A Father's Shadow

So, Aaralyn did. She wrote a letter to her mother telling her everything and placed it under her pillow. And after her mother read the letter, Aaralyn says, Helen Bevel looked at her and said: "You spelled molest wrong."

For years, Helen said she couldn't remember making that remark, though she acknowledges now that she probably did. She does recall setting up a meeting with her mother and all the women who, like her, followed Bevel from city to city and believed in the ideas he advocated, to discuss Aaralyn's allegations. This was how Bevel had taught her to deal with problems. She asked Aaralyn to stand before the women and tell them what she had written in the letter. Aaralyn, who remembers being suddenly filled with the thought that she did not want her grandmother to know, was silent.

Helen, now 57, says now that she couldn't comprehend what the letter was telling her. She had never been exposed to incest and found it impossible to believe it was happening to her daughter. She says neither she nor Aaralyn "had the language" to deal with the issue.

All Aaralyn knew was that she had confided in her mother and had been dismissed. From then on, she no longer trusted her parents: not her father, who she now knew had done horrible things to her, and certainly not her mother who, she decided, was going to allow it to happen. She learned she would be on her own.

Not long after, Aaralyn came home from school one day to find her father inside the house. Nobody else was around. Now that she understood what had happened in the trauma room, she was frightened of him. In terror, she threw down her bag and ran. Her father pursued her. She dove under a bed, shrieking for him to go away. After a time, the house grew quiet.

Then suddenly he was in the room. She could hear him stomping across the floor, could see his feet from under the bed. That's when she saw the broom. It was a big brown broom with enormous strands of straw. And he shoved it under the bed, sweeping her into the open. The straws scratched her arms, her face.

"I couldn't wrap my arms around how he took a broom and swept a child out," she says. "Honestly, I don't remember what happened next. I just shut down . . . After that, I was just a comatose person. I couldn't really deal. It was serious. But the things that happened after that were probably the same."

OF THE CHARISMATIC MINISTERS WHO LED THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT, James Bevel could preach with the best of them. Even Ralph Abernathy. Even Fred Shuttlesworth. Even Martin Luther King Jr. Taylor Branch, who has written one of the most comprehensive histories of the movement, used to keep tapes of Bevel speaking in church and loved to listen to them, awed by the power of his words.

"He was a spitfire preacher, incredibly entertaining," says Branch, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, the first of his trilogy on the civil rights movement.

Author David Halberstam also marveled at Bevel's passion in his 1998 book, The Children, describing "the sheer intensity of the man, the originality and force of mind when Bevel focused on one person."

As a result of those gifts, Bevel rose fast in the movement's early years. Though he was slight of build, no more than 5-foot-7, he possessed an unyielding will that drove the movement at crucial moments. When the push to end segregation stalled in Birmingham in 1963, it was Bevel who conceived a plan to use teenagers in a peaceful march against the forces of Connor, one of the South's most ardent segregationists. He envisioned wave upon wave of young people being arrested until the jails were so filled with black children that the rest of the country would have to take notice.

King was hesitant about using children, but finally yielded to Bevel. And when the first teenagers spilled across Birmingham's Kelly Ingram Park that May and were arrested, they were followed by a river of youthful protesters, overwhelming Connor's minions. Connor called on the fire depart-ment to bring water cannons, which blasted the marchers across the ground like fallen leaves being blown from a sidewalk. And when still more children came, the police brought out dogs. The photographs of children being knocked to the ground with water cannons and chased by police dogs shocked the nation. Within weeks, Birmingham was on its way to desegregation.