Things Too Huge to Fix by Saying Sorry (18 page)

“Well, yeah.” Mac grinned again, and I fixed my eyes on my feet as I climbed the steps to avoid noticing he was cute this time.

Dad and Indri followed along behind me, not helping my shivery insides with their cold silence. Jeez. It wasn't like Mac robbed gas stations for a living. Maybe I should have hated Mac for disrespecting our friendship, but I just didn't anymore.

As for Dr. Harper, maybe he was having a bad day yesterday.
Or maybe he's going to drag you into a dark alley and club you in the head to steal that key
. Yeah. That little fear spoke itself in Indri's voice.

I almost walked right into Ms. Manchester, who had stopped at one of the coffee bar tables. She pulled two of the tables together, then gestured to Mac to bring the high-backed wooden chairs closer.

I took the spot at the end of the table, with Dad on one side and Ms. Manchester on the other. I was thinking about the locker scene with Mac. Maybe, just maybe, if Mac and I
kept talking and being peaceful, I'd get to ask him the real reason he wanted to stop being friends.

“Baby girl,” Dad said, annoyed. “This is your show, remember?”

“What?” I snapped my gaze away from Mac and gaped at Dad, then slowly, slowly remembered why we had come. “Ms. Manchester, you know my grandmother's not well.”

Ms. Manchester nodded, and her smile faltered. Her eyes drifted to my father, and filled with sympathy.

“She's been getting agitated this last week or so, and saying stuff that I think is related to Avadelle—to your mom, and to whatever happened between them. Dr. Harper told us that most feud scholars believe the fight started over
Night on Fire
, and something your mom did or didn't say in her novel. But Dr. Harper also said the fight could have started before that, and their friendship seemed more troubled right after the riot. So, I'd like to understand more about the night James Meredith came to Ole Miss.”

Ms. Manchester didn't answer right away, so I added, “We know Grandma got hurt during the riot.” I pointed to Dr. Harper, who was sitting beside her. “He also told us about that. We're hoping you know something more than the rest of us.”

She stayed quiet, but she got up, went over to a stack of books beside a shelf, took off the top one, and came back. When she put it on the table, I realized it was a bound document, not a book—and by the title, it was the paper she
had written about the Meredith riot. She opened the paper, pulled a pencil from behind her ear, and tapped the first paragraph. “I'll answer what I can, but a little context will help.”

“Oh, here we go with the context again,” Indri said, sounding miserable. Across the table from her, Dr. Harper laughed, and she closed her mouth.

Ms. Manchester tapped the bound document in front of her. “James Meredith first applied to Ole Miss in 1961. Let's trace history from that point forward.”

Excerpt from
Night on Fire
(1969), by Avadelle Richardson, page 361

Early on Saturday Morning, July 7, 1962, I woke to somebody pounding on my front door. My heart jumped straight to my throat, and I near about fell out of bed. Rain pattered on the tin roof as I pulled on my robe and slippers. It might be the police. The classes, helping with voter registration—I was going to jail.

Aunt Jessie and Abram and I hit the living room at the same time. Mama had stayed in bed, in too much pain to move. I grabbed my boy and pushed him at Aunt Jessie. “Take him to the kitchen. If it's the police, you go out back with him, and you keep going, and you don't stop until you get three states north, you hear me?”

Aunt Jessie set her mouth and nodded. She took hold of my son's hand, and she towed him out of that room, leaving me to face the door alone.

Bang. Bang. Bang.

I didn't hear anybody hollering for me to open up, but then, that's how they did sometimes, sneaky-like and mean, so you couldn't be ready or run. I straightened myself, tied my robe, and made my feet walk.

Hand shaking, I gripped the handle and pulled open the door, my eyes blinking so fast, my skin and bones already waiting to be grabbed and tackled and beaten. Instead, I found Leslie standing in the rain like a half-drowned puppy, bawling her eyes out.

I snatched hold of her and pulled her into my house, slamming the door quick behind her. “Are you out of your mind showing up here in daylight?”

