Читать книгу Stranger at the Gates - Tracy Sugarman - Страница 9

The Western College for Women, in Oxford, Ohio, was dreaming in moonlight as I turned off the state highway and wound up the gentle rise to the Administration building. The summer holiday had begun, and the campus slept undisturbed. Single lights in janitors’ basements made pale carpets on the deserted green. I parked the Chevvy and rested against the steering wheel, breathing the cool damp of Ohio farmland. A dozen kids lounged on the grass, silhouetted against the brightness of the deep windows. A girl’s voice rose sweet and quiet as a guitar gently added to the fuzzy complaint of the cicadas. “Good news is a-comin’—good news.” I moved up the walk past them, feeling their eyes on my cotton and Dacron suit and the skinny-brimmed Madison Avenue straw hat. “Newspaper man,” somebody grunted, and the guitar changed again. I paused at the lighted door, held by the young voices, the moonlight, the smell of the new-cut lawn. “Hush little baby, don’t say a word. Mama’s gonna buy you a mockin’ bird. If that mockin’ bird don’t sing…”

I thought of our two-year-old crawling into our bed between us, sixteen years before, and June singing softly in the dark, Dickie cradled in the crook of her arm.

“If that mockin’ bird don’t sing, Mama’s gonna buy you a diamon’ ring.”

In the lounge the kids were talking earnestly in small groups, asking questions, sorting the literature in the folders they’d been given, a few looking shy and hanging back. The Negro kids were the cool ones (“They’re Snick staff, and man, they know”). The volunteers were the questioners, trying hard to relate, questioning the staff, seeking the “word,” asking, asking.

“But how could you.…”

“But why did you.…”

“How do they dare.…”

The appraising, watchful, cautious, brown faces—being careful.

“Now look, man, this is the way it is….”

“Yeah, but Smith ain’t Mississippi….”

The khaki pants, the desert boots, the open Brooks Brothers shirt, the denim skirts, the bright blouse, the sandals, the bright eyes, the horn-rimmed glasses, the pocket books of poetry, Jung, Salinger, The Trojan Wars, Winnie-the-Pooh, Mad Magazine and The New Republic, the easy grace and quick laughter of America’s children of higher education. And the questioning, and the sober reflective look that said “I understand.”

The platoon leaders were Negro boys and girls, from Mississippi. They wore denim jackets and work shirts, and they were studying their troops. They played it cool, but they looked tired.

I moved through the lounge and into the large side room marked “Registration.” A staff meeting of the Council of Churches leaders was being held at its far end. Bruce Hanson caught my eye, smiled, and rose to greet me. He looked drawn and concerned.

“Sign in,” he said. “You’re Press.”

The weary girl at the desk filled out a yellow tag and pinned it on my jacket. I moved to the door and pushed out into the soft darkness of the campus.

The singers were standing now, clustered in a tight knot at the end of the walk. The voices swelled as I moved to join them. Two moved apart to let me in, and my voice lifted with theirs.

“Deep in my heart I know that I do believe.” My eyes burned and I was glad of the darkness. I unpinned the press badge and slid it into my pocket.

I lay on the bed and regarded the suitcase which leaned against the opposite bed. A crumpled seersucker jacket had been tossed on the bed, and an empty sleeve lay negligently hanging across the battered leather of the case. I wondered what my roommate would be like. The boy that came in was pale, a little soft in the middle, I thought. His dark hair was damp and long. It kept drifting down toward his eyes, which were deep- set and seemed black in the cold light of the overhead bulb. He brushed the curly hair back indifferently and stopped as the door closed behind him. I swung my legs off the bed and stood up. He took my hand quietly as I introduced myself. His voice was soft and southern.

“Now look, man, this is the way that it is….”

“I’m John Strickland.”

The grin was gentle and brief. An air of melancholy moved with him, seeming to blunt his movements and dull his responses. Only once in the days ahead was I to glimpse the bright intelligence and banked passion that glowed inside. But usually our conversations were brief, and I sensed a reticence in the boy that I preferred to honor. Nevertheless, by the week’s end, I realized how rare a man was John Strickland. Not only was he a southerner, a white southerner, he was the seventh child of a Savannah sharecropper. To totally disorient my preconceptions of white, southern sharecroppers it was in due course revealed that John was a junior at Harvard! He was here to study “community relations.”

