Free The Truth Hurts by Nancy Pickard

the car.
    From behind curtains, they all watched him run back up to get her. Hubert’s fiancée, Rachel, kept an eye on him, still in the car, as well.
    “I haven’t had time to pack anything,” Lyda protested, when he said, “Come on.”
    He put an arm around her and pulled her out of their house without giving her any chance to grab a sweater or even her purse. “It won’t matter,” the witnesses heard him say. “We have to go now. Leave everything—” They say that he looked back over her shoulder in the direction of the three dark people standing in the deepest shadows of the front hall. His eyes seemed to say to them, We’re sorry. You’ll be safe. Don’t worry.
    The three of them knew that was true. He was sorry. Look what he was losing. And they themselves were most likely in no danger. And they wouldn’t worry. They were good at not worrying about things they couldn’t control, especially when it came to white people. They didn’t, any of them, assume their employers would get out of this all right; they just knew to their bones that this no longer involved them.
    They say that Lyda didn’t look back.
    How could she have, one of the witnesses had thought, sympathetically, at the time. If Mrs. Folletino looked back she would surely turn into the salt of tears.
    As for the child . . .
    They had, themselves, lost children—at least one child each—to poverty and its attendant, stalking weaknesses, illnesses, and deaths. Their own hearts had already been broken and scarred over. They couldn’t feel for the child without aching for their own lost babies, and so they didn’t. To a person, they chose to believe she would survive, and they were right.
    I did.

    Almost forty years later, Eulalie Fisher recalls it.
    “I should have been paying attention to his speech, I suppose, but all I could think of was: where are they? Why didn’t they come to my party? Every single person I invited had R.S.V.P.’d yes to me. So either they were lying then, or something had happened since then. I sat there in my living room with the Wiegans, the Goodwins, and the Reeses, and all I could think of was, how come not a single one of those bigoted bastards and their mean ol’ wives has crossed my threshold tonight? I remember somebody suggested that maybe they were making some kind of a ‘statement.’ But a statement of what? What were they trying to get across to us by being so rude to me like that? Did they know about Hostel? Or did they finally figure out we thought different from them? Were they drawing a line in the dirt?”
    The only people left to watch the big speech were the Hostel members.
    They were also the only ones who had fully realized that something dangerous might be up. “The more we sat around there by ourselves,” Eulalie recalls, “the morenervouswe got. Then the speech came on—the one where Kennedy said he was going to fully commit the federal government to the cause of civil rights, because it was the moral thing to do. I know there are people who still say he had a lot of nerve talking about morality, but nobody ever said Kennedy didn’t know the difference between right and wrong. Anyway, you’d have thought we’d of cheered, being all by ourselves like that, in good company, so to speak, with nobody to have to pretend in front of. But we didn’t. The truth is, we were scared as the dickens. That fat Lackley kept walkin’ to my living room windows, pulling back my drapes, and peeking outside until I finally had to tell him to sit down. I don’t remember a single sound of traffic. The whole town seemed to have gone silent on us.”
    Eulalie sent her extra party help on home to their black part of town. And then just a few minutes later, she even told the live-in help to leave.
    “Go to your daughter’s,” she instructed her maid.
    “Stay with your mama,” she advised their gardener/driver.
    “Eulalie,” Clayton commented upon overhearing her, “don’t you think they can