Rising Tides (30 page)

Hugh saw someone he knew and moved away to talk to him. Ben leaned against the hood of her uncle’s Ford Falcon. “We’d better get moving, or the rally will be over before we get there. Let me show you what you need to know.”

She positioned herself beside him, close enough that the hem of her skirt brushed his dark slacks. She was acutely aware of his presence, and that was new to her. She was used to feeling in control of a situation when she was with a boy. But Ben wasn’t a boy.

“Have you ever used a thirty-five-millimeter be fore?” he asked. Something almost like resignation passed over his face when she answered no. The moment was obviously less enchanting for him than it was for her. She felt the years that separated them, and she saw the scene from his perspective. He was already a man, and she was an awkward high school senior whose grasp of the camera and life in general was shallow and unformed.

“I learn quickly,” she said, thrusting her chin a little higher. “Just show me the basics.”

He did, in five excruciatingly complicated minutes. The harder she concentrated, the more difficult it all seemed. If there had been a certain charm in snapping photographs with her Brownie, that charm was absent now. This was work, and her chances of getting every thing right—light meter, focusing, reloading—were close to zero.

“You’ll do fine.” Ben handed the camera to her. “Just relax and enjoy the process.”

“How important are these pictures?”

“I think your uncle just wanted you to be here.”

She felt cheated, as if he’d just told her that
she
didn’t matter, either. “What if by some odd chance I take a de cent picture? What then?”

He almost looked contrite. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—”

“What then?” she repeated.

“I’ll use it. I’m working on an article about integration in Louisiana. Freelance. I’ll submit it with my material if it’s good enough.”

“Good. Plan to leave some room.”

He grinned. “There’s a little of Father Hugh in you after all, isn’t there?”

“No. I don’t owe anything I am to anyone else.” She looked him straight in the eyes, even though that took a great deal of nerve. “I’m me. And that’s plenty good enough.” She took the camera from his hands and clutched it to her chest.

“Okay, Dawn ‘One-of-a-Kind’ Gerritsen, then let’s go get some pictures.”

Without another word or a glance at him, she followed the crowds into the church.

O
f the two dozen or so photographs that Dawn took that day, a dozen were out of focus or poorly lit, and five were remarkable. Her favorite was a small child sleeping on her mother’s shoulder. The gold hoop in the mother’s earlobe softly brushed the little girl’s baby-plump cheek as she dreamed her childhood dreams. In the background, at the front of the church, a robed choir sang the dreams of adulthood.

Ben claimed the photograph was too sentimental and refused to use it. But he was satisfied with another, one of her uncle clasping hands with the Negro preacher of the church where the rally had been held. Dawn had captured both men wearing identical expressions of respect and shared concern. No one in the church had been fooled by the outpouring of faith and energy. The road ahead was rocky. Not everyone present would live long enough to reach the final destination.

Dawn saw Ben on the day he came to show her the photographs, and again when he stopped by to bring her some blackberry jam that was a gift from Beulah Narrows. She had just come home from school, and he caught her in her uniform. She felt like a ten-year-old in plaid and saddle shoes.

He refused to come inside. Instead, he leaned against a pillar on her narrow front gallery. His blue oxford-cloth shirt was rolled back at the wrists, and fine golden hairs glistened against the tanned skin of his forearms. She had never paid attention to those kinds of details about the boys she dated, but everything about Ben seemed unique and compelling.

“I remember when I was in high school,” he said.

“It’s not exactly a feat to remember back a few years,” she said, with as much starch in her voice as in her white blouse. “You’re not an old man yet.”

“I feel old sometimes, when I see what’s going on in my hometown.”

“What’s different? Bonne Chance has always been the way it is.”

“I’m different. I’m not blind anymore. ‘Was blind, but now I see.’” He smiled at the puzzled look on her face. “From a good old southern hymn. You Catholics miss out.”

“You’re not Catholic?”

“Nope. Baptist, born and dunked. My daddy was a preacher, and my mama played the organ every Sunday morning. I won a black Bible with my name in gold every summer for bringing the most sinners to vacation Bible school.”

“Then what are you doing working with a priest?”

“Getting some real religion.”

She understood that he wasn’t talking about conversion, but about something more elemental. “My uncle’s the best man I know.”

“Yeah. Look around in the next few months and see how many men are like him.” He lifted a hand in salute and went down her front steps a jaunty two at a time.

“Why are you different now? What happened to change you?” she called after him.

He shot her a parting grin. “I grew up.”

Later she wondered if maybe he’d been trying to share something important with her, but at the time all she heard was that he thought
she
was a child. For the rest of the afternoon she flounced and sulked in the privacy of her own room.

