Читать книгу The Children Bob Moses Led - William Heath - Страница 9

Оглавление

Tom Morton: Orientation

Oxford, Ohio

June 21–27, 1964

Oxford is one of those quaint college towns built by transplanted New Englanders, adding a grace note to Ohio’s endless farmlands, look-alike suburbs, and smokestack cities. The campus of Western College for Women, two hundred acres of designed serenity, was a landscaper’s dream of woodlands, lawns, and gardens, dramatically divided by an overgrown ravine spanned by a series of stone footbridges. The main building, Peabody Hall, a U-shaped, five-storied, cupola-crowned pile of brick and ivy, overlooked the scene from its commanding hilltop. Lenny and I pulled off to the side of the soft tar driveway and parked. Other than stalling at the occasional red light, my Edsel had made the three-hundred-mile catercorner jaunt across Ohio without incident. Crayoned arrows on cardboard slabs directed us to a long table where name badges, meal tickets, and room assignments were handed out, along with a thick packet of info about the Summer Project.

Why had I chosen this way to spend my summer? Mississippi, everyone agreed, was a nasty place, a hopeless case; it would be a fool’s errand to go there. My decision, no doubt, dated back to the March on Washington, when, amid that straggling army of shuffling feet, I had felt an overwhelming sense that biracial brotherhood was no idle dream. As I was being pressed on all sides by strangers, it occurred to me that maybe being a lone individual was not what life was about: the important thing was to be part of mankind. I wanted the world to be a better place because I had passed through it. Then came the assassination of Kennedy. For days I sat in a daze in front of the TV, watching and rewatching. If anything seemed clear in that chaotic time, it was that the work Kennedy started had to be completed. I made my decision to join the Mississippi Summer Project one spring weekend when I stayed up half the night listening to a long interview Lenny’s SNCC friend Hal Zizner had taped with Bob Moses. I was struck by his courage and resolution. While I was still seeking my identity, here was a person who knew what to do with his life. There was something compelling about a man named Moses walking into a town named Liberty where no one with a dark skin was free. I felt certain that he was doing what needed to be done, and I wanted to join him.

At the end of the registration table I was asked to sign over power of attorney and pose for two pictures—one front, one side—with numbers propped under my chin. Lenny hummed a few bars of the Dragnet theme, but I didn’t laugh. They even asked me to write down the name of my dentist.

“What’s that for?” I asked Lenny. “My cavities can wait.”

“Like if you were missing, they’d distribute your photo. But if they had to fish you out of some river . . .”

“That’s grisly!” a girl said in a squeaky voice. “Don’t even joke about it.”

“I agree,” I said. “Leave my body out of this.”

Suddenly I felt a lump in my throat.

“Don’t worry about Tom,” Lenny said, trying to sound cheerful. “He can take it.”

“I’m not so sure,” I said. “As a fighter, I’m capable of boxing’s first no-hitter.”

“That’s the whole point of nonviolence,” a guy with pale blue eyes said. “We turn the other cheek.”

His cheeks were too sunken to offer much of a target. He was as thin as a Giacometti stickman; one swift kick and he’d snap like a dry twig.

I wondered how much violence I could take. In high school there’d been the usual James Dean stuff. The guys from Poland would beat up the guys from Boardman and tell them to stay the hell out of their territory and leave our girls alone; the guys from Boardman would reciprocate. One night, after a sock hop, there was a near rumble outside our school. During the face-off, I positioned myself behind our champion shot-putter and hoped for the best. Luckily, some teachers broke it up. That only delayed the inevitable. The next night our corner gang (looking spiffy in their pegged pants, black leather jackets, and DA cuts) fought their corner gang to a draw on the Poland field. Belts and bicycle chains were the weapons of choice, and more than one guy was dragged face-first down the cinder track.

Lenny and I took our bags over to our dorm room in Clawson Hall and then joined a circle of people singing on the hillside in front of Kumler Chapel. Although my voice fit a frog pond better than a concert hall, I loved music. I had been brought up on droning Methodist hymns, deliberately pitched, it seemed, to constrict the vocal cords—only at Christmas did we achieve full-throated joy. Compared to that, even the corny crooners on Lawrence Welk and the bland renditions of the top twenty on Your Hit Parade sounded good. Our family felt genuine sadness when Rosemary Clooney signed off the show with “So long for a while, That’s all the songs for a while, So long for your hit parade, And the tunes that you picked to be played . . . “Then came Elvis the Pelvis, rock ’n’ roll was here to stay, and we no longer assembled around the TV. My sister and I were up in our rooms, portable record players at full blast, listening to our favorite singles.

In college, my taste ran to moody make-out music (Johnny Mathis, The Platters) and then to folk (The Kingston Trio, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez). In the evenings a group of us would troop down to the Hiram sugar camp in the woods, build a bonfire, sit in a circle, and sing “Come By Here” and “Michael, Row the Boat Ashore,” feeling vague cause for celebration. We all knew the words by rote, so we sat on our beach towels and blankets in the middle of Ohio and sang along as if they represented our deepest beliefs.

This music was different. A heavyset black woman with a limp was leading a gathering of volunteers in “It Ain’t No Crime to Have Our Minds on Freedom,” and thanks to a few blacks among the hesitant whites, they were belting out enough soul force to make the walls of Poland Memorial Methodist come tumbling down.

Lenny gave me a nudge. “That’s Fannie Lou Hamer.”

I looked at her with new respect. Her sunken eyes and puffy cheeks confirmed what I had heard about how badly she’d been beaten in the Winona Jail.

“Now y’all gonna hafta sing bettern that,” Mrs. Hamer said to us self-conscious whites. “They’s gonna be times this summer when these songs is all we got to hold us together. And as we sing them this week, we better think hard about what they mean and about what we doin’. My daddy taught me that ‘faith is the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen.’ Now if we can love a God we don’t see, then we had better learn how to love the neighbor we do. You got to understand we wasn’t raised on hate but on love, and love is the onlyist thing we got to keep us goin’. Now first off, if y’all gonna sing, y’all gotta suck in some air and open yo mouths like you meant it. And for God’s sake, white folks, don’t just stand there. This here’s a movement, so move yo bodies, clap yo hands, and come on now, sing with yo whole self.”

We sang “Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around,” “We’ll Never Turn Back,” and “O Freedom.” With each song, I loosened up a little more, gaining tone and volume and rhythm, but I couldn’t get the knack of how to clap. We whites tended to clap on the first and third beats, the on beats of every measure. Blacks preferred the second and fourth beats. Looking around the circle, I could see most of the white hands clapping together to the opposite beat from the black hands. But what we white students lacked in skill we began to make up in enthusiasm. By the time we got to “Go Tell It on the Mountain,” a song I thought I already knew, they probably could hear us over on the Miami University campus a half-mile away.