“He had a heart attack, CiCi.” She sobbed, then covered her mouth. “It was a heart attack.”

“What are you even talking about?”

Leslie lowered her hand, but her eyes were barely focused. Her words sounded like so much crazy rambling. “At Byhalia. At the sanatorium where he goes, you know, after a run of drinking—Wright's? I think that's the name of it.”

Noises behind me let me know that Aunt Jessie had realized I wasn't being arrested. She and Abram
eased up beside me to face Leslie, and Aunt Jessie put a hand on my elbow.

Understanding began to dawn. I stepped back from Leslie, my breath leaving me like I'd been punched. My world got darker and sadder, and I would have cried if life had left me with any tears at all. “Oh. Oh, good Lord.”

Leslie nodded and sobbed again. “He's gone, CiCi. William Faulkner died yesterday.”

“B
Y 1961
,” M
S
. M
ANCHESTER SAID
, “Southerners felt like they were under attack from everywhere because people were insisting that the races get mixed and treated equally. James Meredith applied to Ole Miss, and his application was denied due to his race. On September 10, 1962, the United States Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ordered the University of Mississippi to enroll James Meredith, effective immediately. Three days later, Governor Ross Barnett got on television and radio and stated, ‘We must either submit to the unlawful dictates of the federal government or stand up like men and tell them never!' ”

“Sounds like he wanted people in Mississippi to riot.” Mac frowned. “Telling people to do violent things—that's not legal, is it?”

“What a nutjob,” Indri said, sitting back in her chair.

Dad quit rubbing his head long enough to pat Indri's arm. “That's how people talk when they're scared.”

“That's how people talk when they're huge idiots and want to make people panic and grab guns and start shooting,” Indri fired right back, making Dad smile at her, even though his eyes were half closed.

He held up his hand to block some of the light coming in through the windows. “You have a hippie's heart, little girl,” he said to Indri. “I knew I liked you for a reason.”

“Thanks.” She smiled back at him. “I think.”

Ms. Manchester pointed to her paper, to another underlined section. “The situation at Ole Miss with James Meredith turned into a flashpoint for the push for integration. On September 29, President John F. Kennedy issued a proclamation calling on the governing authorities and the people of the State of Mississippi to ‘cease and desist' their obstruction to Meredith's registration, and to ‘disperse and retire peaceably forthwith.' ”

I had seen videos of President Kennedy before, and I thought about that stern, solemn face, and his weird Yankee accent, and imagined him saying
cease
and
disperse
and
forthwith
.

Ms. Manchester relaxed in her chair and put both of her hands on the table, on either side of the paper she had written. “The next day, James Meredith arrived at the University of Mississippi, and a riot erupted.”

“That's insane,” Mac muttered. My father glanced at him, and Mac moved slightly to the left, giving Dad plenty of space as his aunt kept talking.

“One group of marshals took Meredith to safety in a
residence hall while another group faced the mob,” Ms. Manchester used a different voice than the one she used to tell us ghost stories. No drama. No flashlight. But I shivered anyway, because this was scarier than her spooky tales.

Dr. Harper cleared his throat. His face sagged with a huge frown, and his voice was too quiet when he said, “I knew there was trouble, that there would be much, much more, but honestly, I was deep into working on an article and didn't expect the worst to happen until school actually began.” He paused, keeping his eyes on his hands. “I remember sitting in my Bondurant office, smelling fire, smelling tear gas. When I looked at the clock, it was around nine p.m., and that's the moment I understood I was in trouble, that the campus was in complete turmoil—and that Ruth might be at risk when she came to get the books I had collected for her elementary school class. It was far too late to warn her, since we had no cell phones. Gunfire erupted, seemingly from everywhere. I remember stuffing towels around my doors and windows and huddling on the floor until morning. I prayed very hard for your grandmother's safety.”

