“This is just so unlike you,” Brenda said as we drove down Main Street.
“What do you mean?”
“You … caring so much about Negroes all of a sudden.”
I shrugged. “I’ve always cared,” I said. “I just never really did anything about it until Franklin Street. Now I can see a real way to help.”
“Have you talked to Reed about it?” she asked.
I shook my head. “It doesn’t have anything to do with Reed,” I said. “And besides, I don’t even know if that minister’ll say I can do it, yet.” We drove past the Hockley Pharmacy, owned by my father and my grandfather before him. The prominent sign in the front window cried out PRESCRIPTIONS ARE OUR BUSINESS! We passed the butcher shop and the bakery and the movie theater, where Beach Blanket Bingo was showing. Then the shops gave way to the big white houses that belonged to Round Hill’s finest.
“Don’t you think everyone should have the right to vote?” I glanced at her. She’d opened the car window a few inches and her hair blew wildly around her face.
She shrugged. “They already do, really,” she said. “It’s not your fault or mine if they haven’t bothered to register.”
“I don’t think it’s that easy,” I said.
Brenda went quiet. “You’d have weekends off, right?” she asked after a moment. “You’d still get to go to the beach with me and Reed and Garner?”
“Maybe,” I said. “I don’t know how the program is set up, exactly.”
I drove for about a mile and a half to where the road made a right-hand turn, then dropped down a short slope landing us in Turner’s Bend, and Main Street became Zion Road, the street no white person ever had a reason to travel. We might as well have landed on another planet. Nobody who looked like us—two blue-eyed blonds—ever went to Turner’s Bend. I knew our long-ago maid, Louise Jenkins, lived down here somewhere. My parents would have known where, because they sometimes visited Louise, bringing her our old teapot or toaster, blankets and towels, things we didn’t need anymore that Louise could put to good use. Daddy brought her medicine when she had the flu last year, but I’d never had a reason to visit Louise myself.
We drove past houses on the tree-lined street and Brenda rolled her window up and pressed down the lock of her door, surreptitiously, as if she didn’t want me to notice. The houses were much smaller than those we’d passed in Round Hill, but they looked well cared for, and I wondered if the people living in them were registered to vote. They had to have jobs to keep their houses up so well. I saw women and children on the porches. Men mowing their lawns. We came to a string of shops—the little downtown area. Then, suddenly, the pavement ended and we were on a dirt road. There were more houses, not as nice as those at the west end of the road. Ahead of us on the right stood a brick church with a tall steeple.
“I bet that’s the AME church,” I said, but as we neared it, I saw that the sign out front read ZION BAPTIST, and I kept on driving.
“Don’t you have an address?” Brenda looked at her watch.
I shook my head. I knew the church was on Zion Road somewhere and I figured it wouldn’t be that hard to find, but we were soon in farmland, the houses far apart now, more ramshackle, and the dirt road was rutted and dusty. Dogs and chickens roamed the yards, and men and women were hunched over in every field.
“I think we should go back,” Brenda said. “We’re out in the middle of nowhere.”
She was right and I was losing heart. I should have checked the address, but even so, none of the houses we passed had street numbers on them. A voice in my head told me to turn around. But the stronger part of me kept my foot on the gas. And then, finally, I saw a small, low-slung, one-story white building, its windows clear rather than stained glass. The slender white steeple was topped by a cross no taller than my car’s antenna. On the building itself, next to the door, a hand-painted sign read TURNER’S BEND A.M.E. CHURCH.
There was one car in the parking lot, an older-model black Plymouth. Its tires were coated with a fine tan dust, but the rest of the car sparkled in the April sunlight. I pulled into the lot and turned off my car, wiping my sweaty hands on my skirt.
“I’ll stay here,” Brenda said.
“No, you won’t,” I said, opening my door. “Come on.”
“You’re not roping me in to spending the summer out here in…”
I got out and shut my door, not wanting to hear what Brenda was going to say. But I waited for her at the side of my car, and when she realized I wasn’t going in without her, she slowly opened her door and circled the car to join me. Together we walked across the packed earth toward the church.