And Do Remember Me by Marita Golden Read Free Book Online

would do to him than say to her. As she had done more than once that evening, Macon read his mind and wrapped her arms around his waist, her head against his chest.
    “It’s been a long time, Macon, a real long time,” he whispered into the night.
    “They say it’s like swimming. You never forget. If you need to know how, it comes back.”
    “They’re not always right.”
    “If you want them to be,” she said hopefully.
    “Give me time. Don’t write for a while,” he pleaded.
    “I have to. Those letters to you are the only thing that makes sense anymore. They’re the only thing that’s real.”
    “I can’t promise to answer.”
    “I don’t need an answer,” she said, gazing up at him, her eyes tiny silver pools in the darkness. “I just need you here.”
    Soon he was visiting her every few weeks, bringing her books to read. Macon wrote him often, but he didn’t answer the letters, instead he just showed up at her dorm. Courtland was afraid to make love to her, because she had this crazy kind of hold on him. Every time he promised himself he wasn’t going back to Greensboro because he didn’t have time, he headed to see her again. Finally, Macon seduced him in the backseat of a friend’s car that he had driven from Memphis to see her.
    After they had sex she didn’t make him feel like a possession, as if he were indebted to her forever because of what they had done. Macon made him feel as though she had to have him but could nonetheless live without him. Courtland had prepared no weapons to defeat such a sophisticated, measured manifestation of love.
    Love mugged him, he’d later tell friends, and when it demanded everything he had, he opened his pockets and emptied them.
    W HEN SHE GRADUATED from Bennett and married Courtland, they went to live in Greenwood, staying with his mother for the first several months. Ursiline Hightower was a tall, imposing woman whose Indian blood found expression in her prominent cheekbones and mass of thick straight hair. She was a midwife who had suffered six miscarriages before finally givingbirth to Courtland. Macon sometimes drove with Ursiline Hightower to deliver babies, in her 1945 Pontiac, a vehicular relic that nonetheless traveled the roads of the Delta with considerable assurance. Macon assisted Ursiline at the births that took place on mattresses on the floor, on porches, in one-room houses where a dozen children played noisily outside the curtainless windows or slept on the floor around their feet. Nothing in Macon’s Richmond, Virginia, background prepared her for what she saw in Mississippi. Yet she felt that driving across the Delta with Courtland’s mother, who had delivered at last count three hundred babies, had prepared her for everything she’d done since.
    The phone rang again, and Macon, as if fleeing from the sound, moved closer to Courtland. She wouldn’t answer it this time. She would take a chance. When the phone stopped, Macon thought of their children—where would they be born? But she had learned to take nothing for granted. Before bed that evening, alone in their room, Courtland and Macon had talked about the three missing civil rights workers—Goodman, Chaney and Schwerner—who had disappeared near Meridian. Courtland was convinced they were dead. Sitting on their bed in an undershirt and boxer shorts, wan and tired from his days in prison, Courtland shook his head and said, “God knows I wish I didn’t feel it in my gut. But I was born down here. I know what can happen.”
    He was losing weight, Macon noticed, his cheeks nearly sunken. He reminded her of pictures she had seen of Gandhi, ascetic and obsessed yet unperturbed. But her husband was no prophet, no saint, she knew. And they had even managed to kill Gandhi. All the purity of heart and love in the world hadn’t saved him.
    “But with all the reporters and the TV cameras following these white kids around? How could they be so stupid?” Maconargued. “Even if what you