Free And Do Remember Me by Marita Golden Page B

him.
    ——
    T HE NORTHERN college students began to leave the south. Carolyn Seavers was one of the last to go. The morning of her departure, Macon and Jessie drove Carolyn to the airport in Jackson. Much of the mythology about white women that was once lodged in Jessie’s imagination had been shattered in the few months of her acquaintance with Carolyn. Jessie had cleaned up after and born the withering scorn of white women all her life. She had seen the tattered seams, the sharp edges of their lives, played out in full dress before her as though she wasn’t even there. Yet Jessie had imagined that despite the smudged, grubby reality she witnessed in the Bullock home, and in the home where her mother had worked, that white women’s lives were nonetheless a fanciful, jealously guarded dream. For if their lives were indeed perfect, blemish free, if the world denied them nothing, then that would explain how ruthlessly those lives were guarded against intrusion by people who looked like her. Hardly anything she had learned this summer made sense. Hundreds of black people had been registered, but people had been killed, property had been destroyed and all her preconceived notions had capsized. Despite the litany of disclosures Carolyn had recited lying in bed next to Jessie, night after night, the girl remained a brutally complex equation Jessie was unable to solve.
    From the backseat Jessie stole a quick glance at Carolyn riding in front beside Macon, and saw her staring out the window, her eyes on edge, tense. Experience, Jessie thought, looking back at the road. She now knew what Carolyn had meant by the word. She thought of the afternoon that she and Carolyn had walked past Lurlee Bascomb’s tiny decrepit grocery store where Negroes could buy food, liquor and beer on credit. Lurlee had spotted Jessie and Carolyn out the window and had run from behind the counter, her cash register open, growling to the customers in line, “Yall wait here, I’ll be right back,” as shehandily reached for the rifle that she kept stationed behind the cooler full of Coca-Cola and RC, and headed out the door. The grizzled old white woman stood in the middle of the sidewalk, raised her rifle with a hunter’s skill and fired a bullet that spun several inches past Carolyn’s head. “You nigger-loving, whore Communist,” she screamed at them as in shock they turned to look back. Lurlee stood clutching the rifle barrel, shaking it in the air, stamping her feet, her thin sharp voice stinging the air with curses and anguished screams, threatening not to miss next time. Her fury spent, breathless and red-faced, satisfied by the sight of Carolyn and Jessie in flight, Lurlee Bascomb went back into the store and resumed selling food and liquor to her black customers. Meanwhile Carolyn and Jessie huddled in a nearby alley. Jessie was so frightened she had peed on herself, but Carolyn poked her head around the corner, stared at Lurlee Bascomb and raised her middle finger in the air. She turned back to Jessie and began laughing so hard that she couldn’t stand up and fell on her knees in the alley. “That old bitch,” Carolyn fumed, “she’s crazy, and can’t even shoot straight. Now if she was sane, we’d be in trouble.” And she began laughing again.
    Jessie recalled the evenings that Carolyn returned to the Freedom House, her arms and face sunburned from the long hours canvassing for voters. She listened to her awed stories of the homes she had been to that day, the people she had met, the poverty she had seen.
    “I never knew this was America too,” she’d told Jessie one evening. “I feel cheated because nobody ever told me.”
    “What would you have done if they had?” Jessie had asked.
    “I hope I’d do what I’m doing now,” Carolyn had said.
    There had been long calls home the first two weeks. Collect calls to Minnesota filled with tears and threats, ultimatums and warnings. But in the end Carolyn had stayed.
    Then there