Free The Four Ms. Bradwells by Meg Waite Clayton Page B

were still little like that, still needing me to help them decide which way to run to catch the wind.
    As the splattered purple-red berries on the path smush into the thin soles of my pumps, I try to find comfort in thoughts of my life now: William and the children and our home in Decatur, the many friends pitching in to help with my campaign. My own mama deserves the creditfor my running for political office, or perhaps the word is blame, and Faith, too, played a role. But I’d be nowhere at all without friends. Even my first job in government came through a friend of Daddy’s from his Morehouse College days: Maynard Jackson, who was by then the first black mayor of Atlanta. After I’d graduated from Wellesley, not long after my parents moved to Atlanta, I found myself interviewing to work for a spell on Maynard’s reelection campaign.
    I hadn’t been working but about a week when someone collected me to take me to Maynard’s office, and before I knew it I was following him to speeches and press conferences, in charge of his outreach to young voters. He took me under his wing the way a man does when he’s known your daddy since the two of them were eighteen. He urged me to apply to law school, and took me back into his fold three years later, when I just couldn’t go back to Tyler & McCoy.
    Maynard was the one who talked William and me into buying the house in Decatur, and after we’d already made an offer on a place in Fulton County, too. “Any black is going to have a tough time getting elected in Fulton County unless the white folks in north Fulton manage to secede and re-form Milton County, in which case what’s left of Fulton is going to be poor as the red Georgia clay,” he advised me over fried chicken at Paschal’s, his favorite place for soul food. “A black gal —even one as pretty as you, Laney—she won’t stand a chance. You and William just go on now and have a look at this little house.”
    He wiped his hands on a paper napkin, then handed me a note card with an address, a house that was close enough to Agnes Scott College, where William teaches, for him to walk. Maynard had this all thought out.
    “Mrs. Davidson doesn’t think she’s quite ready to sell yet,” he said, setting at the chicken again. “But you and William give her a fair price and the only one to suffer will be the real estate agents.” And when I insisted I would never run for office, he replied, “You just go on and make a deal with Mrs. Davidson. Your time will be coming, whether you want it to or not.”
    That was the way Maynard did things. He wasn’t a gradualist; he believed the time for change was now. If he offended a few folks or even a lot of folks on his way to getting black Atlanta a fair shake, well, then he offended some folks. That was how he got to be the first nonwhite mayor of a major Southern city, and Maynard was a big believer in dancing withthe girl you brought to the party, except maybe when the girl was Bunnie, his first wife.
    I ought to have run for office back then if only to give Maynard the pleasure of seeing me run, but it wasn’t until I saw Faith at his funeral that I gave it a sturdy thought. June 28 of 2003, a Friday, with Coretta Scott King and John Lewis there, and President Clinton remembering Maynard’s “gift of gab that could talk an owl out of a tree.”
    “Maynard believed politics should be practical, not radical,” President Clinton said that day, and I had to stop to think whether that was true or not. “That we should all strive to be righteous, not self-righteous … and that it was wrong to claim to have the truth and then use it like a stick to beat other people with.”
    Half of Atlanta was at that funeral, and Faith must have been eighty by then, but she plowed through the crowd to find me. She pulled out the same key Ginger is jiggling in the lock now and pressed it into my hand at Maynard’s graveside, when she urged me to run for office, when she said she and