“That’s more like it,” Mrs. Hamer said, her perspiration-drenched face breaking out in a smile. “Let’s sing it again.”

“Who’s that yonder dressed in black?

Let my people go.

Must be the hypocrites turning back . . .”

The second time around, she improvised a few lines:

“Who’s that yonder dressed in red?

Let my people go.

Look like the children Bob Moses led.

Let my people go.

Go tell it on the mountain, over the hills and everywhere,

Go tell it on the mountain, to let my people go.”

I felt proud to be one of the people who knew who Bob Moses was.

At dinner Lenny and I took a table near the end of the cafeteria line. I wanted to inspect the troops one by one, trying to guess by their looks and dress their politics and where they were from. At first glance they seemed to break down into bearded beatniks and sandaled radicals from both coasts and wholesome homebaked liberals from the Midwest. On closer scrutiny and after a few conversations, my off-the-cuff categories didn’t always fit. One storm-the-Bastille type, with the black-blended eyebrows of a satyr, itching, no doubt, to regurgitate half-chewed hunks of dialectic, proved to be a swimming instructor from Muncie, Indiana. And a sandy-haired kid with an ear-to-ear, What, me worry? grin was a community organizer from Newark, New Jersey, who had already been arrested five times. And what, for example, to make of me, with my butch-waxed flattop and Rod Laver tennis shoes, my brand new blue jeans and freshly washed Maynard G. Krebs sweatshirt, hacked off at the elbows and honeycombed with holes? Actually, most of the guys were clean-cut, wearing sports shirts and pressed chinos. The Dean’s List, Who’s-Who-on-Campus set.

“I don’t see as many weirdos as I thought I would,” Lenny observed.

“You could be lonely.”

“Up yours. What do you think of the chicks?”

“I’m still looking.”

There were a lot of pert pretty types, all bounce and curls, whose exuberance gave them an inner glow. Equally prevalent were thin, spiritual girls with circles under their eyes and prim, pinched mouths that looked as if they were tasting one of life’s bitter pills. Several had tense, fervid faces and spoke with shrill petulance. Here and there I spotted someone special—a tall blonde with a majorette’s muscle tone and a jaunty stride; her sandals and sack dress in their simplicity stressing her lean legs and high breasts; long wisps of crispy hair half-hid her face.

“She looks like Connie Stevens.”

“Everybody prefers blondes,” Lenny said. “Look for somebody who couldn’t be from Poland, Ohio.”

“How about that one over there?”

I nodded toward a shapely girl with a glorious mass of thick dark curls that fell halfway down her back. She was wearing hoop earrings, an embroidered Mexican blouse, a thin skirt that clung to her hips, and clogs. Her black, lustrous eyes had an intense expectant look, while her lips held a moody pout that seemed to be the prelude to a smile.

“She looks Mediterranean,” Lenny said. “Probably Jewish.”

“That body could sure set Solomon to singing.”

“You’re not the only one who thinks so. Don’t turn around right away.”

I slowly shifted in my chair and glanced back. I had been so busy ogling the student volunteers I had forgotten all about the SNCC staff. Several of the men were clustered at the table behind us, looking stern and formidable in their blue denim jackets and black boots. One, with the chipped-flint face of an Iroquois warrior and the wide go-to-hell mouth of a hipster, began to whisper heavily: “Oh, baby, if you were mine, I’d stroke you like velvet and sip you like wine!”

That brought a general chuckle, but also a warning from somebody at the table to drop the subject.

“Where have they been hiding?”

“They’ve been here all along,” Lenny said. “You just haven’t been noticing.”

“Invisible men, right?”

“Check out where they’re sitting?”

“Over in the corner. So what?”

Alexander Dining Hall, Lenny pointed out, was actually circular. There weren’t any true corners. “Look again,” he insisted.

“They’re over against the wall. I don’t get it.”

“This room is almost all windows,” Lenny explained. “That’s the only place where they can cover their flanks and keep an eye on the door.”

“But that’s paranoid; this is Ohio.”

“There’s nothing paranoid about thinking people are trying to kill you when people really are trying to kill you.”

What must it be like, I wondered, to live every day on the razor’s edge?

At seven-thirty that evening in Leonard Hall there was an “optional” session addressing the question “Why go to Mississippi?” The three-hundred-seat auditorium—which had no air-conditioning—was packed with sweating volunteers who didn’t let the heat stifle their enthusiasm. Bruce Hanson of the National Council of Churches opened the meeting with a refrain we would hear all week: “If anybody doesn’t want to go to Mississippi, they are free to leave.” He went on to announce that the first contingent of volunteers, who left Oxford the day before, had reached Mississippi without incident.

Then Vincent Harding, a stocky, bespectacled black man who was both a scholar and a Mennonite missionary, came forward to lead the discussion. He spoke with thoughtful compassion, instantly establishing a tone that made it clear he considered us neither heroes nor fools, but serious people engaged in serious business that required total honesty, discipline, and commitment on our part.

“You can consider what you are doing in two ways,” he said. “You can see yourselves as an ‘in group’ trying to help an ‘out group’ enjoy the dubious pleasures of middle-class life, or you can see yourselves as outsiders, seeking the basic restructuring of society. Are we Ins or Outs? Do we want liberal reforms or basic change?”

Several volunteers took this as in invitation to stand up and testify.

“I can’t sit idly by,” one said, “knowing that injustice exists. I cannot merely be concerned; I must also be effective. Empathy without action is impotent.”

Then the striking Jewish girl I’d noticed at dinner spoke out: “There’s not enough justice and not enough liberty. There’s not enough truth and not enough beauty. Who will work for these things? It’s everybody’s job.”

“The fight for civil rights is our fight,” a well-tanned guy in a flowered shirt said. “We must combat racism as our parents combated Hitler. There is a moral wave building for this generation, and I mean to catch it.”

“Very well-spoken,” Harding interjected. “We were wondering what kind of kooks would be crazy enough to spend a summer in Mississippi, but you appear to be people of sensitivity and intelligence.”

We volunteers, who obviously thrived on praise, beamed.

“But I wonder,” Harding added, “whether your big words and fine sentiments will be enough. How will you enter into humanizing relationship with the people of Mississippi? It is hard sometimes for those of us who have had an education, who believe in education, to realize that education might not do it.”

“That’s right,” a goateed volunteer asserted. “Schools aren’t the answer. This is a political question. The whole damn country has gone to hell, and we’ve got to overthrow the system to save it.”

Several volunteers took this as in invitation to stand up and testify.

“I can’t sit idly by,” one said, “knowing that injustice exists. I cannot merely be concerned; I must also be effective. Empathy without action is impotent.”

We volunteers, who obviously thrived on praise, beamed.

ling, we haven’t much time,’ or words to that effect, and bingo, I was home free. I could stand a crisis like that every weekend.”

