Page 221 of Edge of Eternity (The Century 3)

"She's right," his mother would probably say. Not many girls were good enough for her son, in her opinion.

She would ask how he was getting on with Bobby Kennedy. The truth was that Bobby was a man of extremes. There were people he hated implacably: J. Edgar Hoover was one. That was fine by George: Hoover was contemptible. But Lyndon Johnson was another. George thought it was a pity that Bobby hated Johnson, who could have been a powerful ally. Sadly, they were oil and water. George tried to imagine the big, boisterous vice president hanging out with the ultra-chic Kennedy clan on a boat at Hyannis Port. The image made him smile: Lyndon would be like a rhinoceros in a ballet class.

Bobby liked as hard as he hated, and fortunately George was someone he liked. George was one of a small inner group who were trusted so much that even when they made mistakes it was assumed they were well intentioned and so they were forgiven. What would George say to his mother about Bobby? "He's a smart man who sincerely wants to make America a better country."

She would want to know why the Kennedy brothers were moving so slowly on civil rights. George would say: "If they push harder there will be a white backlash, and that will have two results. One, we'll lose the civil rights bill in Congress. Two, Jack Kennedy will lose the 1964 presidential election. And if Kennedy loses, who will win? Dick Nixon? Barry Goldwater? It could even be George Wallace, heaven forbid."

These were his musings as he parked in the driveway of Jacky Jakes's small, pleasant ranch-style house and let himself in at the front door.

All those thoughts fled his mind instantly when he heard the sound of his mother weeping.

He suffered a moment of childish fear. He had not often known his mother to cry: she had always been a tower of strength in the landscape of his youth. But, on the few occasions when she had given in, and howled her grief and fear uncontrollably, little Georgy had been bewildered and terrified. And now, just for a second, he had to suppress the revival of that boyhood terror, and remind himself that he was a grown man, not to be scared by a mother's tears.

He slammed the door and strode across the little hallway into the living room. Jacky was sitting on the tan velvet couch in front of the television set. Her hands were pressed to her cheeks as if to hold her head on. Tears streamed down her face. Her mouth was open, and she was wailing. She was staring wide-eyed at the TV.

George said: "Mama, what is it, for God's sake, what happened?"

"Four little girls!" she sobbed.

George looked at the monochrome picture on the screen. He saw two cars that looked as if they had been in a smash. Then th

e camera moved to a building and panned along damaged walls and broken windows. It pulled back, and he recognized the building. His heart lurched. "My God, that's the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham!" he said. "What did they do?"

His mother said: "The whites bombed the Sunday school!"

"No! No!" George's mind refused to accept it. Even in Alabama, men would not bomb a Sunday school.

"They killed four girls," Jacky said. "Why did God let this happen?"

On television, a newsreader's voice-over said: "The dead have been identified as Denise McNair, aged eleven--"

"Eleven!" said George. "This can't be true!"

"--Addie Mae Collins, fourteen; Carole Robertson, fourteen; and Cynthia Wesley, fourteen."

"But they're children!" said George.

"More than twenty other people were injured by the blast," the newsreader intoned in a voice devoid of emotion, and the camera showed an ambulance pulling away from the scene.

George sat down next to his mother and put his arms around her. "What are we going to do?" he said.

"Pray," she replied.

The newsreader continued remorselessly. "This was the twenty-first bomb attack on Negroes in Birmingham in the last eight years," he said. "The city police have never brought any perpetrators to justice for any of the bombings."

"Pray?" said George, his voice trembling with grief.

Right then he wanted to kill someone.

*

The Sunday school bomb horrified the world. As far away as Wales, a group of coal miners started a collection to pay for a new stained-glass window to replace one smashed in the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church.

At the funeral, Martin Luther King said: "In spite of the darkness of this hour, we must not lose faith in our white brothers." George tried to follow that counsel, but he found it hard.

For a while George felt public opinion swinging toward civil rights. A congressional committee toughened Kennedy's bill, adding the ban on employment discrimination that the campaigners wanted so badly.

But a few weeks later the segregationists came out of their corner fighting.

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