Rising Tides (29 page)

The man in the middle straightened. Even from a distance, Dawn could see how pale he was. “You’re not going to shoot.”

“You’re probably right. Especially not if you start down that road the way you came.”

“Give me back my gun first.”

“I’m not a stupid man.”

The three men looked at each other. There was a moment of indecision; then, as if they’d agreed, they backed toward their trucks.

“I’m sorry,” Hugh said. “I wasn’t clear enough. Leave your pickups here. Take a nice walk down the road. Maybe it’ll cool you off.”

The men grumbled. Hugh shifted his stance, as if to take better aim. As one, the men turned and fled.

Dawn watched them go. When they were out of sight, her uncle started back toward the car. Only then did she begin to sob. She heard her car door open, and in a moment he had his arms around her.

He gave her his handkerchief; then, while she used it, he got in on his own side and started the car. The shot gun, minus its shells, was lying under a cluster of trees at the edge of the dirt lane when they drove away. They were almost to New Orleans before he spoke of what had happened. “I didn’t know it was going to get that bad this quickly. I’m sorry.”

“Why do those men hate you?”

“Nobody ever wants to be on the bottom. Those men are afraid if Negroes are treated the way they deserve, they’ll sink to the bottom in their place.”

“Those men
are
at the bottom! They’re animals.”

“Ah, but they’re God’s animals.” He smiled at her, but he sobered quickly. “I can’t take you back there again. I never would have taken you in the first place if I’d realized I was putting you in danger.”

“But what will the Narrowses and the others think if I don’t go back? They’ll think I don’t care anymore.”

“I’m afraid they’re going to have other things to think about. There’s a struggle coming. It’s in the air. What we saw today was just a skirmish, but there’ll be a hundred full-fledged battles before it’s over.”

He stared at the road, but she knew he saw the future. She felt a chill of foreboding. “Uncle Hugh, maybe you should take a church somewhere else. Those men could come after you again.”

“I can’t leave, Sunrise, but I’ll be careful.”

She never forgot his next words, because they were the only lie he ever told her.

“I promise.” He smiled again to reassure her. “I promise.”

Three years later, Dawn’s convictions hadn’t changed, but her priorities had shifted. In the early fall of 1960, she was a slender, long-legged eighteen-year-old, poised just on the edge of the beauty that five years later she would take for granted. While Elvis was asking “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” and Fred Flintstone was taking Howdy Doody’s place on television, Dawn and the other new seniors were lording it over the younger girls at Sacred Heart, the Catholic girls’ academy on Saint Charles Avenue that she had attended since kindergarten.

School had never been her favorite place. Facts bored her, while ideas started her in directions the older sisters disapproved of. Still, she had managed, without much effort, to make the grades she would need to get into one of the excellent women’s colleges in the North east, where New Orleans debutantes-in-training routinely went to broaden their education. Like her society sisters before her, she was expected to go north for a year or two, then return to Louisiana to make her debut before completing her education somewhere suitably southern.

She was like a million other teenagers, brash and challenging on the outside, sensitive and lonely where no one could touch her. She still saw her uncle and grandmother, but she spent most of her free time with her friends. She had discovered, almost accidentally, that her peers were drawn to her, and she found she liked being sought after, particularly by boys.

Her taste of popularity had brought her mother closer, too. As if she had just been waiting for her awkward caterpillar of a daughter to become a social butterfly, Cappy began to spend more time with her, passing on her considerable knowledge
of how to dress and how to behave in social situations. She even supervised a new bouffant hairdo at her own hairdresser, a man renowned for set ting and combing a decade of carnival queens.

Ferris began to escort Dawn to the requisite social events. Active in two of the leading carnival krewes, he saw to it that when the time came for Dawn to make her debut, she would have the best opportunities. She had grown to be an asset, and for a while, she flourished in his interest.

But the year had a serious side, too. In February, Negro students in Greensboro sat down at a lunch counter and asked to be served. In Little Rock a bomb exploded outside the home of one of the students who had dared to integrate formerly all-white Central High. And in Atlanta, Martin Luther King was put under arrest for perjury in the Alabama bus boycott.

