Half an hour later I poured myself a glass of sherry and went into Momma’s study and called Derry Waters’s house in Montgomery. Aurora answered the phone. “It’s Rhoda Manning,” I said. “How are you? I’m calling for Derry.”

“She isn’t here. She’s still in the hospital.”

“What? What are you talking about?”

“You don’t know?”

“No, tell me what’s going on. What are you saying, Aurora?”

“Don’t you read the papers? It isn’t in the papers up there?”

“What. Tell me what.”

“She was cut. They got her. They finally got her.”

“Tell me what happened, Aurora. What are you saying? What are you talking about?”

* * *

It took a while to get the story out of Aurora because there was so much going on behind her in the house. Doors opening, doors slamming, other phones ringing. “She was attacked coming out of a restaurant with a lawyer from Washington. He ran away and left her there and they got her. They cut her. Charles got a doctor from up North to come and fix her face but they can’t fix her arm. They cut an artery in her arm.”

“What arm?”

“The right one. The one she uses. They don’t know what’s going to happen. They’re talking about taking her somewhere. To a different hospital.”

“What can I do?”

“Nothing. You can’t do anything. I have to go now, Rhoda. There are a lot of people to be taken care of. Write her a letter when she gets home. I really have to hang up now.”

“What hospital is she in? I want to call her.”

“Don’t do that now. She’s had too many visitors already. Wait and write to her.” Aurora hung up and I was left with this tragedy to contemplate all alone. A tragedy that came from a world I did not belong to. A world of action and courage and life, a world where men and women were fighting and dying for a cause. Justice, Derry called it.

There was no way I could call Charles William and Irise for another hour or two. There was no way to find Jim Phillips as he was living in a black neighborhood and didn’t have a phone. I hated to call Charles Waters. If I told my parents they would be mad at me for even knowing these people. In Montgomery, Alabama, momentous things were going on but they did not include me. They had nothing to do with me.