“You’re so cynical; I don’t understand why you’re here.”

I looked over. It was the same sepulchral beanpole who had given us a homily earlier in the afternoon.

“My palm reader told me I was going to live a long and purposeless life,” Lenny drawled out of the corner of his mouth. “I want to prove her wrong.”

As if to clear the air of Lenny’s sarcasm, people began making self-righteous statements about why they were going to Mississippi. Everybody was spouting position papers and reciting received ideas as if this were a senior seminar. I think we assumed in our well-intentioned souls that our erudition and idealism would somehow save us when we went South: we were too good to kill.

A light-brown man of medium height in a dazzlingly white T-shirt and freshly pressed bib overalls walked slowly to the front and mounted the stage. This could only be Bob Moses. He spoke in a voice soft as mist. “Mississippi is unreal when you’re not there.” He paused a long while before he added, “And when you’re there, the rest of the world is unreal.”

He took a piece of chalk and drew a crude map of Mississippi on the blackboard, adding a crescent line to mark off the northwest corner.

“This is the Delta,” he said. “And here is Mrs. Hamer’s Sunflower County, which is also the home of Senator Eastland and the place where the White Citizen’s Council originated.”

Moses marked the spot in the center of the Delta with a square. Then he added a dot and labeled it “Greenwood.”

To the right of the Delta, in the northeastern part of the state, Moses indicated there were fewer Negroes, little industry, the moderating influence of the TVA, and, therefore, less threat. The most dangerous area was the southwestern part of the state. In contrast to the Delta, with its plantations and last vestiges of aristocracy, the Klan ruled supreme in the hill country.

Moses chalked a large-lettered “KKK” in the lower-left corner of his map and made dots for Liberty and McComb. Since the March on Washington, he said, this area had been undergoing a reign of terror.

“The situation there,” he stated solemnly, “is one of guerrilla warfare. If the country realizes that fact, then the federal government has to act. We have to make this nation face up to the reality that the struggle going on there is pressing and crucial. When we tried to speak to President Johnson about Mississippi, we were told he was busy with Vietnam.”

While Moses was speaking with calm deliberation, I took advantage of my front-row seat to scrutinize him closely. He was lean and muscular, by no means frail, and he stood up straight, shoulders back, so that he looked taller than he was. At first I found his heavy, black farmer’s boots and bib overalls incongruous with his horn-rimmed glasses and scholarly air, but the thoughtful assurance of his voice and the forthright dignity of his presence made everything fit. His face was a study in contrasts. He had a strong jaw, not protruding, but firm and defined; a well-shaped, sensuous mouth; and thick, dark eyebrows—all suggestive of a down-to-earth, realistic stance. On the other hand, his large, tranquil eyes seemed to see beyond, into the far distance. His high forehead and elongated skull, slightly tapered at the top, conveyed something mystical and otherworldly. When he spoke, he drew up from a deep inner well the distillate of his thought, uttering each carefully considered word as if it were a separate decision. His prophetic aura held me in thrall. And yet there was a sad beauty in his face that was almost childlike, reminding me of a bright, sensitive kid who is lost.

“When you come South,” Moses said, “you bring the rest of the country with you. You bring their concern, which usually doesn’t extend to Negroes. To accomplish something very real, we are going to try to do something very limited. Don’t expect big results. If we all go and come back alive, that will be an important accomplishment. If we can simply talk to Negroes and stay in their homes, that will be a huge job. We won’t engage in direct action—no sit-ins—nor will we encourage local people to do so. There’s no point in integrating a lunch counter if you can’t afford a hamburger. But we are willing to risk our lives so that Negroes can receive a better education and participate in free elections. Mississippi has been called a closed society. It is more than that; it is a padlocked police state. We think the key to opening it is the vote.”

As Moses laid down the basic ground rules for the summer, I scanned the faces of my fellow volunteers until I saw the dark-haired girl who caught my eye the day before. When she saw me look her way, I tried out my best trouble-is-my-business smile, but I don’t think she bought it.

“We will not allow any staff members or volunteers to carry a weapon,” Moses stressed. “This is absolutely bedrock. If the police thought we were armed, they would simply use that as an excuse to murder us.”

He gave us a hypothetical case:

“What would you do if you were in a farmhouse under attack and the owner, firing back in self-defense, had been shot, and his children were crying for help? You can’t walk away, say ‘I’m nonviolent,’ and find out what happened the next morning. You have to be a part of it. You’d have to make an on-the-spot decision. Should you pick up the gun? If you do, you violate our commitment to nonviolence; if you don’t, you leave yourself and the children exposed. What should you do? I can’t answer that. There is no clear answer. What I can say is be cautious, avoid arrest. The work we’re doing can’t be done in jail—or in the grave.”

I tried to picture what I would do in those circumstances. It was all too easy for me to simulate the fear I would feel, but what decisions would I make? How would I act? Would I meet the test?

“I see an analogy in Camus’s The Plague to what is happening in this country,” Moses continued. “The sickness pervades the whole society, but nobody will admit it. We are all victims of the plague of prejudice, but we refuse to diagnose our symptoms because recognition would make action necessary. Unless we have the courage and lucidity to face facts and openly and honestly discuss our own racism, the Summer Project could blow up in our faces. And unless this country . . .”

At that point Moses broke off in midsentence; one of the SNCC staff was motioning to him from the side of the stage. Moses walked over, bending down on one knee to hear what the man was urgently whispering. He remained there for a moment, rocking gently back and forth, then he rose wearily to his feet and stood silently before us, shrouded in thought. Finally, he looked up and spoke in a flat, inflectionless voice.

“Yesterday morning, three of our people left Meridian, Mississippi, to investigate a church bombing in Neshoba County. They haven’t come back, and we haven’t had any word from them. We spoke to John Doar in the Justice Department. He promised to order the FBI to act, but the local FBI claims they’ve been given no authority.”

Moses paused, absorbed in his own brooding.

a separate decision. His prophetic aura held me in thrall. And yet there was a sad beauty in his face that was almost childlike, reminding me of a bright, sensitive kid who is lost.

He gave us a hypothetical case:

I tried to picture what I would do in those circumstances. It was all too easy for me to simulate the fear I would feel, but what decisions would I make? How would I act? Would I meet the test?

Moses paused, absorbed in his own brooding.

Waves of shock and dismay swept the auditorium. Who was missing? Where was Neshoba? Are they already dead? Do they mean to kill us all? I sat stunned in my chair, paralyzed by a sudden surge of sheer terror.

A frail, birdlike woman in a sleeveless blouse and cutoff blue jeans took the stage. Her thin face was pale and distraught, and she fidgeted constantly with the filter tip in her hand, but her voice was composed.

