Coming of Age in Mississippi (44 page)

The minute I saw them there, I got mad as hell. “Here they are,” I thought, “all standing around waiting to be given something. Last week after the church bombing they turned their heads when they passed this office. Some even looked at me with hate in their eyes. Now they are smiling at me. After I give them the clothes, they probably won’t even look at me next week, let alone go and register to vote.”

As Lenora and I opened the door, the crowd almost trampled us in the rush to get inside. We told them nothing would be given out until Annie Devine, a Negro insurance lady, arrived. She knew most of the families, and we hoped her presence would help prevent people from taking things they could not use. While we all waited, the Negroes were making comments about the clothes. Some said things like, “Them white folks in the North is some good,” or “Look at them clothes, just as brand new as they came outta the store.”

When I told them that I would like to have their names and addresses so we could inform them of the next shipment, they all looked like they were ready to leave the office. I heard one lady whisper, “It’s just a trick to get us to vote.” I found myself wanting to deliver a sermon, but instead I left a pencil and paper on the back desk next to the door and asked them to put down their name and address as they left. After this, the tension eased. I knew they would not leave their names. Just in case, however, I stationed Mrs. Chinn at the back of the office. Over and over again I could hear her saying, “You people
needn’t be scared or ashamed to sign your names. We ain’t gonna use them to get none of you in trouble. All Anne and the rest of these CORE workers are here to do is help you people. They have even been trying to get food to some of you.”

It took us all day to give the clothes out. I had never in my life seen people who were so much in need. After we gave out most of the best coats and things, people started coming up to me telling me that they were desperate for a coat, a pair of shoes—anything. At five o’clock, I was exhausted. I looked at Mrs. Devine and Lenora and saw that their hair was white from the dust and the lint from the clothes. When I looked in the mirror, I discovered mine was too.

Around five-thirty, a group of people who had just gotten off work came to the office. I told them that everything was gone. A lady looked at a box of clothes in the corner and asked, “Can I look through these? I might find something I can use in there.”

“If you would like to, yes. But these things aren’t that good. Most of them are just rags,” I told her.

Before I could finish answering her, she had begun to search through the things. About five other women and two men joined her. They turned the box over on the floor, pulling everything out. They were snatching for old rags and panties and bras. The men were taking shorts that didn’t even have elastic in the waist or were without seats.

When they left, Lenora burst out laughing. “You see, Anne, I told you they weren’t rags.”

“I see that,” I said, “and I don’t think it’s funny. It’s a damn shame people have to be this poor in America—the land of plenty.”

“Well, Anne, we’ve started them now. We have to get some more clothes, else a lot of Negroes will be plenty mad because they were left out,” Mrs. Devine said.

“We’ll never get enough clothes to supply all of the Negroes in Madison County,” I answered. “I think we would do better trying to get them jobs so they can buy their own.”

“I could sure use one,” Mrs. Chinn sighed. “I ran out of food three days ago.”

“How many signed their names, Mrs. Chinn?” I asked, deliberately changing the subject. Every time she talked about her financial condition she got terribly depressed. I not only got depressed, but felt guilty about the way she and C.O. exerted themselves to help us and how much they had suffered because of it.

“Only twenty,” she said. “It’s a shame. Some of them had the nerve to tell me, ‘Minnie Lou, I can’t sign my name, but you know me. Let me know when you people get some more clothes in.’ I felt like killing them. If it was left up to me, I wouldn’t give them anything. That’s all niggers is good for, looking for something for nothing.”

When Lenora and I opened the office the following morning, people were constantly dropping by to see if we had any more clothes. However, when I asked if they were registered to vote, the answer was always no. And none of them had any intentions of trying to register in the immediate future. I began to have the feeling that either we came up with an idea or project better than voter registration or we would have to get out of Canton.

