And Do Remember Me (5 page)

“Jessie, I feel responsible for you. Tell me anything you need.”

“One day, Lincoln, I’m gonna do that,” Jessie promised. “One day I will.”

M
ACON WANTED
to pull the phone out of the wall. Every fifteen minutes since midnight, the phone had rung, the neurotic, edgy sound seeming to suck all the air out of the room. The voice promised to make it real tight for niggers and nigger lovers, said a bomb had been planted where they’d never find it (although the entire house and area around it had been searched and nothing was found). Macon never got used to the calls and wondered how Courtland could sleep as he did, so easily beside her.

That morning she and Lincoln had driven over to McComb to investigate the site of a bombed church where voter registration
classes had been held. Then when they arrived back in Greenwood, they bailed Courtland out of jail, where he had spent two days on a trumped-up traffic violation, designed to get him off the streets. Every time Macon told Courtland goodbye she never knew if she would see him again. Their existence was charged, live-wire hot with the threat of death, the opportunity to find in themselves the kind of courage no one ever told them they had. They never knew when one of them might be arrested, or when they would have to travel to some far-flung part of the state or region. Macon had never been so afraid of dying, nor had she ever felt so alive.

When she first laid eyes on Courtland Hightower, he was giving a talk in one of her classes at Bennett College in Greensboro, North Carolina. As a junior she had picketed the city’s Woolworth’s for integrated lunch counters, leading a group of young women in a rowdy march from the sedate campus of the all-girl’s school into downtown. In high school she had joined the NAACP youth league and, during summers back home in Richmond, she had walked picket lines outside segregated businesses with her mother and father.

Macon Fields spoke her first full sentence at six months, read her first book at two, in elementary school she skipped two grades. While she had absorbed a bristling sense of the world’s enduring injustice from her parents’ political activism, she possessed the thoughtful demeanor of a woman who had considered more than once giving up on the world.

Before leading the march on Woolworth’s, Macon had been put on probation for initiating a prayer vigil on the steps of the chapel in support of the students sitting in at the five and dime, who had ketchup and mustard poured on their heads by angry mobs and who had been slapped and punched. Because of the fervor of her politics, during three years at Bennett, Macon averaged one date a semester. Her studious, intense eyes
convinced the young men she knew that they were either unworthy or too stupid to deserve her attention. So when Macon heard Courtland address her American History class about the work he was doing, she was amazed to find that she felt the first stirrings of sexual desire. “You are intelligent and sensitive,” her mother, an English professor who specialized in the work of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the Brontë sisters and Mary Shelley, often told Macon, “and that’s worth more than beauty. Hold on to yourself, your essence,” her mother told her, “until you are in the presence of a man who can match it.” Macon had never met anyone who loomed as large in her imagination, who by word and deed seemed as expansive as Courtland Hightower. And so, she was convinced he was the man her mother had counseled her to wait for.

After he spoke to her class, Macon got Courtland’s address from her history professor. She wrote him letters in which she informed him of civil rights activity in the state and asked him for advice about her studies and her future. She typed the letters, afraid her handwriting would reveal her feelings, and sent them to his mother’s house in Greenwood. Never once did it occur to Macon that Courtland would not respond. Several months after his talk at Bennett, Courtland visited his mother and was handed a small pile of envelopes addressed to him. The white business envelopes, the typed address on the letters, all made Courtland wonder who he owed money, who was after him now, so official did the correspondence seem. Reading in amazement through half a dozen letters that veered from the political to the emotional sometimes in the same sentence, Courtland simply couldn’t remember the girl. He wondered if she might be crazy or dangerous, for in the last letter sent, she had written, “Courtland Hightower, I love you and know in my heart that we are destined to be together.” Courtland thought he had seen everything. But those letters so amazed him that
he borrowed money from his mother and caught the next train to North Carolina. When he found Macon’s dormitory and sat waiting in the lobby for her, he had no idea who he was waiting for or even why. He hadn’t been with a woman in months, so mobile and tenuous was his existence. And suddenly he was getting provocative, strangely irresistible letters from some college student and traveling halfway across the south to find out who she was and why she was proposing what sounded like marriage. When Macon walked into the lobby Courtland remembered her. Four months ago she sat with her eyes riveted to him, and asked several questions about strategy and activism he now remembered thinking were brilliant.

