Then comes the white boy named Darryl, and at first he couldn’t, he was limp and he couldn’t, and then later on he could and Odetta’s secret other—the screaming, laughing, ugly other—never came near. Darryl and Det lay together until morning, slept spoons until morning beneath the Mississippi moon. Listening to the crickets. Listening to the owls. Listening to the soft smooth hum of the Earth turning on its gimbals, turning and turning ever further into the twentieth century. They are young, their blood runs hot, and they never doubt their ability to change everything.

It’s fare you well, my own true lover …

This is her song in the weeds behind the Blue Moon Motor Hotel; this is her song beneath the moon.

I’ll never see your face again …

It’s Odetta Holmes at the apotheosis of her life, and Mia is there! She sees it, feels it, is lost in its glorious and some would say stupid hope (ah but I say hallelujah, we all say Gawd-bomb). She understands how being afraid all the time makes one’s friends more precious; how it makes every bite of every meal sweet; how it stretches time until every day seems to last forever, leading on to velvet night, and they know James Cheney is dead

(say true)

they know Andrew Goodman is dead

(say hallelujah)

they know Michael Schwerner—oldest of them and still just a baby at twenty-four—is dead.

(Give up your loudest amen!)

They know that any of them is also eligible to wind up in the mud of Longdale or Philadelphia. At any time. The night after this particular hoot behind the Blue Moon, most of them, Odetta included, will be taken to jail and her time of humiliation will begin. But tonight she’s with her friends, with her lover, and they are one, and Discordia has been banished. Tonight they sing swaying with their arms around each other.

The girls sing maid, the boys sing man.

Mia is overwhelmed by their love for one another; she is exalted by the simplicity of what they believe.

At first, too stunned to laugh or to cry, she can only listen, amazed.

NINE

As the busker began the fourth verse, Susannah joined in, at first tentatively and then—at his encouraging smile—with a will, harmonizing above the young man’s voice:

For breakfast we had bulldog gravy
For supper we had beans and bread
The miners don’t have any dinner
And a tick of straw they call a bed …

TEN

The busker quit after that verse, looking at Susannah-Mia with happy surprise. “I thought I was the only one who knew that one,” he said. “It’s the way the Freedom Riders used to—”

“No,” Susannah said quietly. “Not them. It was the voter-registration people who sang the bulldog-gravy verse. The folks who came down to Oxford in the summer of ’64. When those three boys were killed.”

“Schwerner and Goodman,” he said. “I can’t remember the name of the—”

“James Cheney,” she said quietly. “He had the most beautiful hair.”