Dawn kept track of events. On the rare occasions when she and her uncle were alone, they spoke about them, and she listened to the distinctly different conversations held by her father and his confederates. In September, when a small group of Negro and white college students held sit-ins at the Woolworth’s and McCrory’s stores on Canal Street to integrate the lunch counters, she silently cheered their efforts. But a larger issue was developing. As the year advanced, school integration was on everybody’s minds, particularly those, like Ferris, whose political ambitions might be affected.

Late in October, when the summer heat had finally eased and the city had stopped gasping for air “before the door” on its wide front galleries, her uncle came to see her.

She had just returned from a shopping trip with her mother, and she never accompanied Cappy anywhere without looking her best. Since the temperature had finally dipped below seventy, she wore an unbearably itchy but stylish mohair sweater and a skirt that was exactly the same shade of gold.

She stepped into her uncle’s arms for one of his warm, strong hugs. As he held her, she realized just how much she had missed him.

“I’ve got someone in the car I want you to meet,” he told her.

“Super. Are we going somewhere?”

“What are your plans for the rest of the day?”

She’d had plans. She was expecting a call from a Jesuit senior, Alan Murphy, a potential boyfriend who had risen to the surface in the small pond of the Crescent City’s socially acceptable. But Alan might learn a lesson if she was out.

She left a message with Sarah Jane, the housekeeper, and followed her uncle out to his car, where a young man waited in the back seat. She flashed him a quick smile as her uncle held the front door for her, and she turned for the introduction when Hugh got in on his side.

“Dawn, this is Ben Townsend.”

She extended her hand. He held it longer than polite ness required, and his smile warmed her in a way that her new sweater couldn’t. He was blond, and lanky enough to look uncomfortable in the cramped back seat. He was also older than she was, just edging into the zone Cappy considered dangerous, maybe even as old as twenty-two. When he smiled, his eyes crinkled at the corners and never left hers. He was altogether at ease, not cocky like Alan, but confident clear down to the bone.

She noticed the lilt of the lower Delta when he spoke. Her own accent was relentlessly New Orleans—Brooklyn with just a whisper of the South.

“That’s quite a house,” Ben said when he dropped her hand. “Was it built before the Civil War?”

“Just barely.” Dawn knew the history of every nook and
cranny of the house on Henry Clay. Her parents had moved here ten years before, from a more modest show place. “Note the arched window hoods on the two lower stories and the cornice brackets with double drops,” she said in a singsong tour guide’s voice. “Also note the octagonal cupola. These features help place the house in the architectural style known as Italianate, popularized by the pattern books of Andrew Jackson Downing, which were published between 1840 and 1860.”

“Sounds like you’ve done that before.”

“I have to assist when my mother gives tours. She shows the house to anyone who might be inclined to help my father’s career. Most of the time I’m well behaved enough not to call it the Gerritsen Mortuary.”

Ben laughed, and so did her uncle.

“Ben’s from Bonne Chance, but he’s been away at Oberlin College. He’s staying with me for a few months to write about the town for his senior thesis,” Hugh said.

She made a wry face. “Nothing’s happening in Bonne Chance. Nothing ever has or will.”

“Take a deep breath, Sun—” He paused and corrected himself. “Dawn. There’s change coming. It’s in the air.”

“Not without someone paying an awfully big price. I was down there when you were threatened with a shot gun.” Something one degree away from fear stirred inside her. “Are you saying that you and Ben are going to do the kind of things they’ve been doing here in town? Sit-ins and stuff?”

“Are you in favor of segregation?” Ben asked.

She glanced over her shoulder. “I’m not talking about my views,” she said formally. “I’m talking about my uncle’s safety, and yours, for that matter. You’ve been away, so maybe you don’t know that feelings are running strong. Maybe this just
isn’t the best time to ask people in Bonne Chance to risk their lives.”

“The best time to do anything is when feelings are running strong,” Ben said.

