Summer of the Redeemers by Carolyn Haines

and Mama Betts and Arly. You have to use good sense and make certain that nothing bad happens to you.” He paused. “You can’t risk yourself, Bekkah.”
    “Yes, sir.” They’d all gone off the deep end. I was just an hour or so late. You’d think I’d been playing with dynamite. Effie had stepped back in the kitchen, away from the telephone in the hall. “Daddy?”
    “Yes?”
    “If I had a chance at something I wanted more than anything else, something that wouldn’t hurt anyone, would it be wrong for me to try to get it?”
    “Hypothetical questions are impossible at this distance. Would you care to be a little more specific?”
    The detail man. He couldn’t be happy with a simple question. “There’s a woman at the old McInnis place. Her name is Nadine Andrews, and she’s offered to give me horseback riding lessons if I’ll work at her barn.”
    “What does Effie say?”
    “I haven’t told her.”
    “So, that’s the story of where you were and how you lost your bicycle.”
    “For the most part.” It would be stupid to drag the Redeemer boys into an already complicated story.
    “You couldn’t have picked up the telephone and called your mother?”
    “Nadine just moved in. I don’t think her phone is hooked up yet.”
    “Bekkah, I know how bad you want this, and I don’t personally see any harm in it, but I can’t say yes if Effie’s dead set against it.”
    My only hope faded. “Don’t tell her, Daddy. Let me work on it.”
    There was a long pause. “Promise me you won’t run off and worry your mother again. Work it out between the two of you, but don’t leave her wondering if she’s going to find your body in the ditch somewhere.”
    “I promise. How are things in Missouri?”
    “Far removed from the things that are worrying me about Mississippi.”
    Daddy suddenly sounded tired. He was always worried about things that couldn’t be helped. He talked about perceptions and how people got tied down in one way of thinking and couldn’t see the truth. He said that the South was in for a hard time because some northern folks had time schedules in their heads and were determined to keep them. Not a lot of what he said made sense to me, but it troubled him. And Effie too. I had the idea that it had something to do with communists, but somehow Negroes were involved in it too. We didn’t have any Negroes living on Kali Oka Road, so it didn’t seem as if it could really have too much effect on us. Besides, the ones I knew in Jexville didn’t seem upset about anything.
    “Daddy, we’re all fine down here. Don’t worry about us.”
    “Put your mother on the phone, Bekkah. I love you.”
    Daddy wouldn’t tell on me about the horses. We had a deal. I called Effie to the phone and listened for a few minutes as she talked about Jexville and some argument at a juke joint up near the forks of the river at Merrill. A Negro man had been selling shine, and a white man had killed him. The Negro’s brother had then taken a shotgun and blasted the white man in half. I’d heard Effie and Mama Betts talking about it in whispers. It sounded like it was all over to me. The white man had started it, and he’d been killed. There was obviously something more to the whole story because whenever Effie started to talk about it, she whispered and tried to talk in code so that Arly and I wouldn’t catch on. Arly and I, for the most part, weren’t interested.
    “They’ve got him in jail.”
    There was a pause while Daddy talked.
    “No, none of the lawyers will represent him. I’m afraid they’re going to send someone from out of town.”
    There was another pause.
    “No, Joe says the jail is secure. He wants him moved, but there’s no place to take him.” Pause. “No, Greene County would be worse. They’d hang him in his cell. Hattiesburg, maybe.”
    There was a lot longer pause, and Effie cast me an accusatory look. “I’m not afraid to let her grow up. That’s not fair. You’re not even