Sheila and Franklin Standish were twins. In May of 1964 they had turned fifteen and were at a birthday party in their parents’ home on Morningside Heights. The US Postal Service called the space an apartment. It was really a loft, but that term had yet to catch on in Manhattan. One of the many ways New York lagged behind the Bay Area as social change barged its way into urban America.

Robert Standish was a tall, gangly white man who’d grown up in Greenwich, Connecticut and gone to Groton some decades after FDR. One of his grad students had said to his nasally girlfriend that Robert talked a lot like the New Deal president.

“Yeah, us Jews call that Locust Valley Lockjaw,” she said, grinding her way through a pastrami sandwich.”

“What?”

“Next time you see him talk, watch his lips. They hardly move.”

“Shit, I never noticed. You’re right.”

“Usually am.” The guy gave her a little smile and patted her hand.

“Good boy. You know how to keep those little sexual favors coming, doncha?”

“I’m doing my very best.”

Robert’s wife, Tamara, was tall and stately and black. Born in Alabama to a farmer and a piano teacher, she and Robert had met at a conference in Atlanta. She a sophomore music major at Morris Brown College, he a doctoral candidate in sociology at the University of Michigan. The two had married as soon as she graduated. They lived in Ann Arbor for two years until Robert passed his orals, then moved to New York where he’d gotten a tenure track offer at Columbia.

One of the women at the party was an older cousin of Robert’s visiting from Maine. Something about her reminded Tamara of a favorite aunt back in Alabama. Maybe her eyes. Kind and penetrating, but not intrusive. They sent the message, “Whatever you tell me, I won’t judge you. You can’t shock me. I’ve lived too long for that.”

“Is it cold in Maine?”

“It’s almost never not cold.”

“That’s how I felt during the years I spent with Robert in Michigan.”

“Not like Alabama?” she said with a teasing smile.

“Not like Alabama at all. Not in so many ways.”

She paused as Tamara’s eyes moistened. “Maybe you could tell me about that, dear?”

“I wouldn’t know where to start.”

Squeezing the younger woman’s hand, she said, “Where you start is unimportant. Nor when. I won’t leave unless you tell me to.”

They slipped off to a corner and talked for almost an hour.

“So there you are,” said a voice straining its way from childhood to adolescence.

“Hi, honey. Where’s your brother?”

“He’s with Daddy. They told me to find you because it’s time to cut the cake.”

“And I can see how very anxious you are to do that.”

She gave her mother a playful shoulder punch, then turned to the older woman, extended her hand, and said, “Hi, I’m Sheila Standish.”

“Very nice to meet you, Sheila. I’m Susan Cranford. I’m your dad’s cousin. I live in Maine.”

“Pretty cold up there, I’ve heard.”

“Mom and I were just talking about that.”

“I’m sure she told you how hot it is in Alabama. Franklin and I are going there in a few weeks to spend the summer with our grand parents. Yuk!”

“You don’t get along with your grand parents?”

“No, no. We love them. They’re wonderful.”

“So why the yuk?”

“We can’t stand the heat. And we hate all the racist assholes who live there.”

Susan smothered a chuckle. Tamara said, “Sheila, honey, please don’t you use that word.”

“Okay, Mom, But they really are assholes. Dad says that all the time.”

Susan said, “Your mom’s right, it isn’t a very nice word. On the other hand, I do think racists are assholes. We have plenty of them in Maine, let me tell ya.”

“What do you call them up there?”

“Ignorant redneck shitheads.”

As heads turned, Robert trotted over and said, “What’s so funny?”

In 1961, the first summer Sheila and Franklin had gone to Alabama, they met Hannibal. He was a hulking youth of indeterminate age, maybe eighteen. No one seemed to know for sure. He rarely spoke, and he stuttered when he did. He worked on their grandparents’ farm doing all matter of tasks, especially ones requiring great strength. Like heaving a hundred pound bale from the barn floor to the hay loft twelve feet above.

On their first day at the farm, Sheila had tried to introduce herself. Shoulders slumped, he said nothing as he stared at the ground. She took a step closer. “It’s okay if you don’t want to talk. But I would like to shake your hand? Would that be alright?” He didn’t look up but nodded slightly. Waving for Franklin to come next to her, she reached down and gently grasped his right hand. It was three times the size of her own. The palm was so calloused she thought it might be a deformity. She hadn’t the strength to lift the hand so she just gave it a squeeze. “My name is Sheila. This is my brother Franklin. We’re very pleased to meet you.”

He still hadn’t looked up, but he made a little croak. Then another. When he did look up, tears were cascading down the saddest face Sheila had ever seen. Several minutes later, their grandmother was looking out the kitchen window. She gulped as her hand flew to her throat. “Robert, quickly, come see this.” As her husband sidled up to her, he stared and said, “Will you look at that.”

The two children were hugging their new friend around the waist as he caressed the tops of their heads. “Have you ever seen him smile like that, Martha?” “I once saw him grin.” “Did you now?” They stood holding hands and chuckling until it was time to do something else.

