We Are All Good People Here

by Susan Rebecca White

  “In lieu of knowledge you gave me a downy bed

  to sleep on, to weep on, to keep on

  telling myself that it didn’t matter

  when hands—not my own—plowed me

  the seed had long been sown

  I was to swallow the burden as my own

  You wonder now why I can’t go home?

  Atone. Atone.”

  Chapter 23

  MISS EUGENIA’S ROOM

  Roanoke, Virginia, 1993

  Anna reads four poems in total, though none that move Daniella so much as the first one. Applause sounding around them, Anna makes her way back to Daniella and Sarah. Daniella hugs her goddaughter, exclaiming, “You were fabulous!” And then, as Anna takes the seat beside her and the next student-poet makes her way to the podium, Daniella whispers, “I’m going to slip out and find a restroom.”

  She doesn’t actually need a bathroom, just air. She can’t breathe in the tightly packed Blue Room, hemmed in by both students and ghosts. She walks to the main door of University Hall and lets herself out into the night, a little chilly, though it’s only September. She gazes at the mountains that surround the campus. She always thought of the mountains as nurturing, enfolding the students in a gentle embrace. She remembers Eve declaring, after they had both decided to transfer to Barnard, that Belmont was nothing more than a fancy prison for girls, the mountains standing guard. She thinks of Warren St. Clair, locked inside a metal cage within an honest-to-God prison, just one state away.

  Over the course of the past decade, she has spent a lot of time visiting men who live in metal cages. Most of their hopes are humble. They want to remain living inside of their cells rather than be escorted in chains to their death. She met Bruce while working on the case of Malcolm Jones, a man sentenced to die whose IQ was 67. The ACLU had partnered with the SCHR in the lawsuit against the state of Georgia, and they sent Bruce down from D.C. She was drawn to Bruce immediately: his runner’s build, his precision of manner and dress—cultivated by his time in the armed forces—his deadpan sense of humor. On their first date he solemnly stated that he only dated women who also worked for organizations with letters for names.

  On impulse, she walks toward Monty House, the brick Colonial where she and Eve first met, thirty-one years ago almost to the day. It looks more like the home of some wealthy southern landowner than it does a dormitory. But that was the point, wasn’t it? Monty House reflected the sort of home Belmont girls grew up in and the sort of home they would one day be in charge of managing, financed by their husbands, all doctors and lawyers and captains of industry. At least that was the expectation back when she was a student. Pushing on the front door, she realizes that it’s locked. There is a punch pad where the doorbell should be, but she doesn’t know the code. She smiles inwardly, thinking that she never really knew the code at Belmont. As she contemplates whether or not to push the “Help” button, the door swings open and two pretty girls tumble out, laughing, one wearing a sweatshirt with “Fleur” embroidered across its front. She has blond hair pulled into a long, straight ponytail and the clearest skin Daniella has ever seen on a teenager. The other is dark haired and petite, wearing a T-shirt from the Salty Dog Cafe in Hilton Head. Daniella thanks the Fleur for holding open the door. “Yes, ma’am,” she replies.

  Surely Anna would have become like this pretty girl, had life not taken a different turn.

  And now Daniella is back inside. There is the portrait of Georgina March, and there is the grandfather clock, ticking away. The Oriental rug looks to be the same one that graced the foyer when she was a student, though she now knows to refer to it as “Persian” and not “Oriental.” And surely the rug has been rewoven, mended, because she remembers it being thinner and more tattered, a sign of old money. Or at least, that’s what her mother used to say, her mother who was always a little breathless over such things.

  The air is still redolent of orange oil.

  Her first thought is to head up the front staircase, to try to take a peek in her old room. Instead, she pivots, walks to the door leading to the basement stairs. There are no longer maids living in the basements, thank God, so who or what now occupies the space?

