“Are you sure they don’t just mean deeper south?” Mama asked. “You know, Alabama and Mississippi where they have all the trouble? Not North Carolina.”
“Sounds like they mean here too,” Daddy said, “since this Filburn fella’s church is in Turner’s Bend.” Turner’s Bend was the town right next to Round Hill, where we lived.
“This sounds exactly like the sort of thing Carol would’ve done, doesn’t it?” Mama asked.
We all automatically turned our heads to look at the empty rocking chair by the fireplace, where Aunt Carol always sat. Cancer took her from us the year before and I don’t think anyone had sat in that chair since. I felt her loss every minute of every day. Aunt Carol was the only person in the family who seemed to understand me. Or, as she told me one time, I was the only person who seemed to understand her.
“Carol would’ve hopped right on that bandwagon,” Mama continued, and Daddy rolled his eyes.
“That woman never met an underdog she didn’t like,” he said.
Buddy set down the part he’d been fiddling with. “I don’t like the sound of that SCOPE thing one bit,” he said. “What gives anybody from the North the goddamned right to come down here and—”
“Buddy!” Mama said. “Your mouth!”
“Sorry, Mama, but this gets my goat,” he said. “Let them register if they want to, it’s no skin off my teeth, but we don’t need hundreds of crazy white kids from New York or wherever descending on Derby County.”
He and my parents kept up the conversation, but something happened to me in the few minutes it took Daddy to read the article. For the past two years, I’d been a reporter and photographer for the campus newspaper at UNC. I’d covered the protests as students tried to get the downtown restaurants and shops to desegregate. At first, I wrote my articles objectively, just reporting the facts, but when I proudly showed Aunt Carol one of them, she frowned. “I want you to think about what you’re writing, Ellie,” she said, in that New York accent she’d never lost despite her twenty years in the South. “Think about what you write not as a Southerner. Not as a Northerner, either. Think about it as a human being.”
I knew my beautiful blond aunt had long been a champion of civil rights. A year earlier, she’d taken part in the March on Washington, where she heard Martin Luther King, Jr., speak. It was all she could talk about for weeks afterward, making my mother roll her eyes and my father lay down the law, telling her that she could not go on and on about it at the dinner table. Only in the last couple of years had I begun to understand her passion, and talking to her about what was happening on campus changed my work on the newspaper. She made me dig deeper and I began to view events with my heart as well as my head. As I continued to interview the students, their passion and commitment—their belief in the rightness of what they were doing—made sense to me. Those students, white and Negro, put themselves on the line, body and soul. They were steadfastly nonviolent, not even fighting back when abused by passersby or dragged away by the police, and my articles about the protests grew more sympathetic toward them even without me realizing it.
Aunt Carol met Uncle Pete, my father’s brother, when she was an army nurse and he was a soldier. After the war they moved in with us. I was only a year old at the time, so she was always a part of my life. Sometimes, the best part. She left discipline to my parents, so I knew I could tell her anything—almost—without getting in trouble. Uncle Pete died when I was ten, but Aunt Carol remained with us. She was blunt; I never needed to guess what she was thinking. As I grew older and became aware of the prickly relationship she had with my parents—especially with my mother—I wondered why she didn’t move back to New York. Toward the end of her life, when cancer was stealing her away from us, I talked to her about it. “Why did you stay with us?” I asked as I wrapped her shawl tighter around her bony shoulders. She was always cold then, even in the summer. “You never loved North Carolina.”
“No, but I loved you,” she said. “And I think you needed me. I didn’t want you to turn into your mother.”
“What do you mean?” My mother was all right. She wasn’t particularly warm but she was smart. She was a librarian in the Round Hill library.
“She may spend her life around books, but her mind is shuttered closed,” Aunt Carol said. “Think about it. There’s a reason you share what you’re writing for the school paper with me and not with her, isn’t there?”