On April eleventh, Amy received her acceptance letter from Barnard. No one who knew her was surprised, but for several months she had been anguishing over the 81 she had been given in Algebra II — Trigonometry last year, which had pulled down her overall average from 95 to 93, and wondering if her SAT scores weren’t just a trifle too low, 1375 instead of the 1450 she had been gunning for, and whenever Ferguson had tried to reassure her during those anxious months of waiting, she would tell him that nothing was certain in this life, that the world doled out disappointments as quickly and eagerly as a politician could shake hands, and because she didn’t want to be disappointed, she was preparing herself to be disappointed, and therefore, when the happy news arrived at last, she wasn’t happy so much as relieved. But Ferguson was happy, not just for Amy but for himself, above all for himself, since there had been a number of backup choices in case Barnard had turned her down, each one in a city not named New York, and Ferguson had been living in dread that she would land in one of those far-off places like Boston or Chicago or Madison, Wisconsin, which would have made everything so complicated and lonely for him, seeing her only a few times a year, the rushed holiday returns to West Seventy-fifth Street and then gone again, nine long months with little or no contact, writing letters to her that she would be too busy to answer, and slowly and inevitably they would have drifted apart, nothing could have stopped her from meeting someone else, the college boys would have been circling around her and sooner or later she would have fallen for one of them, a twenty- or twenty-one-year-old history major/civil rights activist who would have made her forget all about poor Ferguson, who still hadn’t graduated from high school, and then the letter from Barnard arrived, and he no longer had to contemplate the grim details of what might have been. Ferguson was still young, but he was old enough to have learned that worst nightmares sometimes became real — brothers robbing brothers, presidents shot down by assassins’ bullets, cars crashing into trees — and that sometimes they didn’t, as with the crisis two years earlier, when the world was supposed to have ended but didn’t, or as with Amy’s going off to college, which could have taken her away from New York but didn’t, and now that she would be spending the next four years in New York, Ferguson understood that when the time came for him to go to college, he would have to head to New York as well.
The baseball season had started by then, but Ferguson did everything he could not to think about it. He avoided going to the games, and whatever he knew about the team came from his conversations with Bobby George on their morning rides to school. Andy Malone, who had taken over Ferguson’s spot at third base, was apparently having trouble adjusting to his new position and had cost the team a couple of wins with late-inning errors. Ferguson felt sorry for him and everyone else on the team, but not too sorry, not sorry enough to prevent him from feeling somewhat glad as well, for much as it pained him to admit it, there was a perverse satisfaction in knowing that the team was less good without him. As for Bobby — nothing to worry about, as usual. He had always been good, but now he was the best player on the squad, a power-hitting catcher who could field as well as he hit, and when he finally talked Ferguson into going to a home game against Columbia High School in the second week of May, Ferguson was astonished by how enormously Bobby had improved. A single, a double, and a three-run homer — along with two runners thrown out trying to steal second base. The snot-clogged little boy who had breathed through his mouth and sucked his thumb was now a six-foot-two-inch adolescent, a muscular, quick-footed hulk of more than two hundred pounds who looked like a full-grown man on the field and played with an intelligence that was nothing less than bewildering to Ferguson, for Bobby George was a blockhead at all pursuits that were not baseball or football or laughing at dirty jokes, and the only reason why he wasn’t flunking half his classes was because his parents had hired a tutor from Montclair State to help keep his average from dropping below a C, which was the academic minimum required to participate in interscholastic sports. Put him on a ball field, however, and he played smart, and now that Ferguson had seen how good Bobby had become, there was no need to torture himself by going to another game that spring. Maybe next year, he told himself, but for now it still hurt too much.
