Free Four Spirits by Sena Jeter Naslund Page A

here some fast -moving woman.”
    â€œRun!” one of them roared in her ear, and she jerked and ran a few steps, them laughing around her, running, too.
    Then she made herself stop. No, she wouldn’t run. They stopped, surrounded her. She clasped her purse hard against her side. Her bruised side. She didn’t know these boys. Not from her neighborhood. She was safe long as strangers stayed out.
    From nowhere, she heard loud humming. She herself was humming “Onward Christian Soldiers.” It came from deep in her like the low pedal of a pipe organ on TV church. A grainy, buzzing sound she didn’t know she had.
    Slowly, she started to walk forward. She hummed from the lowest pipes on the organ. Not one took a step after her. They snickered, but they let her go.
    With the Cross of Jesus, she hummed loudly, knowing the knot of boys (now watching her go on without them) must have heard the song sometime in their past. They had to be remembering the words to that hummed music, With the Cross of Jesus going on before . They knew her for a Christian, churchgoing woman just like their mamas.
    As Christine walked toward the dark middle of the block, she projected herself toward the streetlamp at the next corner. Safe again. In the warm night air of May in Birmingham, her song and fear evaporated like a nightmare. But they’d scared her. She felt herself starting to fill with anger. She didn’t want anger now.
    She thought of home, her apartment in the basement. It was a big old house, and many years ago white people had lived there. Christine would step down into the kitchen. Her three kids would be there and her sister watching them. There’d be four empty Pabst Blue Ribbon bottles on the counter, but her sister would be there in her beer haze, keeping them safe. (Gloria wouldn’t even drink beer in a beer joint.) Her sister ought to be in night school herself, but then how could she, Christine, teach in it? She was grateful to her sister, keeping her kids safe, free of charge.
    Soon Christine would go down the steps, use her key, open the door, step into the kitchen light, and they’d all be there, safe. Her woozy sister with one straightened lock of hair sticking up from her head, the hair clamped at the bottom with a brown barrette.
    Christine hurried on down the sidewalk; like heaps of dirty rags, last fall’s leaves still lay on the ground in places. One yard had iris blooms, white and lavender, rising above the old leaves. I am the Resurrection and the Life . Christine felt her own life had been resurrected, by Reverend Shuttlesworth’s preaching, by going to school.
    Baptized! Yes, that was what had happened to her today. Baptism by hose water. Let my heart be clean and fresh, she prayed. Free of hatred. That’s what she owed Jesus, who had saved her from the rough boys. She hated her anger sometimes, and yet to hate it was like hating herself.
    So many schoolchildren in the demonstrations now. Not her kids, too young for school, too little for trouble. Yet. Demonstrating was for grown-ups. Shuttlesworth believed the children in the protests were as invulnerable as himself. He gloried in their numbers, their willingness. King was in agony—suppose a child was hurt? Although King was afraid for them every minute and every hour, just as she was, publicly King said the children had already suffered abuse because of the society they lived in.
    In the Christian Crusades, in medieval times, there had been a Children’sCrusade. Did King know that? Of course. Did Shuttlesworth? The freedom struggle had never called on children before, and she wondered if calling out the children was a tactic out of desperation—if no more adults could be recruited.
    (She could see the big old house, her home, up ahead.) How could a person such as herself, how could a woman, live like Shuttlesworth, like Rosa Parks—unafraid? Rosa Parks was the start of it all. Christine wanted to