Mockingbird Summer

by Lynda Rutledge

Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.

And, as life-changing stories sometimes do, it all began with a book.

The public library was deeply ostentatious compared to other buildings in town. It was a two-story Italian Renaissance–style Carnegie public library, one of the twenty-five-hundred-plus libraries steel baron Andrew Carnegie helped plant across the country at the turn of the twentieth century.

Although some things never change about growing up, the time in which you grow up isn’t one of them. It’s forever changing, shaping you in ways you can’t control or anticipate. As each year passes, the only wild card is you.

Atticus Finch, the lawyer hero of the book, was telling his son, Jem, that he wouldn’t see the laws change before he died, and if Jem did, he’d be an old man. Maybe it was just the shock of her big brother marking up a library book, which was close to a sin in her young world. Maybe the memory would stick because the laws really were starting to change. Or it could just have been the way powerful words linger in a well-told story.

“It’s not about money. Whatever job I find will just be part-time until Corky’s out of school and—” “You already volunteer at the library. Why do you want to be a working girl? Why isn’t taking care of us enough? It was for my mother. Do you want another baby?”

“A woman’s place is in the home,” the saying went. Unless, of course, your husband wasn’t a good breadwinner and you had to work to make ends meet—or unless you had the misfortune to not even have a husband. If you were single after the age of twenty, you were on the verge of being considered an old maid, so you were expected to be husband-hunting double-time. If you weren’t married by thirty, you were pretty much relegated to spinsterhood. This was the world Corky had grown up in. And the world you grow up in always feels like the way it has always been and will always be. Until it isn’t.

“I heard she’s so fast, she could be good enough to make it to the Olympics,” Mr. Dan answered. “If true, I want to be the one who put her in her first pair of good athletic shoes. I’ll also order some women’s track shoes for the same reason, on the house, as well,”

“A book, like music, is very personal. You bring yourself, your own story, to everything you read. It’s a book’s boon and bane. But it’s also its raison d’être—its reason for being—to meet you where you are. Exactly like a great piece of music.”

Turning around, she walked slowly home, pondering what Miss Yoakum had just said. Bringing your own story to a book? Until that moment, she wasn’t aware she had a story to bring to anything. Glancing back toward Miss Yoakum, who had reappeared to sweep her dirt driveway, Corky thought about Miss Yoakum’s doozy of a story. But . . . what’s America’s?

There is a young moment when the world can suddenly reveal that it doesn’t revolve around you. This was Corky’s moment.

Everybody’s got their own story, she realized as she locked eyes with the driver of a passing car . . . and they’re swirling around me every moment of every day. All she had to do was be open to seeing them.

noticing it only because its muffler was rattling. But, as if it had rounded the block, the same loud truck came by again. It had slowed down so much, it was moving at little more than a crawl. Corky squinted for a better view. As it passed under the streetlight beyond the horse corral, she saw it was a decrepit flatbed with what looked like slat side rails. She’d never seen it before. When you live in a tiny town, you pretty much know not only the people but all their cars, especially since nobody bought anything but Chevys and Fords and the occasional Cadillac, if you were a Boatwright. Before it passed out of sight, Corky also noticed one of its red taillights was broken.

“Did you know that baseball is the only sport in which errors are counted as actual statistics?” she went on. “I mean, that’s brutal!”

“It’s not the stats I like. It’s what you do to get the stats: hitting, stealing, throwing, striking, batting, and, oh man, the strategizing. And no clock. It isn’t over until it’s over. Gawd, I love it. All of it. Even putting on my cleats makes me happy.”

And, without explanation, Cal Sr. turned around and headed back to the house, defying Hiram Tilton’s edict to punish his Northside boy for playing with Southside boys. In that moment, the law of the heart had won out over the Jim Crow law of the land.

“Isn’t that something! I don’t think I’ve ever seen women on the front cover of Sports Illustrated.” “Coach Trumbull says it’s the first time, that it was probably a stunt to get attention.” “It got my attention.”

All ladies are women, but not all women are ladies, just like all gentlemen are men, but not all men are gentlemen.

“Here’s the thing to remember about normal. In big times of change, normal is what is being changed.

“After a fifty-four-day filibuster,” she read, “President Lyndon Johnson now has the votes to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in the US Senate. The act will effectively end the application of Jim Crow laws, as it will prohibit discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin . . .” Papa

“Today marks the anniversary of the fastest woman in the world, Olympic gold-medalist Wilma Rudolph, participating in a civil rights protest in her hometown of Clarksville, Tennessee, to desegregate one of the city’s restaurants,” she read. “That very day, the mayor announced the city’s public facilities, including its restaurants, would become fully integrated—”

“I wish I could run like you, I wish I could play softball like you . . . I wish I could be you!”

Corky still thought that America was smarter and kinder and more talented and grown-up than any other teenage girl she knew. That’s what it feels like to meet your idol, and that’s what was happening without her knowing it. Corky was idolizing her, the kind of deep, pure adolescent idolizing that knows no boundaries. In the same way she’d idolized her mother for her beauty and Mack for his baseball skills, she was now, as a brand-new teenager, idolizing America for all the things she wanted to be.

Like the saying goes, that’s what college is for us girls—getting an MRS degree!”

As mad as he was at his father, Mack was aware of how much his father’s adult decisions had paved the way for him to be sitting there wishing for his own dreams to come true. Yet he felt caught in a loop:

Every life has a smattering of days that change everything.

It was an amazing sight. For the first time in the history of High Cotton, the citizenry of both sides of the town’s railroad tracks were in the same place, watching the same game, a situation so unheard of that some who saw it called it a bit of a miracle.

There are none so blind as those who will not see.’”

Two weeks had passed since the game, and it was as if America had disappeared into thin air the moment she’d sprinted across the dark tracks. Holding back tears, Corky rushed to her mother and blurted, “Where’s Evangeline? Where’s America? Why doesn’t anybody know?”

“If that is the case, I, for one, will be glad I had the privilege of knowing her at all.” His

“Since Eden, there’s always been a snake in the garden. That’s the world we must journey through, one full of snakes willing to do wrong.”

Stay open so your heart can do what it’s supposed to do. If you do, I know it’s going to be something good. Just like I know it for America.”

hurried out the door and back across the tracks. It would be the last time she ever crossed them.

thinking about lines. Lines that we stand in. Lines that divide us. Lines that, long ago, blurred for a moment at a little baseball field when, all together, we cheered the extraordinary in our midst. And lines others crossed to do wrong after such a moment of doing right. The last time I saw you, you were sprinting over one of those lines:

people you come to love early, the ones who help shape you into the person you become, never truly leave you, I don’t think. And as time keeps passing, those are the ones who come naturally to mind, the ones you’d love to see once more.

I bet you feel the same tug of mortality and its bittersweet urge to look back.

Because while a journalist’s job is to tell what is true, a novelist’s job is to tell what is truth, to create a world in which you’d want to live, in which everything is just, even if only in the end.

rereads her letter and lingers over its promise . . . until she hears a bird singing. She smiles, hoping it’s a mockingbird.