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In the first week of that July 1964, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee began a three-day sit-in at Jojo’s Restaurant in downtown Atlanta, and on the second morning Mike astounded herself by recruiting a willing and nearly ebullient J.W. Cromie, catching the 9:40
A.M
. Greyhound bus to Atlanta, and joining them.

*  *  *

She could not have said, at the time, why she chose to upset the frail equilibrium that her engagement to Bayard Sewell had achieved at the Pomeroy Street house. Priss Comfort could have said why, but did not get the chance; much later Annie Cochran could say why, and did. By that time, Mike did not care about her reasons. Or so she said. She had taken the action and walked the road on which it set her, and pronounced herself glad that she had done so.

“Because otherwise I’d have no life of my own, and no career,” she told Annie.

“True enough,” Annie Cochran said. “But don’t give me that crap about being glad. You did it because you were forced to, not because you wanted to.”

“Nobody forced me,” Mike said.

“Everybody did,” Annie replied.

Mike took it for granted that Bayard Sewell would support her; he always had. But she knew in the deepest, unsearched heart of herself, knew without allowing herself to know, that her father would be outraged and that the townspeople of Lytton would disapprove almost as heartily.

As for Lytton, Mike would have said that she did not care. She had largely washed her hands of it sometime in the long dawn of her awakening, in the transition from young teenager to woman. Her reading and her sessions with Priss had showed her a wider world of books and arts and ideas, of grace and beauty and stimulation, and her revelation in that winter classroom had limned for her another country entirely, and a kinder one. Moreover, her triumph with the essay had given her a heady taste of power, the tumescent flexing of unfolded wings.

To Bayard Sewell, but only to him and occasionally J.W. Cromie, Mike voiced her new scorn for the narrowness,
the banality and triviality, the meanness of style and substance that she perceived everywhere in Lytton, now that the scales had fallen from her eyes. She disliked the church-and-gossip-dominated, time-stopped existence in the little town. Nothing, she said, ever happened in Lytton. Nothing worthwhile could flourish in such stony ground. No one of substance and vision would choose to dwell among such Philistines. They would tolerate no one and nothing in the slightest degree different from themselves. Mike was quite eloquent in these diatribes to Bayard and J.W., but with everyone else, even Priss, she held her tongue. Priss would have understood, she thought, but Mike feared that she would infer criticism where none was intended. Priss had, after all, opted to cast her lot here. Mike planned to lead her life with Bayard, once college was behind them, in a much larger and vastly more exotic arena than Lytton, Georgia. In this he agreed with her. Bayard Sewell was quietly, efficiently, and savagely ambitious.

“What do you want?” Mike would ask him often. “What do you want for the rest of our lives?”

“To be out of here,” he said. “To be where things can happen. Then I’ll see.”

“Can they happen here?”

“No,” he said. “Not ever here, and nowhere like here.”

And she agreed.

So perhaps the flight to Atlanta to join the sit-in was the first step in that odyssey. Perhaps it was the first shot across John Winship’s bow. And perhaps it was, as it seemed to her later, the first strong beat of a newly naked heart. In any event, Mike took it without conscious thought of the consequences. They were swift and final.

Inevitably, she and J.W. were arrested, along with most of the other protestors, and spent the night in the
Fulton County Jail on Decatur Street in Atlanta. Just as inevitably, the press was there in full cry. It was pure bad luck that the television cameras found and dwelled on Mike as she was led away, struggling in honest surprise and indignation (“I am
Micah Winship!”)
and in handcuffs. It was pure coincidence that the footage aired on the 6:00
P.M
. local Atlanta newscast that almost every family in Lytton, including the Winships, watched at suppertime. It was the first time John Winship had seen Mike since breakfast that morning. He had thought nothing of her daylong absence; he had presumed her to be at Priss’s, or the library, as she so often was.

He would not speak to her when she telephoned home, asking timidly to be bailed out. He hung up when he heard her voice. She finally reached DeeDee, who took her request and her own copious tears over to the Pomeroy Street house and laid them before John Winship. By that time a white-faced Bayard Sewell had joined Mike’s father, but John would not allow him or DeeDee to speak with Mike, and forbade them to go and fetch her. He went to bed in silence, arose in silence the next morning, and closeted himself in silence at first light in his study. He would answer no knocks and calls from outside, and he would not open his door. In the end, it was Priss Comfort who went to Atlanta and bailed Mike and a bewildered J.W. out of jail and brought them home at dusk on that following day. Priss, who had been drinking steadily, was very nearly incoherent when she turned her car into the Winship driveway, but she parked it neatly. Even when she was drunk, Priss could always drive.

