The Swan House Read Online Free

excuse to stay another day.
    â€œOf course, Jason darling! It’s a marvelous idea.” Mama had sung the words in her slow, smooth Southern accent. Then she had pouted. “But what a bore to be on the plane all those hours without you!”
    To which he had guffawed and playfully pinched her. “Yes, you’ll be bored stiff, I’ll bet. Nothing to do but chat with Rosalind Williams and Anne Berry and Elizabeth Bull.”
    â€œBut you, dear Jason?” she said in mock sadness. “I’m thinking of you.”
    He laughed again hearing her words, both of them knowing how he relished the thought of a few hours alone to catch up on business before he got back to Atlanta.
    The jet sped down the runway of Orly Airfield with the bright Paris sky at midday shining down on it, sending gleaming reflections from its sleek metal exterior. Daddy felt the familiar jump in his stomach as the plane accelerated, then an immediate sense of relief to see it poised, ready to pierce the sky, nose pointing confidently upward.
    Then, as he was about to turn away, he saw the silver bird hurtle forward without leaving the ground, heavy streams of white smoke trailing behind it. The plane screeched to the left, wobbling horribly for what seemed an eternity as the white smoke turned black. Daddy watched, horrified, screaming out loud as the nose of the plane struck the runway with the force of an earthquake, splitting the pavement apart. There was the sound of an explosion and then the airplane burst into fierce, lapping orange and blue flames.
    He ran toward the glass doors with a dozen other dumbstruck eyewitnesses, tripping over himself, and made it onto the field before a man in an Air France uniform stopped him, warning, “You can’t go out there!”
    â€œMy wife’s on that plane,” Daddy cried hysterically.
    â€œI’m sorry,” the Air France official told him. “My brother’s on it too.”
    Daddy stood there in shock, imagining the excruciating heat, hearing somewhere on a distant runway the scream of sirens. Hearing his own anguished voice, weeping and calling out, “Sheila, Sheila . . .”
    Atlanta, Georgia
June 3, 1962
    The way I always heard it afterward was that Ella Mae was sitting in church on the morning of June third, fanning herself the way she always did, her big straw hat covering the coarse black hair that was beginning to be laced with gray. She was a large woman, strong, sturdy, and jovial. When she would smile and show her white teeth amidst her ebony face, ah, to me, it was such a simple and profound picture of contrast. Dark and light that blended into one of the most beautiful faces that my young eyes had ever seen. Ella Mae was my family’s maid in the year 1962. I lived on the northwest side of Atlanta in a big house. I had no idea where Ella Mae lived when she wasn’t at my house. She was as much a part of my family as my mother and father and my thirteen-year-old brother, Jimmy. I loved Ella Mae, and even though the tides of racial change were sweeping through our country, and her skin was black and mine was white, I had never seen the difference between us in all of my sixteen years.
    It was, in fact, the events of the next nine months that forced me out of my cocoon. But I am getting ahead of myself.
    At nine in the morning on June third at the Mount Carmel Church in southeast Atlanta, the pews were filled, the singing loud and joyous. The black bodies were swaying to and fro, as Ella Mae loved to describe it, and a young soloist in the choir stepped forward to belt out the last verse of “Oh, Happy Day.” It was a modest church of red brick and white woodwork that needed painting, and the pews had worn gray cushions. But it had ten breathtakingly beautiful stained-glass windows, and the piano was in tune, and the choir, my, could they sing! So caught up were they all in singing and praising the Lord that no one seemed to notice