The Governor had appointed her Secretary of the California Civil Rights Forum (CCRF), Dwayne had been her nominated liaison with the NAACP — the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People — on the CCRF and by the time he returned to Atlanta to help organize the Bedford Pine Park march and rally things between them had… developed.
She had missed him dreadfully when he left the West Coast; it was like a part of her was incomplete and she had known that when he came back to California they would be together…
Catching herself brooding she snapped out of it.
Miranda recollected that afternoon at the Sequoyah Country Club in Oakland when Greg and his now wife, Darlene, had turned up for their mother’s several times delayed sixtieth birthday party, and Greg had broken the news that he and Darlene were getting married, and demanding a loan to purchase the China Girl. Miranda had though her father was going to have a stroke and her mother had, very nearly, swooned; their angst had been so palpable it would have been comic had it not been so revelatory.
To her parents Darlene was white trash, a gold-digger who had traduced their innocent, unworldly baby boy into bed to get her hands on the Sullivan family fortune.
How then would her parents have taken the news she planned to marry a black man intimately involved with the African-American Civil Rights Movement? A man who was an openly declared, dedicated disciple of Doctor Martin Luther King? They would most likely have both had seizures! It was one thing for Greg to go off the rails; they had never had terribly high hopes of him. But she was their little princess…
Darlene Lefebure had never been any kind of gold-digger. It was not that she was unworldly, or dreamy like Greg. She had grown up on what middle class Americans liked to call ‘the wrong side of the tracks’, been mistreated and abused by a stepfather who would have killed her had not she and Dwayne, her unlikely childhood friend in a town where blacks and whites never dated because that was a sure fire way to get lynched, jumped on the first greyhound out of Jackson, Alabama a year before the October War. Gold-diggers planned and schemed; Darlene and Greg had met by an accident of fate only because Miranda had already been involved in Dwayne John’s and Darlene Lefebure’s troubles of last November. It all seemed so improbable, too improbable but then after the last couple of years nothing really surprised Miranda.
She had tried to keep going, thought she was doing okay.
But then the FBI had wanted to talk to her about Dwayne and Doctor King had written to her, inviting her to ‘be with our fellowship’ at Oakland Cemetery to ‘honor our fallen in our own hallowed ground’.
One day she had been discovered at her desk in the Governor’s Office in the State Capitol at Sacramento staring into space, catatonic, deaf to everything. She had sat that way two or three hours, nobody knew exactly how long until her boss, Governor Brown’s Chief of Staff, had suggested she take an indefinite sabbatical. Her job would be waiting for her when she came back; that apparently came straight from the Governor’s lips.
That was nearly five weeks ago.
Greg had wanted to go with her to Atlanta; she had vetoed that. Darlene was six months pregnant and his place was with her here in Sausalito.
Greg must have had one of his now bi-monthly ‘this is the way it is going to be’ conversations with her parents — marrying Darlene had made him prone to unexpected bouts of assertiveness and their parents respected that in exactly the same way they despised ‘going with the flow’ — because her attorney big brother Ben junior and his wife, Natalie, had flown out to Georgia with her, chaperoning her every minute of every day she was in Atlanta. Well, almost every minute. She had been fortunate enough to meet Doctor King privately, been invited to worship at the Ebenezer Street Chapel on the morning of the day of the Bedford Pine Park Memorial Service, and to join the communion in Sunday worship the following day.
Ben and Natalie had brought her home yesterday.
Wrongly, she had imagined her parents would probably try to enroll her in a ‘rest home’, or at least attempt to talk her into signing up for ‘therapy’. In the event Ben and Natalie had delivered her to the foot of the gangplank of the China Girl, and after exchanging uneasy pleasantries with Greg and Darlene — the former they regarded as a harmless dreamer, and the latter as a creature from a foreign country of which they knew little — they had meekly departed.
A note from Terry Francois, the President of the San Francisco Chapter of the NAACP had been waiting for her.
‘I think attending the Bedford Pine Park Memorial in Atlanta is a great act of personal moral courage on your part. I am sorry I was unable to be there with and for you but hope to meet with you again soon. Unfortunately, my recent hospitalization prevents me fulfilling a number of previously scheduled speaking engagements and from attending several forthcoming meetings on CCRF business… ’
Although she had only met Terry Francois the first time last fall she had come to regard the former Marine and long-time NAACP campaigner as a friend whose wise counsel and advice had been invaluable in her work with the CCRF. The poor man had been injured in an automobile crash — the taxi he was riding in had been in collision with a truck in the Mission District three weeks ago — and he was still in traction.
‘The last thing I want to do is impose on you. I know this is a bad time. But if you could see your way clear to picking up a couple of my commitments I would be very grateful to you. I am thinking particularly of an event at Berkeley — a NAACP sponsored rally at which I was going to talk about Atlanta and the start of the March on Philadelphia. And the monthly NAACP gathering at the Third Baptist Church when again, I was intending to speak of the Memorial in Atlanta and the March… ’
Miranda had shown the note to her brother and her sister-in-law.
‘You should tell those college kids up at Berkeley about Dwayne,” Darlene had suggested timidly. Before Gregory came on the scene the two women had been at daggers drawn; however, that seemed like an age ago. It helped that Darlene had got used to the idea that Miranda was the one member of the Sullivan family who was actually happy for her and Greg.
Amenities onboard the China Girl were limited so she had gone ashore and rung through to Terry Francois’s office from a payphone booth on the Bridgeway. Terry’s secretary, a boisterously maternal woman called Florence had been beside herself with pleasure and relief to hear her voice.
‘It’s about the dates in Mr Francois’s diary at Berkeley and the Third Baptist Church… ’
Florence quickly explained that if she could not ‘do them’ that was fine. It was just that ‘Terry thought of you first!’
‘It is okay. I’ll do them both.’
Most days before she went to Atlanta Miranda had curled up in the bunk in the forward ‘stateroom’ and slept, or lain staring at the bulkhead with little or no sense of passing time. Some days she walked along the Sausalito quaysides. A couple of times she had gone shopping with Darlene, a shorter, smaller woman who was already getting very big but not slowing down at all as her pregnancy developed.
Miranda recollected her mother had allegedly retired to her bed practically from the moment of conception to the birth of all her offspring. Darlene had carried on with her cleaning jobs in Marin County and the big houses behind the sea front nearby until about the time Miranda had had her breakdown. Gregory was a teacher and eighth to tenth grade teachers did not get to make their fortune, any kind of fortune, in California or in any other state of the Union.