What she could not do was talk. And so she slumped into the wing chair that had been Claudia’s and dropped her head into her hands, and said no word in Mike’s defense when John Winship came into his twilit living room in the company of a red-eyed DeeDee and
an ashen, drowned-looking Bayard Sewell, and looked at his youngest daughter and the drooping black boy behind her.

“I don’t blame you, J.W.,” he said finally to the terrified boy. “You’re stupid, but you’re not sorry. I know who made you go up there. But you, Micah … well. I guess we could start with whore, couldn’t we? And after that we could add criminal, and race-mixer, and mother-killer …”

The words coiled out of him, snake-cold, thick, murderous, eighteen years of unspat phlegm.

“Daddy …” Mike whispered. She put out her hand and then dropped it onto the back of Priss’s chair to steady herself. She thought that she would faint. There was a roaring in her ears, and her vision blurred whitely.

“I curse the day I earned that title,” the terrible stranger’s voice went on. “And I refuse to wear it any longer. You are not my daughter. I have only one daughter. The other one killed her mother and my wife, and then she died herself, in a jail full of nigger criminals.”

A grotesque sort of snort, a gibbous snicker, came from J.W., and Mike saw with foolish incomprehension that he was crying. Opaque silver tears made snail’s tracks down his black cheeks.

“I’m glad your mother is dead, J.W.,” John Winship said in the frozen snake’s voice. “Otherwise this day would have killed her for sure. Go on home now. As I said, no one can really blame you.”

J.W. fled, snuffling. DeeDee burst into loud wails. John Winship and Bayard Sewell were silent.

Mike turned to the dark-haired boy, standing in the gloom of the unlighted living room. His face shone white. From outside, the scent of the wisteria along the side porch, in full summer flood, perfumed the air as if it were not alive with pain and awfulness.

“Bay,” Mike whispered. “Help me. Tell him. I did the right thing; I tried … I wanted … tell him. And then let’s go. Let’s leave now.”

She held out her hand. It felt impossibly heavy and tremulous, as if balanced on the end of a thin wire yards long.

Bayard Sewell’s face was a blanched mask in the dusk. He did not take her hand. He moved, one blind step, backwards and closer to John Winship. They stood together then, boy and man. He shook his head, back and forth, back and forth.

“I can’t, Mike,” he said. “I’m sorry. I can’t.”

She could scarcely hear him for the roaring in her ears. After a long moment that beat in the air like the concussion of thunder, she said mildly, “Well, that’s all right, then.”

She walked past the two of them, standing there on Claudia’s cherished Bokhara rug. Past Priss Comfort, slumped in the wing chair, staring straight ahead of her. Upstairs to her room, and closed the door behind her. She did not lock it.

The next morning, before five, she took one suitcase full of clothes and the thousand dollars in the duck bank and caught the first morning bus to Atlanta. There were few people on it: workers on the early shift at the Ford assembly plant in Hapeville and one or two black women in maids’ uniforms; no one she knew. She got a room at a Methodist Church home for bachelor girls near the art museum that she had seen before, and went the same day to register for her fall classes at the Atlanta Division of the University of Georgia. She paid her fees in cash. She did not contact anyone in Lytton, and she did not think they would come looking for her. She had moved outside the common kind. She did not think at all.

T
HE MORNING AFTER SHE REGISTERED FOR HER FALL CLASSES
, Mike took a city bus and went downtown to the main branch of the Carnegie Library. Walking into its somnolent green, cool dimness after the murderous white glare of the pavement was like slipping soundlessly into a cathedral, and she breathed fully and gratefully for the first time in two days and let herself sink, spinning slowly, into its cloistered hush. She went down the dingy stone steps to the basement, where the magazine and newspaper reference copies were kept, and ordered up everything she could find about the Civil Rights Movement in the years of its ascendancy. The Atlanta main library was a far richer trove than that in Lytton; it took Mike three full days to move from the movement’s infancy to its fevered present. She read slowly, from midmorning until late afternoon, as absorbed as she had been in the distant, underwater summer when she had holed up on the side porch of the Pomeroy Street house and read
War and Peace
straight through, and when she was done with her day’s reading and her spare Walgreen’s supper, she went back to her cubicle in the church’s home and stretched out on her
single bed in the wash of a small fan she had bought and went immediately and dreamlessly to sleep.