Today she wore a starched man’s shirt, blue jeans and her hair was combed back from her face, plain, simple, not crowded in a mass of curls like before. She looked at him as if she’d known he was coming.

“I’ve been waiting for you to come back since the day you left,” she told Courtland, sliding into an overstuffed armchair directly facing him.

“How’d you know I’d come?” he asked, a fleeting anger playing at the edges of his feelings in the face of the girl’s certainty.

“You had no choice,” she whispered seriously, cupping her chin in her hands.

“Wait a minute now,” he protested, nearly rising from the chair.

“Neither did I,” she said, standing up, walking toward him as though she’d been doing it all her life.

Macon stood before Courtland and reached for his hands, saying, “I’m glad you came, Courtland Hightower, this is where you belong.”

He took her to a nearby restaurant where they talked about philosophy and Negro preachers and W. E. B. Du Bois and the meaning of freedom.

“Nothing I read in my textbooks makes any sense anymore,” Macon said, wolfing down a forkful of french fries.

She was intense, her movements quick and edgy yet graceful. “I mean, we were debating the existence of God in a philosophy class last week and I wondered what difference it makes what the answer is in a world where everybody says God is on their side.”

“God’s not the question or the answer,” Courtland said.

“Don’t you believe?” she asked, startled, surprised.

“Sure I do. In me. Don’t give me that heaven pie in the sky crap.”

“That’s what saw our people through,” she said, her voice full of the confidence that unnerved him in a woman so young and that made it impossible for him to move out of its reach.

“That’s what
duped
our people.”

“Nat Turner was a preacher.”

“He believed in the avenging God of the Old Testament, not the forgiving Jesus of the New.”

“You couldn’t work in the movement if you didn’t have faith,” Macon said.

“Why not?”

“You don’t strike me as a materialist, Courtland, there’s more to you than that.”

“Macon, I just don’t believe you really buy into their God.”

“I don’t. I believe in my own.”

“Your own, huh? So it’s all relative,” he laughed.

“Tell me something that isn’t.”

“Macon, what do you want from me?” Courtland asked, leaning closer to her, wearied, energized by her tenacity, the flamboyance of her spirit.

“Everything,” she told him, pushing her empty plate and half-filled cup aside.

“Do you even know what
everything
means?”

“You’ll tell me.”

Courtland looked at the girl. He had done his homework, had found out through friends in the city that Macon was a hard worker, outspoken, tough.

“And yes, I’m a virgin,” she said, breaking into his thoughts. “You won’t hold that against me, will you?”

“You’re too much,” Courtland concluded, his heart pounding, excited and tense. “Girl, you scare me,” he said, feeling his tongue grow heavy, fearing he’d soon begin to stammer.

“I can’t take anything you don’t give.”

“How old
are
you?” he asked in exasperation.

“I’ve been here before,” she said seriously. “I believe in God and reincarnation.”

“You would.”

“Will you believe in me?” Macon asked gently. “At least give it a try?”

“Sure, sure,” Courtland told her, motioning for the waitress, eager to leave, suddenly terrified of the attraction he felt for this girl who was so direct, obtuse and utterly original.

In front of her dorm, Courtland told her, “Listen, I’ve got no time for what I think you want.”

“You won’t know that until you stop resisting me.”

The warm April evening hovered around them, a quarter moon appearing to be precariously lodged in the sky. He wanted to hold her yet was more afraid what such an action would do to him than say to her. As she had done more than once that evening, Macon read his mind and wrapped her arms around his waist, her head against his chest.

“It’s been a long time, Macon, a real long time,” he whispered into the night.

“They say it’s like swimming. You never forget. If you need to know how, it comes back.”

“They’re not always right.”

“If you want them to be,” she said hopefully.

“Give me time. Don’t write for a while,” he pleaded.

“I have to. Those letters to you are the only thing that makes sense anymore. They’re the only thing that’s real.”

“I can’t promise to answer.”

“I don’t need an answer,” she said, gazing up at him, her eyes tiny silver pools in the darkness. “I just need you here.”