“My husband, Michael Schwerner; a fellow CORE worker, James Chaney, of Meridian; and a Summer Project volunteer, Andrew Goodman, of New York, have to all present knowledge ‘disappeared’ on a mission to investigate a church burning in Neshoba County. A thorough check of all jails and hospitals produced no clue. Our appeals to local and federal officials—the FBI and the Justice Department—have been in vain. We were told the matter is ‘out of the province’ of federal concern. The Mississippi State Patrol told us bluntly, ‘Why should we care?’ Finally, at seven o’clock this morning, we were told by the jailor’s wife in Philadelphia, Mississippi, that the three were arrested for speeding Sunday afternoon and released at 6:00 P.M. after paying a fine. Sheriff Rainey has confirmed that his deputy, Cecil Price, made the arrest and saw them leave town.”

Rita Schwerner then went to the blackboard and wrote the names of the missing men over the map Moses had drawn of Mississippi.

James Chaney—CORE staff

Michael Schwerner—CORE staff

Andrew Goodman—Summer Project Volunteer

Neshoba County—Disappeared

“Go wire your congressman to do something,” she pleaded. “Demand that the FBI start searching for these men. Even though we have contacted them repeatedly, so far they’ve done nothing. If we can get some action from these law enforcement officials, there is still hope.”

Moses came back and said a few words about how crucial the first twenty-four hours were. We then broke up into groups according to states. In a daze, I drafted telegrams to Ohio legislators while I wished I were back in my room packing my bags. This is a mistake, my brain kept telling me. Leave now or you will die. All around me people were cursing and vowing a little too loudly that they were undaunted and more determined than ever to go.

As I walked across the campus on my way to the Western Union office on High Street, I saw Moses, sitting alone on the steps of the dining hall. When I returned an hour later, he was still there, lost in polar solitudes.

At lunch I picked at my food like most of my companions. Cigarette smoke hung in the room as thickly as storm clouds. Everybody talked about the disappearance, but nobody seemed to have any new information.

“Why won’t they tell us anything?” the girl sitting across from me asked. I could see her lips quivering.

“I don’t think they know very much,” I said.

“But I heard they were up all night calling people in Mississippi,” she replied. “They must know more than they’re saying.”

I glanced over to where the SNCC staff were gathered at one long table.

“I knew it was going to be bad,” I said, “but I didn’t think it would be this bad.”

“Cheer up,” Lenny chipped in. “The worst is yet to come.”

Nobody laughed.

At two o’clock I went to a large meeting on the Freedom Schools. The person in charge was distant and disorganized, and everyone’s mind was on the missing civil rights workers anyway. Afterward we received our assignments. Lenny and I were being sent to McComb.

I broke out into a cold sweat and headed for the bathroom.

Our group was already gathered in a semicircle under a large sycamore tree near the chapel. Among the dozen volunteers I immediately recognized the girl I had noticed the day before at dinner. Our project director, leaning back against the tree trunk with his legs stretched out in front of him, was the man who had also had his eye on her.

“I see you’re already on CPT,” he said to me as soon as I sat down.

“I’m a little late,” I apologized. “I didn’t catch what you said.”

“That’s ‘colored people’s time,’” he replied sardonically, giving me a granite look. “Why don’t y’all say who you are?”

The girl was Esther Rappaport.

“My name is Raymond Fleetwood,” he continued after the introductions, “but my friends call me ‘Feelgood.’ We ain’t friends yet, but you can call me Feelgood too. Now listen up, we got things to discuss. I know y’all are scared because of what happened, but I want you to calm down and cool yourselves ’cause they’s a lot of people those crackers plan to kill before they get around to you. To survive this summer, we’re gonna hafta learn to love each other. Now that’ll be real easy for you, ’cause I’m very loveable.” He paused a moment to smile a splintered smile, which exposed a chipped front tooth. “But it’s gonna be a lot harder for me, you dig, because I was brought up to hate whites. Down South the people that’ve been beatin’ on me and abusin’ my people has all got white faces just like yours, so if you want to work with me, you’re gonna have to make your position very clear. I won’t trust you an inch until you show me why I should.”

“If we didn’t care,” Esther said, “we wouldn’t be here.”

“That’s right,” another volunteer added. “I’m more determined to go to Mississippi than ever.”

“What’s happened proves that something needs to be done,” I forced myself to say.

“Babies, don’t run those numbers on me,” Feelgood said. “You honkies is all the same; y’all talk a better game than you play. You got a hole in your soul, so you goin’ South to be with black folks so you can put a little soul in the hole. You think it’s gonna be a ‘rewardin’ experience,’ or some such jive. Listen, I’ve lived in both the North and the South, and you just don’t know the score. You don’t know how those peckerwoods think. I do. They haul you to jail, strip you, lay you on the cement floor, and ask you silly questions, and then they beat you and beat you until you’re most dead. You think you’re livin’ in a democracy? Y’all dreamin’. This is a kill-or-be-killed country.”

“I was told to expect violence,” Esther said, “and I certainly do expect it, but I have no concept of violence—I’ve never known any.”

“Well now, that makes you very fortunate, don’t it?” Feelgood looked at all of us with bemusement. “Where have you folks been all your lives?”

“In schools,” I answered for all of us with a guilty smile.

“How many black people in the South, do you think, don’t know about violence?”

“None,” I replied.

“That’s right. And, babies, that’s why y’all gonna need more than a summer to know what’s happenin’. It wasn’t my idea to bring in a bunch of honkies who don’t know where it’s at. Go down, Bob Moses, and such jive, that ain’t my kinda tune, man. Do you know what it takes to understand what it means to be black?” Feelgood asked me directly.

“No.”

“A life and a death—that’s what.”

Feelgood fell into a morose silence.

“All of us are apprehensive,” Esther said. “Who wouldn’t be? But we want to balance our fears against the good we think we can do. We want to hope for the best, but be prepared for the worst. Can’t you give us specific examples of what we may be in for?”

“You’re ‘apprehensive’; you want ‘specific examples.’ Babies, y’all too much.” Feelgood ran his falcon’s gaze over the whole group, but his eyes lingered on Esther, as if he were trying to estimate the impression he was making on her. “I’ll tell you what it’s like to be in the ‘hot box.’ Will that be specific enough for you?”

“Yes.”

“Me and Luvahn Brown got sent to the county farm for sittin’ on the white side at the county courthouse in Jackson. When we got to the farm, they signed us in as ‘Freedom Riders’ and issued us striped uniforms, not the T-shirt and blue overalls the other prisoners was wearin’. We were put in the maximum security cell. The next morning the warden calls us out and tells us the rules. He says, ‘When I tell you to do something, you do it. If I say grab a hoe, you get it. If I say grab a slang blade, you get it. You some of those smart niggers who tryin’ to change things, but if you talk back to me, I’ll take you behind the barn and give you a fist beatin’ you won’t forget. You see these other niggers here? They’ll beat you, too, if I tell them. They’re in here for decent crimes like boot-leggin’ and robbery.’ He asked them if he should beat us, but they said they thought we’d be all right.

