The Brightest Day: A Juneteenth Historical Romance Anthology

by Alexander, Kianna

  “How dare you backtalk me?” His fist slammed on the table, making the silverware jump. “I’ve given you everything a girl could want, and all I’ve asked for in return was respect.”

  “What do I want, Daddy? Tell me. Because all you’ve given me is a list of ways in which I shouldn’t embarrass you, and that’s a poor excuse for a gift.” She stared at him, fists balled at her sides.

  Her father didn’t answer, he simply pushed his plate away and left the room, as if she weren’t significant enough to argue with. Sofie stood staring after him for a moment, but the creaking of the floorboards above her meant he was in his room, gone to bed for the night.

  Her body moved on autopilot—she wrapped up their uneaten food, washed the dishes, cleaned up the crumbs. The same things she did every night. Only she had never argued with her father like this before—not out loud, at least. When he would explain the things she did wrong and how she should fix them, she’d always nodded and apologized. That was her burden to bear for dragging Mama into that fatal melee; submission was her penance, and she’d always paid it gladly. Tonight had been different in so many ways, though. She didn’t want to apologize; in fact, she was surer than ever that joining the nonviolent movement was the right choice. She hated the lingering discord, but she hated more that her father could so easily find a reason to doubt her.

  Sofie thought of the way Ivan had said, “You look the same.” He was talking about the little girl that her father had called unkempt and unruly, but he said it like it was something good. She had the oddest urge to talk to him, to ask if his parents made him feel like he was only worthwhile if he did exactly as they said. But that was foolish. Ivan wasn’t a friend she could call for support; he was nothing but a memory. And if she were smart, things would stay that way.

  She was courting enough trouble as it were, Sofie thought as she carried her weary body to bed. Thinking of calling Ivan Friedman, or doing anything else with him, simply wasn’t an option.

  Chapter 5

  Ivan had severely miscalculated how suddenly having Sofie in his life would affect him. He’d thought that being a grown man would’ve cured him of the ridiculous tightness in his stomach that used to strike whenever he thought of her. He’d thought he could keep his fantasies of how her curves would feel under his palms confined to his dreams.

  But even now, as he sat squeezed into a too-small desk at the front of the room while fellow committee members berated him on everything from his looks to his heritage, all of his focus was on her. She was at the back of the room filing papers, making lists and putting things in order. That wasn’t surprising—he remembered how she was always so careful to keep the kosher utensils from the non-kosher when she helped Miss Delia with the dishes like it was a challenge instead of a chore. Her gaze often wandered to the fracas at the front of the room. She’d caught him watching her more than once, looking away immediately every time. But he saw the way her hands clutched a pile of papers extra tightly, how she awkwardly knocked a box of pencils off the edge of the desk. He almost groaned when she went to her hands and knees, her dress tightening around her bosom and her full skirt revealing the delicate skin at the back of her knees. He wanted to run his tongue over that spot, but apparently Sofie was a good girl now, and good girls didn’t do those kinds of things.

  “This guy seems pretty immovable,” David said to the man helping him run the training, speaking as if Ivan weren’t sitting right there. “But can we risk someone who beats people up for the joy of it?”

  Two skeptical faces looked down at him.

  “Hey, cool it with that kind of talk. Boxing is a beautiful sport; it’s more than beating people up. That’s not to say it doesn’t require a certain affinity for violence,” Ivan said. He cracked his knuckles and then flashed a smile at David. He wanted to look at Sofie but wasn’t quite ready to see the disapproving expression that likely marred her face. “But the ability to dole out pain is also the ability to accept it. How many of you have ever taken a hit? Do you know how to block—not attack—how to contort your body to lessen the pain of a blow? How to take the violence that’s being done to you and accept it as an inevitability? I can show you those things if you want.”

  Ivan didn’t know what David was thinking. He might not like the idea of a random guy, and a white one at that, strolling in and presuming to exert any kind of authority. It would be the same as the Christians who sometimes showed up at his father’s temple to tell the congregation about the New Testament and how gee-golly great it was, as if his people just hadn’t thought to read past Deuteronomy.

