Coming of Age in Mississippi (43 page)

Finally I headed back to the Freedom House. When I returned, I tried to be more cheerful, even though anyone could look at my eyes and tell I had been crying.

“Moody, come go shopping with me,” Mattie said. “I’m not going to be long.”

“O.K.,” I said, knowing she wanted to talk with me and try to find out what was bothering me.

As we were walking to town she said, “What’s wrong, Moody? Are you mad with us? It’s not Dave’s fault. He’s tried to get someone to work in here with you all. People just don’t want to come in here. Most of them are scared to work in Canton. You know that. Besides, Dave can’t even get money to pay them. Dave thinks you’re mad with him. You know how sensitive he is. He is trying, though, and he’ll find somebody soon, I’m sure.”

“That’s not what’s wrong, Mattie,” I said. “I know Dave is trying.”

“Then what is it?” she asked. “Did you get bad news from home? Are your people all right?”

“I guess they’re O.K. It’s just that tomorrow’s my birthday and I was kinda looking for a card from them. When the mailman came and I didn’t get one, I felt bad about it,” I said.

“Why didn’t you tell us? We could have planned something for you,” she said.

“You all have enough problems without worrying about whether I’m happy on my birthday or not,” I said.

She seemed very glad to hear I wasn’t mad at Dave and ready to jump up and leave the project. While we were shopping, she insisted on buying me two pairs of pajamas that were on sale for my birthday. When we got back to the Freedom House, she called Dave into the bedroom. “She’s probably telling him I’m not angry at him,” I thought. They were in
there a long time. When Dave came out, he was smiling. He began twisting to a record that was playing on the radio.

“Come on, Anne, you ain’t gonna let me finish this one by myself, are you?” he asked.

I was beginning to feel better.

“It’s not that,” I said. “I just don’t want to show you up. My little brother twists better than that.”

“Is that your excuse? I dare you to challenge me,” he said.

I got up and began twisting with him. We were doing a a pretty nasty twist when Mattie came into the room.

“Anne Moody, how
dare
you dance with my husband like that!” she said.

“I think you’re bitching at the wrong person. I’m not married to you, Dave is,” I said.

“Dave, how dare you?” she scolded.

“Come on, George,” Dave said, “let’s go for a walk. Mattie is getting jealous.”

When they were gone, Mattie and I sat down and talked for a while, and then I started cooking dinner. By the time I had finished, Dave and George were back carrying two large bags. “What have you two been buying?” I asked.

“Food, food, food,” George said.

“Food! Where did you get the money? I thought you were broke.”

“Mattie is calling you, Anne,” Dave said, meanwhile looking at the plate of fried chicken on the stove.

“Did you call me, Mattie?” I yelled to her.

“Yes, come here, Moody. Come here a minute,” she said.

“If you touch that chicken, Dave, I’ll cut your hands off when I get back,” I warned.

“I’m going with you,” he said, “so if any’s missing you know who did it.” He looked at George, still standing there holding the two big bags.

“Do you want to go over to Henry Chinn’s place tonight?” Mattie asked me. (Henry Chinn, C.O.’s brother, ran the
biggest Negro nightclub in town.) “Dave, tomorrow is Annie’s birthday.”

“No kidding, how old are you, Anne? Nineteen?” he asked.

“Nineteen!” I said. “I’ll be twenty-three and I look twice that old.”

“Twenty-three,” Dave said. “I thought you were going to say fifty, so I could be kissing you from now until tomorrow.” Then he started kissing me.

“Dave Dennis, if you kiss Anne Moody again, I’ll quit you,” Mattie said. “Tomorrow is her birthday and then you better not kiss her no twenty-three times.”

“You two are too damn jealous,” I said. “Come on, let’s eat.”

As I was taking something out of the refrigerator, I noticed two gallons of ice cream and a large coconut cake in the box. “So this is what George had in the bag,” I thought. “They’re probably planning to give me a surprise birthday party.”

We didn’t go out that night, but we had so much fun just being together. We sat around the house and played cards half the night and cracked jokes. We used to sit around and play bid whist almost every Saturday night. Half of the time, though, we were just sitting up because we were afraid someone would try to kill us after we went to bed.

Sunday, September 15, 1963, was my twenty-third birthday. I got up about nine that morning feeling like one hundred and three. Everyone else was sleeping so I just decided to let them sleep. After a shower, I started to fix breakfast even though Mattie had promised to cook that morning. As soon as I finished, I got them up because we were supposed to have a staff meeting later.