“Then they loaded us in a truck and put us to work clearin’ a road. We were movin’ logs, two men to a log, but the guard told me to move one by myself. I tried and I couldn’t. ‘You damn nigger,’ he says, ‘move that log.’ He hit me with a leather strap across the face; then he says, ‘Peewee, cut me a stick.’ He come back with a stick about two inches thick and four feet long. He told Peewee and another prisoner to pull down my pants and hold my arms. Then he started wackin’ me as hard as he could on my back and thighs. After he let me up, he pulled out his gun and pointed it at my face. ‘Have you got anything to say to me, nigger?’ he says, ’cause I ain’t done with you yet.’

“When we returned, he told the warden, ‘I’d like to wrap my strap around this damn nigger’s neck.’ ‘We got a place for smart niggers,’ the warden says. ‘Put him in the sweat box.’ They took me to a hole in the ground, about nine feet by twelve feet, with a steel door and no window. ‘What did I do?’ I asked. They said, ‘Nigger, just shut up, pull off your clothes, and get in.’ It must have been a hundred and twenty degrees; the walls and ceiling dripped. It was pitch-black; the only time I saw a light was three times a day when they brought me bread and water. They left me in that slimy shit hole for over a week. If one of our lawyers hadn’t found out where I was, I would’ve been a dead man. That’s Mississippi for you, babies. They’ll kill you for just nuthin’.”

I stared at Feelgood, wondering if I could survive an ordeal like that. It was one thing to hear about atrocities on television, another to be told about them face-to-face.

“Do you think this Summer Project will make a difference?” I asked.

“If we really pulled off something big,” Feelgood said with a sarcastic curl to his lip, “like if some of you babies was to die, that might do it, that might crack Mississippi wide open.”

“I don’t see why anyone has to die,” Esther said, “to achieve something so basic as the right to vote.”

“Babies,” Feelgood said, “you don’t see a lot of things, but you will.”

I was lying in bed thinking about the harrowing events of the day and debating whether I should go or stay when Lenny showed up with Hal Zizner. He had been at the SNCC office in Atlanta and was furious at the FBI for not investigating the instant they learned that the three were missing.

“As far as I know,” he said, “they still aren’t on the case. And now it’s too late.”

“Why do you say that?”

I knew that the troubled look on Lenny’s face mirrored my own.

“Because this morning the jailor’s wife said the three had been arrested for speeding, fined twenty bucks, and released at six o’clock. But this afternoon we learned that they were released at ten and were last seen heading south on Route 19 toward Meridian.”

“I thought they called the Philadelphia Jail late Sunday afternoon,” I said.

“They did. That’s one of the things that looks bad. You see the picture?”

“When does it get dark in Mississippi?” I asked.

“Between eight and nine.”

“Why didn’t they contact Meridian?” Lenny asked. “Aren’t you allowed one phone call?”

“You are if they let you.”

“So it was a setup,” I said, finally seeing what Hal saw, “and the police were involved.”

“Somebody tipped the cops off,” Hal said. “The speeding charge was obviously trumped up. They held them until dark, took them to a concealed place, and killed them. They probably dumped the bodies in the Pearl River.”

Hal’s account, with its grim matter-of-factness, chilled my heart.

“Then there’s no hope,” I said.

“They never had a chance. When that church was burned, the FBI should have known something was up—the bastards.”

Hal’s anger undercut my resolve. I had assumed the FBI would provide federal protection; I hadn’t realized that they simply didn’t care.

“In Mississippi they’re saying it’s a hoax,” Hal continued. “That our three guys are probably sipping Cuba Libres on Castro’s patio in Havana.”

“What do we do now?” I asked.

“Now we’ve got to find the bodies. A bunch of us are driving down tonight to start searching. If we don’t, they’ll deny and deny and deny. You wouldn’t believe how deluded those people are. You know the joke, ‘What’s got four eyes but can’t see?’ ‘Mississippi.’”

“I wouldn’t tell the other volunteers what I just told you,” Hal added. “We don’t want people to panic.”

“Tom here is already nervous enough to be Anthony Perkins’s understudy.”

“I’m scared shitless,” I admitted. “Do you know where Lenny and I are being sent? McComb.”

“I won’t kid you, McComb’s rough,” Hal said, “but I don’t anticipate some kind of bloodbath. The power elite in Mississippi doesn’t want violence; they’re into the politics of ‘let’s pretend’: Let’s pretend there isn’t any problem and there won’t be one. It’s the rednecks in the hick towns we’ve got to worry about.”

“Aren’t there a lot of them?” I asked.

“Enough. But if we can find the bodies and show the world what a hellhole Mississippi is, some of these crackers might have second thoughts. It’s a terrible thing to say, but you two might be safer because those three guys are dead.”

“I’m not sure I have the guts to go through with this,” I said. “I’m scared of the high dive; how am I going to cope with Mississippi?”

“Listen, we’re all afraid,” Hal admitted, “but we can’t let them kill the whole Summer Project. This is important. We can’t back down now. Nobody is safe. You could be walking along a sidewalk in your home town and get killed by a flying hubcap. Once you understand that, you’ll know what it means to put your body on the line. What do you want to do with your life: major in history or make history?”

I thought I’d rather take my chances with flying hubcaps, but Hal’s mentioning of history brought me back to the reasons I had decided to go to Mississippi in the first place. Somehow, I had to find within myself the courage to be like Bob Moses.

I was congratulating myself on the return of my appetite at dinner Tuesday evening when Bob Moses came to the microphone with ominous news:

“Two Choctaw Indians spotted the station wagon about thirteen miles northwest of Philadelphia. It had been doused with gasoline and burned down to the frame and hidden off the highway near the Bogue Chitto Swamp. Some footprints were found leading away from the car, but there was no sign of the three boys. Robert Kennedy has invoked the Lindbergh Law, ordering the FBI to treat the disappearance as a kidnapping. Agents are now on the scene, and they plan to begin a full search tomorrow. We fear they may be too late.”

My heart started pounding and a prickling sensation ran up my arms while the room broke into heated discussion. My unfocused fears had been replaced by specific terrors: a burned car, a fetid swamp.

“I thought they were last seen heading south,” I said to Lenny.

“They were lying,” Lenny responded glumly. “Remember what Hal said. They probably never got to head anywhere at all.”

