his wife. She said she could care less about his affair, but as far as she was concerned, they had made a business deal, so no divorce. What could Maggie do? He stayed in a miserable marriage, and she stayed with him. It had been humiliating to have to hide and sneak around all those years, but at least she had never been a “kept woman.” She had made it a point to pay her own way. He had tried to buy her things; in the first year, as a birthday gift, he had surprised her with a down payment on a condo, but she had insisted on making the monthly payments and had bought all the furniture. Looking back, she could see now, that entire section of her life had been just like the plot of the movie
In retrospect, considering her lack of gardening skills, she wondered if she would have made a good parent. She dearly loved flowers, but her garden had never been a success. Every spring, Hazel had sent over Easter lily bulbs, and every spring, she had planted them; she watered them, she waited; but every year, Easter came and went, with no Easter lilies. She didn’t understand it. Hazel planted the exact same bulbs, and every year, without fail on Easter morning, she had hundreds of lilies blooming all over her yard. Maggie had wanted to give up, but Hazel had insisted she keep trying. She said, “You just wait, Mags, one of these years, they will bloom when you least expect it.” When the cactus she planted died (how can you kill a cactus?), she just gave up and had the entire garden covered over with decorative rocks and stuck a birdbath in the middle. If children didn’t turn out right, you couldn’t just throw rocks over them and go on; you were stuck for life, so maybe things had worked out for the best. Brenda, who volunteered with Planned Parenthood, said each person who did not breed was doing the planet a big favor in the long run. Brenda said it was not going to be nuclear war that destroyed the world, it would be overpopulation; and she was probably right. Still, Maggie couldn’t help but wonder what she had missed. To this day, she couldn’t pass by a children’s clothing store without mentally shopping for the little girl she might have had.
Political Aspirations
Brenda Peoples was already a familiar name in local politics. She had served on a lot of different committees in town, and she had personally started the Youth at Risk program. She was the president of the local alumni chapter of her sorority, Alpha Kappa Alpha. She knew that to be successful at anything, it was important to know as many people as possible. This was something she had learned firsthand from Hazel.
In 1979, Hazel had finished her big speech at the Women in Business luncheon with this statement: “And so, girls, in closing, I’ll leave you with these three words of advice: Network, network, network.” It was a credo Hazel lived by, and Brenda had taken Hazel’s advice about networking to heart. Just last month, when she and Maggie had gone to the symphony, Brenda had gone backstage and introduced herself to the entire orchestra and to all the stagehands as well. “Everybody votes,” she said to Maggie later. And voting was not something Brenda took lightly.
While Maggie had been busy learning to play her harp and dreaming about becoming Miss Alabama, Brenda had been across town, trying to make some sense out of what was beginning to happen. She knew white people lived in one part of town and her family lived in another. Her parents had informed her in a roundabout way that some white people were nice and some weren’t, but it had not affected Brenda much one way or another. Her family had a very full and active social life where they were. Her father was the dean of an all-black college, and her mother was a high school English teacher. They lived in a nice house in a good neighborhood. But when she was about ten, Brenda noticed that the grown people had started talking in troubled whispers about something that was upsetting them.
Then later, when all the upheaval in Birmingham began, her parents, like a lot of their friends and neighbors, had not approved of using children in the protest marches. They were afraid of what might happen. They kept Brenda, Robbie, and their younger brothers home from school the day of the marches. But their oldest sister, Tonya, was thirteen that year, and her best girlfriend told her how much fun the march would be and said to come on and go. She said there would be so many kids downtown, their parents would never find out. Tonya, always up for fun, slipped out of the house and met her friend on the corner of Fourth Avenue North. And it had been fun; the two of them were running around and laughing their heads off, tickled to be out of school, tickled to be downtown without their parents knowing; they were still laughing when they ran around the corner.
To this day, Tonya could still remember how it felt: the sudden shock of the huge round sledgehammer of hard, cold water hitting her in the chest, knocking her down to the ground. She could still remember the sounds of laughter turning into screams of terror; dogs barking, people running, water everywhere. Tonya would always remember the moment when the world stopped being fun.
The next day, when the pictures hit the front pages, the entire city was horrified. How could it have happened? This kind of brutality would never have been condoned if they had known about it in advance. The head of the fire department immediately informed the city commissioner that his men would “never again” use fire hoses on human beings. But it was too late.
If Tonya had been stunned at the sudden turn of events, Maggie was just as stunned. This was not the Birmingham she lived in. She had never heard her parents or anyone she knew say an unkind word against black people. Up until that time, Maggie had had no idea they were so unhappy. She had never gone to school with a black person. She’d been told that they preferred to be with their own. When the black high school bands marched in the parades downtown, they seemed very happy. They were always laughing and looked like they were having a good time. Maggie knew on some level she was better off being white, but she had never given it much serious thought. When she was growing up, teenagers had not been very political, certainly not the ones she knew. They were too busy obsessing about boys and clothes and worrying about pimples to think beyond the next day, much less about social injustices. Sadly, the blacks lived in one world and they lived in another, and they just didn’t see it, or at least she hadn’t. But unfortunately, history always expects people, young or old, to have known better at the time.
Then later, when four little black girls were killed in a church basement, the city was so shocked, they simply could not believe it. It was such an unspeakable and vile act. A lot of people in Birmingham found it easier to believe it had been radicals from the North who had blown up the church, trying to get more national press, or else it must have been just a horrible accident of some kind. It was too frightening to believe that there was that much cruelty and hatred anywhere, and especially in their own city. But years later, when the white men who had done it were finally arrested and convicted, the city had no choice but to face facts, and it hurt.
What Had Possessed Her?
Richard did have curly black hair and a sweet nature, but she now realized (too late) that he had also been weak and a little dumb. His father had been the smart one, though he had been completely ruthless
