In June, Meredith finished her second year of law school. Classes had ended only a few days before when she got a call from the ACLU. They told her that CORE, the Congress of Racial Equality, had been organizing bus and train rides throughout the South and needed volunteers, to attempt to desegregate all public transportation. They called them Freedom Rides, and wanted to know if she’d sign up. She thought about it for about two minutes and agreed.
She debated telling her parents and decided not to, and told Claudia instead.
“Do you think you should? You got arrested the last time you did something like that. Your father will have a fit if it happens again.”
“I’m twenty-five years old. I have a right to make my own decisions. And this sounds pretty tame. It’s just a couple of bus and train rides. There’s nothing dangerous about it.” But they both knew that when integration was involved, anything could happen, and they’d be traveling in the Deep South.
She left on the Fourth of July, the day after her parents and Alex left for Martha’s Vineyard. She had said that she was spending the Fourth of July weekend on Long Island. In fact, she was going to be away for two weeks.
She was planning to call her parents at the Vineyard without telling them where she was. But she promised Claudia she’d let her know.
She’d been assigned several bus trips and train rides. It was very well organized, and Martin Luther King Jr. was involved, as usual. The first week of her assigned rides went smoothly and everything happened according to plan. It was a little dicier on the Fourth of July weekend, and several people objected when her integrated group of black and white people got on the train. But eventually they calmed down and the Freedom Riders got off at their destination without incident.
But two days later on a train from Atlanta to Birmingham, the conductor spoke to the men riding the train but they refused to move. State troopers were called, the Freedom Riders were dragged off the train, and Meredith was back in jail again, with no way to pay bail and no one to call but her father. He was outraged when he heard where she was and what she’d been doing, and threatened to leave her in jail this time. For a minute it sounded like he’d do it, but in the end, he rescued her again. She was tempted to stay with the Freedom Riders once she got out, but she’d already been there for a week, and she knew she couldn’t defy her father, who had demanded that she come to Martha’s Vineyard immediately. She was taking a train to Boston, and from there to Newport, Rhode Island, to get the ferry to the Vineyard. She spent the night on a bench at the dock, and took the first ferry in the morning. Her parents and Alex were having breakfast when she walked in.
“Don’t even speak to me,” her father said with a look of fury. “You may want to spend your life as a jailbird, but I’m a federal judge now. This is unthinkable. I don’t know what you think you’re doing, Meredith, but I won’t bail you out again. Next time you can rot in jail,” he said, slamming a fist down on the table, as Alex looked worried. He had never seen his father so angry, nor had Merrie. And he looked as though he meant it. “I don’t know what’s driving you to behave this way, but it’s sick.”
“Someone has to do it,” she said in a quiet, respectful voice. She didn’t want to argue with him, and it was upsetting for all of them. Alex looked shaken this time too. Bad people went to jail. So what was his sister doing there?
She had called Claudia from the station when she changed trains and she said Meredith’s trips for the ACLU made her nervous too. She was afraid Meredith was going to get injured one of these times, or trapped in the midst of a riot and killed.
“Let someone else do it,” her father said, still angry at her. “Women from your background don’t do things like this.” And her mother looked like she’d been crying. She kept wondering how they’d failed, that Meredith was turning out to be such a rebel. “You’re going to get yourself killed one of these days,” her father went on. “And for what? So a Negro can ride a bus in Montgomery, or a train in Mississippi, or have lunch at Woolworth’s in North Carolina? The victories are too small, and the risks too huge. You don’t belong down there. This isn’t your battle,” her father said, looking fierce.
“Yes, it is our battle. And the victories add up. The laws are changing. Look at Little Rock. Black kids can go to high school there now. These aren’t small victories.”
“Well, let someone else win them,” he said again. “And you’re not leaving this house all summer. I want you here until you go back to school.” She nodded and went to her room. But at least she had made a small contribution, and had done what she could.
Her two-month house arrest on Martha’s Vineyard was not unpleasant. She went fishing with her brother, swam in the ocean, and went sailing with friends, and eventually her father stopped being angry at her. On Labor Day they went back to New York, and the next day she started her third year of law school at Columbia.
The Freedom Riders had been in the news all summer. Many of them were arrested, but no one had been killed, which was an even bigger victory than the precedents they were establishing and the freedoms they were winning.
* * *
—
She had lunch with Claudia right after school started and she told Merrie she had finished her book over the summer and was looking for a publisher for it. Thaddeus was going to help her find one, he had the connections she needed to get published. She had just sent the book to two editors he knew, and was excited about it.
A week after she started back to school, Meredith got another announcement from Ted. They’d had another baby boy, ten months after the last one. At twenty-six, he was married and had two kids. She called him and teased him about it, and he said he was happy and the boys were adorable, and Emily was really good with them. But Meredith wondered if she was good with him too. They were just two kids themselves, and now they had two sons.