After dinner I joined our Freedom School group for a rambling discussion of our duties once we got to McComb. Whatever Feelgood’s merits were as a project director, it was clear to me that organization was not one of them. He would skip from topic to topic and suddenly fall into a long silence that left me hanging. Unlike Moses, whose silences were always meditations, Feelgood would simply slip into a heavy funk. I sat beside Esther, breathing in the fragrance of dusky hair.

I fell into step with her after the session, and we began to walk and talk, eventually sitting together in a small, stone gazebo outside the chapel. She seemed to like the stories I told about growing up in Ohio and going to Hiram College. Her life had been remarkably different.

“I’m a red-diaper baby,” she said. “My parents were leftists. And I mean were, at least in the case of my mother. It was a classic Lower East Side story—pushcart peddler meets sweatshop seamstress. When my mother married my father, she was a Trotskyite, totally committed to the working class, a corned-beef-and-cabbage person. Now her idea of lunch is champagne and oysters. She thinks Las Vegas is the most fabulous place on earth.”

“I think it’s a waste of electricity,” I said, and Esther laughed in agreement.

I told her about growing up during the Mafia wars of the fifties, when Youngstown was called “Little Chicago” and gangland bombings and murders were common.

“When I was about ten, the Mafia shot a man on my street. One morning he stepped out his backdoor to go to work, and a sniper was waiting for him on the garage roof. I remember I ran down and looked at the house when I heard the news. The police and the ambulance had already come and gone, but I was curious, so I walked up the driveway. What I saw on the blacktop by the garage was a chalked outline of the body and a pool of blood. At that moment, a woman came out of the house (she didn’t see me), connected up the garden hose as if she were going to water the flowers, and began to hose the blood down the drain in the center of the driveway.”

“I suppose that’s what it means to be a Mafia wife,” Esther said.

“We probably shouldn’t be talking about such gruesome stuff. I can’t sleep as it is.”

“We’re all afraid. Now with those three guys missing, it’s even harder to admit how afraid we really are.”

“I know what you mean,” I said. Somehow, acknowledging my fear made it seem less terrible, and if Esther had the courage to go, I did too.

“I had a truly bizarre nightmare last night. It was so scary.” Esther hesitated a moment. “I took a long kitchen knife and slashed two tires. Suddenly there was an ugly man there with bony hands who had a longer knife, and he slashed all four tires on our family Mercedes. I was furious, so I ran to my mother screaming, ‘I only slashed two tires and he slashed four!’ and I held up four fingers for emphasis. ‘In this life,’ my mother said in an absolutely calm and controlled voice, ‘we must expect retribution.’ At that moment I looked out the window and I saw the man slash his stomach open. . . . Then I woke up.”

“I wonder what Freud would make of that.”

“Oh God,” Esther cried, “don’t tell me. I hadn’t even thought of it in those terms. It was just so terrifying!”

“How come your mom isn’t political anymore?”

“Money. It’s that simple. They made too much of it. She and my father used to do things, now they just discuss them. They think politics is a spectator sport; I think it’s acting on your beliefs.”

“What does your father do?”

“He’s in advertising. You know that line for Playtex: lasting stretch that won’t wash out? That’s his. He still subscribes to the I.F. Stone Weekly and gets angry when he watches the evening news. He’s big on cause and effect. If you do this, then that will happen, especially in terms of politics. My father still talks a good line, but what has he ever done? He thinks if he nods to the doorman, he’s done his duty by the workingman.”

“Do you think going to Mississippi will change things? Before I came here, I thought for sure it would, but the more I learn about how bad it is, the more doubts I have.”

“I feel sure that going to Mississippi will change me. Someday I’d like to be a mother—I’m really curious to know what having a baby is like—but right now I want to give birth to my self—I want to be a new woman, a new direction, a start at something better. I want to become what I truly am. Feelgood’s right about white people having a hole in their soul. People see their imperfections as holes, and they try to fill those holes with another person. But we need to make ourselves whole.”

“What do you think about Feelgood?” I blurted out.

“Why do you ask?”

“I don’t know; I saw him watching you.”

“He’s not the only one,” Esther said, smiling over at me.

“Oh,” I responded with a guilty laugh. “I guess the question is, ‘Has anyone ever not told you that you’re beautiful?’”

“Lots of people, but thanks. I don’t see my body as so great. I just walk around in it. The only thing I like about my looks are my eyes.”

“I wouldn’t touch a thing.”

“Oh, wouldn’t you?” Esther broke into a throaty cackle.

“Feelgood has demons,” she remarked, returning to my question. “He’s been through a lot. All those SNCC guys have experienced incredible things. They are terrifically interesting, much more exciting than anybody I met in college. They aren’t afraid to show their feelings, to laugh, cry, shout, sing. They don’t just sit back and label life; they go out and confront it. That’s what I want to do, too: I want to live with people who have solved some of life’s simple problems. I’ve never felt so vitally alive as I have these past few days. This may sound crazy, but I think the fear adds to the experience.”

I longed to kiss her and make that her next experience, but clearly her mind was elsewhere. We sat in silence for a while, watching fireflies flicker in the ravine. Then we stood up and hugged.

“You’re a good listener,” she said, smiling up at me. “I can tell that you’re one of those people who remembers and mulls over everything they hear.”

“Only if it’s interesting.”

“Well, don’t think about things too much. Get some sleep.”

After a night of tossing and turning to horrendous dreams—complete with poisonous snakes, quicksand swamps, and sadistic sheriffs—I welcomed James Lawson’s topic for Wednesday morning: nonviolence. But his presentation left me cold. Although he was thoughtful and articulate, there was something aloof, pedantic, and off-putting about his manner. He was a mystical idealist who used abstract words as if they had absolute meanings. Listening to him, I was reminded of an anecdote Abe Ravitz, my American lit professor at Hiram, once told me: when Melville read one of Emerson’s more vaporous essays, he felt impelled to scrawl in the margin “To one who has weathered Cape Horn as a common sailor, what stuff is all this!” Rather than being inspired by the philosophical underpinnings of nonviolence, I felt superior to its unrealistic expectations.

The early Christians in the catacombs may have kept their spirits clean, I thought, but did the lions in the arena appreciate their accomplishment? I didn’t like the idea of nonviolence as a tactic to provoke white violence, shock the nation, and create a crisis only the federal government could resolve—that made us victims of the very mass culture I was in revolt against. Just because the media had become jaded and responded only to blood, did that mean that I had to bleed? Impulsively, I stood up and stated a part of my inner debate: “If putting my body on the line will make this a better world,” I said, “I’m ready to do that. I just don’t want my sacrifice to be in vain.”