  It’s dark, but she finds the light switch by feeling along the wall, and after a moment long fluorescent bulbs flicker on from the ceiling. She hears the tumbling of laundry, and sure enough, there are several coin-operated machines in the room adjacent to what had once been Miss Eugenia’s. Breath held, she looks in Miss Eugenia’s old room. There are several wooden desks stacked inside, along with a twin mattress propped against the wall and countless cardboard boxes sealed up with packing tape. She turns on the bare bulb in the center of what is now, clearly, a storage space. There is no window. How could she forget that Miss Eugenia’s room had no window? Had she simply overlooked that detail when, at age eighteen, her own life was flooded with so much light?

  Daniella walks back out into the open basement, sliding her back down the rough wall until she is sitting on the floor. Her bad hip protests only a little from the sudden movement. Has it really been thirty-one years since she and Eve sat together with their backs against this same basement wall, aghast at what had happened to Miss Eugenia, and yet still able to wipe away their tears and rejoin the world above?

  Daniella pictures Eve back in the day. She can’t help but smile. How bold she was standing up for Miss Eugenia. How bold she was standing up for Daniella when she was cut from Fleur! How glorious she once had been, a bright, golden sunflower, stretching toward the sky, determined to grow beyond what her roots would allow.

  Now Eve, at nearly fifty, reminds Daniella of a woman made of wax, still beautiful if observed from enough distance, but frozen, locked, her ash-blond hair touched up every three weeks, her body forced daily through grueling workouts, under the direction of her personal trainer, Caesar, a gay black man Eve declares “so darling!” seemingly with no self-consciousness about the fact that the conservative church to which she now belongs was created in outraged reaction to the Episcopal Church’s decision to ordain an openly gay priest.

  Oh, Eve. Is this really where you’ve landed?

  Sarah says she is too hard on her old friend, and perhaps she’s right. But doesn’t the fact that she’s hard on Eve prove that she still loves her? Or is her love for Eve an artifact from the past, a habit she can’t quite seem to break?

  Once, they lived together in this very building. During the waking hours they shared their every thought. At night they lay across from each other in their respective twin beds, inhaling and exhaling the same air. And when that air became too stifling, they linked arms and jumped from the insulated world of Belmont to Barnard and all it exposed them to. And then they lost each other. Again and again they lost each other. There were moments when it seemed they might find their way back to what they once had—when Eve came to her, pregnant, her old life literally burned to the ground. When Pete died and the grief was unbearable and Eve showed up day after day with food, tucking Sarah under her maternal wing, keeping her busy and loved. But their connection never lasted. The rope that held them together grew increasingly frayed. And now the only thread that seems to remain is their shared love for Sarah and Anna.

  But that’s a tenacious thread.

  Daniella pictures the now-fierce Anna reading her aching, sophomoric poems, poems that were surely intended for the one person she no longer speaks to. Daniella wonders what trajectory Anna will follow. She hopes her goddaughter will continue to dig for the truth of her life, to integrate her past into her present. The cynic in her imagines she’ll try for a few years and then grow weary of the effort and instead find a stable boy from a good family from Hampden-Sydney or Washington and Lee to rescue her from her fractured past. What a seductive belief—that one can start fresh simply by jettisoning one’s history, that one can leave all that is painful or unsavory behind.

  And what of Daniella’s own part in an unsavory past? What of her own role in what happened to Mi
ss Eugenia, how she despaired over the fired maid’s fate but did nothing else to help her? When she told the story to Bruce, his eyes had pooled with tears.

  “She could have been Mama,” he said. He was not being hyperbolic. His mother had worked as a maid, not at a white college but at a white woman’s house. Like Ada.

  Ada. Ten years ago, Daniella had failed to step up and help Ada purchase a modest house, after Bob and Eve refused to co-sign her loan. At the time, Daniella was about to leave her well-paying job to work for the Southern Center for Human Rights. Money had been tight. But she had always had the comfort of knowing that Pete had left her enough to pay for Sarah’s college and some of her retirement. And she always knew, too, in the back of her head, that one day—far in the future, she hoped—her parents would die and she and her brother would split their assets. And one day Stockton Strum would die (Pete’s father had died years ago) and she would leave money for Sarah, only daughter of her beloved son.

