The Hope Chest by Karen Schwabach

between here and Tennessee. This may be just a tourist jaunt to you, but to us it represents the culmination of a seventy-two-year battle.”
    Mr. Martin glowered at her. Then the train started with a lurch that threw him into her lap.
    “A thousand pardons, Miss Dexter,” Mr. Martin apologized, getting into his own seat with difficulty. “I can assure you that I care every bit as much about the woman suffrage issue as you do,” he added frostily.
    “I find that very hard to believe,” said Miss Dexter. “But if you actually care about the Susan B. Anthony Amendment, then don't jeopardize our chances by making ugly scenes about unrelated issues.”
    “It is not an unrelated issue!” Mr. Martin said heatedly. “It's all the same issue. If you can't see that—”
    “You sound like a Bolshevik,” said Miss Dexter, and turned pointedly to look out the window. Mr. Martin turned the other way and stared across the aisle out the opposite window. The other suffragists in the seats around them were all trying hard to look like they weren't staring at Miss Dexter and Mr. Martin. Violet felt extremely uncomfortable. This was going to be a long train trip. She wished Myrtle had been allowed to stay.

In the Jim Crow Car
    M YRTLE HAD HER BUNDLE TUCKED UNDER one arm—the extra cut-down dress and a toothbrush and a comb that Miss Burns had bought for her. The only possession she really cared about she always carried in her pocket, like a talisman. It was a tiny tin-framed snapshot that Mama and Daddy had had taken the day they were married. Mama had come through clearly, looking just like Mama only not as tired as Myrtle remembered her. Daddy was mostly hidden. The flash powder had left a blurred spot in the middle of Daddy's face, so that she could only see the edges of it. She wished whoever had taken the picture had known this was going to be the only time William Davies's daughter would ever see him and had tried again.
    Daddy had gone down to Panama to work on Mr.Roosevelt's canal just before Myrtle was born. Then he had died, either of yellow fever or in a cave-in; the boss who wrote to Mama wasn't sure. So many American colored men died digging the Panama Canal, according to Mama, that the bosses couldn't keep track of them. Myrtle imagined that Daddy might have looked a bit like Mr. Martin, only much handsomer, and colored, of course. She liked Mr. Martin. He reminded her of Daddy somehow, which was dumb, considering Myrtle had never actually met her father.
    The conductor followed Myrtle down the length of the train car to the vestibule between the cars, then said, “The colored car's all the way at the back,” and left her. Myrtle struggled to open the door into the next car, the one behind the one that Mr. Martin and the other white people were in. The door wouldn't budge. She braced one foot against the side of the train car and hauled as hard as she could at the handle. The door opened and she stumbled backward but managed to recover and get through the door before it closed.
    The next car was full of white people, and Myrtle hurried through it. Some of them gave her cold stares over their newspapers. One woman smiled at Myrtle and said to the man next to her, “They're so cute when they're little.”
    The train started and Myrtle fell down. Somebody laughed. Myrtle got to her feet, angry but schooling her face to perfect passive indifference. She made her waybackward as the train sped forward. A conductor grabbed her arm.
    “You're in the wrong car, girl,” he said.
    Myrtle gave him a vacant look. “I'm going to the colored car, mister.”
    “The Jim Crow car is in the back,” the conductor said. He opened the door at the rear of the car and shoved Myrtle through it. “Keep walking.”
    The floor of the vestibule shifted and creaked under Myrtle's feet. The doors to the cars were even harder to open now that the train was moving. Myrtle found she couldn't open the next one at all, and against her will,