Soon he was visiting her every few weeks, bringing her books to read. Macon wrote him often, but he didn’t answer the letters, instead he just showed up at her dorm. Courtland was afraid to make love to her, because she had this crazy kind of hold on him. Every time he promised himself he wasn’t going back to Greensboro because he didn’t have time, he headed to see her again. Finally, Macon seduced him in the backseat of a friend’s car that he had driven from Memphis to see her.

After they had sex she didn’t make him feel like a possession, as if he were indebted to her forever because of what they had done. Macon made him feel as though she had to have him but could nonetheless live without him. Courtland had prepared no weapons to defeat such a sophisticated, measured manifestation of love.

Love mugged him, he’d later tell friends, and when it demanded everything he had, he opened his pockets and emptied them.

W
HEN SHE GRADUATED
from Bennett and married Courtland, they went to live in Greenwood, staying with his mother for the first several months. Ursiline Hightower was a tall, imposing woman whose Indian blood found expression in her prominent cheekbones and mass of thick straight hair. She was a midwife who had suffered six miscarriages before finally giving
birth to Courtland. Macon sometimes drove with Ursiline Hightower to deliver babies, in her 1945 Pontiac, a vehicular relic that nonetheless traveled the roads of the Delta with considerable assurance. Macon assisted Ursiline at the births that took place on mattresses on the floor, on porches, in one-room houses where a dozen children played noisily outside the curtainless windows or slept on the floor around their feet. Nothing in Macon’s Richmond, Virginia, background prepared her for what she saw in Mississippi. Yet she felt that driving across the Delta with Courtland’s mother, who had delivered at last count three hundred babies, had prepared her for everything she’d done since.

The phone rang again, and Macon, as if fleeing from the sound, moved closer to Courtland. She wouldn’t answer it this time. She would take a chance. When the phone stopped, Macon thought of their children—where would they be born? But she had learned to take nothing for granted. Before bed that evening, alone in their room, Courtland and Macon had talked about the three missing civil rights workers—Goodman, Chaney and Schwerner—who had disappeared near Meridian. Courtland was convinced they were dead. Sitting on their bed in an undershirt and boxer shorts, wan and tired from his days in prison, Courtland shook his head and said, “God knows I wish I didn’t feel it in my gut. But I was born down here. I know what can happen.”

He was losing weight, Macon noticed, his cheeks nearly sunken. He reminded her of pictures she had seen of Gandhi, ascetic and obsessed yet unperturbed. But her husband was no prophet, no saint, she knew. And they had even managed to kill Gandhi. All the purity of heart and love in the world hadn’t saved him.

“But with all the reporters and the TV cameras following these white kids around? How could they be so stupid?” Macon
argued. “Even if what you say is true, they won’t get away with it. They can’t.”

“There’ll be a trial and a jury of their peers and they’ll get off. Look at what happened with Medgar,” Courtland said wearily.

The search for the three men involved dredging the rivers of the state. In the past few weeks a score of anonymous, long disappeared Negro bodies had been brought out of the terrible Mississippi waters. These missing people had sparked no nationwide or even local manhunt. They had been considered just another nigger gone by whites, by Negroes an issue that, if pursued, could result in other disappearances. But as more and more bodies were found in the black communities of the Delta, the day of reckoning arrived. Children’s questioning eyes inspired overdue revelation, and long-dreaded encounters with a truth parents denied more to spare themselves than their offspring. Family members dreamed of and remembered transgressions that had put those who disappeared and were now found in jeopardy. The truth washed ashore along with the dead.

The movement was creating bonds between black and white that were tenacious and tenuous. Lying next to Courtland, she thought of the clandestine affair between their friends, Marlon Jeeter and Carolyn Seavers, who had proven to be one of the most hard-working people in the Freedom School. Marlon had confided in her about his affair with Carolyn, saying, “She’s just so different, so special. I mean I never met anybody like her.” He sat on the steps of the Freedom House next to Macon, jittery with infatuation and desire. “She’s just so different,” he kept saying, an amazed smile flickering across his face. Macon fought to control the bitterness she felt in the face of Marlon’s admission, but lost the battle, saying angrily, “She’s white, Marlon, that’s all, she’s white.”