“That was quite an outburst,” she said that afternoon, when Mike came by on her way to the library. “What on earth got into you?” She was looking at Mike very intently, as if trying to read her face for something outside Mike’s ken.
“I don’t know,” Mike said, fidgeting a little, as she often did, under Priss’s green stare. “It just seemed all of a sudden like … I can’t explain it …”
“It’s called an epiphany,” Priss said. “Saul of Tarsus had something similar happen to him on the road to Damascus. Fair jerked him inside out, it did. Well. Now that you’ve had your epiphany, what are you going to do about it?”
“I don’t know,” Mike said. “I have to think about it some more. It does feel like something you have to do something about, though. Or I do. Only I can’t think what. What do you think, Priss?”
“I think you’ll know what you ought to do when the time comes,” Priss said. “You might start with that essay. Go on to the library and see what’s there about the Civil Rights Movement … though God knows, I doubt if anything much is, in Lytton … and put some facts behind this fine new passion of yours. That’s a good place to start.”
Mike thought, as she left, that she caught the nearest flicker of wetness in Priss’s eyes, but only one lamp was on in the dark, crowded little living room, and she could not be sure. On reflection, she thought she must have been mistaken. Priss in tears was like the madonna in a fever of sexuality, simply beyond imagining.
“Good for you, for standing up to that jerk Cato,” Bayard Sewell said, when she told him about the incident. “But you better hope your daddy doesn’t hear about it. He’d have a fit.”
Mike, who had been poised to tell him about the remarkable perception that had accompanied her words, did not. Somehow she had expected him to sense what she had felt, to understand, to share the fullness of it with her. She could not have said why she kept silent. He was, after all, dead right about her father. But there had been no thought in her mind of standing up to Wesley Cato; that had not been what her words were about. It was the first time their private lexicon had faltered. It disturbed her, and she did not mention it again.
As the slow spring came on, Mike devoted herself to her essay at the library while he worked evenings at Pembroke’s Drugs, and when they met afterwards to talk of the day and the future and to hold one another and exchange their endless hungry caresses, the tremulous new truth in Mike’s heart stayed there mute between them, as warm and living and secret as an embryo.
S
HE WAS WORKING ON AN ESSAY FOR A CONTEST SPONSORED
by the Georgia Civil Liberties Union. The prize was a year’s full scholarship, covering tuition, room and board, to the University of Georgia, and Mike yearned to present it triumphantly to her father, in the presence of Bayard Sewell, when the proper time came. She was aware that her new status as acknowledged daughter in the Winship house and her tentative favor in John Winship’s eyes had been won by Bayard Sewell and by no innate qualities of her own, and though she was not resentful of this, still, the opportunity to make such a grand gesture shone in her mind like a lit white taper.
Neither Mike nor anyone else in Lytton with the exception of Priss Comfort, who was the administrator of the essay contest at Lytton High, would have known the Civil Liberties Union from the Supreme Court of the United States, and so Mike felt few qualms about pursuing the essay. Its subject, “The South on Fire: The Civil Rights Movement at the Crossroads,” did give her a small, electric stab every now and then, especially when she imagined her father’s reaction to her victory, but she dismissed it, seeing in her mind’s eye his pride and awe when she presented him with the check for one
thousand dollars. She went on with her research in the library, which was as Priss had said, virginally innocent of materials on the Civil Rights Movement; but Priss supplied good source material, and Mike’s own new convert’s zeal carried her high and fast.
She talked of her work to no one except, and perhaps not surprisingly, J.W. Cromie. To Bayard Sewell and her father, she said only of her immersion in the library and her upstairs bedroom, “I want it all to be a surprise.” And on the surface, this was true. Mike did not look any deeper than that. In the new momentum of her happiness, she had gratefully abandoned introspection. She might have spoken of her work to Priss, but Priss did not ask, and when Mike broached the subject, as she did once or twice at the beginning of the project, Priss had said, “We’ll talk about it when the contest is over. I don’t want to hear a word about it now. It’s very important that everything you do be totally and completely yours, Mike.”