  David’s eyes were narrowed in contemplation. “That could be useful to us. We’ll see how the rest of the training goes. Sofie, come here. Switch with Lemuel. Lem, you’re good for the sit-in. Remember to practice the meditation, deep breathing, and to reread from the selected texts beforehand.”

  Ivan tensed in his seat. He didn’t know what David was up to or why he was calling Sofie to take part in this ugliness, but he didn’t like it.

  Breathe in, breathe out. He drew on his years of training and didn’t let the way Sofie’s hips swayed as she approached the desk, or the sweet vanilla scent of her as she passed in front of him, distract him.

  Their gazes clashed again as she sat down, and Ivan felt a disconcerting sensation, similar to when an opponent had him against the ropes with no defenses. Everything about her was perfect—too perfect. Her pastel green dress, handmade so that it hugged every curve just right but didn’t offer up everything on a platter. There was a series of tiny buttons down the sides of her dress; he doubted she knew what an enticement something so prim could be.

  She was stiff in the seat beside him, and now that she was next to him she wouldn’t look his way. Her back was straight, shoulders pushed back, and every strand of her hair was pomaded down and pulled into a tight bun. He wanted to reach over, undo those damned buttons, and maybe see what was keeping those stockings up beneath her skirt if not magic. He wanted all of that, but more, he wanted her to ask him to do it.

  Sofie glanced at him warily, and Ivan hoped his face didn’t project the lecherous path his thoughts were taking. There was a flushed look about her, same as the other night. She hadn’t known who he was, but she had stared at him all night just the same. She wasn’t the first woman who’d looked at him that way, but she was the only one who made it seem like she was breaking some rule by doing so. Ivan wasn’t one for following the rules, and if she needed some guidance in that department, he’d be happy to help.

  Henrietta rushed over. “This might be too much for her, David. I can do it if you want.”

  “Honey, you know Sofie isn’t the kind of person to fight back. She’ll be fine.” David’s words were hugely insulting, but for some reason he seemed to think he was being complimentary.

  “You sure you talking about the same person, David? The Sofronia I knew had the quickest temper this side of the Mississippi,” Ivan said. He was just joking, but she glared at him.

  “The Sofronia you knew doesn’t exist any more,” she said. Her voice was sweet, but only to cover the tartness of her words, like the candies he used to get by the bag from the five and dime. “And it’s Sofie now. Sofie is nice, kind, quiet, and the last person to go around stirring up trouble.”

  Funnily enough, the bitterness underlying Sofie’s words sounded a lot like Sofronia to him.

  “I’ve been taking a physics class at college,” Ivan said, leaning closer to her because his body didn’t seem to want to do anything else. “My professor says that nothing can just stop existing. Energy can only change form. Maybe old Sofronia isn’t down for the count just yet.”

  She crossed her arms and looked up at David. “Can we get on with this? My father is expecting me home soon.” Ivan wondered why the mention of her father made her frown deepen. But training was back in session, and as much as he wished it were otherwise, he wasn’t someone she would confide in.

  David pressed up close behind them so
that his thighs were touching both of them. “What do we got here? A nigger lover, boys.”

  The words scalded through Ivan. He knew this was fake. He knew there was no way that David was being malicious, but his jaw still clenched hard.

  “Seems like this fool don’t know that black pussy is only for getting your dick wet, not gallivanting around the streets with. You from up north? Yeah, that’s it. Maybe you’re a Yankee kike who thinks he’s gonna change things down here.”

  Anger was coursing through him, but he didn’t turn and pop David in the face like his instincts spurred him to. There was a lot of waiting in boxing if you were fighting someone good, and he’d wait out this barrage like he always did, except David wouldn’t be sprawled on the floor afterward.

