“And you don’t want her to go?”
“It’s not that I don’t want her to go. It’s that I’m afraid for her to go.”
“You’ll always be afraid for her, Stacey.”
“But going south?” Stacey shook his head. “I just don’t understand it. She wants to go to a Negro school so bad, she could go to Wilberforce or Central State right here in Ohio. She doesn’t have to go all the way down to Georgia or South Carolina or Tennessee. She’s even talked about Mississippi. She’s applied to all those schools down there—Tuskegee, Alcorn, Tougaloo, even Jackson State.”
“I know.”
Stacey fingered his cup. “I don’t know what to do, Cassie. What if she’s accepted?”
I smiled. “You know she will be.”
Stacey acknowledged that with a glance. “I don’t know if I can let her go to the South without me, Cassie, not without me there to make sure she’s all right.”
I understood my brother. He watched over his two girls with the strength of a lion and the magnitude of his father’s heart, just as Papa had watched over me. He wanted always to protect them and keep them safe. Everyone who came to live at the Dorr Street house, everyone who came to live in their new house, Stacey had let them know how Rie and ’lois were to be treated. He would never tolerate disrespect to them in any way, and everyone adhered to his words. Stacey once confided to me that when the girls were little, before they got so grown that they wouldn’t have wanted him doing so, he had always opened their door at night with Dee, just to check on them, just to make sure they were all right. He said that during those moments, he wondered how he could have fathered such beautiful, talented, and vivacious daughters.
I reached over and laid my hand over his. “Stacey, you’re going to have to let Rie go at some point. You’re going to have to let both of them go, sooner or later.” Stacey looked at me, then out the back window to the snow-flocked spruce. I knew Stacey was not about to give up his mantle as protector of his girls.
* * *
◆ ◆ ◆
In the days following Christmas, the family had gathered first at Christopher-John and Becka’s house for another huge dinner and then, on the following day, at Clayton Chester and Rachel’s. Both sisters had spread out more fabulous meals for all to enjoy. In addition to all the Logans at the post-Christmas dinners were Becka and Rachel’s four nephews and their young families. All the nephews had followed their aunts from Mississippi, lived in their houses with them, and married Toledo women. Dee’s brother Zell and the Davises had married Toledo women as well, so their Christmas dinners were with their wives’ families, but during the holiday week, they all made their way back over to Stacey and Dee’s with their families and enjoyed some of the holiday cheer, so everybody in the family saw everybody else during the holidays. I couldn’t help but reflect on the fact that all this extended family was in Toledo because Stacey, the first one to come, had made the abrupt decision to leave Mississippi.
It was a good time.
On New Year’s Day, all of the Logan family gathered one last time at Stacey and Dee’s. In celebration of the new year, hog-head souse was on the table, along with chit’lings, baked coon with sides of sweet potatoes, collard greens, cornbread, and black-eyed peas, a New Year’s Day good luck tradition. It was a real down-home meal. Later, as we sat around the evening fire, we talked and laughed some more, squeezing in as much as we could before we had to part. While the adults talked, the younger children played way beyond their bedtime, but no one worried about that. We took comfort in just being together. Tomorrow Uncle Hammer and Aunt Loretta would be leaving, heading back to Chicago, then to Oakland. The day after that, Papa, Mama, and Big Ma would be taking the train south, and I would be heading back to Boston. We did not know when we would all be together again.
As the first day of the new year wound to a close and the younger children lay asleep covered by blankets on the carpeted floor, we sat talking quietly, reminiscing about what had been and projecting what was to come and dreading the thought that at some point, the day and our time together would have to end. Midnight neared, the older children yawned sleepily, and Becka and Rachel insisted they had to get the children home to bed. Finally, we had to part.
As always before a journey, we held hands and formed a circle and the children who were still awake joined in, and we prayed, each person in turn. Papa’s words were the final words, and in closing the family circle of prayer, he said, “Dear Lord, please bless us now and forever, and please watch over each and every one of us while we’re apart, one from another.” And with those words, amidst hugs and kisses, we said good night and wished each other a happy new year.
A new decade had begun.
TIME OF CHANGE
(1960–1961)
It was 1960. The year had hardly begun when Negro college students down in North Carolina decided to sit at the lunch counter of the local five-and-dime store. This was unheard of. Five-and-dime lunch counters in the South were for whites only. In fact, all stores owned by whites in the South that had lunch counters were for “whites only.” Yet students from North Carolina sat down at the lunch counter anyway. All the students wanted was to be served. They were not served. The North Carolina students weren’t the only ones who chose to sit down at “white only” lunch counters. Negro college students in South Carolina, Virginia, Missouri, and Georgia sat down at those exclusive “white only” lunch counters. They, too, were not served. Students were now being arrested, but more kept coming, again and again, to the lunch counters. Each day it seemed there was a new demonstration, not only in North Carolina but in other states that had “white only” signs. In Nashville, the police arrested some one hundred students for sit-ins. In Chattanooga, a riot broke out because of the sit-ins. White citizens clashed with the demonstrators, and the white police kept on arresting the peaceful sit-in students and hauling them off to jail.
The nightly news reported it all.
The students did not let up. They even challenged the Deep South. In Alabama hundreds of students from the Negro college Alabama State marched on the capital in protest of Alabama’s racist laws. Students participating in the demonstration were expelled. Across the South from Florida west to Texas, the sit-ins and the demonstrations were going on. Students were being jailed and high-velocity water hoses and police dogs were being used to dispel them, but mostly the hard line of segregation held, though now the world was beginning to pay attention. In September, Rie enrolled at Spellman College in Atlanta, and our family got worried. At Rie’s request, I went with Stacey and Dee and ’lois when they took Rie to the school.
“Now, I don’t want you getting into these demonstrations down here,” Stacey told Rie, not for the first time.