But she talked to J.W. on many evenings, when she had finished working and Bayard had gone from his job at the drugstore straight into the Winship dining room to study at the huge, round oak table under the Searcy family chandelier. Later, around ten-thirty, they would meet briefly for cocoa in the kitchen, and John Winship would join them, and after that he would retreat to his monastic bedroom with elaborate tact and leave the living room to them and their greedy and desperate hands and mouths. But the blank hour or so between she had come to fill again with the renewed visits to J.W. in the little house behind the hedge.
J.W. said little during these visits, as was his habit, but he listened. Mike told him what her reference books and newspapers and magazines said, and what she heard on the radio and television, as if he had no access to them himself, and most important, she told him what she thought about all of it. What she thought was quixotic
and idealistic in the extreme at the beginning of her work, borne impossibly high on the updraft of her revelatory fire, but gradually a lean and reasoned shape began to emerge from her exhortations, something very near a whole and viable theory about the struggle for racial equality in the South, and what might be done about it, and what might not. Though she had virtually no experience of the world outside the South and no perspective to speak of on the phenomenon of the movement, Mike had the longtime native Southerner’s almost subliminal knowledge of the day-to-day textures and realities of blacks living among whites. It lent her somewhat simplistic and passionate sentiments on the subject a convincing pragmatism.
And she had always had what Lytton would have called a way with words. She read her essay, in all its drafts and revisions, to J.W., and he said nothing, only nodded when she paused and looked at him, his face as solemn and apparently judicious as if it had been, in effect, he she was talking about. Mike’s long early years of feeling alone and exiled, of betrayal by her very birth, gave her words an urgency and homing precision that sometimes … very rarely … brought a quick smile of recognition to his face; if she had seen the smiles, she would have known that she had in J.W. a more receptive audience than any of the judges in their offices in Atlanta, but she seldom looked up from her papers when she was reading aloud to him.
She might have seen something else, too; the small flame of a newborn pride and commitment. She had no way of knowing that in her words, on those spring evenings, J.W. Cromie was seeing dancing possibilities he had never known existed. Between the two of them, the essay was conceived, nurtured, and bom. In mid-March she retyped it one last time and mailed it off.
In May she learned that she had won the competition.
Mike ran grinning and hugging herself from the Lytton post office to Priss Comfort’s house. Priss looked at her a long moment, and then at the certified check for one thousand dollars, and smiled.
“Leave a copy of your piece for me when you go,” she said. “Now I’ll read it.”
“It’s a fine piece of work, Mike,” she said the next day. “It tells me a lot about where you might take your life, if you work hard and have enough courage. That’s the part I don’t know about yet. Have you shown this to your father? Does he know about the prize?”
“No,” Mike said. “I was going to wait and surprise him … oh, sometime later. You know, right when we’re getting ready for the wedding and all, just say, ‘Oh, by the way, you don’t have to worry about school for me this year. This ought to cover it,’ and sort of hand it to him casually.”
Priss looked at her thoughtfully.
“What about Bayard?”
“I … well, no. He hasn’t read the essay. And he doesn’t know about this, yet. I just now got it, Priss; I came straight here …”
“I think you’re right, Mike, even though you may not know why you want to wait. I think you ought to wait, maybe until you’re married, if you’re absolutely certain that that’s what you want …”
“Oh Priss! Of course I’m certain; it’s what I’ve always—”
“All right, okay.” Priss held up a hand. “You can’t blame me for trying, though. I can see so clearly from this essay how valuable you might come to be to the South; I’d always hoped you might want to be a journalist, and I think, with a lot of work and a lot of dedication and all the courage you’ve got, you might, in time, be one of the important young voices in the new South. If, God help us, we can throttle the old one.”
“You can? You do? Well … gosh, Priss. Thanks.
You never said … but why can’t I do that anyway? What does being married have to do with it? Why can’t I be both? I’d always planned to work; Bay always wanted me to do that …”
“I’ll bet he did,” Priss said. “I think you
could
be both, Mike. I just don’t think you will. All the fire you’d need to go into your work is going right straight into that young man of yours,” Priss said sadly. “You have the gift, and you have the fire, but I don’t think you have enough of either to go around, and I think maybe you haven’t built or found nearly enough courage yet.”
