Auntie Mip wanted to refresh herself. She felt a little sweaty and her joints were stiff. The Evanses had been to collect her before the sun rose, the sky then changing from blue to purple and they had seen the sun come up in Tennessee. There was just the three of them, traveling from Selma to Detroit in the Evans’s blue Chevrolet Bel Air. Auntie Mip sat in the back seat with provisions: ham sandwiches, deviled eggs, peaches, a brown paper sack full of peanuts roasted that morning even before the tweeting of birds or the howling of dogs. She wore a floral head wrap over the tight curls in her hair that she planned to comb out as their destination grew closer, and she was wearing a new pant suit, the color of a cantaloupe. Her skin tone was the color of brown mustard and her face was dashed with red freckles.
By contrast, Etta Evans---Auntie Mip's friend from church---was the color of deep maple. Etta wore two thick braids pinned across the crown of her head and heavy gold earrings dangled from her earlobes. The two of them would do most of the talking on this trip: comparing their recipes for making fruit pies, frying fish, or canning chow-chow; gossiping about their church ersher board, or piecing-together the whereabouts of members of their families who had left the south. At times the tone of their conversation was determined by the time and colors of day in whatever state they were driving through. There were some hours when they didn’t converse at all. Being that it was late October, the land was lush with color, and beautiful to look at as they covered northern Alabama, then Tennessee, Kentucky, flat Ohio. Some eleven hours later they would finally cruise by the interstate sign that welcomed them to the state of Michigan.
Years later these stretches of highway would become more populated with rest stops and housing communities, but that was too far off into the future for anyone to know. In 1968 there was a lot of peaceful-looking territory to cover, although, since the Freedom Rides in the summer of 1961, and Freedom Summer of 1964, the air felt (---at least to sensitive people like Auntie Mip) changed. There seemed to be a blend of imminent danger and liberation hanging in the air.
“Hey, we’re making pretty good time. What do you say, Rufus?” Aunt Mip threw this lone bit of conversation to Rufus, who had done all of the driving.
“Yeah. Making pretty good time.” Rufus Evans replied. He was a clean-shaven, fine-hat-wearing, caramel-colored man. “Etta, is there some more coffee left in that thermos?”
“Whatever’s left is probably cold by now.” Etta reached for the thermos on the floor beside her feet, and shook it to gauge about how much liquid was inside.
“I don’t care. Let me have those dregs.”
“Don’t you want to stop and get some fresh?” Auntie Mip sounded hopeful. She wanted to get out of the car to inhale deeply the scent of trees and earth, as well as to stretch her limbs.
“Naw, that’s okay.” Rufus said. Auntie Mip gazed out of the window and pursed her lips. Yeah, better not. thought her self-scolding voice. They were all born and raised in the Jim Crow south and it wasn’t part of their cultural upbringing to move about in the world in uninhibited ways. Only white people did what they wanted whenever and wherever they pleased. Although it was often true that white people who aligned themselves with black people had their own hell to pay.