When she reached the coverage of the previous week and the sit-in at Jojo’s Restaurant, she read it with no more and no less detached interest and absorption than she had read the rest of the material she had ordered. It seemed no more real than the slick paper of that week’s
Time
.

On her way home from the library the last day, Mike took a shortcut through the basement of Kresge’s Five and Ten Cent Store, and found herself drawn up in front of a display of billfolds. She was riveted to one, a lurid pink plastic item embossed in a snakeskin pattern, and all of a sudden wanted it as simply and totally as she wanted sleep and food. She opened and examined it. Its photo section had glossy, preening head shots of Rock Hudson and Doris Day and Anita Ekberg, and a group shot of the Cleaver family, with the Beaver twinkling impishly in front of his parents and brother Wally. She bought the billfold out of her day’s allotment from the duck bank, which left her nothing for supper, but she was not hungry. She fidgeted impatiently on the bus until she reached her stop, and ran in the long, hot twilight across the street and into the church’s home and up the diarrhea-brown stairs to her room, and dropped her purchase on the bed. Methodically, she switched the contents of her own wallet, a supple burgundy calfskin Priss had given her at Christmas, into the new flamingo-colored one, and threw the old wallet into the green tin trash can. She threw the photographs of her father and DeeDee and Bayard Sewell after it. In their places she put Rock and Doris and Anita and the Cleaver family.

The next morning, in the same five-and-dime store, she bought a money belt that fitted around her waist under her clothes, and after that she wore her eight-hundred-odd dollars against her sharpening ribs, even
on the hottest days. They were as comforting there as the clasp of a parent or a lover.

After she had been in the church’s home for a week, Mike had a dream. She dreamed that she stood on a wooden dock reaching out into a blue mountain lake, much like one she remembered from a trip she and DeeDee had made with John Winship up to Lake Burton in the north Georgia mountains, when she was very small. In a wooden rowboat tethered by a rope to a cleat in the dock were her father and sister, Bayard Sewell, Priss Comfort, Rusky, and a beautiful woman in dripping wet clothes whom she knew somehow to be her mother, Claudia. They smiled and beckoned to her, and she ran eagerly toward them at the edge of the dock. It did not strike her as odd that in the dream they were the ages they were in life, or would have been, while she was still a small child. Looking down, she could see the tiny, stubby white sandals on her feet and thin white socks with flowers embroidered on their cuffs that she remembered from a photograph of her fourth birthday. She skipped and capered with joy and held out her hands to meet their outstretched ones, in the gently bobbing boat.

But when she reached the edge of the dock and should have stepped into the boat, she stooped instead to the cleat around which the rope was knotted and deftly unlooped it. In an instant, the boat and the people in it slid swiftly away from the dock and out into the lake, with the telescoping rapidity of dreams, and soon were mere specks in all the dancing, sun-struck blue. She could still see their arms waving to her long after their faces were too small to distinguish. In her dream she smiled and smiled, but when she awoke, sitting soaked with sweat and bolt upright in the pale light from the streetlight outside, there were tears running down her face and into the corner of her mouth. She wiped them away and got up and padded down the hall
to the big communal bathroom, and splashed her face, and brushed her teeth, and went back to bed and to sleep.

She did not cry again for many years.

For the next week or so, she spent her mornings in the downtown library, and in the afternoon she read library books in her room, or went to a rare movie. Sometimes she went to nearby Piedmont Park and sat in a swing and looked out over the dirty little lake. She seemed to live on a peaceful plain, walled away by mountains of heat and distance and the simmering city from the barely remembered fear and pain of the last day in Lytton. She was careful with the money in the belt, eating in drugstores and cafeterias, for she knew that when it was gone she would have to find another way to finish her education. She cared about only that, and about leaving the South.