Paul nudged the man next to him. “Who is that guy?” he asked, pointing to the dark-haired, round-faced man on the stage.
The man looked at Paul as though he’d dropped down from another planet. “Bob Jones, of course,” he said, a hint of pride in his voice. “Our Grand Dragon.”
“Oh, right,” Paul said. “I didn’t recognize him in person.” Paul turned to the rest of us and rolled his eyes, mouthing, The Grand Dragon.
I snapped a few pictures of Bob Jones and listened to what he had to say. It seemed important to know what we were up against. I felt embarrassed that my new Northern friends were witnessing this—that they would think every Southerner bought into the message of white supremacy. I had to admit that from the size of the crowd, it certainly looked like it.
“Do you know, we’re now ten thousand members strong in North Carolina?” Bob Jones shouted. Cheers and applause erupted from the crowd. “We have Klaverns in every corner of the state, more than in all the other Southern states combined!” His face was shiny with sweat. “We travel across the Old North State every night, sharing our message with good, honest, hardworking folks like you, working to preserve our precious way of life!” Another cheer went up from the crowd. I wondered if we should cheer, too, just to protect ourselves. We mustn’t stand out. But not a soul seemed to be paying attention to us.
“I ain’t got nothin’ against the colored man,” Bob Jones shouted. “I’m all for equal rights, but separate rights.” More cheering. “Integration is a threat to your jobs, folks, you know that,” Jones said. “A threat to your very way of life. And if Lyndon Baines Johnson bends to the communists and the Jewish cabal behind the civil rights movement, well he can go straight to hell!”
The crowd loved that, apparently, shouting and cheering and waving Confederate flags. I felt sick. Sort of helpless. How did our little band of freedom fighters stand a chance against so many thousands of hateful people? I thought of the sweet Dawes family, struggling just to survive, and my eyes filled with tears.
“Holy mackerel!” Jocelyn grabbed my arm. “Look at how big that cross is!”
I’d been so focused on Bob Jones and the crowd that I hadn’t realized the towering structure behind the stage was a cross. It had to be at least eight times the height of Bob Jones himself and I knew—everybody who lived in the South knew—that its bulk was formed by gasoline-soaked burlap. The blaze would be enormous. I thought of how terrifying the small cross had been at the Daweses’ house and I hoped we didn’t stick around long enough to see this one burn.
As Bob Jones continued spewing his hateful talk, I glanced around us at all the excited, open faces, glad they were unfamiliar to me. But then my eyes lit on one man. He was maybe twenty feet away from me, off to my left, and for a moment I was absolutely certain he was Garner. The man turned away to speak to someone and I lost sight of him, but I felt a shiver run up my spine. I stopped examining the crowd and told myself I was crazy. Garner wouldn’t come to something like this.
But then, neither would I.
Jones stepped aside from the microphone and a white-robed woman took his place. “We have our raffle winners!” she shouted, her voice so high-pitched and piercing through the speaker that I winced. The woman called out a few numbers and people squealed or shouted from different parts of the crowd. She told the winners to make their way up front when the rally was over. Then the Grand Dragon stepped behind the microphone again.
“So what should we do about LBJ?” he shouted, and the crowd went wild with derisive jeers. I was no fan of President Johnson at that moment myself, but for different reasons. Was he ever going to sign the voting rights bill?
A woman pushed her way in front of us, holding out a large bucket, and it took me a moment to realize that she was collecting money for the cause. Paul had a clear head, dropping a few coins into the bucket and giving the woman a conspiratorial we’re one of you wink. The woman smiled her thanks at him, then glanced at Jocelyn and her expression suddenly darkened. She turned away from us and continued on through the crowd. I looked quizzically at Jocelyn. What had she seen in Jocelyn’s face? Then I realized it wasn’t Jocelyn’s face that gave her away. Her SCOPE pin was still on her collar, the black and white circle looking like a target against her pink blouse.
“Your pin!” I shouted into her ear.
She felt her collar. “Oh! I’m an idiot!” She unfastened it and slipped it into her purse.
“The civil rights movement has got to be kept down!” Bob Jones shouted. “We’ve got to put our heel on its heart and squash the lifeblood clean out of it. Civil rights workers are the villains and must be stopped. Now we’ve got coloreds running for office. Gaining power. Any day now, they’re gonna have the vote and they’ll be sitting next to your daughters in their high school classroom. I tell you, I am not about to let my daughter sit next to no colored boy!”
There were whistles and applause and cheering, a palpable, mounting hysteria that frightened me. This was always the hot-button issue; every Southerner knew that. Black boys and white girls. Danger! Bob Jones knew just what he was doing, planting that image in the eyes of every scared white parent in the field. Making them crazy with fear and anger.
Darkness had fallen around us without me even knowing it and giant floodlights flickered to life. Paul turned to look at the rest of us. “Let’s beat the rush outta here,” he shouted against the din.
We followed him toward the road, keeping up with each other, afraid to lose one another in the growing darkness. Suddenly, I spotted the woman who had been carrying the bucket working her way through the crowd, pointing at us. Shouting something. People turned to look at us. Above Bob Jones’s ranting I heard someone shout, “Them SCOPE kids!”
“Sons of bitches!”
“Commie lovers!”
And then I saw who was with the woman. She was dragging the man by the arm, pointing at me and my friends. Sheriff Byron Parks, the man I thought of as my father’s best friend. The man I called “Uncle Byron.” He locked eyes with me and I froze. In a moment he was next to me, nudging me and my coworkers in the direction of the road.
“I’m just here to keep order!” he shouted in my ear, and I wanted to shout back, Then why aren’t you in uniform? But maybe he had to be in street clothes. Maybe that was the way he handled a crowd like this one.
“You need to get out of here!” he shouted. “Keep going!” He waved us forward. “Just head for the exit! Get out of here before anyone else realizes—”
It was too late. A mob was after us. I heard the shouts and felt the surge of people who knew we didn’t belong. They were worked up enough to beat us to a pulp without a second thought. I grabbed on to Paul’s shirt to keep from losing sight of him, my hand clutching the fabric in my fist. Then suddenly, the floodlights went out and we were in darkness for a few seconds before the gigantic cross flared to life behind the stage, the flames cutting through the black sky. People applauded and shouted and whistled and I hoped the spectacle stopped whoever was after us. Everyone began singing “The Old Rugged Cross” as we continued our way through the crowd, twisting and turning until we were finally free. We ran for the road. With my eyes glued to the white of Paul’s shirt in the darkness, I didn’t see the ditch between the field and the road. I was down in an instant, the world a blank.