“The best time to get killed, too.”

Hugh put his hand on her shoulder. “I’m aware how hard we can push without putting anyone in serious danger. Trust me.”

“It’s just that I know Leander Perez and Largo Haines. You know what Largo thinks about integration. He’s dead serious about making sure Negroes stay in their place, and he’s not talking about a voting booth or a white school.” Leander Perez was the undisputed dictator of Plaquemines Parish, a man known throughout the South for his outspoken racism. Largo Haines was Bonne Chance’s on-site dictator, said by some to be next in line to Perez. Dawn had known both men since she was a small child.

“We can’t change the Haineses of this world, but we can change conditions for better people than them. At least, we can try.” Hugh’s expression was serious now. “But let’s talk about something else. Ben and I need a photographer for something we’re going to do today, and I thought of you.”

“Me?” She was perplexed. She had a simple Kodak Brownie that she used to take snapshots of friends or school field trips, but by no means was she a photographer.

“I’ve seen some of your pictures. You’re good. Very insightful.”

“Me?” she repeated.

“You’ve always had an artistic streak. You’ve just been too busy growing up to do anything much with it.”

She had always liked to draw, but early in her school career she’d seen the work of more talented students, and she had
relegated art to her leisure time. “Well, I like taking pictures, but—”

“I have a camera you can borrow, a Leica, a real little beauty. Ben can show you how to use it. Then all you have to do is come with us and snap whatever you think is worth snapping.”

She imagined Ben Townsend’s golden head bent next to hers as he showed her how to focus and compose a shot. The possibility was irresistible. “Is anybody going to be shooting at me?”

“We’re not going back to Bonne Chance. We’re going to a meeting here in town on school integration.”

“My father’s not speaking, is he?”

“Now that’s something I’d like to see.”

She understood her uncle’s answer after they parked on a street in the city’s Ninth Ward. A tan brick church with a modest steeple sat on the farthest corner. People streamed inside from every direction, most of them dark-skinned and dressed in their Sunday best. But white faces dotted the crowd, too, men and women with determined expressions and decisive footsteps.

“Changing your mind?” Ben asked as Hugh went around to open the trunk and get his camera.

“Listen, do you know something I don’t?” she asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, if I’m as prejudiced as you seem to think, no body’s told me.”

“You forget, I’m a Louisiana boy. I know your father’s voting record in the legislature.”

She felt forced to defend Ferris. “Look, if you’re from here, you ought to understand. He has to make compromises.”

“Does he?”

“He’s a lot more progressive than some of his colleagues. And he does what he can for the people in his own district, Negroes, as well as whites.”

“Ever discuss your father’s politics with your uncle?”

“No.” Dawn had always been grateful that her uncle didn’t belabor the differences between himself and Ferris. She had never wanted to choose between the two men, and she still didn’t.

“Do you know that the legislature tried to override the school board’s authority and put the governor in charge of the New Orleans schools? And you know what kind of integration your father and his colleagues are trying to stop? First grade. That’s all. Just Negro and white together in first grade. And your father voted against it. All in the name of states’ rights.”

“My father believes in states’ rights. I’m not denying that. But he
really
believes in them, not just as a ploy against integration. He believes that states have the right to make the choices that affect them.”

“And what about you?”

“I think that sometimes states can make mistakes.”

“Would you say segregation’s a pretty big mistake?”

She was beginning to think that coming along on this adventure had been a pretty big mistake, despite Ben Townsend’s physical appeal. “I’d say that you’re trying to confuse me.”

“There’s nothing confusing about it. Do you believe in segregation or don’t you?”

“It’s more complicated than that. But if you can’t handle complexity, I’ll go along with you. I don’t believe in segregation. I really and truly don’t.”

She realized that her uncle had joined them. “Ben’s a budding journalist. A master at probing questions. Sometimes too masterful.”

Ben gave a lazy grin, the force of which almost sent her reeling. “We’ve already cleared taking photographs with the organizers. But I don’t want to show you how to use the camera in there. Let’s do it now and keep this subtle.”