2
For breakfast, George Jakes’s mother made him blueberry pancakes and bacon with grits on the side. ‘If I eat all this I’ll have to wrestle heavyweight,’ he said. George weighed a hundred and seventy pounds and had been the welterweight star of the Harvard wrestling team.
‘Eat hearty, and give up that wrestling,’ she said. ‘I didn’t raise you to be a dumb jock.’ She sat opposite him at the kitchen table and poured cornflakes into a dish.
George was not dumb, and she knew it. He was about to graduate from Harvard Law School. He had finished his final exams, and was as sure as he could be that he had passed. Now he was here at his mother’s modest suburban home in Prince George’s County, Maryland, outside Washington, DC. ‘I want to stay fit,’ he said. ‘Maybe I’ll coach a high-school wrestling team.’
‘Now that would be worth doing.’
He looked at her fondly. Jacky Jakes had once been pretty, he knew: he had seen photographs of her as a teenager, when she had aspired to be a movie star. She still looked young: she had the kind of dark-chocolate-coloured skin that did not wrinkle. ‘Good black don’t crack,’ the Negro women said. But the wide mouth that smiled so broadly in those old photos was now turned down at the corners in an expression of grim determination. She had never become an actress. Perhaps she had never had a chance: the few roles for Negro women generally went to light-skinned beauties. Anyway, her career had ended before it began when, at the age of sixteen, she had become pregnant with George. She had gained that careworn face raising him alone for the first decade of his life, working as a waitress and living in a tiny house at the back of Union Station, and drilling him in the need for hard work and education and respectability.
He said: ‘I love you, Mom, but I’m still going on the Freedom Ride.’
She pressed her lips together disapprovingly. ‘You’re twenty-five years old,’ she said. ‘You please yourself.’
‘No, I don’t. Every important decision I’ve ever made, I’ve discussed with you. I probably always will.’
‘You don’t do what I say.’
‘Not always. But you’re still the smartest person I’ve ever met, and that includes everyone at Harvard.’
‘Now you’re just buttering me up,’ she said, but she was pleased, he could tell.
‘Mom, the Supreme Court has ruled that segregation on interstate buses and bus stations is unconstitutional – but those Southerners just defy the law. We have to do something!’
‘How do you think it’s going to help, this bus ride?’
‘We’re going to board here in Washington and travel south. We’ll sit at the front, use the whites-only waiting rooms, and ask to be served in the whites-only diners; and when people object we’re going to tell them that the law is on our side, and they are the criminals and troublemakers.’
‘Son, I know you’re right. You don’t have to tell me that. I understand the Constitution. But what do you think will happen?’
‘I guess we’ll get arrested sooner or later. Then there’ll be a trial, and we’ll argue our case in front of the world.’
She shook her head. ‘I sure hope you get off that easy.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You grew up privileged,’ she said. ‘At least, you did after your white father came back into our lives when you were six years old. You don’t know what the world is like for most coloured folk.’
‘I wish you wouldn’t say that.’ George was stung: he got this accusation from black activists, and it annoyed him. ‘Having a rich white grandfather pay for my education doesn’t make me blind. I know what goes on.’
‘Then maybe you know that getting arrested might be the least bad thing that could happen to you. What if things get rough?’
George knew she was right. The Freedom Riders might be risking worse than jail. But he wanted to reassure his mother. ‘I’ve had lessons in passive resistance,’ he said. All those chosen for the Freedom Ride were experienced civil rights activists, and they had been put through a special training programme that included role-playing exercises. ‘A white man pretending to be a redneck called me nigger, pushed and shoved me, and dragged me out of the room by my heels – and I let him, even though I could have thrown him out the window with one arm.’
‘Who was he?’
‘A civil rights campaigner.’
‘Not the real thing.’
‘Of course not. He was acting a part.’
‘Okay,’ she said, and he knew from her tone that she meant the opposite.
‘It’s going to be all right, Mom.’
‘I’m not saying any more. Are you going to eat those pancakes?’
‘Look at me,’ George said. ‘Mohair suit, narrow tie, hair close-cropped, and shoes shined so bright I could use the toecaps for a shaving mirror.’ He usually dressed smartly anyway, but the Riders had been instructed to look ultra-respectable.
‘You look fine, except for that cauliflower ear.’ George’s right ear was deformed from wrestling.
‘Who would want to hurt such a nice coloured boy?’
‘You have no idea,’ she said with sudden anger. ‘Those Southern whites, they—’ To his dismay, tears came to her eyes. ‘Oh, God, I’m just so afraid they’ll kill you.’
He reached across the table and took her hand. ‘I’ll be careful, Mom, I promise.’
She dried her eyes on her apron. George ate some bacon, to please her, but he had little appetite. He was more anxious than he pretended. His mother was not exaggerating. Some civil rights activists had argued against the Freedom Ride idea on the grounds that it would provoke violence.
‘You’re going to be a long time on that bus,’ she said.
‘Thirteen days, here to New Orleans. We’re stopping every night for meetings and rallies.’
‘What have you got to read?’
‘The autobiography of Mahatma Gandhi.’ George felt he ought to know more about Gandhi, whose philosophy had inspired the civil rights movement’s non-violent protest tactics.
She took a book from on top of the refrigerator. ‘You might find this a little more entertaining. It’s a bestseller.’
They had always shared books. Her father had been a literature professor at a Negro college, and she had been a reader from childhood. When George was a boy he and his mother had read the Bobbsey Twins and the Hardy Boys together, even though all the heroes were white. Now they regularly passed each other books they had enjoyed. He looked at the volume in his hand. Its transparent plastic cover told him it was borrowed from the local public library. ‘To Kill a Mockingbird,’ he read. ‘This just won a Pulitzer Prize, didn’t it?’
‘And it’s set in Alabama, where you’re going.’
‘Thanks.’
A few minutes later he kissed his mother goodbye, left the house with a small suitcase in his hand, and caught a bus to Washington. He got off at the downtown Greyhound station. A small group of civil rights activists had gathered in the coffee shop. George knew some of them from the training sessions. They were a mixture of black and white, male and female, old and young. As well as a dozen or so Riders, there were some organizers from the Congress of Racial Equality, a couple of journalists from the Negro press, and a few supporters. CORE had decided to split the group in two, and half would leave from the Trailways bus station across the street. There were no placards and no television cameras: it was all reassuringly low-key.
George greeted Joseph Hugo, a fellow law student, a white guy with prominent blue eyes. Together they had organized a boycott of the Woolworth’s lunch counter in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Woolworth’s was integrated in most states but segregated in the South, like the bus service. But Joe had a way of disappearing just before a confrontation, and George had him pegged as a well-meaning coward. ‘Are you coming with us, Joe?’ he asked, trying to keep the scepticism out of his voice.
Joe shook his head. ‘I just came by to say good luck.’ He smoked long mentholated cigarettes with white filter tips, and he was twitchily tapping one on the edge of a tin ashtray.
‘Pity. You’re from the South, aren’t you?’
‘Birmingham, Alabama.’
‘They’re going to call us outside agitators. It would have been useful to have a Southerner on the bus to prove them wrong.’
‘I can’t, I have stuff to do.’