There was a long silence. Finally, from the back of the room, came Moses’s slow, soothing voice. As usual, he had the last word:

“Politics without morality is chaos, and morality without politics is irrelevant. You must understand that nonviolence is essential to our program this summer. It is academic whether you embrace nonviolence philosophically or not. But if you are going to work in Mississippi with us, you must be prepared to accept the ground rules. Whatever your reservations may be in this, you can only act nonviolently in the Movement. If you can’t accept this, please don’t come with us. In the end, you see, everybody has to live together. In the end, Negroes and whites will share the land, and the less overlay of bitterness, the more possible an accommodation. I think nonviolence leaves the door open to reconciliation.”

Hal had advised Lenny and me to go into town and buy some bib overalls and a denim jacket—the kind Bob Moses wore—to prepare us for Mississippi. He said the SNCC outfit wasn’t just for show, but it also offered good protection if a cop took a notion to drag you down the street.

We all gathered on the grass behind one of the dorms to be instructed in security precautions, role-playing situations, and passive resistance. James Forman, the executive secretary of SNCC, was in charge. He calmly smoked his pipe as he issued multiple warnings about the dangers we faced. His instructions were daunting in their completeness, ranging from the normal precautions of locking doors and watching for suspicious cars to telling the men to shave their beards if they didn’t want them pulled out hair by hair and the women not to wear earrings if they didn’t want their earlobes torn.

Then we broke into small groups and acted out more complex scenarios. The SNCC staff played their roles in these situations to the hilt, falling instantly into character—from Klansman to sharecropper—and making the scene come unnervingly alive. For them, this was no mere exercise in stereotyping and melodrama. We volunteers, on the other hand, could only grope in the dark and try to imagine what we might do or say.

In one, Feelgood, as a jailor, grabbed me by the collar and shoved me into a cell with four SNCC guys playing rednecks.

“Got some company for you, fellas,” he said. “One of those northern nigger-lovin’ agitators. Treat him nice now.”

“I’m certainly no troublemaker,” I said, stumbling to establish rapport. “Don’t you guys think Joe Namath is overpaid?”

Finally, we all assembled again on the lawn for instructions in passive resistance. I learned how to curl up like an unborn baby, using drawn-up knees to protect my vital parts, forearms to hide my face, and clasped hands to cover the nape of my neck. I followed directions, dropping to the ground and flopping on other volunteers for protection.

“Defend those family jewels,” Feelgood shouted at me, slapping at my exposed areas with a piece of rubber hose he had brought along to test our mettle.

“I’ve only got two hands,” I retorted.

“Swift, I don’t think you can take it,” Feelgood said, turning to Lenny.

“Look, I’ve suffered,” Lenny replied. “Ask my dentist.”

Forman then tacked a sign that read “COURTHOUSE” on a spreading oak tree and divided us in two groups. We determined “Niggers” had to march through a gantlet of angry “Rednecks” to reach the courthouse and have a chance to register. Emotions boiled up and over in a matter of seconds. Before I had taken five steps, I was smashed to the ground, kicked in the face, and smothered beneath a pile of writhing bodies. I shrieked with pain and cursed a blue streak as I tried to claw my way free.

“I’m hurt,” someone cried. “I think my ankle’s broken.”

“Keep it up,” Forman shouted. “Bundle together to cushion the blows.”

After what seemed like an hour, we were ordered to untangle and pull ourselves back together. I had a sore lip, a torn T-shirt, and lots of grass stains. We all looked the worse for wear, but there were no serious injuries—just bruises, scratches, and one sprained ankle.

I was more than a little shocked by the experience. The speed with which jeers turned to blows was astonishing. I was shaken by my own pent-up fury; I had been swept by a rush of rage to hurt others before they hurt me. Our violent impulses were all too real, and yet we had withstood the onslaught. I looked at my fellow volunteers with new respect, as if we were raw recruits who had survived our first battle. I had yet to walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Death, but at least I had taken a first step.

The media people, cameras grinding, jumped at the chance to get some action shots for the six o’clock news. Afterwards, the CBS crew treated everybody to ice cream. At dinner I heard that a handful of volunteers had left. I was determined to stick it out. I looked around; the impending danger seemed to stimulate the hormones and spark the libido. In spite of the warnings we had received about interracial sex, people were pairing off and making out all over the place—on couches, in corners, on the grass, and down in the overgrown ravine.

“The bushes are shaking,” Lenny noted as we walked across the campus back to our dorm.

I was still riding a rush of adrenaline from the afternoon. I looked around for Esther. How I would have loved to make some bushes shake with her!

Although we were supposed to meet with our project leaders after dinner, many of us played hooky to watch a CBS news special: “The Search in Mississippi.” I squeezed into the crowded lounge just as Walter Cronkite announced that the nation’s attention and concern was now focused on the state because of the disappearance of the three civil rights workers. Next came footage of the orientation session for the voter registration volunteers the week before. It was strange to watch the same SNCC staff saying many of the same things we had heard to another group like us. The camera zoomed in on one volunteer in particular: a reflective-looking young man with a boyish tousle of black hair, a delicate, well-defined mouth, and eyes at once dreamy and receptive—as if they interrogated, even slightly doubted, what the speaker said, reserving to the last the right to agree or disagree. I envied his repose. It was Andrew Goodman. He looked a lot like me.

They showed shots of Goodman’s parents and Rita Schwerner. There was a distraught father pleading, “Please, David, come home; you don’t know what you’re doing.” They even had interviews with a few volunteers; interviews that had been held the day before in the very room where we sat watching the program.

“I was misquoted,” Lenny cried as the camera pictured him earnestly explaining why he wanted to spend his summer in Mississippi.

When Eastland was shown, claiming that all the darkies on his plantation were as happy as could be and didn’t have a care in the world and when Governor Johnson called us “beatnik-type weirdos,” we all shouted, “You’re lying!” I relished Governor Johnson’s slip of the tongue: “We have no racial fictions . . . I mean frictions, here.” The room rocked with laughter. Finally Fannie Lou Hamer related how, when the owner of the plantation where she had worked for eighteen years said, “We don’t need registered Negroes here,” she had responded, “I didn’t do it for you; I did it for me.”

The program closed with a shot of us singing “We Shall Overcome.” We stood up, joined hands, and began singing along with ourselves on the television.

“Let’s hum the next verse,” someone said. “Everyone hum softly.”

As I hummed, I was moved by a black voice from the back of the room speaking with conviction: “You know what we’re doing. . . . We’re moving the world. We’re here to bring all the people of Mississippi, all the peoples of this country, all the peoples of the world together. We’re bringing a new revolution of love, so let’s sing out together once again now, everybody hand in hand.”

So I sang again, more fervently than before,

“Oh, Oh deep in my heart, I do believe,

We shall overcome some day.”

I felt a warm glow as I walked out into the flower-scented summer evening. I wanted to find Esther and see if we could have another good talk like the one we’d had the other night. Then I saw her, arm-in-arm with Feelgood, heading down the path toward the lake.

