The Presence of the Past on Screamer Mountain

“Darling, phone call for you.”

“I’m so tired. Can you take a message?”

“It’s Martin. He wants to know if you got the card he sent last week.”

“I’ll be right there. . . . Martin, it’s so good to hear your voice. How are Coretta and the kids? . . .”

Every time I go up to the Lillian E. Smith Center, I think about the conversations that possibly too place up there, the people who sat in the chairs that I sit in, walked the grounds that I walk, pull the books down from the shelves and flip through them. I don’t know if Martin Luther King, Jr. ever made up to Clayton to see Lil and Paula. I know him and Coretta wanted to head up there to see them in 1962, and saw each other multiple times in Atlanta, with Coretta even hosting an event for the reissue of Killers of the Dream and King getting pulled over in May 1960 for driving Lil back to the hospital.

When I sit in the big common room, I imagine Lil being there, gazing out at Old Screamer Mountain when the phone rings. Paula picks it up, but Lil, due to the cancer eating away at her body, feels too tired to move from her seat. When she hears that it is King on the phone, she rises from her chair, wearily, and walks over to the kitchen where the rotary phones sits next to a notepad hanging from the wall. She may sit on a…