“Why do you say that?” Mike was stung.
“Because you haven’t shown that first-rate essay of yours to either your father or your fiancé, and you haven’t told either one that you won the contest. Surprise, nothing. I don’t know how that young man of yours feels about this race thing, but you and I both know how your father does.”
“Well, if you think that, then I’ll go home and show them both this check and this essay right this minute …”
“No. I think you’re right. I don’t think you should do that. I don’t think they are ready for it, and I don’t think you are, either. Wait until you’re married. Wait until you’re as good as enrolled in your classes at Georgia. Wait until
after
you are. It’ll be much harder to change plans then.”
“Why would plans change? You don’t think that just because I wrote a silly little essay, Daddy would change his mind about our living with him, or paying our way … besides, I’m paying my own way. He’ll be proud, Priss …”
Priss Comfort’s face softened, and she put her arms around Mike’s shoulder, a rare gesture. Priss was not much for touching.
“He certainly should be, Mike,” she said. “He really should be. Congratulations. I told you way back that
you needed to put your muscle where your mouth was, and you’ve made a good start on it. Now keep going, Micah Winship. They’re going to hear that name outside Lytton one day, I’d bet on it.”
“Micah Sewell.” Mike smiled.
“Sewell,” Priss corrected herself. She did not smile.
Mike took the check to the Lytton Bank and Trust and cashed it, swearing Lavinia Calhoun, the middle-aged teller, to secrecy. She put the money in the silver duck bank that Priss Comfort had brought when she was born. She took it out and counted it so often that the crisp newness of the ten $100 bills began to soften and fade, and then she put them away for good, but she kept the duck polished bright, and looked often at it. It seemed tangible proof of her worth.
G
RADUATION CAME AND WENT, AND THE BLACK-ROBED, CAN
dlelit baccalaureate ceremonies. The capped and gowned, sweat-trickling graduation ceremonies in the stifling high school auditorium wheeled by in a blur. Mike watched and heard Bayard Sewell give the valedictory address through a sheen of tears and a high ringing of pride and love, and delivered her own salutatorian’s briefer address faultlessly, to steady, if more modest, applause. Both of them graduated with honors, he with the highest, she with a still-respectable magna. John Winship hugged her glancingly and pumped Bayard’s hand, and his mother mewled damply over both of them, and Priss gave her a long, hard, bourbon-fogged hug. DeeDee kissed her chastely and gave Bayard a giggling embrace. Her husband, Duck, gave Mike a rough, insinuating kiss on the mouth; Mike flinched in disgust at the wet lips and the seeking hardness of his groin as he ground it against her. He was always putting his hands on her, and calling her “little sis.” DeeDee glared at him. He grinned hugely back and gave Bayard a resounding thump on the back and a savage and genial knuckling on the biceps.
John Winship’s graduation present to them was a
clean, seemly little two-year-old Ford coupe. He handed the keys to Bayard.
“Couldn’t I keep it?” Mike entreated. “I wanted to go into Atlanta and see if the
Journal
or
Constitution
had any summer work. You’ll be staying here at the drugstore, so I thought …”
“It’s in Bayard’s name, just to make things easier,” John Winship said. “If you want to work for a newspaper, why don’t you go see Carl Thigpen? He could use some help on the
Observer
, and you know he’d be glad to have you.”
“Well, Daddy, you know, it’s just a weekly,” Mike said. She did not know why it stung her so, to have their joint gift put in Bayard’s name. In three months they would be a legal unit anyway. “I’d really like to get some experience on a daily. It would help me a lot after college, when I look for a full-time job.”
“Maybe by that time you’ll be starting a full-time family, and it won’t amount to a hill of beans whether you work for a daily or a weekly this summer,” her father said. He almost twinkled it, a near-grotesque spasm.
She smiled. But often in those heat-jellied days of early summer, she remembered what Priss Comfort had said.
“Micah Winship. They’re going to hear that name outside Lytton one day.” And, “Put your muscle where your mouth is, Mike.”