A few days later, a Negro high school girl, picking cotton after school out in the country, was raped by a white farmer. The news was whispered throughout Canton. All the Negroes thought it was horrible, but none of them stopped sending their children to pick cotton. They had no choice—the little money the teen-agers made from picking cotton kept them in school. In Madison County, the use of teen-aged labor during the cotton-picking season was an institution. The Negro schools actually closed at noon the first two months of the school year, so that the students would be available to work for the white farmers. Their own parents, who had almost as much land as the whites but received much smaller allotments
from the government, practically starved. Most of them couldn’t even afford to give their children lunch money and buy them school supplies.

This fall the cotton picking in Madison County continued as usual, and the man who had raped the girl went around talking about it and saying things like, “Them niggers even got the nerve to complain about getting rid of a little pussy since that damn organization [meaning CORE] moved in.” One of his friends remarked, “I used to could pick up a nigger anytime; now they is all scared somebody might see them.”

Because the girl came to the CORE office and filled out an affidavit, her father had to resort to packing a gun to protect his family. After that, several open assaults were made on young Negro girls by the white men in the area. The assaults provoked a lot of talk concerning other affairs. For about a week or so the talk went on and on about what white man was screwing which Negro woman. It came out in the open that some of the top officials of Madison County had Negro mistresses that they lived with almost full-time. It was Centreville all over again.

It was now three weeks since the Birmingham church bombing, and during this time the Klan had been extremely busy. What I feared most was that the threats would stop, and action would begin—that I would see a bunch of Klansmen riding through Canton. If this ever happened, I was sure the streets of Canton would flow with blood for days. We had been through enough to know that as long as the threats kept coming, nothing was immediately planned to terrorize the Negroes.

Out of compassion and sisterhood for me, Doris Erskine, my old jail buddy from Jackson, had finally consented to work with us in Canton. Once she arrived, there were four of us working in the area, and we again attempted to set up the nightly workshops. We also planned another Saturday night party for the high school students.

One day Doris and I went over to the high school campus
to announce the party. The principal was one of the worst Toms in Canton. He had placed some informers on the school grounds to let him know if any CORE people came around. As Doris and I were making our way through a crowd of students, he came running up to us.

“May I speak to you two ladies in my office?” he said angrily.

“Oh! Mr. Principal,” I said, as if I hadn’t even noticed him before. “Why, we were just leaving. I would love to chat with you for a while, but I’m afraid I don’t have the time. I have a meeting in about five minutes at the office. Maybe we can get together one day next week.”

“Good evening, Mr. Principal. We’ll be leaving now,” Doris said.

As we walked away, he just stood there with his mouth wide open, not knowing what to say. Some of the students snickered at him. I thought it was pretty damn cool, the way we left him hanging there.

Many more high school students came to the second party than had come to the first. We sang freedom songs for four hours. I was told by one of the students that the principal again had threatened to expel any of the students that came to the party. He said that after this threat got around campus, some of the students formed a group to solicit for party participants.

Meanwhile the principal had asked the chief of police to have us arrested if we ever came on campus again. The chief agreed and also saw fit to promise that we would be arrested if we were ever caught trying to persuade the students to stay out of school. Every day the chief and his boys would hang around the high school at the lunch hour just in case we showed up; they would also be stationed there when school let out for the day.

The teen-agers seemed to be very aroused over the principal’s actions. On Monday, they left school and held a rally in an open space behind the Boyd Street housing project. I
wanted so badly to attend it, but I knew the teen-agers had to make their own decisions. I was glad that they had decided to act independently.

When the rally was over, the students marched in and around the Boyd Street projects, singing freedom songs, with the chief and two carloads of police driving alongside them. Lenora, Doris, and I sat watching from the steps of the Freedom House, guarded by two cops in a parked car. As we sat there, George came running up and told us that he had almost been arrested by the chief. He said that we had been accused of starting the demonstration.

Early that same evening, we were told that the police would raid the Freedom House late one night during the week. They evidently planned to frame Doris, Lenora, and me on some kind of prostitution charge, and hoped our arrest would cause so much public dissension that we would be forced to leave Canton. George, the only guy in the house, decided not to stay with us for a while in case the police went ahead with their plan.