“Breakfast is ready! Breakfast is ready!” I called.

Dave came running in the kitchen, yelling, “Mattie, shame on you. Today is Anne’s birthday and here she is cooking breakfast while you sleep.”

“Is today your birthday?” George asked, stumbling into the
kitchen—as if he didn’t know after buying two gallons of ice cream and a cake yesterday.

“I’m sorry, Moody,” Mattie said. “I heard you cooking, but Dave wouldn’t let me get up.”

“You tell that on me, Mattie?” Dave said. “It was Mattie, Anne. She kept begging me, ‘Just once more, Dave, Just once more.’ Now who do you believe, Anne?” He was hugging Mattie and both of them were trying to look at me with a straight face.

We were all eating and listening to the radio when the music stopped abruptly in the middle of a record. “A special news bulletin just in from Birmingham,” the DJ was saying. “A church was just bombed in Birmingham, Alabama. It is believed that several Sunday school students were killed.” We all sat glued to our seats, avoiding each other’s eyes. No one was eating now. Everyone was waiting for the next report on the bombing. The second report confirmed that four girls had been killed. I looked at George; he sat with his face buried in the palms of his hands. Dave sat motionless with tears in his eyes. Mattie looked at Dave as if she had been grounded by an electric shock. I put my hand up to my face. Tears were pouring out of my eyes, and I hadn’t even known I was crying.

“Why! Why! Why! Oh, God, why? Why us? Why us?” I found myself asking. “I gotta find myself some woods, trees, or water—anything. I gotta talk to you, God, and you gotta answer. Please don’t play Rip Van Winkle with me today.”

I rushed out of the house and started walking aimlessly. I ran up a hill where there were trees. I found myself in a graveyard I didn’t even know was there. I sat there looking up through the trees, trying to communicate with God. “Now talk to me, God. Come on down and talk to me.

“You know, I used to go to Sunday school when I was a little girl. I went to Sunday school, church, and B.T.U. every Sunday. We were taught how merciful and forgiving you are. Mama used to tell us that you would forgive us seventy-seven times a day, and I believed in you. I bet you those girls in Sunday school
were being taught the same as I was when I was their age. It that teaching wrong? Are you going to forgive their killers? You not gonna answer me, God, hmm? Well, if you don’t want to talk, then listen to me.

“As long as I live, I’ll never be beaten by a white man again. Not like in Woolworth’s. Not anymore. That’s out. You know something else, God? Nonviolence is out. I have a good idea Martin Luther King is talking to you, too. If he is, tell him that nonviolence has served its purpose. Tell him that for me, God, and for a lot of other Negroes who must be thinking it today. If you don’t believe that, then I know you must be white, too. And if I ever find out you are white, then I’m through with you. And if I find out you are black, I’ll try my best to kill you when I get to heaven.

“I’m through with you. Yes, I am going to put you down. From now on, I am my own God. I am going to live by the rules I set for myself. I’ll discard everything I was once taught about you. Then I’ll be you. I will be my own God, living my life as I see fit. Not as Mr. Charlie says I should live it, or Mama, or anybody else. I shall do as I want to in this society that apparently wasn’t meant for me and my kind. If you are getting angry because I’m talking to you like this, then just kill me, leave me here in this graveyard dead. Maybe that’s where all of us belong, anyway. Maybe then we wouldn’t have to suffer so much. At the rate we are being killed now, we’ll all soon be dead anyway.”

When I got back to the Freedom House, Dave and Mattie were gone. I found George stretched out on his bed.

“What happened to Mattie and Dave?” I asked.

“Dave was called for a meeting in Jackson, and they had to leave. Where have you been all this time?”

“Walking,” I said. “Was there any more news about the bombing?”

“No,” he said, “except that the four girls were killed, and the city is getting pretty tense, the closer it gets to dark.
They’ll probably tear Birmingham to bits tonight. I pray that they don’t have any violence.”

“Pray! Pray, George! Why in the hell should we be praying all the time? Those white men who hurled that bomb into the church today weren’t on their knees, were they? If those girls weren’t at Sunday school today, maybe they would be alive. How do you know they weren’t on their knees? That’s what’s wrong now. We’ve been praying too long. Yes, as a race all we’ve got is a lot of religion. And the white man’s got everything else, including all the dynamite.”

