Coming of Age in Mississippi (40 page)

“Anne! Anne!” Mrs. Chinn was calling me. “Are you asleep?”

“No,” I answered.

“Let’s go down to the office. Maybe C.O. and George are there,” she said. We all got up and headed for the office. We arrived just as Mr. Chinn and George were getting out of the car. “They’re O.K.,” Mr. Chinn told us. “They were released from the hospital about five-thirty this morning.” He explained that they had been hit with buckshot.

That afternoon when the five teen-agers came to the office to fill out affidavits to be sent to the Justice Department, I heard the full story. They had been walking home down Pear Street after last night’s rally when the incident occurred. As they passed the service station on the opposite side of the street, Price Lewis, the white owner, had been standing in the doorway. This did not seem unusual—they generally saw him there. Then just as they were crossing the railroad tracks to the left of the service station, they heard a loud noise. They looked back and noticed that Price Lewis was now holding a shotgun pointed in their direction. At this point, one of the girls said she looked down and discovered blood was running down her legs into her shoes. She realized she had been shot and saw that the others had been wounded by buckshot pellets too.

Price Lewis had been arrested at the service station and taken to jail during the morning. Immediately he posted a small bail and was released. Within an hour or so he was back to work at the service station, carrying on as though nothing had happened. His Negro service attendant was still there too. He acted as if he really hated being there and he must have known how other Negroes were looking at him, but I knew he couldn’t afford to leave his job.

The shooting really messed up our relationship with the teen-agers. Within two or three days they had stopped coming
to the office. I knew that their parents were responsible for most of them not coming back. From the beginning most of the parents had not approved of their participation in the voter registration drive. Several kids had told me that they came against their parents’ wishes, but they always refused to let me go home with them to talk things over with the adults. They took too much pride in the work they were doing with us to let me do that. I think they knew as well as I that it was for themselves and themselves alone that they were working—because within a few years they would be the ones who would have to deal with the whites.

Now, however, I felt I had an obligation to go and see their parents. I did so with very little success. Some flatly refused to see me. Those that did gave made-up excuses as to why their children had to stay home. One sent her little boy to the door to tell me she was not home; “Mama say she ain’t heah,” he said.

I hardly knew what to do. I was not prepared to cope with this situation. I kept trying to think of some way to get the teen-agers involved again. For one thing, we would not be able to get our work done without them. Bettye and I tried canvassing alone for a day or so and ended up almost dead from exhaustion.

During this lapse in the project, I got one of those weeping letters from Mama again. As usual, she was begging me to leave Mississippi, and as usual she peeved the hell out of me, but I couldn’t take lightly what she said about Wilkinson County. I knew too well what I was up against.

The next day, in an attempt to forget her letter, I decided to busy myself with cleaning the office. I got the one teen-ager that still hung around to help me, and sent him to the café for a pail of water. When he came back, he said, “Anne, there are two white men outside in a car asking to see the person in charge of the office.”

“Are they from Canton or around here?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “I’ve never seen them before.”

My heart almost jumped right out of me. It was not until then that I really began to think of some of the things in Mama’s letter. She had said that the white folks in Centreville had found out that I was in Canton, and that some Negro had told her he heard they planned to bump me off. She had been pleading with me this time as she had never done before. Why did I want to get myself killed? she kept asking. What was I trying to prove? Over and over again she said that after I was dead things would still be the same as they were now.

Now here I was standing in the middle of the office trembling with fear, not wanting to face the white men outside. Maybe they were here to tell me something terrible had happened. Maybe they came just to make sure I was here. George was out in the country talking to some farmers, and Bettye was cleaning the Freedom House. How I wished one of them were here now, so they could go outside instead of me. Finally I stopped shaking long enough to make myself walk out of the office. “You can’t be getting scared without finding out who they are or what they want,” I kept telling myself.

As I approached the car, and took a good look at the two men inside, I was almost positive I didn’t recognize them from Centreville. Feeling almost limp from relief, I walked up to the driver and said, “I was told you would like to see the person in charge.”

“Yes, we are from the FBI,” he said, showing me his identification. “We are here to investigate the shooting. Where can we find the five kids who were involved?”

I stood there mad as hell. “The stupid bastards!” I thought. There I was getting all flustered and scared because of my mother’s letter, not knowing who they were. “Why didn’t you come inside and present yourselves as officials from the FBI?” I asked angrily. “We just don’t happen to run out into the streets to see every white man that drives up in front of this office, you know. After all, it might just be someone ready to blow our heads off.”

“Can you tell me where I could find those five kids that were shot?” he asked again, a little indignant.

“I’ll see if I can find the addresses for you,” I said sweetly. “Why don’t you two come inside for a minute?”

I knew they weren’t particularly interested in getting out of their car and coming into the office. However, I gave them a look that said, “You’ll never get those addresses unless you do,” so they followed me. They stood around impatiently, looking at our broken-down chairs and sofa, as if to say, “What a shame these niggers have to come into a place and open up a joint like this and cause all this trouble for us.”

“I can find only three of the addresses for you,” I said. “I would like that you wait and see George Raymond, our project director. He should be back soon and he’ll be able to show you where they live. Why don’t you two have a seat until he comes?”

“What time do you expect him?” one asked.

“Within fifteen or twenty minutes,” I said. Realizing they had to wait that long, they decided to sit. They placed themselves carefully on the sofa, as if it was diseased or something. They must be from the South, I thought. “Where are you two from?” I asked.

“New Orleans,” one said.