“What will you be doing, John?” I asked

He frowned and studied his hands that rested in his lap. “We’re supposed to build bridges to the white community in Mississippi.”

A wry smile flitted across his face. “If they’re like my daddy, it’s going to be tough. Real tough.”

Two weeks before the orientation began in Oxford, Ohio, Charles McLaurin was beaten by the Mississippi Highway Patrol. In all the arrests, the endless days and weeks of outlasting time in Ruleville, Greenville, Greenwood, never had he been hit. The afternoon I had met him in 1963 when he was visiting in Connecticut he had joked about it. “Not me! I’m lucky, man!”

But the Highway Patrol had beaten him now. The SNCC staff workers had been forced off the road by the Patrol as they headed for headquarters in Atlanta. They had beaten the driver and then herded the five young men to jail. The Patrol had known they were heading east on the highway, and they had simply mousetrapped them. There was no charge, just arrest, “held for investigation.” One month later Andy Goodman, Mickey Schwerner, and James Chaney would be arrested, “held for investigation,” released at night, and killed.

One by one the five Negroes were summoned from the cell. McLaurin was the last. From his cell he could hear the murmur of the interrogation, the angry shouting, the numbing sound of flesh striking flesh, the surprised gasps of pain. In an agony of terror he watched his body, unbidden, move from the open cell. “I watched myself go,” he says. “It was like it was happening to somebody else. I watched my feet move, one after the other till I reached the top of the iron stairs.”

“We’re gonna light a lamp in Ruleville, and it’s gonna shine all over that Delta.” Charles McLaurin, SNCC.

“Down here, boy!”

He remembers looking down, the two policemen looking ridiculously tiny, their white faces turned up to McLaurin. Suddenly he was standing at the bottom of the stairs and the two police faces filled the room.

“Boy,” said the patrolman, in a conversational voice, “are you a Negro or a nigger?”

McLaurin swallowed, his throat tight and parched.

“I’m a Negro.”

The patrolman slammed the back of his fist into McLaurin’s mouth, splitting his lip. Tears betrayed the pain, and his mouth was full of blood.

“Boy,” repeated the patrolman, his voice level and quiet, “are you a Negro or a nigger?”

McLaurin looked straight at the man.

“I’m a Negro.”

The patrolman at his side jolted him with a straight punch that exploded on the side of his jaw, pitching him in a thudding sprawl on the concrete.

“I felt no pain,” he says, “but my back teeth felt loose, and my mouth was a mess. As I lay there at the bottom of the stairs I knew they would keep hitting me until they killed me if I didn’t say ‘nigger.’ That man had to hear me say it. He just had to. I got up and he said, ‘Boy, are you a Negro or a nigger?’ And I said, ‘I’m a nigger.’ He nodded, and I left the jail.”

The second day at Oxford I found McLaurin conducting a workshop on Sunflower County. He tilted back in his chair and the opaque sunglasses moved slowly across the faces straining forward to hear. “Sunflower County is in the heart of the Mississippi Delta. This is the home of Senator James Eastland. His bank is in Ruleville, and his office is over the bank. Indianola is the county seat, and it’s the home of the White Citizens Council. We’re gonna start in Ruleville, because those folks will stand up. And we’re gonna change Sunflower County. We’re gonna light a lamp in Ruleville, and it’s gonna shine all over that Delta.” I looked at the yellow chalk map that he had sketched on the blackboard—Drew, Ruleville, Cleveland, Shaw, Indianola, Sunflower and Bolivar counties. A long arrow stretched from little Ruleville at the top of the county to Indianola at the bottom. “Twenty-five miles” was lettered on the arrow. McLaurin grinned as I shook hands with him at the end of the session.

“Good to see you again,” he said.

“Mac, I’d like to go with your group for the summer. I want to show people what you’re doing. Can you use an artist?”

The eyes behind the dark glasses were still, and then he nodded several times. “Hell, yes.” He grinned. “Glad to have you.”

Jack Preiss paused next to me on the soft tar road in front of the Administration building. He squinted in the brightness and absently watched the students sweat and yell, chasing a volleyball that was being used for a soccer scrimmage. A pick-up game had started, and the tension of the past two days was exploding in the grunts of body contact as they checked and slammed. The too-light ball would soar like a demented bird, and the sweat- drenched bodies would chase it, laughter spilling behind them.

