Sarah Phillips by Andrea Lee (beach books .TXT) 📗

and hugged my head against his chest and said, “Hi, Baby,” his shirt under his suit jacket was as wet as if he’d jumped into a swimming pool. Daddy and the youngest of his cousins sat around the dinner table late into the night, talking about integration and Dr. Martin Luther King, and once Cousin Rachel gave me a naughty thrill when she exclaimed, in a piercing voice that I could hear from my bedroom, “But Forrest”—his middle name was Forrest, and in her Tidewater accent it became “Farst”—“for Negro ladies, there’s not a decent public toilet in the District of Columbia!”

On our way back to Philadelphia at the end of the month, Daddy and I rode in a cab to Union Station. The driver wore a small gray cap tilted onto the back of his head; the arm he draped along the top of the front seat was a rich brown-black, the color of peat moss, and his voice, rising slowly from his throat, had a dark, peaty sound. When he found out Daddy was a minister, he addressed him as “Reverend Doc,” and the stories he told about the senators who rode in his cab made Daddy shout with laughter. When we came within sight of the station, the driver whistled a few notes and then said, “Yessir, the District is a pretty empty town in the summer, but in a month or so, say on the twenty-eighth of August, gon’ be a whole lot of people here, that right, Rev?” He turned his head slightly toward us, so that the corner of his eye showed like a white thread between his close black lids.

Daddy said, “Going to be a whole lot of people here. A lot of people marching.”

“Amen,” said the driver. He stopped at a light and turned his broad face around completely, so that he and my father could smile together like accomplices.

Something began to burn and flutter in my chest: it was as if I had swallowed a pair of fiery wings. The newspapers had been writing about the great civil-rights march that was to be; I had heard adults talking about it, and I knew vaguely that that was why Daddy was in Washington, but all that had been happening at a distance. Now, suddenly, a tremendous picture appeared in my mind, as clear and severe in its lighting as one of those old battle engravings that swarm with distinctly uniformed soldiers the size of fleas. I saw a million men, their faces various shades of black, white, and brown, marching together between the blazing marble monuments. It was glory, the millennium, an approaching revelation of wonders that made blood relatives of people like my father and the cab driver. The force of my emotion made me sit up very straight and clench my back teeth; my stomach, bound in the tight waistband of a plaid skirt, ached slightly.

Daddy seemed unmoved by the conversation in the taxi; in fact, at the newsstand in Union Station he began to complain about the driver. “That son of a gun took an extra dollar twenty-five!” he said, clutching a Washington Post under his elbow and going through his wallet.

On the train, Daddy studied a letter from his briefcase, read the paper, and then opened a detective novel titled Stiffed in San Remo. The train went through a tunnel of trees hung with swags of Virginia creeper and then passed a cornfield where a tow-headed boy stood waving, his hair bouncing in the breeze like the corn tassels. I was holding The Melendy Family, but I was thinking about the Crusades and the French Revolution; in my mind, still reeling with my new vision, rang vague, sonorous chords of a grand processional.

“I’ll go on the march with you,” I said to my father.

Daddy marked his place in the novel with his thumb and looked up. “What?” he said.

“I said I’ll go with you on the march.”

“Sweetie, that’s a great idea,” said Daddy. “But it’s so far in the future. Let’s think about it when the time comes.”

“But I know I want to go!”

Daddy sighed. “Sarah, you know that if you go, Matthew will want to go too, and I’m not sure that Cousin Rachel will have room for our family and for Uncle Freddy and Aunt Iz. But we’ll see—we’ll ask your mother when she gets home.”

Dusty summer air blew in through the window, and I sat back in my seat feeling the baffled resentment I experienced whenever I ran up against adult obtuseness. From the Crusades to Cousin Rachel’s bedroom space! In a few minutes Daddy looked up again from his reading and patted me on the knee. “My brave girl,” he said, looking at me with a certain amount of understanding in his bright little eyes; but I was already angry.

In August my brother and I watched the Washington march on television, the two of us lounging on the creaky green glider that stood on the sun porch at home. As I had known, there had been no question of my going along with my parents: my mother, ever practical, had immediately squelched the idea for fear of stampedes and what she called “exposure”—by which she meant not sun and wind but germs from possibly unwashed strangers. Matthew and I had been confided into the care of evil-tempered old Aunt Bessie, who distrusted most forms of technology and agreed only grudgingly to allow us to turn on the television to see the march.

As we watched, the quiet gray crowd moved down Constitution Avenue and split in half near the end, spreading out like a pair of vast wings in front of the Lincoln Memorial. I strained my eyes at the specks of faces in the procession and imagined my mother and father there, and the mothers and fathers of my friends. Was it grand for them, I wondered, or were they exercising the curious adult talent for considering trivial things in the midst of great?