  He glanced at Sofie, expecting to see her teary-eyed or hunched over, but when her dark eyes turned up to his they were rich with suppressed emotions. She didn’t tremble, or acknowledge how everyone was hovering, waiting to pull her out of the scene in case it got too much for her. “Did you know that a teenage girl lost her baby last week?” she said calmly to Ivan, ignoring their fellow volunteers, who had now begun shoving them. Ivan shook his head. “She lived in my neighborhood and went to my church. The last time I saw her she was telling me how the sickness hit her at any time, not just morning, and could get so bad she couldn’t stand. One day last week, she took a seat at the front of the bus.”

  Ivan didn’t want to hear the rest of this, but Sofie seemed to be steeling herself with the story.

  “I went and visited her today. She wasn’t trying to be an activist—she just didn’t want to vomit and she couldn’t hardly move once she sat down. A police officer shoved her off the bus, beat her, and then said she was resisting. They didn’t take her to the hospital when she said she couldn’t feel her baby kicking anymore.”

  There was a silence as Sofie’s hard gaze left Ivan’s face and she looked at the other volunteers. “Now all I can think about is how a black baby can be killed just to ensure that a white person gets a seat. And it makes me angry. It makes me wish I had the power to set this world ablaze, but, lucky for some people, I don’t. So nothing anyone screams at me is worse than the knowledge that Patty’s baby was alive and now it’s dead. A beating won’t make me forget that every day of my life I have to defer to someone else just because I have more melanin. I can go to a sit-in and take whatever these people dish out, but don’t make the mistake of thinking I’ll do it because I’m nice.”

  There was something about the way the word nice scraped out of her throat that made the hairs on Ivan’s neck stand on end. She had obviously shocked the people around her, the people who were supposed to know her best, but the only thing that surprised him was that she’d waited this long to let it all hang out.

  “Wait, are you saying you want to do the sit-in, Sofie?” Henrietta clasped her hands together as if she was speaking to a child. “What will your father say?”

  “And what if you get hurt?” David asked.

  “What if I do?” Sofie asked. “It’s the chance we all take. You just sent me up here because you thought it would be funny. Because I’m so sweet.” She laughed bitterly then, and if anyone had been under that impression, they were surely changing their minds now. “The bottom line is I’m one of the best-qualified people to do this sit-in. I’m young, photogenic, and I’ve been quietly suffering fools for most of my life. I can do this.”

  “Girl, I just knew there was more to you than that Miss Prim and Proper,” Henrietta said with a relieved sigh. “Sometimes you just got that little extra edge in your voice, and I knew it couldn’t be gas all the time.”

  When Sofie’s eyes flashed back to Ivan, they were sparkling with challenge.

  The door to the common room flew in and a young man, lanky and high yellow, called out, “Come see the news. Come! It’s horrible.”

  The scenes on the small black-and-white television looked like something out of a war film. The camera panned over a mob of white men surrounding an interstate bus, ravening as they broke out windows with pipes and rocks and attacked the people inside. On the outskirts of the crowd, women dressed in skirts and dresses cheered them on, their faces contorted into masks of hatred. Some of them cradled infants in their arms. A shell-shocked news reporter tried to explain what was happening behind him. “They say that they’re going to burn them alive in the bus. Folks at home, remember that these are six members of a nonviolent protest group and there are innocent passengers who have nothing to do with the protest.” A man ran by and shoved the reporter, and then there was a loud whoosh, like the sound of a lit matchmaking contact with the gas from a stovetop burner. There were even more screams as flames shot out of the back of the bus.

  All of the air seemed to disappear from the room around them as they surrounded the small television. Ivan heard an ugly sound from next to him and saw that Lemuel, the man he had been practicing with, was fighting against the sobs rising up in his throat. He realized that the black students had moved together unconsciously, leaving a buffer zone between him and them. Between the person who looked like the attackers on television and those who looked like most of the protestors being beaten. Sofie still stood beside him. Her expression was unreadable. She didn’t cry like the man on the other side of him, but there was something infinitely sadder in the way she regarded the screen. He thought of how he’d felt when shown pictures of emaciated concentration camp survivors, knowing they had committed the same crime as him: being born Jewish. When it came to the pictures of the piles of bodies, he’d always closed his eyes, afraid of seeing some familiar feature that revealed his grandparents or his aunt Ilona or any of the other Friedmans who hadn’t escaped the machinations of the Third Reich. Seeing those images in black and white, and in the black ink tattooed on some of the worshipers at synagogue, had made everything real in a way his imagination could not.