“It’s not working,” he said.

We moved across the road and under a huge beech tree. The sounds of the scrimmage were less strident, and we stretched out on the shaded lawn. Preiss wrinkled his forehead and rubbed his freckled fish back and forth against the fleshy tip of his nose.

“It’s really not working. I’ve been listening for two and a half days, and they’re really not getting through to each other. I’m worried. They don’t have a hell of a lot of time.”

He sat up and wrapped his arms around his knees. His eyes moved in pursuit as the kids ran stumbling after the ball.

“It’s Tuesday, and they leave for Mississippi on Sunday. They’re all talking about it, but they’re not listening.”

Reverend Bruce Hanson, National Council of Churches of Christ, COFO co-ordinator.

I had met Preiss in the dining room the first night. He was a sandy- complexioned, middle-sized man. Reddish hair edged back from his forehead, betraying his forty years, for his crinkling smile and freckled face made him seem boyish. He was a comfortable man to be with. The night before we had sat late over beers, swapping war stories and speculating about the weeks that stretched ahead. His job was to work with the group dynamics of the orientation week, and he was struggling to establish some real communication between the two groups that stubbornly refused to flow.

You watched the kids listening, and you knew they were wondering, “Am I good enough?”

“They don’t really know how they feel yet,” he said. “Maybe the playacting will do it tomorrow. Something better had!” He kicked at a small ant hill with the heel of his sneaker.

“Christ, a week’s just not enough time. They’ve got to get to know each other.”

For two days the lectures and workshops had been mounting an unrelenting assault on the volunteers. I wondered uneasily if this perhaps was not the real screening process. We were being frightened, and I sensed that this was a calculated process; a sharp, scalpeled insertion of reality intended to kill or cure. The terror and violence of Mississippi was detailed and dissected. The extents of police brutality were catalogued, and the unreal world of the barbarous newsreel and the tabloid spread was suddenly becoming our world. The volunteers listened to the incredible stories of beatings and murder and knew surely and profoundly that this incredible world was credible. The knowledge served only to widen the immensity of the gulf that stretched between them and the field workers.

The cool self-sufficiency of those SNCC people reminded me of the RAF veterans of the Battle of Britain. We had come fresh and eager from the States, trained, primed, and itching to find the war and win it. These tired, old-young men had regarded us politely, nodded, and returned to the private society of those who knew because they had shared it together. No insult had been intended. They were glad we were there to win the war. It had simply ceased to be the same war they had fought. We had so envied the knowing grace of them. Each who was left had been tested, purified of the doubts that nagged us in our Quonset huts. And they regarded us as brash, pampered youngsters, overpaid, overtrained, and overequipped. They deeply envied us our pay, our training, and our equipment. We were never to really know their world, for they were to pack their neat duffles, step quickly back, and move swiftly into the backwash of a war that had moved on. How could we know the pain and the nightmares that were packed in those duffles? But here the pain and the nightmares were being exhibited like ghoulish displays. There seemed to be a muffled drumbeat you sensed in those first days of that curious week at Oxford. “They’ve got to know. They’ve got to know.” For we were moving into the same battle as these quick, knowing field workers. You watched the kids listening, and you knew they were wondering, “Am I good enough?”

My God, what if you really were beaten. What if they held you and smashed you. Could you take it—really take it—and not cut and run? The SNCC kid this afternoon had said, “You’ve got to expect to be scared.” Okay. Think about it. What really frightened you? The dogs, maybe. Those terrible pictures of dogs biting children in Birmingham. You tried to imagine being bitten, being smashed. Try as you might you couldn’t imagine being killed. Not really. Three hours before, in this auditorium, Ed King had stood and tried to tell you what it was like. One side of his face was dreadfully scared by the Mississippi vigilantes who had tried to kill him.

“Trust your instinct,” he said. “When that feeling in the pit of your stomach says ‘Duck!’ or ‘Run!’ trust it. It may save your life. It saved mine.”

“Save your life!” Even the words sounded theatrical. Come on, man. Don’t put me on. But they watched the late afternoon sun touch King’s livid cheek and knew it was so.