Momentous events had been happening in the United States while I struggled with my personal demons. And I had moved back into the heart of the struggle. North Alabama, nineteen hundred and fifty-nine. The Montgomery bus boycott was over, the Little Rock crisis, the integration of the New Orleans schools, the rise of the White Citizens’ Council, the creation of a whole new school system in the South. It was the most divisive thing that had happened in the United States since the Civil War and there was no middle ground. You were for civil rights or you were against it. I didn’t know where I stood. I was for it when I was with my friends and against it when I was with my father. “Now the niggers will be all over us,” he said. “They’ll take us over. They’ll mongrelize the races.” He held forth every night, drinking scotch and water on the porch with his cousins. “You turn the niggers loose and the women will be right behind them. Well, I got home just in time to stiffen up your backs,” he would yell at them. “What you boys going to do, Cousin Larkin? You just going to let them take you over or you going to fight?” He would wave his glass in the air and furrow up his brow. Cousin Noisy, his cousins called him behind his back but they could not stay away. The scotch was free and, besides, he was saying everything they were afraid to say, everything they wanted to hear. “I got these grandbabies coming along,” he would say. “I bought some land for the new academy and gave it to them. What you going to do for them, Larkin? How about you, James MacDonald? You going to pitch in or you going to let your little girls go to school with niggers?”

I listened to it and I would get caught up in the language. He could hold forth with the best of them and debate you into the ground but I did not believe everything he told me anymore. I had come to believe he could be wrong. He had encouraged me to leave my husband and here I was, as miserable as I could be, getting drunk every night to salve my loneliness. Besides, for every fearful statement I heard on the porch at night, I had a different stream of information pouring in from Atlanta. Charles William had given me a terrible book to read, Native Son, by Richard Wright. It made me see the black people around me with different eyes. No matter what they said or how obsequious they pretended to be, they cared. It mattered to them what we thought of them just as it would have mattered to me. The thought cut me like a sword. The thought pierced my heart.