All that first night police rode by shining flashlights on the Freedom House. Later on when they discovered that only girls were living in the House, they began to harass us every night of the week. We became afraid to stay there. Until dawn cars would pass by and bricks would be thrown at the windows. I was nervous, but I wasn’t as bad as Doris when it came to nerves. She was afraid to sleep in a room alone. Some nights she and Lenora would both come in and sleep with me. Often we would talk all night to keep from falling asleep. After a week I was so tired I felt like I was dying on my feet. I felt as though I hadn’t had a good night of sleep since coming to Canton.

We opened up two or three workshops in the county again, and that made things worse. We no longer had our protective guys riding around with us. Most of them had gone north or to California trying to find jobs. Now either George went with us, or we went alone. Doris and I were coming from a workshop
twenty-six miles out in the country one night, when we were chased by a group of drunken whites. Doris panicked. She began driving like a crazy woman, making every curve on two wheels, sending rocks sailing everywhere. I just knew we would turn over in a ditch and be killed. I wondered whether it would be better to force Doris to stop, or to jump out of the car into a ditch, as Doris turned a curve, hoping the other car would pass without seeing me. If I forced Doris to stop the car, I thought, maybe we would just be beaten or raped by the drunks and not killed. Finally, I just closed my eyes and hoped that whatever would happen wouldn’t take too long or be too painful. I must have blacked out, because when I opened my eyes we were at the Freedom House.

The next night George went with us but the fear was still there. All the jokes we were able to come up with couldn’t erase the experience we had encountered on those long, dark, country roads.

I came to the Freedom House one evening and found Doris sitting in a chair with a rifle across her lap, and Lenora oiling a pistol.

“Hey, what in the hell is going on here?” I said. I stood there with my mouth wide open.

“I’s a oilin’ mah gun,” said Lenora.

“This heah baby is a takin’ a nap,” said Doris.

“Come on, now, cut that shit out. Where did you two get those guns?” I asked.

“I’ve had this one a long time,” Lenora said, in her normal voice.

“Where did you get the rifle, Doris?”

“Well, Moody, some nice colored man was kind enough to lend it to me,” she said.

“Are we going to have a real shoot-it-out with the Klan tonight? If so, where is my piece?”

“No, we just kinda figured we needed some protection around the house. After all, three young women just don’t live in Mississippi alone without any protection.”

“Seriously, did we get a threat for tonight?”

“Don’t we get them every night?” Doris asked.

I stood there looking at them, thinking, “These fools are out of their minds. What in the hell would we do with two guns against all the dynamite and ammunition the Klan has? I guess they are beginning to feel like a lot of other Negroes I know. If you can’t beat them, join them. Matching fire with fire instead of kneeling and praying while some white cracker shoots you to death or throws a few sticks of dynamite on you and blows you to hell or somewhere. I figured if some Negro was kind enough to bring a gun to the Freedom House for us to protect ourselves with, then they must be gathering ammunition to protect the community.”

Now that we had a gun around the house, my fear seemed to get worse. I was constantly wondering whether the man that brought the rifle was paid by the whites to bring it. If the cops caught us with guns in the Freedom House, they would surely have a perfect excuse to arrest us. I knew I couldn’t talk Lenora and Doris into giving them back. In fact, I was not sure I wanted to. Just about every night cops were flashing lights on the house. If they weren’t flashing lights, they were out there talking loud and laughing, trying to keep us awake. One night a man came by with a truck-load of big bloodhounds and K-9 police-type dogs. He let them out in front of the Freedom House and they ran all around scenting everything. He left them there a while and then drove back and whistled for them to jump up in the truck. This frightened the hell out of us. Night after night, the dogs were brought to the house, and Doris and Lenora would stay awake threatening to shoot them. I knew that this was the Klan’s doing. I figured they were probably planning to burn down the house one night and run us out to be devoured by the dogs.