Over the Mountain
It was a muggy Sunday in September 1963. I was ten years old, standing in the kitchen when the phone rang. It was Ethel, whom we called our “maid.” I don’t remember her last name. She was a domestic worker who cleaned our house and often took care of us. She called my parents, “Mr. and Mrs. Schaffer,” but she was only addressed by her first name. We lived in the all-white neighborhood of Mountain Brook, Alabama.
My father took the phone from me. Ethel was wailing and screaming. I knew something traumatic had happened, and I was terrified. My father tried to get Ethel to tell him what happened. After an hour or so, he got off the phone. He turned to me and said that Ethel’s daughter’s best friend, Denise*, had been murdered along with other children. A bomb had exploded at Ethel’s church. He said, “We’re next.”
What he meant by “We’re next” was that the same people who blew up the church would attack our synagogue, Temple Emanu-El. There had been bomb threats at the temple, and he and other men had been guarding the front steps at night. He made some calls to other fathers, and they were looking for guns.
I went outside and looked at the trees at the top of the hill in the woods. I listened for the city, but the trees and sky were quiet where we lived, “over the mountain.”
I wanted to do something. I didn’t care if it was for Blacks or for Jews. The car was parked up on the road, and I got inside and crouched down in the back. I knew my father wouldn’t let me come to the temple, but in my ten-year-old mind, he might give me a gun, and I could stand guard next to him. I can still visualize what I fantasized that day, standing next to him at the top of the steps of the temple, holding a rifle.
When I peeked through the back window of the car, he was picking weeds out of the yard. He saw me and said, “What are you doing?” I said, “I’m coming with you.” He said, “Don’t be silly.”
The next day at school, you could tell something had changed. Maybe there weren’t the usual racist jokes. Somebody tried a racist joke, and somebody else said, “Hey, shut up.” Change occurs in tiny, hopeful increments.
* Denise McNair was one of four young girls who were murdered by a bomb that Klan members had planted outside the 16th Street Baptist Church on September 15, 1963.
In April 2026, Danny Schaffer offered this original story for publication with Kids in Birmingham 1963.