“And what are you up to? Still going to protests and getting arrested?” He sounded affectionate as he said it, and said he missed her. But they never came into the city anymore. Emily didn’t like to leave their babies. It didn’t sound like much fun to Merrie.
“I haven’t gotten arrested in at least two months. My father locked me up on the Vineyard this summer, after I got arrested on the Freedom Rides in July.”
“You’re incurable. Just don’t get yourself murdered,” he said seriously. It was what everyone said to her.
They promised to have lunch if he ever came to the city, but it didn’t sound like he did. And he didn’t invite her to Connecticut. He said Emily would be busy with the new baby, and he was working hard for his dad. It was nice talking to him, but their lives had gone in totally separate directions. She was glad she saw Claudia as much as she did. She would have been lonely without her.
* * *
—
She was busy at school for the next three months, and in December, three days before Christmas, the nation was shocked when the first U.S. combat death occurred in Vietnam. So it was happening now. They weren’t just advisors anymore, they were combat troops, and one of them had been killed. Unfortunately, it proved her right, she said to her father when they switched off the TV. American boys were going to die there. It had already started.
“It’s just one,” her father argued the point with her.
“That’s one too many,” she insisted, reminding him again that it could be Alex, and he stormed out of the room. He didn’t want to hear it. It was too close to the truth.
Chapter Eleven
The second publisher who saw Claudia’s book bought it a week after she read it, and seven months later, in April, Claudia had a book signing at a little bookstore in her parents’ neighborhood on the Upper West Side, near West End Avenue. It was a respectable publisher, and she had called the book Point of No Return. It was nonfiction, her story of the war, and there was a photograph on the cover taken by a soldier of a few emaciated children
standing behind the barbed wire at Auschwitz when the camp was liberated. The photograph could have been of Claudia, but it wasn’t.
It was a powerful book and she had already gotten two good reviews, but you had to have a strong stomach to read it. She had told the unvarnished truth. Her mother had read it and sobbed all the way through. Claudia had never even told her those stories. She was too traumatized when she arrived, and afterward she didn’t want to talk about it, and her mother had discouraged her from clinging to the memories. But it had been healing for Claudia to write the book. Her whole family came to the book signing, and so did Meredith, Claudia’s work friends from the Herald Tribune, several of Thaddeus’s friends, and the customers of the bookstore.
With the money the publisher had paid her, she had told her parents she was going to rent a small apartment in Greenwich Village. She was very excited about it, and they didn’t know it, but Thaddeus was planning to move in with her. They had been together for three years. Her parents had finally stopped pushing her to meet someone else and get married. They had accepted him at last, despite his successful Hollywood father whom Claudia had met and liked. But she and Thaddeus had no plans to marry. The relationship worked well as it was.
Her mother wondered now if the tragic experiences she’d been through in Germany made it harder for her to make a commitment. Maybe she was afraid to lose the people she loved again. But whatever the reason, she seemed to have no interest in marriage or children.
Her mother never knew about him, but it had more to do with Seth Ballard, who had disappointed her so severely. She had never heard from him again. And one of her sisters was getting married that summer, to an investment banker who was the son of friends of her parents. So her mother was busy planning the wedding. Her sister was the same age as Meredith, who had no interest in marriage either. Sometimes her mother thought that the two close friends were too modern in their thinking and a bad influence on each other.
The book had opened Claudia’s eyes to new avenues for her writing. She loved her job and also wanted to do some freelance pieces. Thaddeus wanted her to work on a documentary with him, and at twenty-seven, she was already working on a second book, a novel about an independent young woman in New York. Her career as a writer was off and running.
The book signing went well. More people came than expected, and Claudia was beaming as she signed the books. It was an important moment for her, the culmination of a lifetime goal, and she had finally achieved it. And this was only the beginning.
Three weeks later, in May, Claudia and Thaddeus joined the McKenzies at Meredith’s Columbia Law School graduation. Her grandfather was there, smiling broadly, and so were her parents. Meredith was worried about her father. He seemed angry and negative and increasingly vocal in favor of the war in Vietnam, which added tension to Merrie’s relationship with him. As far as he was concerned, people didn’t understand the benefits of the conflict and should support it, instead of criticizing it all the time. There were eleven thousand “military advisors” there now, and they had the right to bear arms and fire them as needed, so American military personnel were slowly slipping from an advisory role to a combat capacity, which terrified Merrie, and she remained convinced that things were going to get worse before they got better.
It upset her too that as a federal judge, her father was in a position to sentence conscientious objectors to prison instead of to alternative service in hospitals and other medical facilities. He hadn’t had to make that decision yet, but she knew he might. And if he did so, she knew it would strain their relationship even more than it already was. They seemed to disagree about everything. Her goals and ideals made no sense to him. He wasn’t even pleased by her finishing law school. He was afraid that she was going to use her degree to benefit the causes she espoused.
