Freedom Train

April 1, 1963 Pt. 4

April 1, 1963 Part 4

"You saw them kissing?" Lizzie asked in horror. "What a back-stabbing, lying, evil..."

"Calm down," Ronny said to his girlfriend as he put his arm around her shoulder and gave her a squeeze. "Let A.B tell the rest of the story."

Lizzie nodded and took a deep breath.

"Okay. Continue. So, did you confront her?"

"You can bet your ass I did..."

**flashback. March 17, 1963. Greenwood, Mississippi**

"Annabeth, I need to talk to you," Candy said as she walked into the hotel room she shared with Annabeth and four other women.

Annabeth gripped the sides of her book in her hands and ignored Candy, focusing on the words she held instead.

"Annabeth? Did you hear me?" Candy said, confused. "I need to speak with you privately."

"Maybe we should give them a minute," Maude said, grabbing her sisters hand and leading her toward the door.

The other girls seemed to get the hint and followed the twins from the small hotel room.

"Why are you ignoring me, Annabeth?" Candy asked once they were alone, sitting on the edge of the bed that Annabeth occupied.

"I saw you today," Annabeth hissed, slamming the book closed. "I saw you kissing him."

"Annabeth, it wasn't what..."

"It was clearly what I think it was. It's been Terry all along, hasn't it? That's why you would never tell me who you fancied. Because it was him and you didn't want me to know exactly what kind of girl you truly are."

"Annabeth, no. You don't understand."

"I understand completely," Annabeth yelled, standing to her feet. "I understand that you're a lying, two faced, whore! You were never my friend, were you? It's all been a ruse so that you could steal my boyfriend! How long have you two been sneaking off behind my back? Since the beginning? Oh, how you must've laughed together at my suffering."

"You're acting crazy," Candy screamed, becoming equally as angry at Annabeth for her assumptions and her name calling. "If you would just listen to me..."

"I don't want to listen to you. I refuse to listen to you ever again." Annabeth proclaimed as she grabbed her purse from beside the bed and stalked passed Candy and out the door.

***flashback over***

"What brought you home? Are you home to stay?" Ronny asked a while later, when the lemonade pitcher emptied and the sun began to set.

Annabeth looked up at the wall clock and shook her head.

"I'm just here for a little while, a few weeks. Maybe a month or so. Bobby rented a room in Bessemer. I'm going to stay with him, try to find some work to save up a few bucks for our next move."

"What's the cause?" Lizzie asked.

"Project C," Annabeth answered.

Liz and Ronny looked confused by her response, so Annabeth elaborated.

"It's like this," she explained. "In the South, segregation is still the rule rather than the exception. We're trying to get the South to think more like the North in terms of racial equality. There's still literal laws here that state even if a business owner or public official is willing to integrate, it's illegal to do so. So, the C in Project C stands for confrontation. We plan to confront segregation in the South head on, by breaking the back of segregation in Birmingham, and by doing so weaken segregation everywhere in the South. We hope to generate strong national awareness, so that the Kennedy administration is forced to actually defend the civil rights movement, instead of just saying that they do. We want to bring in the National press, mobilize enough popular support in the North to break a Southern filibuster and pass a national civil rights act to overturn all segregation laws and outlaw all forms of overt racial discrimination world-wide."

Ronny whistles through his teeth.

"Sounds like you all got your work cut out for you," he said.

Annabeth laughed.

"You have no idea."