A Mighty Long Way: Chapters 9–12

I also began chemistry with some trepidation because I had not taken Algebra II, which wasn’t offered through correspondence classes.

I’d learn soon enough that those fears were warranted.

The teacher seemed to bristle at even the notion that a black kid had the audacity to question him, and Jeff’s grades suffered for it.

The teacher seemed to bristle at even the notion that a black kid had the audacity to question him, and Jeff’s grades suffered for it.

But this was my senior year, when I should have been looking forward to the sentimental milestones, like getting asked to the prom and filling a memory book with personal notes and photos to immortalize those special days.

The school, now a historic site, was an early training ground for the children of many upper-echelon black men and women.

I sometimes had attended school dances at Mann with her. With Peggy gone, so was my main link to Mann and any semblance of a normal high school social life.

With the legal case behind us and the protests by segregationists more sporadic, there was little need for the five of us to meet every day at the home of Mr. and Mrs. Bates.

She was the brainy type who read voraciously, which gave her a maturity and worldliness beyond her years.

In some ways, Sandra Johnson was her opposite, the effervescent one, always bubbly and upbeat.

He received a five-year sentence and agreed to testify against Perry and Lauderdale, the alleged mastermind. At Lauderdale’s trial nearly three months later, prosecutors called the bombings a “diabolical scheme.”

There, at the base of the chimney, I could see where the dynamite had landed. A gaping hole, about two feet in diameter, was a testament to the power of the blast.

Bricks were strewn all about.

I know Mrs. Bates was as dumbfounded as I was just two days after the bombing to read in the newspaper the wild implication by Amis Guthridge, chief attorney for the white Citizens Council.

Maybe the Chamber’s coffers were low after putting up such a hefty reward just a few months earlier.

He was still working nights at Big Daddy’s pool hall to help make ends meet because his construction work had become so erratic.

He’d charged Herbert and Maceo under a statute that made it illegal to “willfully or maliciously destroy or injure property by means of an explosive,” which carried a maximum penalty of up to five years in jail.

At times during the day, the anger and fear inside me felt like a fist in the pit of my stomach, but I refused to cry or even look afraid. I tried to appear nonchalant and intensely focused on my studies.

It was unfathomable to me that anyone could suspect that my father would be involved with attacking his own house while the love of his life and their three daughters slept inside.

But days later, I learned that indeed the police had suspected Daddy of concocting the bombing to get insurance money or as a ploy to raise money from people “up north” and that he’d paid Maceo and Herbert to pull it off.

“It sounds as if somebody’s trying to railroad somebody,” Mrs. Bates told the Gazette in a February 20 story, gauging the reaction of community leaders to the arraignment of Herbert and Maceo. “I can’t understand why they would charge these two fellows. I don’t know what evidence they have, but it sounds ridiculous to me."

Now, Smith was gone, his good name besmirched.

They were a close-knit, upstanding family.

Mother had been subpoenaed by the prosecution to testify.

Flowers’s clients faced the death penalty, but two of them had been acquitted.

Flowers sought to have the case dismissed on the grounds that Holt had violated the Constitution with a decision to file charges without a grand jury indictment.

That was the first I’d heard of the alleged confession, but I suspected it was coerced. I remembered that the same law enforcement authorities had beaten my father and tried to force him to confess.

Flowers, as well-meaning as he was, did not call a single witness to challenge the timing of the prosecutor’s account—how long it might have taken, for example, for Herbert to run up the block from my home to his house, drink a cup of coffee, and get into bed. Nor did he challenge whether it was even feasible for all of this to occur while a fuse was burning down.

But I hurt deeply for Herbert, his family, his compromised future, his deferred dreams.

As graduation drew nearer, school officials gave each graduate six tickets for family members to attend. I was excited just to hold the tickets. They were a tangible sign that this was really happening.

The segregationists had been suspiciously quiet all spring, but I knew better than to believe they had just conceded defeat.

I thought about Rosa Parks, that gracious woman whose courage I had tried to emulate on my toughest days at Central.

Governor Faubus even went a step further and opined that the bombing was a ruse to raise money for integration causes.

Governor Faubus even went a step further and opined that the bombing was a ruse to raise money for integration causes.

Maceo took the stand and angrily denounced the confession.

Maceo also reported that one detective suggested that a “hosograph” should be used on him—a phony term that may have been a facetious reference to the late chief Eugene Smith’s decision to open the fire hoses on recalcitrant segregationists at the start of my senior year.

He pointed his finger at Holt and exclaimed: “I don’t know who did it.... As far as I know, you could have done it, and I’m not being facetious.”

According to detectives, my father had procured the dynamite.

Maceo’s attorney, Will Shepherd, who had advocated for the moratorium, was an ongoing burr in the side of the white establishment in Little Rock.

In July 1961, the governor commuted the sentences of three of the Labor Day bombers: J. D. Sims, John Coggins, and Jess Perry.