The Last House on the Street(4)

Aunt Carol met Uncle Pete, my father’s brother, when she was an army nurse and he was a soldier. After the war they moved in with us. I was only a year old at the time, so she was always a part of my life. Sometimes, the best part. She left discipline to my parents, so I knew I could tell her anything—almost—without getting in trouble. Uncle Pete died when I was ten, but Aunt Carol remained with us. She was blunt; I never needed to guess what she was thinking. As I grew older and became aware of the prickly relationship she had with my parents—especially with my mother—I wondered why she didn’t move back to New York. Toward the end of her life, when cancer was stealing her away from us, I talked to her about it. “Why did you stay with us?” I asked as I wrapped her shawl tighter around her bony shoulders. She was always cold then, even in the summer. “You never loved North Carolina.”

“No, but I loved you,” she said. “And I think you needed me. I didn’t want you to turn into your mother.”

“What do you mean?” My mother was all right. She wasn’t particularly warm but she was smart. She was a librarian in the Round Hill library.

“She may spend her life around books, but her mind is shuttered closed,” Aunt Carol said. “Think about it. There’s a reason you share what you’re writing for the school paper with me and not with her, isn’t there?”

She was right. My mother would have been disgusted by the way I wrote about the protests. The way I now sided with the protesters.

“I’m dying, Ellie,” Aunt Carol said, matter-of-factly. “But keep talking to me after I’m gone, all right?” She smiled. “Pretend I’m here. You’re a wonderful young woman. Keep writing about injustice. Act on your convictions. Don’t let those shutters close your mind. Not ever.”

Around that time, I’d been assigned to work on a project with Gloria, the lone Negro student in my pharmacology class. I suggested we talk about our project at the local sandwich shop, but she shook her head. Let’s meet in the library, instead, she said. I’m not hungry. Only in bed that night did I realize that Gloria wouldn’t have been allowed to eat in the sandwich shop with me and I felt embarrassed that I’d suggested it and angry on her behalf.

Then last spring, only a few miserable days after Aunt Carol’s funeral, Brenda was with me when I was assigned to cover an extraordinary protest for the paper. Students and professors and even some townspeople knelt side by side across Franklin Street, blocking traffic. They held protest signs against their chests, their expressions solemn and sincere. I snapped pictures and felt moved by their quiet courage. Some of the girls wore skirts and I knew the asphalt had to be killing their knees and wrecking their nylons. I could tell from their stoic expressions that they didn’t care. Their stockings were the last thing on their minds. They weren’t thinking about themselves at all. They were thinking about the segregated shops and restaurants. They were thinking about the segregated grocery store where the owner poured ammonia over the heads of peaceful demonstrators, sending some of them to the hospital with second-degree burns. Aunt Carol had cried when I told her about that.

Gloria was one of the protesters in the street that day. She knelt at the end of the line closest to us next to a young white man, and I made sure to get her in some of my photographs.

Brenda shook her head as I snapped pictures. “This is stupid,” she said. “They’re all going to end up getting arrested, and what for? It’s not going to change anything.”

Her words were nothing more than a whine in my ear. Impulsively, before I had a chance to change my mind, I handed her my camera, slung my purse over my shoulder, and stepped into the street myself.

“What are you doing?” Brenda shouted from behind me.

I took my place at the end of the line—which was in the gutter—and got down on my knees next to Gloria. She didn’t look at me but kept her eyes straight ahead and I did the same. Pain settled into my knees almost instantly and I felt the stocking on my right leg run clear up my thigh. A young man moved toward me and handed me a sign. I didn’t know what it said, but I held it in front of me, as my fellow protesters were doing. My heart pounded but my breathing felt steady. My breathing felt right.

There was commotion all around us. Cars and angry drivers. A group of protesters marching on the other side of the street. Townspeople taking our picture. Through the cacophony, I heard Brenda yell, “What the hell, Ellie! Get out of the damn gutter!” I tuned her out. I tuned all of it out. I heard Aunt Carol’s voice in my head: Act on your convictions. Although the physical pain had slipped to the background, I felt tears sting my eyes. Roll down my cheeks.

The police came in a white truck everyone called the paddy wagon.

“Go limp!” someone in the line yelled. I knew that’s what you were supposed to do. Don’t fight the police, but don’t make it easy on them either. I felt the temptation to get up. Walk back to Brenda and disappear into the crowd of onlookers. But the stronger part of me held my ground. The cops began dragging and carrying my fellow protesters toward the paddy wagon. One cop pulled the sign from my hands, lifted me to my feet, and pushed me toward the truck, his hands gripping my shoulders. I couldn’t make myself go limp like some of the others. Like Gloria did. She made them carry her, her skirt hiked up to her garters. It frightened me, the thought of being that helpless. Instead, I let myself be prodded along until the gaping rear of the truck was in front of me, and that’s when reality began to sink in. I could still hear Brenda shouting to me from the other side of the street as I climbed into the truck, though I didn’t know what she was saying. Was I being arrested? How would I explain to my parents that I felt as though I had to do what I did?