Mountain Girl

Wade sat next to a young, black school teacher by a campfire at a civil rights rally north of the city. “Drop me off on your way home?” she asked. Stephanie Tyson directed him to a street of modest homes near Long Island Sound. “Here’s a switch,” she said. “In my neighborhood I don’t want to be seen with you.” Wade parked in shadows. “Come up?” she asked. They climbed back stairs. They sat on her bed. Stephanie lit a candle and tuned to WWRL, a radio station aimed at Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant. “Hello pretty brown-skinned girls,” a male voice carressed the room. “I know it’s corny, but it makes me feel wanted in the late, hard night,” Stephanie said. “Tell me, what does Bob Dylan mean in that song when he says, ‘Black is the name and none is the number...?’” Wade, suddenly wary, sensed accusation. “I guess it means that blacks don’t have power, something like that.” A candle flung wild shadows. Stephanie, legs folded, sat on her bed facing him. He admired her pretty face and tiny drops of perspiration that shone on her arms. She bent her head and slipped off a shoe. Maxine Brown sang on the radio: “I don’t know, baby, maybe it’s all in my mind...” Wade leaned to kiss those forbidden lips. They lay together. “I’m your first?” she asked. “Yes. You too?” “Yes.” Each knew what the other meant. That winter the powers at The Outlook awoke one morning and realized that their newspaper employed not a single black reporter. Nolan McManus hired two within a week, Lonnie Crenshaw to cover courts, Nate Lincoln for general assignment. Wade made it a point to welcome both. He invited Stephanie Tyson to the city and showed her around Greenwich Village. She stayed the night at his apartment and they listened to Bring Back that Loving Feeling, a song sung by two white men, the Righteous Brothers. “I thought they were black, the first time I heard the song,” she said. “So did everybody else. It’s still ranked number one on soul radio WWRL.” “I’d like to use that in one of my columns,” Wade said. “The power of perception. The movement itself -- you think it’s changing?” “Yes,” Stephanie said. “All this threatening of violence, forecasting of ‘long, hot summers.’ Jesus. I’m sick of the phrase.” Wade paraphrased her comments in a Sunday column in The Outlook. “That’s my property you’re threatening,” he quoted a hypothetical white liberal, who sought to justify reducing his civil rights money contributions. “Why do we need white generals?” he quoted Stephanie, identifying her as a hypothetical black on the barricades. Mason Cohen of East River CORE telephoned Wade at 2 a.m. one morning. “Eddie pulled a gun on me.” “Tell me about it.” Wade reached for paper and pen. “Party at the storefront; Eddie King points a gun at me. ‘Out, you white motherfucker.’ I think he’s kidding, but nobody laughs. ‘Get your ass away from here, Jew boy,’ he says. Brenda Frazier almost spits at me.” “You were smoking? Drinking?” “We passed some wine. Nobody defended me, Wade. I walked out. Nobody tried to stop me.” “It’s over? What will you do?” “I’ll find another cause: Indians out West, maybe the Caribbean. People somewhere always need organizing.” Wade did not write a story about the incident because Mason asked him not to. He did note, as a possible theme for a future column: “Consider: maybe some people need the oppressed more than the oppressed need them.” Warmer weather enlivened the city. Wade made a final round trip to his ski house in Vermont and continued in New York to date both Lorraine and Stephanie Tyson. He did not feel at all smug about this. These were two women, one white, one black, who could take care of themselves, and he knew they both dated other men. He noticed that if some violent interracial incident occurred, he called Stephanie, and that at these times their sexual relationship seemed to intensify. But on other, calmer weekends, when interracial violence ebbed, his preference tended toward Lorraine. If he were honest, he thought, he would write a column examining this.