  “They’re not allowing the Riders to exit.” The reporter talked slowly as if considering whether each word could actually be true whether his eyes were deceiving him. Ivan felt something wrap around his arm—Sofie’s hands had clasped his biceps, seemingly just to hold herself up. They all stared on as the fire engulfed the bus. Another explosion sounded and the mob cleared from around the bus, allowing the passengers to escape.

  “Shit.” Ivan didn’t know who said it. It could have been him. The moment of elation for the people escaping was short-lived as the mob closed around them and began beating and kicking and tearing; they were out for blood, and they got it. The crowd surrounded a white man with thick horn-rimmed glasses as he stumbled off the bus coughing; a man teed up with a metal pipe like he was at baseball practice and swung at his face, laughing as the man with glasses crumpled to the ground. As if on signal, the police finally moved in.

  David shut the television off. His shoulders heaved, and for a moment Ivan thought he was preparing some kind of rousing battle cry. Instead, his voice was broken when he turned to the other students and spoke. “This is what we are fighting against, brothers and sisters. Do you understand that these people see us as subhuman? Or worse: humans who might be just as good as them.” He glanced at Ivan. “They’ll see you as a race traitor. They’ll want to give it to you good.”

  “Consider me Judas, then,” Ivan said. “I’ve heard all the stories of how my people knew Kristallnacht and the purges and something even worse were coming, but everyone hoped it could be avoided somehow. Hope alone can’t change things in this country. You’re trying to do that, and I intend to help.”

  “I’m still in,” Sofie said. “I imagine that after seeing that, you’re going to have a lot more volunteers.”

  “And a lot more enemies,” Henrietta added.

  “Do not fear or be dismayed because of this great multitude, for the battle is not yours but God’s,” David said. His voice was strong again, and the vehemence of it raised goosebumps on Ivan’s arms despite his neutrality when it came to religion. “Everybody join hands,” David said,
and the students obeyed. “Let’s sing, together, and know that just as our voices are joined, our will shall be joined, too.”

  Sofie’s hand was warm in Ivan’s as the song began, but her voice was low as if she had muted herself. He wanted to lean down to hear her, but just being able to touch her was enough. “Let the circle, be unbroken, by and by, by and by.”

  Ivan hadn’t known what he’d expected when he volunteered, but as the words of his new compatriots mingled with his own deep voice, he was reminded of the sense of connection and unity he only experienced on the high holy days or on those trips to synagogue that had grown few and far between.

  “We’ll meet here again tomorrow night,” David said. He pulled Henrietta close, and they swayed there, supporting each other. “Would you mind leading a session at tomorrow night’s meeting?” David asked. “I would appreciate it. Fisticuffs aren’t my forte.”

  Ivan nodded. The pride that surged through him could have been considered a sin, but then again even the Talmud conceded that a scholar must possess at least an eighth of an eighth of pride in his studies. It wasn’t often that people looked at what he had spent years studying, as diligently as any Torah scholar, as something useful to the greater good. His own father compared him to a common thug, as if the Jewish boxers who’d dominated the sport for years had meant nothing. But now Ivan had a chance to help people, and one person in particular.

  Sofie hugged her arms around herself, her earlier vim and vigor gone. “I—I can’t come tomorrow night. I have to have dinner with my father. He’s not happy about me coming here and…” She shrugged, and her full mouth compressed into a thin line as she held back some emotion. Ivan didn’t know what words she struggled for in trying to describe what was happening with her father, only that he felt them, too.