Tara Lake | 2009 Fiction Finalist

Excerpt from A Time To Rise

Group three was under the direction of Reverend Long, who set to work unpacking the idea of non-violent resistance and the state of “The Movement” throughout The South and in New Jersey. Victoria took it all in with great interest – though that interest led her frequently beyond the Reverend’s talk, it being platitudinous in a way that might have tried the longsuffering of the biblical Job. Now and then she would survey the room, trying to get a feel for the others. Everyone seemed so at home, with their modern clothes, intelligent eyes, and composition notebooks. Even many of the girls raised their hands, as Elizabeth did, to answer or ask questions. They didn’t seem the least bit uncomfortable.

Victoria’s eyes rested on an older girl in group two, just a couple of rows away. The girl wore a sharply pressed, collared white blouse and an impossibly sweet pink sweater. If Victoria weren’t so busy being studious, she’d have wondered where the girl had found it – not that she had the money to buy a store-bought sweater herself. The girl’s profile looked like something regal there, and Victoria set up a little volley for herself. She’d watch and listen to Reverend Long, at appropriate moments writing some tidbit in her flimsy diary with its cracked leather cover. After some time, she’d change the scenery. Now she would scan her group with a smile. And then she would turn to study the girl in the pink sweater.

Miss Pink Sweater’s eyes were a bonus. It was only because she, like Victoria, had been surveying the room that they could be seen from Victoria’s vantage. They were such serious eyes, like pools of quiet nestled up in a face holding a non-intentional and very deep everything. Victoria stole glances more directly after that, letting her eyes play in pleasant passing on the girl’s hair, a hearty gathering barely contained. And she mirrored the girl’s studious notetaking. There was something in that deliberate intellectualism and hunger that she liked. Nobody here was like any of the slackers haunting Wilson High, but not everyone seemed so earnest as the mysterious girl in group two.

Rev. Long’s fervor called Victoria back the circle, and she lent him her full attention.

“And it goes against our very nature,” Rev. Long insisted. Reverend Long was the kind of preacher who sang in a pulpit way when, for example, asking that someone pass the pork chops. “Because man’s very instinct is to defend himself. The impulse of the most delicate woman would be to die, if need be, in defense of her child.”

Reverend Long looked directly at Elizabeth, and then Victoria, when he said this. Then he laid the capstone.

“And so the very foundation of our preparation must be prayer and supplication. Only The Lord Jesus can give us the strength to resist the temptation to return the strikes and blows, and the malicious words that will surely come to attack and dissuade us.”

Sound like that take a whole lot of Jesus, Victoria thought. Still, she wrote the words “prayer and S-U-P-P-L-I-C-A-T-I-O-N” in heavy, bold, letters, underlining the phrase twice. Next to that she wrote “Non-Violent Resistance”. Underlined that. She did not write down the vocabulary word that came to mind: O-X-Y-M-O-R-O-N.

But Victoria felt on solid ground here. She had the inkling that she was right where she ought to be. It was as if she had stumbled upon the right people, and all she had to do was learn how to get along. Or remember. She let her eyes travel the two rows again to the wise-looking girl in the pink sweater, and gave them permission to linger there. Study. This time, they swept over the girls left cheek. There was a mole there – near her eye.

The mole moved.

Victoria wasn’t immediately aware that the Pink Sweater Girl’s liquid eyes were meeting her own, joining with a slight smile in a polite and mute “how-do”. Luckily, Victoria’s manners remembered themselves – nodded her head to the girl, and then turned it elsewhere, abbreviating the stare that had no doubt prompted the encounter in the first place. The clammy warmth of queasy embarrassment flooded over her. It was not like Victoria to behave in such a way. She was never so…confrontational. Or rude.

How could she expect to ever make decent friends with such behavior? Setting up there gawking like a country girl without no sense. Good grief, she hoped her mouth hadn’t been open. Victoria buried herself in her small diary, chastising internally and taking notes on Rev. Long’s jacket.

The session ended, and the attendees popped up with excitement, anxious to mingle and nibble on oatmeal cookies. Some gathered up papers, ink pens, and composition books. Others picked up lively conversations produced from wherever they had been tucked during the workshop. In moments, the room was a careful cacophony of throaty laughs, note comparisons, and introductions. Everyone looked so bright and attractive, and Victoria wished she could shroud the long, simple skirt, the pea green sweater, and the cream-colored blouse, with its telltale detailing in the collar.

She thought to slip on her heavy coat, despite its faded coloring and loose button. But there wasn’t no sense in that. The auditorium air was temperate, and she’d look silly in a coat. Aw Lord, everything she had on had seen it’s better days.

Last thing I need is to be standing up here sticking out like a sore thumb, looking like I just come in from the fields, she thought.

But here she was.

Daddy would have said, “Oh well, Vic. This what you got. Better put your best foot forward and not worry about what’s on it.”