“Hold it—is that Miss Woolworth, the Nonviolent Miss Woolworth talking like that?” he asked.

“Let’s face it, George. Nonviolence is through and you know it. Don’t you think we’ve had enough of it? First of all we were only using it as a tactic to show, or rather dramatize, to the world how bad the situation is in the South. Well, I think we’ve had enough examples. I think we are overdoing it. After this bombing, if there are any more nonviolent demonstrations for the mere sake of proving what all the rest of them have, then I think we are overdramatizing the issue.”

“You feel like talking about anything else?” he asked.

“Yeah, let’s talk about that beautiful march on Washington,” I said, almost yelling. “It was just two weeks ago, believe it or not. And 250,000 people were there yelling, ‘We want freedom.’ Well, I guess this bombing is Birmingham’s answer to the march. But what’s gonna be our answer to the bombing? We’re gonna send more of our children right back to Sunday school to be killed. Then the President will probably issue a statement saying, ‘We are doing Everything in our Power to apprehend the killers. And we are in close touch with the situation.’ After which we will still run out in the streets and bow our heads and pray to be spat upon in the process. I call that real religion, real, honest-to-goodness nigger religion. If Martin Luther King thinks nonviolence is really going to work for the South as it did for India, then he is out of his mind.”

———

On Monday, the day after the bombing, the Negroes in Canton were afraid to walk the streets. When they passed the office, they turned their heads to keep from looking in. Every time I passed one of them on the street, they looked at me and almost said, “Get out of here. You’ll get us killed.”

I left the office shortly after lunch. When I got to the Freedom House, I played freedom songs and tried to analyze what had happened thus far for us in the Movement. I discovered my mind was so warped and confused I couldn’t think clearly. The church bombing had had a terrible effect on me. It had made me question everything I had ever believed in. “There has got to be another way for us,” I thought. “If not, then there is no end to the misery we are now encountering.”

I put a Ray Charles record on the box and he was saying, “Feeling sad all the time, that’s because I got a worried mind. The world is in an uproar, the danger zone is everywhere. Read your paper, and you’ll see just exactly what keep worryin’ me.” It seemed as though I had never listened to Ray before. For the first time he said something to me.

George came in later, bringing a girl with him. “Anne, I would like for you to meet Lenora. She might be working with us. She was kicked off her father’s plantation.”

“Why?” I asked.

“It seems as though she was thinking like you yesterday, after the bombing. Somehow it got back to her father’s boss man, and she left running last night.”

I knew that he brought her here because he wanted me to have some other person to talk to.

“If you can’t go home, then don’t go feeling like the Lone Ranger,” I said. “I haven’t been home since Thanksgiving of ’61. I know a lot of other people that can’t go home either. So you see, you have plenty of company.”

She grinned like a silly little country girl.

“Where are you living now?” I asked. “Are you working?”

“In the project with an aunt,” she answered. “I had a job, but …”

“Then why don’t you move in with us?” I asked. “We need some help and maybe we can get you on the payroll. But you won’t be making much money.” I wondered, though, how long we could stay in the area ourselves, before the Negroes asked us to leave.

Lenora moved in the next day. The only thing she had to move was a shopping bag. She didn’t come with any clothes, just Lenora.

That night she opened the icebox and found two gallons of ice cream. “Moody, what’s the ice cream for? Can I have some?” she asked.

“Sure, Lenora, help yourself. It was for my birthday, which was Sunday,” I said. “There’s a coconut cake in there, too, if you’d like some.”

“You want me to fix some for you?” she asked.

“No, thanks,” I said. “I don’t think I could eat it.”

But suddenly I had an idea. We could use the ice cream and cake to give a party for the high school students. Maybe a party would stir up their enthusiasm again. I couldn’t wait till George came in to ask him what he thought about it.

We gave the party Saturday night and it turned out to be a great success. There were so many high school students there that finally the party became a rally. We all went out in the
yard and sat on the grass and sang freedom songs for hours. One of the students told me that the principal of the high school had forbidden anyone to come. I was glad he had—it seemed to have boosted attendance. Ten students volunteered to speak in church services throughout the county on Sunday and to spread the word about the clothes we were going to give out the following Wednesday. They did such a good job spreading the word that when Lenora and I turned the corner to the office early Wednesday morning, there were about two hundred Negroes already in line outside it.