Two days later Sheila was in the kitchen standing on a stool washing carrots at the sink.

“These things are huge, Gramma. Not like the ones we get from the supermarket in New York.”

“Is that a fact?”

“You’re teasing me, aren’t you? Mom does that, but I think she’s more serious than you are.”

“Oh, child, your mother is far more serious than I am or ever have been.”

“Why do you think that is?”

“You like to ask questions, don’t you?”

“Most grownups say that about me. Especially my teachers. They say the questions wear them out.”

“Well, that’s just too bad for them, now isn’t it?” Sheila grinned and began a little dance on the stool.

Terrified she would fall, her grandmother swooped her up and smothered her with kisses. “Little one, you may well be the death of me.”

“Will not,” she said with a flurry of giggles.

In that first summer Sheila and Franklin confronted the vast difference between what they’d left in New York and what they’d found in rural Alabama. Many things were positive. Loving grandparents. Hannibal. A working farm with crops and critters. Pollution-less skies painting night scenes the Hayden Planetarium could never match.

On the negative side, of course, was missing their parents and friends. But worst was the bigotry and apartheid that pervaded the Deep South. Yes, the civil rights movement was gathering momentum. But nothing could completely shield them from being black in a world where whites held massive power. Power they could savagely wield and not be held accountable. How were twelve year olds to cope with that?

One late afternoon the two were riding on a wagon drawn by a huge horse named Marcus. Hannibal sat on a wooden seat holding the reins, straddled by the children. Sheila was chattering away about something that held no interest to the two humans and probably not to Marcus.

As they approached the end of the road, still on farm property, two white men swaggered towards them. Big, fat, and dressed in overalls and battered straw hats. In their mid twenties. Both chugging forty ounce bottles of beer. Not their first of the day.

“Billy, that’s one big old horse, isn’t it?”

“Surely is, surely is. Tell you what. I believe I could ride him. I got me some rodeo skills.”

“Where you been hiding ‘em? Up your huge ass?”

“You’re one to talk, fatso. Anyway, let’s unhook him and give it a go.”

During this interchange, Sheila was doing a slow burn. “Hey, dumb shits. This is private land. Turn around and go back in the sewer you crawled out of. Now!”

Franklin was always amazed at the street profanity his sister had picked up. It frightened him to the core. He wondered if she’d been sneaking down into Harlem for lessons. “Shut up,” he whispered. “You wanta get us killed?”

Hannibal tapped both children on the knees and shook his head. Without a hint of a stutter he said, “You gentlemen go right ahead and get Marcus out the traces. He right gentle. He won’t hurt ya.”

“Well, thank you, boy. We’ll do that. And you tell that little nigger bitch she needs to mind her manners.”

“Yessuh. I’ll do that right now. She know better ‘n talk sassy to a white man.”

Apparently mollified, the two men went about unhooking the horse as Hannibal softly repeated, “Easy, Marcus. Easy now.” Once they had removed the traces, they held Marcus by the bridle. Now they looked confused. How was one of them to get up on the huge animal?

As they pondered the problem, the horse started moving his head up and down. Faster and faster, to where he was lifting one off the ground. Then he began neighing. High pitched, piercing, loud.

“Hey boy, you said he was gentle. This ain’t gentle. How comes he’s so worked up?”

“Suh, I got no idea. He don’t never act like this. You want I come down and settle him?”

One of them had pulled out a switch blade and yelled, “You better come down, boy. Otherwise I’m gonna stick him.”

“No, no, suh. Please don’t do that. He don’t like knives and such. No telling what he might do.”

“Fuck that. I’m gonna stick him.” As the fat man started to swing the blade, Marcus turned with blazing speed and kicked with his hind hooves. One connected with the man’s groin, doubling him over with unspeakable pain. The other froze in place, terrified.

Just then the children’s grandfather roared up in an old pick up and jumped out brandishing a shotgun. He raced over to the standing man and smashed him the face with the butt of the gun. Then he yelled, “You and your peckerwood friend get off my land right now. You don’t, I will shoot you both in the knees. That what you want, you cowardly excuse of a man?”

“Nigger, you got no idea who you’re threatening.”

“I’m not threatening, son. I’m promising. Case you haven’t noticed, black folks are about fed up with white trash fools like you. Dr. King talks about peaceful resistance. That’s all well and good for some. Not for my friends and me. We see you around here again, we will come in the night and string you up. And we won’t be wearing white hoods and burning crosses.”

You could see the man wanted to respond but had thought better of it. With great effort he got his buddy up on his feet, and the two wobbled down the road into the failing light.

Sheila started rubbing the side of Hannibal’s face. “You didn’t stutter the whole time with those two. How come?”

“When Hannibal gets mad, he doesn’t stutter,” said her grandfather. “You two keep that in mind. Let’s get in the house. Your grandmother will be wondering where we all are.”

“Maybe we shouldn’t tell her about all this,” said Sheila.

“Won’t have to. She’ll figure it out on her own.”