It’s slow going. The steps are narrow and steep and Rainie can barely reach from one to the next. I hold my left hand close to her back as we climb, my right clutching the railing. Soon we find ourselves in a musty-smelling empty wooden shell. The wood is very old except for one corner where Jackson must have repaired some damage. I suddenly recall Daddy telling me that the Hockley kids had a tree house in the forest at the end of the street. Could this house possibly be that old? I laugh to myself. I wonder if Ellie would like to see this? If this is where she spent some of her childhood?
“I love this little house!” Rainie spins a circle in the middle of the room, arms outstretched. “I can bring my stuffed animals up here!”
I stop her spinning and put my hands on her shoulders. “Rainie, until you’re older, you may not come up here alone, okay? It’s way too high and those stairs are too dangerous.”
She wrinkles her nose. “How old?”
“Eight,” I say, and she stomps her foot.
“That’s too old!”
“That’s the rule. Promise me you won’t try to come up here by yourself.”
She pouts. “I promise,” she says.
“Okay. Good.”
There is a deck attached to the tree house. I crawl through the low rear doorway, but the opening is high enough for Rainie to walk through. The deck itself is clearly old, but it looks like Jackson built a railing around it, the wood new and sweet smelling. The clearing is far below us. From this height it’s even more obvious that it’s a large, man-made circle. So strange.
Rainie giggles. “I’m pretending I’m a squirrel.”
“I’m pretending I’m a bird,” I say. We chat a while longer, then make our cautious way down the steps to the ground. For a moment, I can’t find where the trail picks up. I can’t even see the part of the trail we arrived on, and I turn around in a disoriented circle before I notice a few small cuts on the trees where branches have been removed to create the entrance to the trail. I breathe a sigh of relief and Rainie and I start walking in that direction.
Rainie chatters about the “little house” the whole way home. “I can’t wait till I’m eight!” she says. “But I can go up in it with you, right?”
“Right,” I say cheerfully, but I hope she’ll soon forget about the tree house. It’s going to be a good long while before I want to walk this trail again.
Chapter 16
ELLIE
1965
It was nearly nine o’clock on Saturday night by the time all the students were packed up and ready to leave Morris Brown College for their field assignments. I’d hoped John—the only real friend I’d made during the week—might miraculously be joining me in Derby County, but he was assigned to a county in Mississippi, which I knew was what he wanted. There would be ten of us “freedom fighters” in Derby—eight guys and two girls. The only person whose name was familiar to me was Chip Stein, one of the boys I’d ridden down to Atlanta with.
Several vans showed up at the college to transport all of us to our assignments, but Paul Golden, an older graduate student from Columbia who was assigned to Derby, had a car he was letting SCOPE use for the summer. Before I knew it, I found myself in his silver Plymouth with him and two other students, ready to head back to Derby County. We agreed we’d take turns driving on the eleven-hour trip, and Paul got in behind the steering wheel to start us off. Jocelyn, the only other girl heading to Derby County, was in the front seat. She had a delicate look about her. Her pink glasses nearly blended into her fair skin, and she was slender, almost skinny. She wore her long dark hair in an ivory barrette at the back of her neck. She was twenty, like me, and even though we hadn’t met before we got into the car, she turned to me, instantly chatty and friendly—even after she heard my accent—as we waited for one of the SCOPE leaders to send us on our way. I liked her immediately. I was in the back seat with a student named Winston Madison, who didn’t say a word to any of us.
Before we took off, one of the SCOPE leaders, Dan, leaned in the car window to wish us a safe journey. When he saw me sitting next to Winston, he rearranged us, putting Winston up front with Paul, and Jocelyn in the back seat with me, so we wouldn’t have a Negro guy sitting next to a white girl in case anyone noticed us while we were on the road.
“You’re just asking for trouble if you get stopped with you next to Winston,” Dan said, once he was satisfied with the new seating arrangement. He told Winston to duck down if we passed too close to other cars until we were on the highway. Winston nodded, but looked unconcerned. He was tall and lanky, with dark eyes behind horn-rimmed glasses. I’d noticed him over the course of the week, as he seemed to like to sit near the front of the packed gym, like John and I did. He was hard to miss. While most of the boys wore tan chinos and plaid shirts, Winston always looked freshly pressed in dark slacks, a white shirt, and an occasional tie. He wore his hair close-cropped as if he’d just stepped out of a barber shop. The only time I saw him smile was when Reverend King took the microphone. He was there to work, not play. Not that the rest of us were playing, exactly, but we were energized and enthused, while Winston seemed to hold everything in, a tight spring. Only when we sang at the end of the night did he seem to relax.