They waited restlessly until George returned. He spent a few hours driving around with them and they saw all the kids and questioned them. That was the extent of their “investigation.” The same afternoon they left town and we never saw or heard from them after that.

By the beginning of August when the teen-age canvassers still had not returned, Dave Dennis decided to bring in three other workers—two girls, who were students from Jackson, and a boy called Flukie, a CORE task force worker. There were now six of us, but there was still more work than we could handle. George and Flukie went out in the country
each day to talk with farmers and to scout for churches to conduct workshops in. The rest of us were left to canvas and look after the office.

So far we had only been able to send a handful of Negroes to the courthouse to attempt to register, and those few that went began to get fired from their jobs. This discouraged others who might have registered. Meanwhile, we were constantly being threatened by the whites. Almost every night someone came running by to tell us the whites planned to bump us off.

One evening just before dark, someone took a shot at a pregnant Negro woman who was walking home with her two small sons. This happened in a section where a few poor white families lived. The woman stood in the street with her children, screaming and yelling for help. A Negro truck driver picked them up and drove them to the Boyd Street housing project, which was right across the street from the Freedom House. She was still yelling and screaming when she got out of the truck, and people ran out of all the project houses. The woman stood there telling everyone what had happened. She was so big it looked as though she was ready to have the baby any minute. As I looked at the other women standing around her, I didn’t like what I saw in their faces. I could tell what they were thinking—“Why don’t you all get out of here before you get us all killed?”

After this incident, Negro participation dropped off to almost nothing, and things got so rough we were afraid to walk the streets. In addition, our money was cut off. We were being paid twenty dollars a week by the Voter Education Project, a Southern agency which supported voter registration for Negroes. They said that since we were not producing registered voters, they could not continue to put money into the area. It seemed things were getting rough from every angle. We sometimes went for days without a meal. I was getting sick and losing lots of weight. When the NAACP invited me to speak at a Thursday night women’s rally in Jackson, at one
of the big churches, I tried to prepare a speech that would get across to them how we were suffering in Canton. Everything went wrong the night of the rally. Ten minutes before Dave arrived to pick me up, Jean, one of the new girls, had a terrible asthma attack, and we had to drop her off at the hospital in Jackson. I arrived at the church exhausted and an hour late, still wearing the skirt and blouse I had worked in all day; they looked like I had slept in them for weeks. The mistress of ceremonies was just explaining that I was unable to make it, when I walked straight up on the stage. She turned and looked at me as if I was crazy, and didn’t say another word. She just took her seat, and I walked up to the mike. By this time I had completely forgotten my prepared speech, and I don’t remember exactly what I said at first. I had been standing up there I don’t know how long when the mistress of ceremonies said, “You are running overtime.” I got mad at her and thought I would tell the audience exactly what I was thinking. When I finished telling them about the trouble we were having in Canton, I found myself crying. Tears were running down my cheeks and I was shaking and saying, “What are we going to do? Starve to death? Look at me. I’ve lost about fifteen pounds in a week.” I stood there going to pieces, until Reverend Ed King walked up on the platform, put his arm around me, and led me away.

Outside he said, “You touched them, Anne. I think you got your message across.” He was still standing with his arm around me, and I was drying my eyes when Dave came up.

“What’s wrong with her?” he asked.

“She just finished a speech which I think was tremendous,” Reverend King said. “But I think she needs a rest, Dave.”

Dave took me to his apartment in Jackson and said I could rest there a couple of days. I didn’t really think about what had happened during my speech until I was in bed trying to sleep. Then I realized I was cracking up, and I began to cry again.

———

When I got back to Canton on Sunday, I discovered that a tub of food had been brought in from Jackson. We arrived just in time to find Flukie helping himself to some golden brown chicken. He gave me a note that had been left with the food:

I knew Mrs. Young through her sons, who had gone to jail with me during the demonstrations in Jackson. She had nine children, five of whom had been arrested. She was a beautiful lady and I appreciated the food she brought. But I felt bad about taking it, thinking about all those children she had and no husband.

Dave and Mattie Dennis, and Jerome Smith, another CORE field secretary, moved in to Canton with us the next week. Dave felt that the only way we were going to get any money put back into the area was if we got more people registered.

Suddenly we began to get quite a lot of support from the local Negroes. Mr. Chinn began working with us almost full time. They saw that we were trying hard and that we were doing our best under the circumstances. Every day now we managed to send a few Negroes to the courthouse. Soon we had a steady flow moving daily. But the registrar was flunking them going and coming. Sometimes out of twenty or twenty-five Negroes who went to register, only one or two would pass the test. Some of them were flunked because they used a title (Mr. or Mrs.) on the application blank; others because they didn’t.
And most failed to interpret a section of the Mississippi constitution to the satisfaction of Foote Campbell, the Madison County circuit clerk.

All of the Negroes who flunked but should have passed the test were asked to fill out affidavits to be sent to the Justice Department. Hundreds of these were sent and finally two men came down from Washington to look at the county registrar’s books. They talked with the registrar and persuaded him to register four or five people who had been flunked because of using “Mr.” or “Mrs.” One of them was a blind man who had failed several times, and who should not have had to take the test anyway.

To keep up the pace, Dave brought in two more workers. Now there were nine of us working full time. When this news got to the white community, and they sensed the support we must be getting, they began to threaten us again.

One Friday evening, just as we were finishing dinner, Sonny’s brother Robert came running into the kitchen. He was sweating and panting as if he had been running for a long time. At first, he didn’t say anything. We all sat and stared, waiting. He just stared back. He looked like he was trying to decide how to tell us something. I thought that he had been chased by someone.