“Ruth and my mother had been working at your grandmother's school,” Ms. Manchester said. “Like Dr. Harper, they expected the big showdown to happen the next day. By the time they reached campus, the Lyceum was under siege. A mix of students and citizens and Klan members and paramilitary groups had taken control of the Circle, and they raised the Confederate flag on the university's flagpole.
Groups of fighters roamed the campus, making trouble and attacking people.”

“I can't imagine that,” Indri said. “I mean, I know the campus like my own backyard. I've been to the Lyceum a zillion times. I knew there was a riot because of that statue of James Meredith, but I just can't see a real military attack happening right out there on the grass.”

Ms. Manchester studied her. “That's one of the reasons I made it the focus of my paper, to try to get a better understanding of what happened, and how. That night, the badly outnumbered marshals fired tear gas, but the mob fought back with rocks and Molotov cocktails and attempted to drive cars, a fire engine, even a bulldozer into the marshals' position at the Lyceum. By eleven p.m., most of the students had withdrawn, leaving Ku Klux Klan groups shooting at the marshals. More marshals came to reinforce the first group, but the Lyceum had become a field hospital. Hundreds of injured marshals were holed up inside with some journalists and medical folks, just trying to stay alive.”

She stopped to let us absorb all of that. My dad got up, went to the coffee bar, and poured himself a cup. When he came back to the tables, he tried to pay Ms. Manchester for it, but she waved him off. After Dad sat back down, his face as grim as when he tried to watch war movies, Dr. Harper told us the rest.

“I had my radio on by then,” Dr. Harper said. “President Kennedy called in the National Guard, and when that wasn't
enough, he sent in the United States Army. They started arriving in Oxford by air around one in the morning. By the next morning, two people were dead, a French reporter and a jukebox repairman. Over one hundred sixty federal marshals were injured, along with about one hundred forty other people.”

Not in our history books
, I thought.
Not in our history books, not in our history books
. I knew that the riot happened, but I didn't know the names of the two dead people. I didn't know the names of the three hundred hurt people—except for one, Ruth Beans—and this stuff happened right
here
, where I lived.

“On October 1, 1962,” Ms. Manchester said, “James Meredith officially matriculated into the University of Mississippi. By the next day, twenty-three thousand troops occupied Oxford to keep order, and Mr. Meredith had to be escorted by federal marshals until he graduated in 1963. There's a lot more to the details, like secret deals made and broken by the governor, and the fact that Ross Barnett's own son had to face down his father to do his duty as a national guardsman during that crisis.”

Indri held up her hand. “Wait. Twenty-three thousand troops? Here?”

“I have photos.” Ms. Manchester pushed back from the table and went to the stack of books. When she came back, she had a folder full of black-and-white pictures. When she spread them out, the scenes looked like something straight out of World War II—jeep after jeep, transport after transport,
packed with rifle-toting Army soldiers, rolling through streets I recognized. In one photo, gas-mask-wearing soldiers with their round helmets marched ten across, for as far as I could see. In another, troop transports crammed the football field and the area all around it.

“If that happened today,” Indri whispered, “I would freak out.”

“The Posse Comitatus Act—that's a federal law—limits when regular military troops can be deployed on U.S. soil, even to keep order,” Dr. Harper said. “So it's rare. Thank God.”

Ms. Manchester gathered up her photos and faced me, holding the stack in both hands. “The bottom line is, Ruth and my mother unknowingly drove into the middle of an armed insurrection during a time when the highway patrol wasn't restricting access to the Ole Miss campus. From what I can piece together from what Mother has told me, and from what she wrote in
Night on Fire
, she and Ruth made it to the Circle and got stopped by the mob and the tear gas. They got out and tried to get past the Lyceum to Dr. Harper's office. The mob went after Ruth, and Mom stood up to them and tricked them into backing off. They got separated, and Ruth wound up injured. Mother thought she might have fallen in a steam tunnel.”

My chest ached at the thought of Grandma hurt in the steam tunnels, lying down there in the dark and calling out for somebody to rescue her, and realizing nobody would come.
The screams from the steam tunnels. Just like that ghost story.