He shook his head as if he knew perfectly well how he’d just stunned me. “Tell me about your people,” he said, folding his arms across his chest.
I shifted on the hard pew. “Well, we go back a few generations in Derby County,” I said. “I live on Hockley Street in Round Hill in the same house my father and grandfather were born in. My father’s a pharmacist and he owns—”
“Hockley?” He interrupted me. “Your daddy owns Hockley Pharmacy?”
“Yes.”
His whole countenance softened. He unfolded his arms, stretching his left arm along the back of the pew and turning more fully toward us. I hadn’t realized how tightly wound he’d been until he relaxed, and for the first time I thought his smile was genuine.
“Your daddy’s a good man,” he said. “Sometimes our own pharmacy can’t get what we need and Doc Hockley comes through for us. A real good man.”
“He is,” I said. My father wasn’t a doctor, but I knew a lot of people referred to him as “Doc Hockley.” I hadn’t known, though, that he helped out the folks in Turner’s Bend. Maybe Daddy might understand why I wanted to work for SCOPE.
“He helped my own little daughter one time when she came down with something,” Reverend Filburn continued. “Carried a special cough syrup all the way down here for her.”
“That sounds like him,” I said, touched and proud.
“You have to understand something … Eleanor, is it?” Reverend Filburn asked.
“Ellie. Yes.”
“I’ll tell you plain,” he said. “I didn’t trust you when you walked in here. Not sure I trust you even now. White girl, walking into a Negro church asking to help folk vote? Not an everyday occurrence.”
I nodded.
“We’ve already had threats and SCOPE hasn’t even started,” he said. “My church has had threats. I’ve had threats. My wife and children have had threats. I saw you walk in and I wondered if you’re here to plant a bomb in a pew. Understand?”
“Wow,” I said.
“For all I knew when you walked in here, you could have been part of the Klan, or—”
“The Klan!” I laughed.
“Not as improbable as it sounds,” he said. “The Civil Rights Act brought them out of the woodwork last year, and a Voting Rights Act is only going to make them double their efforts. Right now, North Carolina has more Klan members than all the other states put together.”
“I didn’t know that.” I’d been startled last summer to see a small procession of Klan members, both men and women, dressed in their white satin robes and tall pointed hats, strolling—unmasked, proudly—on the sidewalk through downtown Round Hill. An anomaly, I’d thought then, and when I mentioned them to my mother, she said, “Oh, it’s more of a social club these days, honey. People like to belong to something.” To me, the group had looked silly. To a Negro person, I imagined there was nothing at all silly in the sight of them.
“They’re not as … violent here, though, right?” I asked.
“Don’t bet your life on that.” It sounded like a warning. He glanced at Brenda, then back at me. “If you work for SCOPE, you’ll have to be watchful. Every place you go. Everything you do,” he said. “The thing the Klan hates more than a Negro is a white person who tries to help a Negro. Have you really thought this through?” he asked.
“I … I think so,” I stammered.
“I don’t think you have. You thought you’d be able to sleep at home with Mama and Daddy every night. You need to understand what you’ll be doing. You might have to walk five, ten miles a day canvassing, trying to get people to come out to vote when they have twenty good reasons not to.”
“I’ll do anything you need,” I promised. I felt Brenda’s eyes on me. She probably thought I’d lost my mind.
“The other thing.” He shifted his position on the pew again till he was facing me more directly. “The way I distrusted you when you walked in here? No one’ll trust you. Not the people you’ll be trying to help and not even the other students. The Northern students. They’ll be suspicious of you.”
“You could put me in an office if you need to hide me away,” I said. “But let me help. Please.”
“You need to take some time to think it over.”
“Maybe that’s a good idea.” Brenda spoke up for the first time, nudging my arm. I ignored her, but she continued, speaking to the minister. “I don’t understand why you’d bring in white Northern students to do this,” she said. “It doesn’t make any sense.”