Old and young, their audience stood with wary faces while the visitors spoke of education and jobs and black people in charge, and handed out leaflets that displayed the proper ballot symbol, a red rooster. The blinding sunlight and those shuttered faces gave Y.F. a feeling of vertigo. At times, though he never told his friend, he was overcome by the impression that a fundamental mistake had been made: that it was really he and McGinty who needed information and hortatory phrases. That the black strangers standing barefoot in front of him had a secret hoarded strength that made talk of power and revolution simply presumptuous. And that no election would ever bring to an end the old sad story that lay like a dark river between them. These gloomy thoughts sometimes became so pressing that he had to go back to the car and pound his head to dislodge them.
At the ends of the long exhausting days, the White Boys hung out with the other young volunteers at backwoods roadhouses that throbbed like funky hearts in the night. There they could buy beer without showing ID, and argue about Fanon and Marcuse with black college students who, in their Afro hairstyles and city clothes, drew as many stares from the locals as the White Boys themselves. Though many of the black volunteers did not approve of their presence, or even of their existence, the boys had such a winning eagerness to heap ashes on their own heads for the sins of their race that a grudging camaraderie sprang up. Even romance made an appearance. McGinty flirted with the belle of the summer, a doe-eyed Spelman sophomore, who galvanized the male population of Tenlow County with tight leotards and armloads of silver bracelets. And Y.F. yearned after Reverend Basnight’s daughter Nicolette, whom he did not describe to me, but whom it is easy to imagine as one of those wayside flowers one finds in rural ministers’ households. Nicolette almost certainly had a pretty, virginal face the color of rosewood and a genteel straightened coiffure held back by a stretch hair band. She didn’t frequent the juke joints, of course, but chattered with prim vivacity to Y.F. as she worked the mimeograph machine in the office. Mostly she expatiated on her love for the novels of Pearl Buck and her dream of studying medicine at Howard University; and she never let Y.F. so much as touch her hand.
In its last two weeks, the campaign went into overdrive. A New York, Washington, and Atlanta delegation swept into town, and suddenly Tenlow County was indeed watched by the rest of the country. Y.F. and McGinty were no longer the only white faces in the campaign, which the national press was describing as one of the test cases of the decade. Famous journalists and political luminaries arrived at rallies or sauntered into Reverend Basnight’s Sunday services, appearing and disappearing as casually as the restless Olympians in the Iliad. An atmosphere of marvels hung in the thundery August air. Rumors about the opposition grew daily more sensational: it was whispered that Governor Wallace had issued a secret order for the bombing of black schools and churches, that the Klan was preparing a preelection night of terror. In reality, their opponents put up little resistance. Perhaps the powers of Tenlow County were simply confident that white rule was part of the climate on their ancestral soil. But most likely the lack of opposition sprang from dawning pragmatism, for after nearly two decades of bitter struggle the most obdurate segregationists had begun to recognize through the smoke the lineaments of the second great lost Southern cause.
In any case, the campaign had from the start the feeling of being directed by a conscientious Providence. On election day the biggest problem was not harassment but a fearful inertia on the part of the new voters. Y.F., McGinty, and the other volunteers had instructions not to let anyone stay home and spent hours cajoling people out of their houses and ferrying them to polling stations. In the early evening, when Y.F. was on his own in a hamlet in the eastern corner of the county, trying to talk a particularly reluctant old man off his front porch, he saw a van pull up and two men get out. One of them was a photographer, and the other he was stunned to recognize as a great civil rights leader, a legendary figure who was the right hand of Martin Luther King, and whom he had seen in newscasts parting ravening mobs like Moses dividing the Red Sea. And, because it was a day of wonders, this hero clapped Y.F. on the back and boomed—in a mighty voice, like a bell cast in a supernatural foundry: “Good job, son. We’ll take it from here.” And in a grand popping of flashbulbs he escorted the old man into his van.
Of course they won. Everything happened the way it is supposed to happen in a saga of the good fight and summum jus. The poor, the downtrodden, the orphans of history triumphed, as two thousand new voters swept into power the first black officials since Reconstruction. The next day hundreds of sharecroppers, dressed in their Sunday clothes, poured into Barreville for the victory celebration, held in the newly integrated high school. In the front of the auditorium, the great civil rights leader stood