Dawn was increasingly torn between two worlds, one full of possibilities, one the familiar and relatively narrow world of her childhood. Perhaps if her eyes hadn’t been opened by her uncle she might have found it easier to drift along. Her friends were perfectly con tent with their parents’ plans for them, and at times Dawn was content, too. But other times she felt hemmed in and, at the same time, shut out.

She was different from her classmates. She knew that the world beyond the safe confines of privilege was a different and sometimes frightening place. She re solved to keep her feelings close to her heart and her eyes wide open.

But keeping her eyes open meant that she had to be conscious of everything that was happening around her. The assembly at the church had made her more aware of the growing tension over school desegregation. The school board had decided that two schools in the city’s Ninth Ward would be integrated first. The outcry had been loud and forceful. As the time for the children to attend their first day drew closer, the tension deepened.

Hugh came to see Cappy the day that the state legislature, in the name of states’ rights, passed twenty-nine last-ditch bills designed to stop desegregation. Dawn had never seen her uncle so angry, not even the day of the confrontation near the Narrows home. He greeted her in the hallway, but he’d come to see her mother.

From a seat on the stairs, she listened to their argument in the parlor. She was sure everyone, including the gardener edging
their walkway, could hear them. By the time she had settled herself, her uncle was already in full swing.

“Don’t tell me you agree with Ferris, Cappy. You don’t have to swallow his bigotry like a box of Valentine candy.”

Dawn heard a tinkle. She could imagine her mother calmly pouring herself a drink. Or perhaps not so calmly, because when she spoke, her mother’s voice had the edge to it that always made Dawn want to pack and head back to her grandmother’s house.

“If I agree with Ferris, it’s because I agree with Ferris. The only thing I’m swallowing is good Scotch, and that only because you’re making such a fuss!”

“Don’t you hate it when somebody fusses? You have to think.”

“I don’t have to stay here and listen to this.”

“Somebody has to stand up to Ferris. If you can’t, who’s going to be strong enough? Do you know what he said today in support of one of those bills? He said if Negro boys went to school with white girls, every white father in New Orleans was going to have to stand outside the classroom doors with shotguns! He says those things to get ahead. Do you think he really cares who goes to public school with whom? Not as long as his own daughter can stay in that expensive white hot house on Saint Charles.”

“What an opinion for a priest to have about a Catholic school.”

“Right now it’s in Ferris’s interest to be a bigot, so he’s one step away from the cavemen running the Citizens’ Council. He’s even slated to speak at one of their rallies next week.”

“Ferris says what he has to say to stay in office.”

“And what good does he do there? Does he sponsor
legislation to lift this state out of the Dark Ages? Has he voted for anything that would benefit the poor?”

“Not everyone feels a need to slap mosquitoes and hold hands with colored people down in the Delta, Hugh. Your mother produced one martyr when she had you. That’s probably all any family’s entitled to.”

Silence stretched so long that Dawn began to wonder if her uncle had left by one of the French doors leading out to the garden. But when he finally spoke, she could tell by his tone, which was quieter and more considered, that he had been thinking about her mother’s words.

“Cappy, all you’ve ever wanted is for somebody to tell you what you could be. You’ve wanted to know what was good and fine about yourself, but nobody’s ever told you.”

“Aren’t you being a little sentimental?”

“Are you trying to make Ferris love you by not speaking out? Can’t you see he never will, not the way you need, no matter what you do for him? Can’t you see you have to do what’s right, no matter what he thinks?”

“It’s right for me to stay out of something I know nothing about.”

“You know everything you need to. The schools are going to be integrated, no matter what people like Ferris do or say. Come with me when they are. Other women are willing to help, women no different from you. Join them. Help them escort the white children who try to stay in school to their classes. Stand outside the door with me. You have it in you.”

“You’re mistaken if you think I want colored children in school with white.”

“When those children are sent to a white school, they’ll be
hated for no reason. They won’t understand it. I can’t understand it. You can’t, either.”

“I’m not Joan of Arc.”

“No, you’re Dawn’s mother, and you’re more sensitive and compassionate than anyone else believes.”

“I just don’t want to be involved in something that has nothing to do with me.”

“Then at the very least stay home. If you won’t come with me, don’t go to the rally with Ferris.”

Another silence followed. Dawn wished she could see her mother’s face. During the course of the conversation, Cappy’s voice had grown less brittle. In fact, Dawn was surprised by the warmth in it. She wondered if her uncle really did see things in her mother that she had never witnessed herself.

“I won’t go to the rally,” she said at last.

“Thank you.”

“But I don’t want you taking Dawn with you when the schools are integrated, either. She thinks you walk on water. She’d go anywhere you said, and I don’t want her hurt.”

“Neither do I.”

