Free While the World Watched by Carolyn McKinstry

bricks, Reverend prayed aloud that another bomb had not been planted and that God would keep them safe.
    Soon someone saw a hand sticking out from the debris. They kept digging until they uncovered each girl. The girls lay lifeless on top of each other in a pile that resembled stacked-up firewood. One by one their bodies were lifted from the rubble.
    From what I heard later, the blast had rendered the girls’ bodies unrecognizable. Cynthia’s head was dismembered from the rest of her body. Her family identified her by the birthstone ring found on her finger.
    A large, sharp stone had embedded itself in Denise’s skull during the explosion. At the morgue, Denise’s mother removed the rock and took it home with her. She placed it in a glass case and kept it for years in the family’s photography studio.
    Shortly after the bombing, the FBI summoned my friend Junie Collins to accompany them. Her parents weren’t home when the agents came, and since Junie was the oldest child in the family, it fell to her to assume adult-level responsibility. She thought she was going to see her sister, Addie, in the hospital. Instead, they took her to the morgue to identify Addie’s body. Junie later told me, “If my life depended on it, I couldn’t say this was my sister. But then I saw this little brown shoe—like a loafer—on her foot. And I knew it was Addie.”
    I did not see the bodies, but in the coming days I read the paralyzing and chilling descriptions in the newspaper. I shook my head and covered my eyes, attempting to remove the horrible images from my mind. I didn’t want to know the gruesome details. But it was too late—over the long years since the bombing, the painful images have continued to recall themselves to me.
    * * *
    My family and I were in shock. Complete disbelief. Over the course of the evening—through phone calls, the radio, and the evening news—we pieced together what had happened that morning. The story surfaced in bits and pieces, like segments of a strange puzzle.
    We sat at home in stunned silence.
    Someone had turned on the television. We turned it off because we couldn’t continue to watch the news. I felt more frightened than ever. An air of woe and doom came over me. A voice inside my head kept telling me, They missed you this time, Carolyn. But the girls are dead. You were there—you talked with them right before they died.
    At that moment, the bombings in Birmingham took on a new twist for me. People were dead. And these were people I knew! The racial situation had now become very real and very personal.
    My young, innocent mind made another powerful note: It happened in my church! Church had always been a special place, a haven where we worshiped God. It was his place—a spot reserved each week just for God.
    My parents had drilled into our brains the sacredness of God’s house. “In church, we don’t run,” they explained with definite seriousness in their voices. “We don’t chew gum. We don’t eat food. We don’t talk loud. We don’t play. Church is a place where we show respect and reverence.”
    Instead we had people planting bombs in our church and my friends dying there.
    Until that moment, I had not understood the depth of the volatility between blacks and whites in Birmingham. I could not fathom the extent of the hatred some whites had for black people.
    Oh, I knew about segregation, about the protests and marches down city streets, about black people trying to get the “whites only” and “coloreds” signs taken down from restroom doors, restaurants, train stations, and city buses. But I had always felt protected by my father, my grandfather, my brothers, and my church. Before September 15, 1963, I didn’t know to worry about dying because of my skin color. But the thought kept echoing and refused to leave my mind: People will actually kill us over this! What is this thing about skin?
    And I felt helpless because I was just a child and I couldn’t change