Our freshman year at Duke University completed, Jackie Herndon and I met outside my dorm at 6 a.m. and loaded our stuff into the trunk of my Ford, a cherry-red 1963 Galaxie hardtop I’d inherited from my grandfather. We drove to the dorm where Alma Jones lived. We were picking her up and driving to Alabama to begin our summer break.
Alma’s dorm door was locked. We tried all the doors, and all were locked. “You told her six o’clock, right?” I said.
Jackie shrugged. “Yeah, I told her twice to be packed and ready to go.”
At 6:30, a girl came out the door dragging a big suitcase. I offered to carry her suitcase to her car if she would go tell Alma that her ride was waiting. She agreed. In a few minutes Alma appeared at the door.
“What’s the damn hurry?” she grumbled.
“It’s a long way to Alabama, at least twelve hours,” I said.
She scowled. “All right, all right, I’ll be down in a few minutes.”
A grimace flashed across Jackie’s face. “I’m sorry, man.”
Jackie grabbed his basketball and began twirling it on his finger. He raised the ball high above his lean, six-foot-seven-inch frame. His unlined, mocha-colored face studied the spinning orb intently. I noticed again what I had observed when the two of us were studying in the cafeteria—Jackie’s hands. His very long fingers wrapped effortlessly around a basketball. He had long, perfect fingernails and unblemished brown skin on the backs of his hands, but nearly white palms.
The fact that Negroes had white palms had fascinated me since I first noticed it as a five-year-old and had asked my grandmother’s cook about it. “Orene, why your hands two colors? You wash ’em hard?”
She had smiled. “They just that way, Tommy.” The mystery of Negro hands.
We waited an entire hour before Alma came down bearing two big suitcases. She looked over at Jackie. “Put those in the car.” No “please,” just a command. Not a word of apology about making us almost two hours late leaving.
Even angry at her, I was awed by Alma’s presence. At six feet, she came closer to looking me in the eye than any girl I had ever known. Tight jeans accentuated her endless legs and the round butt perched atop them. Her skin was smooth and about the color brown of the Hershey’s chocolate wrapper. She had a small gap in her flashing, proud grin. There was no question about why she started Jackie’s engine. She started mine too, and watching her fold herself into the Ford’s back seat, I felt for the first time desire for a black woman.
I was starved and desperate for a cup of coffee. At the drive-through window of a donut shop, I ordered a dozen donuts and coffee. Alma demanded milk. Still no “please,” and no offer of money. Full of donuts and milk, she lay down in the seat as we pulled away.
I headed southwest down the North Carolina piedmont toward Charlotte. From there I would move through the South Carolina upcountry and the northern Georgia hills to Atlanta. There was no cloud in the sky, and the air was already warm. Jackie tuned the radio to Junior Walker and his All-Stars. He tapped time on the red leather seat between us as the saxophone trilled and the backups sang “Shotgun. Shoot ’em ’fore they run now. . . .”
“Damn it, turn that off!” Alma said in a shriek.
I should have stopped the car right then and had it out with her. But I was chickenshit. Jackie shook his head, either as intimidated by her as I was, or unwilling to offend the sexy woman with whom he was spending the summer. Jackie would have all summer to woo Alma or be terrified of her: she had persuaded him to help her teach at a “freedom school,” a special school for black kids from segregated schools in a small Alabama town not that far from my home in Eden Rise. Alma was Duke’s leading civil rights activist.
Jackie wanted me to join them at the freedom school, and I had said I would think about it, which was why she sat up in the back seat after two hours of sleep and said “Well, are you going to work with us or not?”
I shook my head. “I don’t think so.”
“Why not?” There was a challenge in her tone. “What you got better to do?”
“That’s just not what I want to do.” In fact I didn’t know what I wanted to do that summer except to eat my mother’s cooking and visit my sick grandmother. The idea of teaching at a freedom school made me nervous. Out of the corner of my eye, I caught the disappointment on Jackie’s face.
“Anything’s better than trying to help a few little niggers, huh?”
Jackie jerked around to face her. “Leave him alone or we’ll be walking to Alabama.”
Why was she so hostile to me? I hardly knew her and could count on one hand the number of sentences we had exchanged before our ride that morning. I had never said or done a contrary thing toward her. I figured she had to dislike me for what I was, a white Southerner, or what she assumed I was from my accent, my haircut, and my button-down shirt and penny loafers—a bigot in training.
When she fell asleep again, Jackie and I talked in low tones. “Is she always like this?”
Jackie groaned. “Man, I knew she liked to run things, but I thought that was because she was older, not ’cause she’s a bitch. I dread being with her in that little-assed town.”
“You could bail out too and go home with me.”
Jackie squinted at me. “What about your parents?”
I said, acting my most confident, they would be fine with it. Jackie and I had never talked about my parents, and I wondered if he also thought I was a typical Alabama bigot like the ones who appeared in the newspaper jeering at black people marching for the right to vote.
“You sure?”
“Yeah, I’m sure.” I was, of course, lying out my ass. Mama and Daddy would be startled that I brought home a colored guy, but Mama probably would recover quickly. If it turned out to be uncomfortable in Eden Rise, we’d just jump in the car and head back to Jackie’s home in the Virginia tidewater. We could be longshoremen or paint ships, or something.
Jackie nodded. “Don’t say nothin’ till we get there.”
It felt like a late July sun on the boring new interstate through the piedmont of South Carolina. The outcroppings of clay might have been heaps of hickory wood on fire, and the signs offering the premature peaches of the season—sadly enough, the most interesting sight in my vision on this ride—glared back at me in orange and black. The white rays boiled me the whole way, though some of the heat emanated from within, so intensely did I dread the scene I imagined would take place at the freedom school.
After Atlanta, spindly pines monopolized the roadside to Newnan, past LaGrange, and on into Alabama. As we drove on, the sun hovered over the horizon in front of us. It now cast a light much easier to use, and its angle threw multilateral shadows across the pastures that covered much of this part of the Alabama Black Belt. When I was no longer driving directly into the orange mass on the horizon, I could appreciate the delicate shades of white in the Queen Anne’s lace and the brilliant yellow of the Brown-Eyed Susans that decorated the roadsides. But to remind you that these beautiful ladies didn’t rule the roads unchallenged, sprinkled among them were the tall, prickly stems of the noxious rusty
