Coming of Age in Mississippi (34 page)

Dave and the other demonstrators had been arrested and were to be bailed out around eight that night. By eight-thirty a lot of us were sitting outside on the dormitory steps awaiting their arrival, and they still hadn’t shown up. One of the girls had just gone inside to call the NAACP headquarters in Jackson, when suddenly two police cars came speeding through the campus. Students came running from every building. Within
minutes the police cars were completely surrounded, blocked in from every direction. There were two cops in the front seat of each car. They looked frightened to death of us. When the students got out of the cars, they were hugged, kissed, and congratulated for well over an hour. All during this time the cops remained in their seats behind locked doors. Finally someone started singing “We Shall Overcome,” and everyone joined in. When we finished singing, someone suggested we go to the football field and have a big rally. In minutes every student was on the football field singing all kinds of freedom songs, giving testimonies as to what we were going to do, and praying and carrying on something terrible. The rally ended at twelve-thirty, and by this time all the students were ready to tear Jackson to pieces.

The following evening Medgar Evers again came to campus to, as he put it, “get some of Tougaloo’s spirit and try and spread it around all over Jackson.” He gave us a good pep talk and said we would be called upon from time to time to demonstrate.

That spring term I had really wanted to do well in all my subjects, but I had become so wrapped up in the Movement that by the time mid-semester grades came out, I had barely a one-point average. Other students who had gotten involved with the NAACP were actually flunking. I started concentrating more on my work—with little success. It seemed as though everything was going wrong.

In addition to my academic problems, I was running out of money. In May I was so broke, I could not pay my last month’s bill and was forced to write Mama and ask her to send me thirty dollars. A couple of weeks went by without a letter from her. If Mama had the money, I knew she would have sent it. Apparently she didn’t have it, but why didn’t she write anyway? Finally I got a letter from Adline, who was working in New Orleans. Mama had written Adline and asked her to send me some money, because Raymond wouldn’t let her send me any herself. Adline could only spare ten dollars, and
she wrote me that she was sorry I had gone to Tougaloo when I knew I could not afford it.

The letter made me so mad that I was sick all the next week. I decided to write Emma and ask her for the thirty dollars. She sent me forty right away and said that she and my daddy would have helped me more and that they wanted to, but my daddy had been bothered with his back and had not been working.

Emma’s money took care of the spring term, but now I was faced with the problem of the summer. I had to make up some credits in summer school, and I was counting on getting a student loan.

One day as I passed the main bulletin board on campus, I noticed a memorandum from the Dean, saying that applications for federal loans had to be turned in before the week was up. The next day I stopped in at the Dean’s office to pick up a form. His secretary told me that I was too late. There were too many applicants already. I went to see the Dean, and had to give him my whole damn life history. I didn’t like that at all, but I needed the money. I told him I wouldn’t be able to graduate next year if I couldn’t go to summer school. He wasn’t very encouraging, but he gave me a form to fill out just in case one of the other students had a change in plans. My luck was so bad, I didn’t believe this could possibly happen.

By now I was so low I needed someone’s comfort. I started seeing Dave again, and the same old trouble started. But this time I didn’t care so much. School would be out soon and I wouldn’t see him again. Dave would graduate if anyone did. He had even received a Woodrow Wilson fellowship.

I took my final exams and was preparing to leave the campus, when I received a notice from the Dean’s office. It said that I had been given the sum of one hundred fifty dollars to assist me in summer school. Even though I had asked for three hundred, I started feeling better—better than I had felt in a long time. I didn’t know how I would manage on a hundred and fifty dollars, but I knew I would find some way to do it.

———

During the summer a white student moved into the room across the hall from me. Her name was Joan Trumpauer, and she told me she worked for SNCC as a secretary. In a short time we got to know each other very well, and soon I was going into Jackson with Joan and hanging out at her office. SNCC was starting a voter registration drive in the Delta (Greenwood and Greenville) and was recruiting students at Tougaloo. When they asked me if I wanted to canvass every other weekend, I agreed to go.