  But in those years immediately following Pete’s death, Daniella had not been able to trust that she and her daughter were going to be okay. To trust that things would be okay would be to relinquish some of her grief over losing Pete, and that would mean relinquishing Pete himself, something it had taken her a long time to do.

  But she did, finally. And then came Bruce. Bruce, with whom she will start a new chapter in College Park, in a bungalow purchased with cash, thanks to the profit she will earn selling the Morningside house. And Ada—whose life was, of course, so much bigger than the work she did to support herself—Ada raised not only Eve but also Sarah and Anna, the two girls Daniella loves most. And what does her final chapter hold? An apartment in a run-down housing project where half of the windows are boarded up.

  It isn’t right.

  She should have co-signed the loan. It wasn’t too great a risk. And now it’s too late. The house is long gone, and Ada is in her seventies, with a bad back. But Ada could move into a nicer apartment, one with an elevator so she wouldn’t have to manage stairs, maybe even a high-quality assisted-living unit, so there would be someone to care for her if her body keeps giving out. Daniella’s mind flashes to the Sunday before, at Bruce’s church, when a woman spoke to the congregation about donating funds to help build an after-school center in a high-crime neighborhood. “Give as much as you can,” she urged. “Then give more.”

  Daniella would give Ada as much as she could. And the world would remain unjust. But she would do it anyway—acknowledge Ada’s humanity while claiming her own.

  Was it Eve’s humanity that drove her to write a letter in support of Miss Eugenia, to drop out of Fleur, to (temporarily) relinquish all comfort to protest imperialism both here and abroad? How much easier to think of Eve as egotistical, naïve—to think of her as nothing more than a silly child. How much easier to pin her to a board, dissect her under a harsh light, declare her deficient, and throw away the remains. But instead she pictured her friend as she found her thirty-one years ago, slumped against this same basement wall, having just watched the banishment of Miss Eugenia, overcome with pure grief.

  Daniella’s eyes pool with tears. Eve’s instincts were once pure. It was just that so much got in the way. Daniella allows herself the hope that the girl Eve once was still lives inside the woman, buried but breathing.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  It is with humility that I lift up the names of some of the very real people mentioned in this book who dedicated their lives to the ongoing struggle to end systematic racism and racial oppression, including: Medgar Evers, James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and Fannie Lou Hamer. Gratitude goes to the (then) youth, led by Bob Moses and others, who journeyed to Mississippi during the summer of 1964 to work in tandem with the black citizens of that state to attempt to bring their voting rights to fruition. I would not have been able to write about that summer with any clarity had I not viewed director Stanley Nelson’s excellent documentary, Freedom Summer, or read Elizabeth Sutherland Martínez’s Letters from Mississippi: Reports from Civil Rights Volunteers & Poetry of the 1964 Freedom Summer. Also helpful was the “Timeline for the 1964 Freedom Summer Project” published by the Wisconsin Historical Society.

  The Smash Collective was loosely inspired by the radical leftist group Weatherman. Instrumental in my understanding of both the genesis and the ideology of this group was Sam Green and Bill Siegel’s gripping 2003 documentary, The Weather Underground. I also read several memoirs written by former members, including: Cathy Wilkerson’s Flying Close to the Sun: My Life and Times as a Weatherman; Bill Ayers’s Fugitive Days: Memoirs of an Antiwar Activist and Public Enemy: Confessions of an American Dissident; and Mark Rudd’s Underground: My Life with SDS and the Weathermen. Indeed, in the chapter “Called Home,” Eve references a story in which the real-life David Gilbert links the oppression of blacks in America to the bombing of villagers in Vietnam. The story of Mr. Gilbert’s revelation came from the chapter titled “A Good German” in Mr. Rudd’s excellent autobiography. Additionally, I gleaned much from Lucinda Franks and Thomas Powers’s five-part series about Diana Oughton, “Diana: The Making of a Terrorist,” first published in The Boston Globe in 1971. It was through their account of Oughton’s life that I first read of members of Weatherman killing, skinning, and eating a tomcat in order to show how ruthless they had become. The cat story might be apocryphal—Bill Ayers adamantly denies that it happened—but in any event, reading about it both troubled me and sparked my imagination.

