dismissed it, seeing in her mind’s eye his pride and awe when she presented him with the check for onethousand dollars. She went on with her research in the library, which was as Priss had said, virginally innocent of materials on the Civil Rights Movement; but Priss supplied good source material, and Mike’s own new convert’s zeal carried her high and fast.
She talked of her work to no one except, and perhaps not surprisingly, J.W. Cromie. To Bayard Sewell and her father, she said only of her immersion in the library and her upstairs bedroom, “I want it all to be a surprise.” And on the surface, this was true. Mike did not look any deeper than that. In the new momentum of her happiness, she had gratefully abandoned introspection. She might have spoken of her work to Priss, but Priss did not ask, and when Mike broached the subject, as she did once or twice at the beginning of the project, Priss had said, “We’ll talk about it when the contest is over. I don’t want to hear a word about it now. It’s very important that everything you do be totally and completely yours, Mike.”
But she talked to J.W. on many evenings, when she had finished working and Bayard had gone from his job at the drugstore straight into the Winship dining room to study at the huge, round oak table under the Searcy family chandelier. Later, around ten-thirty, they would meet briefly for cocoa in the kitchen, and John Winship would join them, and after that he would retreat to his monastic bedroom with elaborate tact and leave the living room to them and their greedy and desperate hands and mouths. But the blank hour or so between she had come to fill again with the renewed visits to J.W. in the little house behind the hedge.
J.W. said little during these visits, as was his habit, but he listened. Mike told him what her reference books and newspapers and magazines said, and what she heard on the radio and television, as if he had no access to them himself, and most important, she told him what she thought about all of it. What she thought was quixoticand idealistic in the extreme at the beginning of her work, borne impossibly high on the updraft of her revelatory fire, but gradually a lean and reasoned shape began to emerge from her exhortations, something very near a whole and viable theory about the struggle for racial equality in the South, and what might be done about it, and what might not. Though she had virtually no experience of the world outside the South and no perspective to speak of on the phenomenon of the movement, Mike had the longtime native Southerner’s almost subliminal knowledge of the day-to-day textures and realities of blacks living among whites. It lent her somewhat simplistic and passionate sentiments on the subject a convincing pragmatism.
And she had always had what Lytton would have called a way with words. She read her essay, in all its drafts and revisions, to J.W., and he said nothing, only nodded when she paused and looked at him, his face as solemn and apparently judicious as if it had been, in effect, he she was talking about. Mike’s long early years of feeling alone and exiled, of betrayal by her very birth, gave her words an urgency and homing precision that sometimes … very rarely … brought a quick smile of recognition to his face; if she had seen the smiles, she would have known that she had in J.W. a more receptive audience than any of the judges in their offices in Atlanta, but she seldom looked up from her papers when she was reading aloud to him.
She might have seen something else, too; the small flame of a newborn pride and commitment. She had no way of knowing that in her words, on those spring evenings, J.W. Cromie was seeing dancing possibilities he had never known existed. Between the two of them, the essay was conceived, nurtured, and bom. In mid-March she retyped it one last time and mailed it off.
In May she learned that she had won the competition.
Mike ran grinning and hugging
She talked of her work to no one except, and perhaps not surprisingly, J.W. Cromie. To Bayard Sewell and her father, she said only of her immersion in the library and her upstairs bedroom, “I want it all to be a surprise.” And on the surface, this was true. Mike did not look any deeper than that. In the new momentum of her happiness, she had gratefully abandoned introspection. She might have spoken of her work to Priss, but Priss did not ask, and when Mike broached the subject, as she did once or twice at the beginning of the project, Priss had said, “We’ll talk about it when the contest is over. I don’t want to hear a word about it now. It’s very important that everything you do be totally and completely yours, Mike.”
But she talked to J.W. on many evenings, when she had finished working and Bayard had gone from his job at the drugstore straight into the Winship dining room to study at the huge, round oak table under the Searcy family chandelier. Later, around ten-thirty, they would meet briefly for cocoa in the kitchen, and John Winship would join them, and after that he would retreat to his monastic bedroom with elaborate tact and leave the living room to them and their greedy and desperate hands and mouths. But the blank hour or so between she had come to fill again with the renewed visits to J.W. in the little house behind the hedge.
J.W. said little during these visits, as was his habit, but he listened. Mike told him what her reference books and newspapers and magazines said, and what she heard on the radio and television, as if he had no access to them himself, and most important, she told him what she thought about all of it. What she thought was quixoticand idealistic in the extreme at the beginning of her work, borne impossibly high on the updraft of her revelatory fire, but gradually a lean and reasoned shape began to emerge from her exhortations, something very near a whole and viable theory about the struggle for racial equality in the South, and what might be done about it, and what might not. Though she had virtually no experience of the world outside the South and no perspective to speak of on the phenomenon of the movement, Mike had the longtime native Southerner’s almost subliminal knowledge of the day-to-day textures and realities of blacks living among whites. It lent her somewhat simplistic and passionate sentiments on the subject a convincing pragmatism.
And she had always had what Lytton would have called a way with words. She read her essay, in all its drafts and revisions, to J.W., and he said nothing, only nodded when she paused and looked at him, his face as solemn and apparently judicious as if it had been, in effect, he she was talking about. Mike’s long early years of feeling alone and exiled, of betrayal by her very birth, gave her words an urgency and homing precision that sometimes … very rarely … brought a quick smile of recognition to his face; if she had seen the smiles, she would have known that she had in J.W. a more receptive audience than any of the judges in their offices in Atlanta, but she seldom looked up from her papers when she was reading aloud to him.
She might have seen something else, too; the small flame of a newborn pride and commitment. She had no way of knowing that in her words, on those spring evenings, J.W. Cromie was seeing dancing possibilities he had never known existed. Between the two of them, the essay was conceived, nurtured, and bom. In mid-March she retyped it one last time and mailed it off.
In May she learned that she had won the competition.
Mike ran grinning and hugging
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