Interesting Women by Andrea Lee (7 ebook reader txt) 📗

and a proper way to approach the sixties, a period about which it is almost impossible to reminisce without entering the realm of myth or parody. Y.F. made no attempt to paint pictures with language, yet whatever he said spurred me to fill in the spaces with my own visions.

He said: We drove, and I saw a stretch of desert highway and a battered Volkswagen carrying a pair of teenagers with faces out of the great Anglo-Saxon diaspora. Beautiful boys, almost twins, with long hair the color of the bleached flatlands around them, and straight teeth, and bodies whose rude health had just previously been the province of conscientious mothers and pediatricians. And carefully tattered jeans patched like Appalachian quilts. Boys who listened to the car radio as if their lives depended on it; which in a sense was true, since the radio poured out the statistics of the faraway yet curiously intimate war that in a few years might devour those healthy bodies. From the radio, too, came some of the best music of all time, rock, country, and soul masterpieces, which they accepted casually as the soundtrack to their own inimitable adventure. Of course they felt themselves to be on a mission, burning with a pure revolutionary flame, yet on the road they acted like fraternity brothers, stealing dips in motel pools, lifting cheeseburgers from indignant carhops, hanging moons at girls in passing cars. They’d been friends since childhood, but their friendship was not important to the story.

Their conversation I imagined as a torrent of leftist politics that was neither as superficial or as muddled as both of them were later to pretend, in times when it became fashionable to jeer at oneself in the sixties. Something else easily mocked in later days was the uncomplicated belief both of them had that the bad old world could be hammered to pieces and then put to rights. Already at the beginning of their trip this belief had been severely tested in a Tucson park, where they tried to engage in a bit of comradely dialogue with a group of Mexican kids. When their new acquaintances—in an efficient but not acrimonious fashion—knocked them down and relieved them of their watches, Y.F. and McGinty had the good sense not to discuss the matter. They put their reflections on hold and drove on to Alabama.

They’d expected to be foreigners in Tenlow County, but what actually happened was that, for the first time in their lives, they became minorities. The powers-that-were in Montgomery and Washington had bowed to the pressure for separatism that was already fragmenting the civil rights movement, and had channeled most other young white volunteers out of the field. At the first meeting of the voter registration volunteers, held in the county seat of Barreville in the Tinley Temple African Methodist Episcopal church, the two arrivals from California were the only Caucasian faces in the crowded pews. And those faces turned red as Chinese flags when the Reverend Emmanuel Basnight, pastor of Tinley Temple and local head of the voting drive, suddenly paused in the midst of an emotional invocation of justice to point his finger at the two of them. “The world is watching Tenlow County,” he thundered. “And the proof is that these two white boys have come all the way from California to help us win the vote! Stand up, boys!” They tottered to their feet, grinning feebly as the congregation burst into hallelujahs. And for the rest of the summer, as if they had been formally christened, Y.F. and McGinty were known, to their concealed irritation, as the White Boys.

When I heard that, I sent an innocent smile down into my mug of Guinness.

As the story went on, it was easy to picture Tenlow County. Just the deep South, a part of the world as contaminated by myth as the late sixties period itself. A region I’d never visited, but which was familiar to me from books and newspapers and my parents’ dramatic reminiscences. Familiar as the dark woods in every fairy tale. A sea of cotton in the boll, strewn at intervals with plantation houses, moribund Greek Revival towns, shacks clustered in the unchanged patterns of slavery. Crushing heat that felt more like doom than weather, and a halo of buzzards over every tree. Dirt roads, kudzu, juke joints, and the lingering perfume of original sin. Black earth and—everywhere, everywhere—black people. Neither Y.F. or McGinty had ever before sat at a table or in a classroom with a black person, but that summer there were days when the White Boys felt a shock of surprise at the sight of each other, and at glimpses of their own wan faces in mirrors.

They lived for two months in a shotgun house on the outskirts of Barreville, guests of a widow who was half blind with diabetes. There they learned to appreciate pigs’ ears and collard greens, and helped out their elderly hostess with an officious gallantry that would have amazed and enchanted their mothers back in California. Each morning they shoveled down a plate of grits and raced over to the storefront headquarters of the voter registration project, where they received marching orders from Reverend Basnight. This gentleman, since baptizing them with their nickname, had remained a remote, awe-inspiring figure who made it clear that his public enthusiasm had nothing to do with his private feelings. It was clear, in fact, that he was disposed to like or trust the White Boys about as much as he did the white men who spat tobacco in unison outside the town hall. Tall and thin, with skin the color of an old penny and a face as angular and humorless as that of a Byzantine saint, he would hand out the day’s assignment while regarding them with a cold skeptical eye that left them shuffling and itching to be off. Then they’d take the battered dusty Volkswagen bumping down back roads and pull up in front of a cluster