Every evening we had dorm discussions about whether we should or shouldn’t go and what the chances of getting hurt were. As I sang the songs and listened to the speakers, I certainly didn’t become less afraid—if anything, I was more terrified—but something else emerged as well: a feeling of being a part of a united effort that truly mattered, so that personal doubts and misgivings diminished in comparison. By week’s end I was at once scared to death and anxious to see what Mississippi was really like.

On Friday evening, James Forman talked to us first. The SNCC staff realized that this was their last chance to instruct us, so they wanted to make every word count.

“I’d like everybody to stand up,” Forman said. “Put your arms around the person on each side of you and sing ‘We’ll Never Turn Back.’”

“We have hung our head and cried

For those like Lee who died,

Died for you and died for me,

Died for the cause of equality,

But we’ll never turn back . . .”

“The song you just sang is about Herbert Lee, who was killed for trying to help people register to vote. Louis Allen, who saw the murder, was shot down this past January. Medgar Evers was assassinated a year ago. Five other deaths in the last five months. I may be killed; you may be killed; the whole staff may go.

“We cried over you in the staff meeting because we love you and are afraid for you. We are grown men and women who have been beaten and shot at, and we cried for you. We want you to understand exactly what you are getting into. But one thing is sure: If anything happens to you, it will also happen to us. If you get beaten up, I’ll be standing right behind you. We are going to be there with you, and you know we’ll never turn back.”

Then Bob Moses asked if any of us had read The Lord of the Rings.

“The hero, Frodo, obtains a powerful ring, which he knows he must destroy, yet as he carries it, he becomes corrupted by it, so that he is in danger of destroying not the ring but what is best in himself. When you spend your time fighting evil, you become preoccupied by it. It consumes your energy; you become part of the evil, and terribly weary. . . .”

He stared at the floor a long moment, and then, in a voice so soft he seemed to be whispering to himself: “The kids are dead.”

He paused while the truth I knew but hated to admit sank in. He said he had known since Monday, but he had remained silent out of respect for Rita. He even said he hoped they found the bodies soon so that we would realize the danger we faced. I expected my heart at that moment to break into a thundering gallop, but I stayed surprisingly calm. Maybe I was better prepared to go to Mississippi than I realized.

“The responsibility for sending you into dangerous situations is mine,” Moses continued. “I justify myself because I am taking the same risks; I ask no one to do what I would not do. Negroes who tried to gain their rights, nameless men, have already been killed in Mississippi. Herbert Lee, Louis Allen—people who trusted me—have already died. We want each one of you to stop and think, to face head-on the question: Are you willing to risk your life or not? Do you know what’s important, really important, and are you ready to stand up for it? If the answer is no, we can say, ‘Later, later, it’s too dangerous now.’”

Could we? Could I? I believed that I had the courage to risk my life, and I knew for sure that I did not want to die. An undertone of pain in Moses’s voice and a hint of inward agony in his eyes suggested that he almost wished we would say, “No, let’s call it off; we don’t want to go.”

“Don’t come to Mississippi this summer if you think you are bringing sweetness and light to the Negro. Only come if you understand, really understand, that his freedom and yours are one. All our strength comes from the local people. If they want sewing clubs or cooking classes, that’s what we’ll help them organize. It’s their decision, not ours. Because they’re the ones who will still be living there after we’ve gone.

“Now I want to say a few words to the Freedom School teachers: Please be patient with your students. Don’t expect too much. Break off a little chunk of love and follow it. If you do nothing more than be friendly, if you don’t teach them anything at all, that will still be something. When we bring people to register, they take a long time studying the test. And if they fail it, they take this to mean they should study it harder. They don’t see it as a trick to steal their rights. Many of your students will be like that. But you must remember there is a difference between being slow and being stupid. The people you’ll be working with aren’t stupid. But they’re slow. So very slow.”

He stood lost in meditation, deliberating whether he had left something unsaid. Finally he mentioned that he wanted to meet with the volunteers assigned to the McComb and Natchez projects in the lounge, then he walked out the door. For a minute or two we sat in total silence; by now we knew enough not to clap. At last a lovely soprano voice lifted us all into song:

“They say that freedom is a constant struggle,

They say that freedom is a constant struggle,

Oh, Lord, we’ve struggled so long,

We must be free, we must be free.”

I stood with my arms around Lenny and Esther and sang about how freedom was a constant crying, a constant dying, a struggle that had to go on. Next, as slow as a funeral dirge, came Bob Moses’s favorite song:

“We are soldiers, in the Army,

We have to fight, although we have to die,

We’ve got to hold up the freedom banner,

We’ve got to hold it up until we die.”

Then I went to meet with Moses.

“We sat up through the night,” Moses said as soon as we were assembled, “wondering what we should say to you volunteers. We wanted you to be scared—but not too scared. When no one had dropped out by Wednesday, I was worried. Now a few have left, but the rest of you have resolved to stick it out.

“As you know, the southwestern part of Mississippi is very dangerous. Already some homes have been bombed; vigilantes are drilling; automatic weapons and hand grenades have been stolen from an arms depot near Natchez. We have made a vow that we would not abandon the hardest areas, and so some SNCC field secretaries and a few volunteers will go to McComb and Natchez, but I have decided that the situation right now is simply too dangerous for the rest of you at this time. If a lot of people went now, they would face a high probability of being killed. Therefore, you will be dispersed to projects in the Delta where I think you will be safer. We will wait and see how the other volunteers are received. If conditions improve, you will be sent to your original assignments later in the summer.”

As Moses read out our new destinations, some lines from Three-Penny Opera raced through my head: “Re-priev-ed, Re-priev-ed, As the need is sorest, So the answer comes soonest.” I always thought they were purely ironic lines, but now I was taking them seriously. I felt a tremendous sense of relief, as if this last-minute reprieve were a confirmation of my heartfelt wish that I would not be harmed. My new project was in Tallahatchie, a relatively safe town in the heart of the Delta; Lenny would be in Greenville, the most liberal place in Mississippi. Of our group, only Esther was still going to McComb—no doubt at Feelgood’s insistence. I told myself that if she stuck to teaching Freedom School and stayed within the black community, she would be safe too. But in spite of my fear, I still wished to be where she was.

“You spoke tonight of sacrifice,” I said with surprise at the sound of my own words. “We are willing to go wherever you send us, no matter what the risks.”

Esther glanced my way with what I took to be admiration.

“We understand that some of us may have to die,” another volunteer added with passionate sincerity.

“Yes,” Moses said softly, “people will always be expended.” He looked at me, his eyes betrayed tremendous strain. “The question is . . . Are they ever expendable?”

After that we all walked outside where a group of volunteers were doing the hora. I watched Moses set the sheaf of papers he was carrying on the grass and, with solemn joy, join the circle of the dance.

Подняться наверх