The first time I went to the Delta, I was with three other girls. A local family put us up and we slept two to a room. The second time I was there I stayed at the Freedom House—a huge white frame house that SNCC was renting from a widow for sixty dollars a month. This time I was with Bettye Poole, who had been canvassing for SNCC for a couple of months, and Carolyn Quinn, a new recruit like me. We arrived at the Freedom House on a Friday night about twelve-thirty and found fifteen boys all sleeping in one large room on triple-decker beds. They were all sleeping in their clothes. Some of the boys got up and we played cards for a while. A couple of them were from McComb, Mississippi, which was only twenty miles from Centreville. We cracked jokes about how bad the whites were in Wilkinson County. Around 2 A.M. I started to get sleepy and asked where the girls were going to stay. I was told we were going to stay right in the same room with all those boys. I was some shocked. Now I understood why Bettye Poole was wearing jeans; just then she was climbing into one of the empty bunks and settling down for the night. Here I was with only a transparent nylon pajama set to sleep in. Carolyn Quinn wasn’t prepared either. The two of us just sat up in chairs until some extra pairs of pants were found for us. The boys explained that they slept in their clothes because they had had bomb threats, and had to be ready to run
anytime. They all slept here in this one big room because it was sheltered by another house.

The next morning I woke up to the sounds of someone banging on a skillet and hollering, “Come and get it! Come and get it!” When we walked in the kitchen, the boy who’d made the racket said, “All right, girls, take over. Us boys have been cooking all week.” Most of the guys were angry because he had gotten them up in that manner, but they didn’t make a big fuss over it. Carolyn and I started cooking. When we announced that the food was ready, the boys ran over each other to get to the kitchen. It seemed they thought the food would disappear. It did. Within five minutes, everything on the table was gone. The food ran out and three boys were left standing in line.

I really got to like all of the SNCC workers. I had never known people so willing and determined to help others. I thought Bob Moses, the director of SNCC in Mississippi, was Jesus Christ in the flesh. A lot of other people thought of him as J.C., too.

The SNCC workers who were employed full-time were paid only ten dollars a week. They could do more with that ten dollars than most people I knew could do with fifty. Sometimes when we were in the Delta, the boys would take us out. We did not finish with our work some Saturdays until ten or eleven, and all the Negro places had a twelve o’clock curfew. But we would have more fun in an hour than most people could have in twenty-four. We would often go to one place where the boys had made friends with the waitresses, and they would sneak us fifths of liquor. Those SNCC boys had friends everywhere, among the Negroes, that is. Most whites were just waiting for the chance to kill them all off.

I guess mostly the SNCC workers were just lucky. Most of them had missed a bullet by an inch or so on many occasions. Threats didn’t stop them. They just kept going all the time. One Saturday we got to Greenville and discovered that the office had been bombed Friday night. The office was located up two flights of outside steps in a little broken-down building. It
seemed as though a real hard wind would have blown it away. The bomb knocked the steps off, but that didn’t stop the rally on Saturday night. Some of the boys made steps. When the new steps began to collapse, we ended up using a ladder. I remember when the rally ended, we found that the ladder was gone. For a few minutes we were real scared. We just knew some whites had moved it. We were all standing up there in the doorway wondering what to do. There was only one exit, and it was too high up to jump from. We figured we were going to be blown up. It seemed as though the whites had finally trapped us. The high school students were about to panic, when suddenly one of the SNCC boys came walking up with the ladder and yelled up to ask if the excitement was over. A lot of the other guys were mad enough to hit him. Those that did only tapped him lightly and smiled as they did it. “The nerve of those guys!” I thought.

