding dully on the corrugated tin roof.
    To her vast surprise and pleasure, the earth did move, as it had for Robert Jordan and Maria, a circumstance that she had never imagined might occur with anyone other than Bayard Sewell. It was her first time, and she had thought it would hurt, would revolt her, until, as DeeDee had said, she had gotten used to it. When it did not, when it