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FREEDOMWAYS                            THIRD QUARTER 1973

gleaming Braniff DC6, rushed for a window seat and buckled myself in. A few seconds later an elegantly togged lady who seemed to be smelling something very unpleasant, edged into the outside seat. When the stewardess came down the aisle there was a whispered conversation which terminated when the stewardess turned her white mask toward me with the advice that I'd be acting real smart if I got the hell out of that seat and moved up forward. She didn't add "or else" but it was there beneath the words. I moved. I still had enough of my wits left about me to remember that I was, after all, in this greatest of all democracies, Black and outnumbered. You dig? But it turned out much better than I deserved. The only vacant seat left was up front next to a sister who turned out to be so cool, so full of quietly brilliant humor that I almost forgot the honeysuckle-drenched woman who carried the power of the whole U.S. government and its "law" enforcement thugs firmly clutched between her miserably scrawny haunches.
Now here I was, in 1972, twenty-five years later, at the same Nashville Airport. When I heard my flight being called I took the escalator down to the port boarding room where I took a seat near the door. A few minutes later that same god damned woman came into the room. Of course, when I got myself together I realized that it wasn't she but it sure as hell could have been. Something had happened to Miss Anne in the intervening years. She'd lost that mulishly arrogant canter. Instead of sweeping into the room she trickled in. The megalomaniac White-Fairy-Queen glare, which best-selling novelists describe as "a level stare" wasn't working. Instead she wore a simpering plea of helplessness with which she checked the room. I was the only Black passenger in the room and so, naturally, those hypocritically cunning eyes stopped and she moved toward me like the mesmerized lady in Dracula. She took the next seat and leaning toward me she said, "Suh, ah sho to goodness hope that nobody in heah is gon' hah-jack our plane this tahm. Do you s'pose they will?" Talk about Bugville. That's where I was at! When I finally got my mouth to close up I wanted to laugh until I cried but when I managed to get myself together I told her, "Well no, Miss Anne, I don't think there's anything to worry about." She smiled even more and hurried to say, "No, I'm Miss Lurleen...." I didn't hear the rest of it because this time the chuckles were breaking through my cool. Seeming somewhat relieved, but not much, Miss Lurleen continued, "Do you reckon anyone in heah is ca'ing a guuuun?" "No," I assured her, "if anybody, you for instance,

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---------- Reopened for Editing 2024-02-26 14:41:12