Things didn’t seem to be coming along too well in the Delta. On Saturdays we would spend all day canvassing and often at night we would have mass rallies. But these were usually poorly attended. Many Negroes were afraid to come. In the beginning some were even afraid to talk to us. Most of these old plantation Negroes had been brain-washed so by the whites, they really thought that only whites were supposed to vote. There were even a few who had never heard of voting. The only thing most of them knew was how to handle a hoe. For years they had demonstrated how well they could do that. Some of them had calluses on their hands so thick they would hide them if they noticed you looking at them.

On Sundays we usually went to Negro churches to speak. We were split into groups according to our religious affiliation. We were supposed to know how to reach those with the same faith as ourselves. In church we hoped to be able to reach many more Negroes. We knew that even those that slammed doors in our faces or said, “I don’t want no part of
voting” would be there. There would also be the schoolteachers and the middle-class professional Negroes who dared not participate. They knew that once they did, they would lose that $250 a month job. But the people started getting wise to us. Most of them stopped coming to church. They knew if they came, they would have to face us. Then the ministers started asking us not to come because we scared their congregations away. SNCC had to come up with a new strategy.

As the work continued that summer, people began to come around. I guess they saw that our intentions were good. But some began getting fired from their jobs, thrown off plantations and left homeless. They could often find somewhere else to stay, but food and clothing became a problem. SNCC started to send representatives to Northern college campuses. They went begging for food, clothing, and money for the people in Mississippi, and the food, clothing, and money started coming in. The Delta Negroes still didn’t understand the voting, but they knew they had found friends, friends they could trust.

That summer I could feel myself beginning to change. For the first time I began to think something would be done about whites killing, beating, and misusing Negroes. I knew I was going to be a part of whatever happened.

A week before summer school ended, I was in town shopping with Rose, a girl from the dorm. We had planned to split cab fare back to campus, but discovered we did not have enough money. Cab fare out to Tougaloo was $2.50 and bus fare was thirty-five cents one way. We decided to take the Trailways back. When we got to the station, I suggested to Rose that we use the white side. “I’m game if you are,” she said.

I walked in the white entrance. When I looked back, I saw that Rose had not followed. I decided I would not go back to see what had happened, because she would try and talk me out of it. As I was buying my ticket, she walked up behind me.

“Shit, Moody, I thought you were kidding,” she said.

I didn’t answer. I was noticing the reaction of the man behind the counter. He stood looking at me as if he were paralyzed.

“Make that two tickets, please,” I said to him.

“Where is the other one to?” he said.

“Both to Tougaloo,” I said.

As he was getting the tickets for us, another man had gotten on the phone. He kept looking at us as he was talking. I think he was reporting to the police what was taking place. The man that sold us the tickets acted as if that was the last thing in the world he wanted to do. He slapped the tickets down on the counter, and threw the change at me. The change fell off the counter and rolled over to the floor. That bastard had the nerve to laugh as we picked it up. Rose and I sat opposite each other, so we could see what was happening throughout the terminal. The bus was to leave at three-thirty, and we had gotten there about two-forty-five. We had some time to wait. Rose had a watch. I asked her to keep a check on the time.

People came in and stared. Some even laughed. Nothing happened until a bunch of white soldiers sat with us and started talking. The conversation had gone on for some time when a Negro woman got off one of the incoming buses. She saw us sitting in there and walked right in. She had about six small children with her. The little Negro children started running around the station picking up things from the counter and asking if they could buy them. At that point the excitement started. A drunken white man walked into the station behind the Negro lady with all the children. He started cursing, calling us all kinds of niggers.

“Get them little dirty swines outta heah,” he said, pulling one of the little boys to the door.

“Take your filthy hands off my child,” the Negro woman said. “What’s going on here anyway?”

“They got a place for you folks, now why don’t you take them chilluns of yours and go on right over there?” the drunkard said, pointing to the Negro side of the bus station.

The lady looked at us. I guess she wanted us to say something. Rose and I just sat there. Finally she realized a sit-in or something was going on. She took her children and hurried out of the door. Instead of going to the Negro side, she went back on the bus. She looked as though she was really angry with us.