Four Spirits (63 page)

WHEN I WAS A COLLEGE STUDENT IN THE EARLY SIXTIES
in Birmingham, Alabama, I promised myself, if I ever did become a novelist, that I would write about the acts of courage and tragedy taking place in my city. I would try to re-create through words what it was like to be alive then: how ordinary life went on, how people fell in and out of love, how family members got sick, how people worked ordinary jobs, tried to get an education, worshiped, looked for entertainment, grew up, died, participated in the great changes of the civil rights struggle or stood aside and watched the world change.

There were many horrors and haunting events but none more powerful than the murder of the four young girls to whom this book is dedicated. In my imagination they stand in a sacred circle, a ring of fire around them. I do not step into that circle. That is to say, I do not try to re-create them. Their families and friends are holding them dear the way they really were.

I have created fictive characters for the reader to know and mourn. The event at the White Palace is meant to stand not for any particular historic event but to suggest some of the many atrocities that occurred between May 17, 1954, when the United States Supreme Court outlawed school segregation in
Brownv. Board of Education
and the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4, 1968, in Memphis, Tennessee, a death preceded by the deaths of many less well known people, including, on February 8, 1968, those of Samuel Hammond Jr., Delano Middleton, and Henry Smith, students in Orangeburg, South Carolina, killed when highway patrolmen fired on protestors.

For the sake of readers too young to remember, some of the historical events alluded to or presented in a fictive framework in
Four Spirits
include the beating of the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth in front of Phillips High School (where I was a student) in 1957, and the repeated bombings of his home and church; the castration of Judge Aaron; the appearance and speech making of Birmingham Public Safety Commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor at Ku Klux Klan rallies; the peaceful and unnoted occasional integration of the Gaslight nightclub on Morris Avenue in Birmingham; the demonstrations of May 1963 led by Reverend Shuttlesworth and Dr. Martin Luther King, among others; the assault on those demonstrators by fire hoses and police dogs, as ordered by Bull Connor; the jailing of thousands of schoolchildren protestors, as well as Dr. King and other leaders; the joining of mass meetings by a few white college students, such as Marti Turnipseed; the bombing of Sixteenth Street Baptist Church and the deaths of four schoolgirls; the 1963 and 1964 Mississippi murders of Medgar Evers, of James Chaney, and of New York activists Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman; the assassination of President John F. Kennedy; the educational effort made on the Miles College campus by a number of white people, including myself and my friend Carol Countryman, who, like Catherine Cartwright in this story, came to the campus in her wheelchair. Carol lived to become a pioneer for rights for the handicapped, eventually making a trip to Washington, D.C., assisted by our mutual friend Nancy Brooks Moore, to speak out in that cause.

TO MY LITERARY AGENT, JOY HARRIS, AND TO MY EDITOR,
Marjorie Braman, I owe a joyful debt of gratitude for their belief in me and this book and their indefatigable work on our behalf. They have become dear friends.

My thanks must also begin with my gratitude to my husband, John C. Morrison, for his constant support in the writing of this book and for his considered comments that helped to shape it. I also offer a special thanks, within my family, to my brother John Sims Jeter, who encouraged me and corrected many of my mistakes, while working on his own first novel, and to his wife Derelene Brooks Jeter, for her heartfelt praise and astute suggestions. My daughter Flora Naslund and her partner, Marty Kelley, always cheer me on in my efforts to write, as do Sara and Michael McQuilling; Debora, Paul, David, and Ryan Morrison, my stepchildren; and David Rizzolo, Debora's husband. I also thank my brother and sister-in-law, Marvin Jeter and Charlotte Copeland, for their support.

For reading every draft of the novel and freely giving of their time and insights, while completing their own novels, I thank especially Lucinda Dixon Sullivan and Karen Mann. Other writer friends whose critiques I have cherished include Julie Brickman, Marcia Woodruff Dalton, Greg Ellis, Robin Lippincott, Eleanor Morse, Jeanie Thompson, Neela Vaswani, Mary Welp, and the actor/director Sheila O'Neill Ellis. I can never thank each of you enough for your generous advice.

A very special thanks to Nancy Brooks Moore, my lifelong friend, and Ron
Countryman for their careful reading and much-needed encouragement. I also thank Richard M. Sullivan and Elizabeth Chadwick for their advice about the opening sequence. I thank Callie Hausman and Thelma Wyland for directing me to essential reading in my research and for their faith in me.

Many other friends—including Lynn Greenberg, Maura Stanton, Richard Cecil, Alan Naslund, Paul Bresnick, Leslie Daniels, Deborah and David Stewart, Ralph Raby, Maureen Morehead, Nana Lampton, Charles and Patricia Gaines, Jake Reiss, Frank and Diana Richmond, Elizabeth Sulzby, Luke Wallin, Daly Walker, Bill Pearce, Denzil Strickland, Katy Yocom, Jim Rooney, and Susan Soper—have encouraged me in ways for which I am profoundly grateful.

I thank all my colleagues and friends at the University of Louisville, especially Tom Byers, Suzette Henke, and Karen Chandler, and all my colleagues and students of the Spalding University M.F.A. in Writing Program. I thank the University of Louisville for granting me a sabbatical leave, during which I worked on research and the writing of this novel, English Department Chairperson Debra Journet, and Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences Jim Brennan. Over the years, grants from the Kentucky Foundation for Women have been particularly sustaining, as well as from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Kentucky Arts Council. The Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, Kelly Ingram Park and the Birmingham Public Library, the Rosa Parks Museum and the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, and the Martin Luther King Jr. Museum in Atlanta have provided places of inspiration and reflection for me, as has the King memorial of rushing waters in San Francisco.

A special thanks to the University of Montevallo, Alabama, where my husband and I shared the Pascal P. Vacca Chair of Liberal Arts during the spring of 2003, and to Elaine and Bobby Hughes, and Bill and Loretta Cobb, among many other new Montevallo friends.

And to my newest friend, Chris McNair—how can I ever thank you enough for letting me into your life and for taking the author photograph for
Four Spirits
?

Sena Jeter Naslund

MONTEVALLO AND BIRMINGHAM,

MARCH 2003