She was going back to work at the ACLU until she took the bar exam in a few months. As a lawyer, they would give her more interesting projects than the ones she’d had before. But it was only a stopgap measure for her until she passed the bar. She was looking for a position in a law firm. She wanted to work for one that handled discrimination cases, which she hadn’t told her father yet. He had made her an offer to join the family law firm, and was still angry that she had turned it down. Wall Street didn’t interest her. She wanted to do the most good, not make the most money. Money and personal gain had never been the motivator for her. She had far more in common with her eighty-year-old grandfather, who had a younger person’s view of the world than her cantankerous father, who was constantly resisting change.
Alex was having trouble relating to Robert too. He worshipped his father but was saddened by his rigid, antiquated ideas. Alex had just turned sixteen and looked like a beanpole. He was a handsome boy, and already thinking about college. He wanted to go to Harvard or Yale, and Harvard Law one day, and Meredith was sure he would since he was bright and had relatively good grades.
Her father had taken over the private room at 21 again, as he had after her graduation from Vassar, and Meredith wanted Adelaide invited this time. She was part of the family, but her father objected and said it would make everyone uncomfortable.
“Why would that make anyone uncomfortable?” Meredith asked, looking startled. She and Addie had long talks every day, and she had been with them for all of Merrie’s life. She had a right to share in the celebration, but her father was adamant and her mother agreed, as she always did with everything he said. “That’s ridiculous. Besides, I want her there. She practically brought me and Alex up except when we were in Germany.” And they still got Christmas cards from Anna, who had four children now and sent them a card every year with their picture.
“Bottom line, Meredith,” her father said tersely, “you don’t invite the maid to a fancy dinner. It just doesn’t make sense. I’m sure she wouldn’t want to be there either. She knows it’s not her place.”
“It’s what I ride around on trains and buses for in Alabama and Mississippi, and get arrested for, so Addie can come to dinner wherever she wants, and is wanted.”
“Your mother and I don’t want her there,” he said clearly. “She doesn’t belong with our family and friends. Just like you didn’t belong at her church. We can’t lose our boundaries just because nine kids integrated Central High School in Little Rock. Those are legal technicalities. This is real life.”
“No,” Meredith said quietly, “they’re one and the same. And she’s too important to leave out this time. I wanted to ask her last time, but I forgot.”
“Well, don’t ask her this time. You can have dinner with her in the kitchen sometime, if you want to.”
“Dad, that’s disgusting,” Meredith objected, but he didn’t give an inch. And shortly after that, he went upstairs to his room. In his mind, the subject was closed. It shocked and saddened Meredith to realize how prejudiced some people still were, even in big cities in the North, educated people like her own father, a judge. In the end, most of them didn’t want to have dinner with Negroes. And Meredith realized she was fighting for the right for something that many people she knew didn’t want, and maybe never would. It was horrifying to her. She lived and breathed her ideals.
In the end, she forced it on them, and invited Adelaide herself. She sat at the end of the table at 21 next to Alex, but at least she was there. She had cried when Meredith asked her, and worn her best dress to dinner. It was a bright red satin dress and she had worn a small red hat with a veil, and shiny black shoes. Meredith thought she looked terrific and was thrilled to have her there. And Addie said she’d never forget it. She knew how her employers felt and was proud of Merrie for being different.
Adelaide thanked her especially for it the next day. She knew it must have taken a lot to get her there. She thought Meredith was wrong for some of the things she did—messing around with buses in Alabama, lunch counters in North Carolina, and getting arrested—and she didn’t want her to get hurt.
But she really appreciated being invited to dinner, and she wanted to thank Merrie and her parents for taking a big step forward. Meredith gave her a hug and then left the kitchen. She had to get to work. She couldn’t wait to start at a law firm, but for now she was pleased to be working for the ACLU. This time they were going to include her in projects and meetings.
She was surprised when the subject of a major protest came up at work that morning. James Meredith was a black student who had applied for admission to the University of Mississippi the previous September and had been denied due to his race, although he was an Air Force veteran. He had just filed suit to support his application. It was likely to evolve into an explosive situation by the fall, and they spent the entire morning trying to anticipate what could happen next if his suit against the university was upheld. It was a potentially serious situation.
“We don’t want to be facing Little Rock all over again,” one of the members of the advance planning team said.
“It sounds like we’re heading there,” someone added. The South was a bastion of segregated education. They finally decided that they had time to see where things went and didn’t need to panic yet, but this was definitely liable to be their next hot spot and proving ground in the next four months. Merrie listened to the discussions with interest and agreed that the situation could rapidly get out of hand.
She had interviews that week with two law firms that she was interested in. Both specialized in discrimination suits, and she would have been happy with a job from either one.
She told her father about it that night, and he looked unhappy. After dinner he came to her room. She was studying for the bar exam, and thought longingly of Claudia’s new apartment. She would have loved to have her own place, where she could have peace and the freedom to do whatever she wanted. But she knew her parents would never agree to her moving to her own apartment. They still believed that only bad girls had their own apartments, and she couldn’t afford it without their help. She had to live at home.
The Good Fight Page 15