While the World Watched Read Online Free

attention to it. I guess Daddy knew that if he didn’t establish some order and organization in a house with six growing children, chaos would rule.
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    As Chester drove Wendell, Kirk, and me to church that fateful Sunday, I thought about my best friend, Cynthia Wesley. Her father had been my elementary school principal at Finley Avenue Elementary School, and Cynthia and I were in the same Sunday school class. We talked on the phone almost every day, and we were both members of a small all-girl community club called the Cavalettes. The group of about fifteen black Cavalettes got together mostly to socialize, eat cookies, drink punch, talk, and dance to records we played on the portable record player. We had just had a club meeting the week before, and we had another one scheduled for the afternoon of Sunday, September 15. The upcoming meeting would be particularly exciting for us because we had placed an article in the local newspaper about it. The announcement simply said, “Cavalette Club to meet Sept. 15 at 3 p.m.” I served as our president, and I had told everyone to bring three dollars that Sunday to pay for the matching gold caps and shirts we had ordered from Fred Singleton’s, the downtown Birmingham sporting-goods store. Our first names would be printed in black letters on the front of the shirts, and the letter C for Cavalettes would be printed on the back. We could hardly wait to get them the following week.
    The Wesleys had adopted their only child, Cynthia. They lived in a beautiful brick house in Smithfield, an area of Birmingham better known as “Dynamite Hill” because of the routine Klan bombings there. Back in 1948, the year I was born, several black families had crossed the “color line” that separated white homes from black homes in the Smithfield area of Birmingham. The Klan responded with random bombings for almost two decades. Several well-known Civil Rights activists lived in Dynamite Hill at the time, including Angela Davis, whose family had a house at the top of the hill on Center Street, and Arthur Shores, one of the first blacks to practice law in Alabama. The Klan bombed the Shoreses’ brick ranch house on two different occasions. Fortunately, neither he nor his family was injured either time.
    I wondered what Cynthia would wear on that Youth Sunday. Her mother sewed all her clothes because she could never find anything to fit Cynthia’s petite size-two frame. Mrs. Wesley made beautiful clothes for her daughter—dresses just the right length and color and that perfectly fit Cynthia’s tiny waist.
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    Chester pulled the car to the side of the street in front of the church. My little brothers and I stepped out of the car and walked into the church’s lower-level door, which opened to the basement. The children’s Sunday school classes met each Sunday in the lower auditorium. The adult Sunday school classes met upstairs—each one in a corner of the large main sanctuary or in the balcony between the two great stained-glass windows. In one window, Jesus tenderly held a lamb in his strong arms. I sometimes pictured myself as that little lamb, so safe and secure and loved in my Shepherd’s hands. In the other window, my favorite one, was the kind-faced Jesus, poised with his hand in front of a large wooden door. I could almost hear him knocking softly, respectfully, on the door . . . again and again and again. His face showed a tender pleading for the person inside to open the door and let him in. I came to learn that the door represented a lost person’s heart—a heart Jesus longed to enter and live within. I studied those windows closely every Sunday, and each one permanently etched itself in my mind. On both sides of the sanctuary, the stained-glassed images of Jesus comforted me and brought me great peace and joy.
    The children’s Sunday school classes were already in session when I sat both boys in their metal