Summer was approaching, and with the business of college finally off the table for her, Amy was talking politics again, pouring out her ideas to Ferguson in long conversations about SNCC, CORE, and the direction of the movement, bitterly frustrated that she was too young to go down south to take part in the Mississippi Summer Project that was being organized during the last months of the school year, the three-pronged initiative launched by SNCC that involved the recruitment of a small army of college students from the North, a thousand extra pairs of hands to help with (1) a voter registration drive for the disenfranchised Negroes of the state, (2) the running of the Freedom Schools that would be set up for Negro children in dozens of towns and small cities, and (3) the founding of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, which would elect a slate of alternative delegates to go to the convention in Atlantic City at the end of August in order to unseat the all-white, racist delegation of the regular Democrats. Amy would have given anything to go down into that danger zone of violence and bigotry, to put herself on the line for the cause, but nineteen was the cutoff age and she wasn’t eligible to apply, which was all to the good from Ferguson’s perspective, for much as he believed in the cause himself, a summer without Amy would have been intolerable to him.
Many intolerable things occurred in the months that followed, but not to them, not directly to them, and in spite of their summer jobs as clerk at the Eighth Street Bookshop (Amy) and staff member at Stanley’s TV & Radio (Ferguson), they managed to see each other often, not just on the weekends but on many weeknights as well, with Ferguson driving into the city the moment he got off from work, picking up Amy at the bookstore and then on to hamburgers at Joe Junior’s and a movie at the Bleecker Street Cinema or a walk through Washington Square or a naked tumble in the apartment of one of Amy’s absent friends, free to go wherever they wanted now because of Ferguson’s car, the Freedom Car of that Freedom Summer, the Saturdays and Sundays when they would drive out to Jones Beach or drive up north to the country or drive down to the Jersey shore, a summer of big thoughts and ferocious love and immense pain, which began so encouragingly when the Civil Rights Bill was passed by the Senate on June nineteenth, and then, immediately afterward, just seventy-two hours later, the intolerable things began to happen. On June twenty-second, three of the young men who had joined the Mississippi Summer Project were reported missing. Andrew Goodman, Mickey Schwerner, and James Chaney had left the project’s Ohio training center ahead of the other students in order to investigate the bombing of a church and had not been heard from since the day of their departure. There was no question that they had been murdered, beaten and tortured and killed by white segregationists out to terrorize the invading horde of Yankee radicals who were plotting to destroy their way of life, but no one knew where the bodies were and not one white person in the state of Mississippi seemed to care. Amy wept when she heard the news. On July sixteenth, the day Barry Goldwater won the Republican nomination for president in San Francisco, a white cop shot and killed a black teenager in Harlem, and Amy wept again when James Powell’s death was answered by six straight nights of rioting and looting in Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant, with the New York police shooting live bullets over the heads of people standing on rooftops and throwing stones and garbage down on them in the streets, not the fire hoses and dogs used to disperse black mobs in the South but real bullets, and Amy wept not only because she finally understood that racism was just as strong in the North as it was in the South, just as strong in her own city, but because she also understood that her innocent idealism was dead, that her dream of a color-blind America in which blacks and whites stood together was no more than stupid wishful thinking, and not even Bayard Rustin, the man who had organized the March on Washington just eleven months earlier, had the least bit of influence anymore, and when he stood in front of the crowd in Harlem and begged them to stop the violence so no one would be hurt or killed, the crowd shouted him down and called him an Uncle Tom. Peaceful resistance had lost its meaning, Martin Luther King was yesterday’s news, and Black Power had become the supreme gospel, and so great was that power that within a matter of months the word Negro had been erased from the American lexicon. On August fourth, the bodies of Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney were discovered in an earth dam near Philadelphia, Mississippi, and the photographs of their half-buried corpses, lying in the mud at the bottom of the dam, were so horrible and disturbing to look at that Ferguson turned away his head and groaned. The next day, word was released that two U.S. destroyers patrolling the Gulf of Tonkin had been attacked by North Vietnamese P.T. boats, or so it was stated in the official government report, and on August seventh Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, giving Johnson the power “to take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression.” The war was on, and Amy was no longer weeping. She had made up her mind about Johnson now, and she was furious, so exalted in her anger that Ferguson was almost tempted to crack a joke to see if she would ever smile again.