Then he got back into his car and drove away.

CHAPTER TWO

For breakfast, George Jakes’s mother made him blueberry pancakes and bacon with grits on the side. “If I eat all this I’ll have to wrestle heavyweight,” he said. George weighed a hundred and seventy pounds and had been the welterweight star of the Harvard wrestling team.

“Eat hearty, and give up that wrestling,” she said. “I didn’t raise you to be a dumb jock.” She sat opposite him at the kitchen table and poured cornflakes into a dish.

George was not dumb, and she knew it. He was about to graduate from Harvard Law School. He had finished his final exams, and was as sure as he could be that he had passed. Now he was here at his mother’s modest suburban home in Prince George’s County, Maryland, outside Washington, DC. “I want to stay fit,” he said. “Maybe I’ll coach a high school wrestling team.”

“Now that would be worth doing.”

He looked at her fondly. Jacky Jakes had once been pretty, he knew: he had seen photographs of her as a teenager, when she had aspired to be a movie star. She still looked young: she had the kind of dark-chocolate-colored skin that did not wrinkle. “Good black don’t crack,” the Negro women said. But the wide mouth that smiled so broadly in those old photos was now turned down at the corners in an expression of grim determination. She had never become an actress. Perhaps she had never had a chance: the few roles for Negro women generally went to light-skinned beauties. Anyway, her career had ended before it began when, at the age of sixteen, she had become pregnant with George. She had gained that careworn face raising him alone for the first six years of his life, working as a waitress and living in a tiny house at the back of Union Station, and drilling him in the need for hard work and education and respectability.

He said: “I love you, Mom, but I’m still going on the Freedom Ride.”

She pressed her lips together disapprovingly. “You’re twenty-five years old,” she said. “You please yourself.”

“No, I don’t. Every important decision I’ve ever made, I’ve discussed with you. I probably always will.”

“You don’t do what I say.”

“Not always. But you’re still the smartest person I’ve ever met, and that includes everyone at Harvard.”

“Now you’re just buttering me up,” she said, but she was pleased, he could tell.

“Mom, the Supreme Court has ruled that segregation on interstate buses and bus stations is unconstitutional—but those Southerners just defy the law. We have to do something!”

“How do you think it’s going to help, this bus ride?”

“We’re going to board here in Washington and travel south. We’ll sit at the front, use the whites-only waiting rooms, and ask to be served in the whites-only diners; and when people object we’re going to tell them that the law is on our side, and they are the criminals and troublemakers.”