  Other books that helped me get a handle on that era include Todd Gitlin’s The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage; Abe Peck’s Uncovering the Sixties: The Life and Times of the Underground Press; Bryan Burrough’s Days of Rage: America’s Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence; Dan Berger’s Outlaws of America: The Weather Underground and the Politics of Solidarity; Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album; Minrose Gwin’s Remembering Medgar Evers: Writing the Long Civil Rights Movement; Jamal Joseph’s Panther Baby: A Life of Rebellion and Reinvention; and Betty Medsger’s The Burglary: The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover’s Secret FBI. Pete Strum’s dissertation on Reconstruction is directly inspired by Eric Foner’s 1989 masterpiece, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877. Much of Daniella Strum’s work defending indigent prisoners on death row was inspired by Bryan Stevenson’s transformative memoir, Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption. On a lighter note, like Anna and Sarah, I, too, read all of Lois Duncan’s thrillers when I was growing up, and enjoyed rereading Stranger with My Face for the purpose of writing this book. Similarly, it was fun to revisit the seminal Our Bodies, Ourselves by the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective.

  My son was born in the middle of my writing this book, and it took me a few years to acclimate to being both a mother and a writer. Thank you to my stalwart editor, Trish Todd, who told me that she cared more about me getting the book “right” than turning it in on time. Thanks also to my fierce advocates at William Morris Endeavor, and especially to my lovely agent, Claudia Ballard.

  Thank you to Katharine Roman who shared the experience her mother, Sharon Powell, went through as a Jewish woman going through sorority rush at a southern university in the 1960s. Sharon, your harrowing story inspired Daniella’s experience with Fleur. Thanks also to my loyal writing group—Beth Gylys, Peter McDade, Jessica Handler, and Sheri Joseph—who read and critiqued much of this book in progress. Special thanks to Sheri, who read the whole novel once I completed a draft, and offered me exhaustive notes for revision. Sheri, the book is so much better because of your diligence and care! Joshilyn Jackson also read the book in early form, and her brilliant sense of story significantly improved the final version. Not only that, but Joshilyn suggested the title. My eagle-eyed husband, Sam Reid, swept in at the end of this project and read the manuscript line by line with pencil in hand, making it approximately a thousand times more graceful and cohesive than it was originally.

  Tha
nks always to my loving parents, Ruth and Tim White, who offered their enthusiastic support for this book early on. And thank you, Mom and Dad, for being such loving grandparents. Thanks also to my wonderful in-laws, Barbara and Ron Reid, who have made me feel such a part of their family and who regularly care for my son. Your steadfast commitment to him helps me continue to be a writer. Thanks for making our little boy feel so special and loved. (Truly, Ronnie, it takes a village!)

  On that note, I can think of no better “village” in which Sam and I can raise our little boy than the one offered by my loving and inclusive church. Church family: Y’all humble me and help me believe in an eternal love that is ultimately more powerful than the forces of hate and division.

  WE ARE ALL GOOD PEOPLE HERE

  Susan Rebecca White

  Introduction

  We Are All Good People Here is a gripping, multigenerational story inspired by true events. It follows two best friends through their political awakenings in the turbulent 1960s and the repercussions of their actions after their daughters encounter the secrets they thought they had buried long ago.

  Eve Whalen, privileged child of an old-money Atlanta family, meets Daniella Gold in the fall of 1962 on their first day at Belmont College. Paired as roommates, the two become fast friends. Daniella, raised in Georgetown by a Jewish father and a Methodist mother, has always felt caught between two worlds. But at Belmont, her bond with Eve allows her to finally experience a sense of belonging. That is, until the girls’ expanding awareness of the South’s caste system forces them to question everything they thought they knew about the world and their places in it.

  Eve veers toward radicalism—a choice pragmatic Daniella cannot fathom. After a tragedy, Eve turns to Daniella for help in beginning anew. But the past isn’t so easily buried, as Daniella and Eve discover when their daughters are caught up in secrets meant to stay hidden.