Angry now, Dawn wondered if they would seal their pact with a handshake. She knew the conversation was winding down, and she wanted to confront her uncle outside. She intended to wait for him beside his car, but as she approached, she saw that Ben was sitting in the passenger seat.

She almost turned around. She didn’t want anyone to make her feel gauche and childish today, even if her mother and uncle thought they could decide what role—or lack of one—she would play in the events unfolding in the Ninth Ward.

“Hi,” Ben said. He looked preoccupied and faintly annoyed that she was about to disturb his thoughts.

His attitude fueled the flames. “Look, don’t mind me. I’m
waiting for my uncle, and I don’t have any interest in a conversation with you, anyway.”

“Whoa. What brought that on?”

“I wish someone would take a good look at me. Just once. I’m intelligent and reasonably well educated, even if Uncle Hugh doesn’t approve of my alma mater. I have opinions of my own, and I’ll make my own decisions.” She narrowed her eyes as he got out of the car. “And I don’t need you to make me feel like a little kid, Ben Townsend. I’m not a little kid, even if I haven’t reached the exalted age of twenty-three, or whatever you are.”

“Twenty-two.”

“It doesn’t matter.” She glared at him.

He smiled—a confident older-man smile. “I’ll bet quite a few someones have taken a good look at you.”

“You’re not listening. I’m not talking about boys. I’m talking about someone taking me seriously. Are you so decrepit you can’t remember what it feels like to be my age?”

He sobered. “I’m sorry.”

“You look at me, and what do you see? A teenager who just thinks about her hair and whether she’ll get an
A
in trigonometry? I’ve got feelings about what’s happening here. I’ve got feelings about those little kids and what they must be going through. And I don’t want any one telling me what I can and can’t do about them.”

“Who’s trying to?”

“Do you know my father’s going to be speaking at a Citizens’ Council rally?” He grimaced.

“Well, nobody bothered to tell me,” she said.

“So how do you feel?”

“Angry.” The anger began to evaporate as soon as she named
it. “Confused. How could he do something like that? Almost all our politicians are saying they’re for segregation, but not all of them are going to speak at that rally.”

“I bet you feel pulled between your uncle and your father.”

“Of course I do. I love them both.”

“And now you have to make a choice.”

“No. No, I’m never going to choose between them. This isn’t about which one I love better. It’s about what I feel.” She put her fist to her chest. “It’s about who I am, not who they are.”

“That’s very mature.”

She knew she had passed some unspoken test by the admiration in his eyes. But this wasn’t about Ben’s admiration. It really
was
about her, and what she believed. “I’m going to talk to my father,” she said. “I’m going to talk to him and beg him not to go to that rally next week.”

“Your father’s in Baton Rouge,” said a voice from be hind her.

Dawn faced her uncle. He looked tired, and older than she had ever seen him. “I know. But he’s coming home tomorrow.” She hugged him for a moment; then she backed away. “You had no right to promise my mother you wouldn’t take me with you when the schools are integrated, Uncle Hugh. That’s my decision to make. I don’t like you or my mother deciding things for me.”

“She loves you. She’s worried about you.”

“I guess the mothers of those little kids who are going to the white schools for the first time are worried about them, too.”

“I forget sometimes that you’re nearly grown up.”

She relented a little. “Well, sometimes I make that easy.”

“We have to go.” He touched her shoulder. “If you talk to your father tomorrow, things may not go your way.”

“Daddy’s a better man than you think he is.”

He didn’t reply.

“Good luck,” Ben said. “Just don’t forget that this is about you, just like you said.”

By the next morning, she had almost lost her nerve. She had never confronted either of her parents before. She was terrified to make anyone angry at her. Her relationship with her mother was held together by tenuousties. Her relationship with Ferris was stronger, but it, too, depended on her playing a role. She had tried to be the presentable, congenial daughter he wanted. Now, if she confronted him, she would be neither.

She got ready for school an hour earlier than usual and left the house after telling Sarah Jane she would head for school from her grandmother’s. She found Aurore in her garden. White and gold chrysanthemums bordered the rose bed, which was a radiant rainbow of blooms after summer’s heat. Aurore hovered over a scarlet tea rose with sharp pruning shears.

“What are you doing?” Dawn asked.

“Goodness, you startled me, sweetheart.” Aurore opened her arms for a hug. Dawn stepped into them easily.

As her grandmother held her, Dawn realized how fragile she had become. Aurore was seventy-two, but she had always had the energy of a much younger woman. She still went to the Gulf Coast offices each morning, although her staff and board of directors took care of the lion’s share of the work. In the past three years, Gulf Coast had added more than a dozen new common-carrier cargo liners to its fleet, all capable of twenty knots. A new class of bigger, faster ships was planned, with Aurore’s hearty endorsement.