What Jessie sat witnessing was such a mockery of everything she had been taught, she was almost afraid to continue looking. The Freedom House was alien territory, a foreign country lodged in the solid hard heart of Mississippi. Jessie didn’t know if she could learn to speak the language required on this soil. And the fear that she could not made her jittery and headachy and suddenly so afraid that she ran onto the porch and sat on the steps. Here, finally, she could breathe.
Moments later, Lincoln joined her and asked, “What’s wrong?”
“I ain’t never in my life seen nothing like what’s going on in there,” she told him, shaking her head in disbelief, terrified of even glancing back over her shoulder into the living room. “Everybody all mixed up together. Like color don’t matter,” she whispered breathlessly, terrified of even saying out loud what her eyes had seen and refused to believe.
“That’s what the movement’s about,” he said gently.
“I thought we was just gonna register people to vote.”
“We are. But that’s gonna change everything, Jessie, everything.”
That night in bed beside Carolyn, Jessie hugged the edge of the mattress, so fearful was she of touching the girl who slept in only a bra and panties.
She heard Carolyn stir. In response Jessie moved closer to the edge of the bed, her nails digging into the soft round edges of the old mattress, her hips, back, stomach, all sucked in to make her small and unobtrusive. The room was humid. The air outside the window was still, unmoving. A mosquito buzzed around Jessie’s ear. Carolyn had turned on her side and Jessie felt the warmth of her breath on her neck as she said, “My parents would die if they knew I was here. They think I’m in New York.” The girl’s voice was giddy, glazed with excitement and dread as she waited for Jessie’s response.
Jessie felt a moment of empathy and wondered if Carolyn Seavers had run away from home too.
“They wouldn’t give me permission to come down here. So I told them I was going to visit a friend in Rye, New York. Can you believe it, Jessie, they dared me to come. They don’t let me do anything,” Carolyn complained, turning on her back. “They shelter me all the time, from life, from reality.” Carolyn spoke in that blunt, energetic, fully self-possessed way characteristic of the northern college students. They talked, Jessie thought, as though words were invented just for them. And the words Jessie heard them use were hard, abstract words that they could command like a toy, or play with like a game.
“Did your parents do that to you, Jessie, you know, keep you from having experiences?” The girl’s voice was genuinely distraught, and in it Jessie could hear all the arguments, the crying and the screaming that went on in the nice big house Carolyn Seavers had left in Minneapolis.
But what, Jessie wondered, did Carolyn mean by experiences? Did that mean living, the things you went through every day, the stuff you had to put up with, couldn’t get away from no matter what? Or did that mean something different? Something you decided you wanted and then went out and did.
Jessie didn’t know and so she said reassuringly, “I think you’ll get a lot of experience this summer, Carolyn. When you go back home you’ll have plenty to tell.”
But restless, unsatisfied by Jessie’s words, Carolyn left their bed, to sit by the window and smoke a cigarette. Watching Carolyn’s profile cast against the window, highlighted by the glow of the moon, Jessie wondered what it took for white people to be happy. They had claimed all the beauty and goodness in the world and wrapped themselves up in it. With none left for anybody else. And just like Carolyn Seavers, that still wasn’t enough. Carolyn sat there for a long time, quiet, but agitated, Jessie could tell, before suddenly asking, “I guess you’re used to being scared, huh?” her voice easily intruding, poring over the outline of Jessie’s life. Jessie wondered how she knew, how this white girl from the north knew.
“What you mean?” she asked, suddenly terrified, her head bobbing up in the darkness.
“I mean, you know, the lynchings and the Klan and the way you guys can’t vote.”
“Oh, that’s what you mean?” Every pore on her body was instantly bathed in relief. Resting her head again on the pillow, Jessie wanted to laugh and to cry.
“What did you think I meant?” Carolyn asked, blowing a thin stream of smoke out the window.
Jessie smiled grimly in the darkness and said, “Nothing. I was just thinking about something else, that’s all.”
“I guess it’s pretty bad for you down here,” Carolyn insisted. Her voice felt to Jessie like hands rubbing her, touching her, trespassing.
“It ain’t all bad all the time,” she heard herself say. “You’d be surprised how long I can go without thinking about rednecks or white folks not liking me.”
“I just don’t see how you guys have stood it all this time, all these years,” Carolyn marveled, mashing out the cigarette in a small ashtray and folding her arms across her chest.
“You talk like we’re mules or something,” Jessie said, a completely new, hard anger seizing her with the desire to throw something at Carolyn Seavers. “We’re folks just like you. And there’s been plenty of us fighting back. Long before yall come here.” Jessie did not know this as fact. But she knew it as an instinctive, total truth.
“I didn’t mean it the way it sounded,” Carolyn sighed, walking back to the bed. She lay down beside Jessie and whispered good night.
In the dark, Jessie waited for Carolyn’s breathing to grow shallow, regular. Then she propped herself up on an elbow and stared at the jumbled mass of golden, silky hair cascading over Carolyn’s pillow. This was hair that Jessie had pretended she possessed standing before the living room mirror as a child, scarves draped over her head. More than once she had wished so hard for hair like this that she had opened her eyes and yes, yes, there it was surrounding her dark face. The hair had vanished in the blink of an eye, but she had wished it, made it so. She reached out and touched Carolyn’s hair, gently at first and then possessively, feeling its texture, its weight, the way the long strands curled at the end. Jessie had wondered so long at the sight of hair like this, fantasized about its feel, that beneath her hands it was suddenly a disappointment—light, thin, insubstantial. Still, Jessie felt reassured for the first time that day. She closed her eyes, silently stroking Carolyn Seaver’s hair until she fell asleep.
SHE HAD FINALLY taught the man to write his name. The white lined paper was crinkled, smudged and as tortured as the trembling, frail script that spelled out Bob McGee. The man, who, when Jessie had asked his age, told her, “I’m near bout old as dirt,” had struggled with the cursive, looping script for nearly two weeks, practicing the letters of the alphabet, then words as simple as cat and dog, before moving to words that defined and shaped his life—cotton, tractor, his name. So proud was he of the letters that filled the page in a grimy but sturdy pattern that he strutted around the long table and shoved his paper beneath the glance of the other adults who sat sounding out vowels, reading simple sentences from first-grade primers, and writing the first letters of their lives to friends and family.
“Oh, sit yo self down, Bob McGee, Odessa Pendergast yelled in mock exasperation. “You ain’t the only one in this room know how to read and write. You ain’t the only one gonna git to vote.”
The school, held in the basement of Faith Rising Baptist Church, held classes from nine in the morning until eight at night. In the morning, the children came, ragtag, unwashed, some with hungry, bloated bellies poking through holes in their shirts and dresses. In the evening, the adults arrived, straight from jobs or dinner. Working with these people made Jessie miss her family and she wondered when she would see them again. One night after all her students had gone, she wrote a letter to her sister, Mae Ann.
Dear Mae Ann:
I don’t know when I’ll be able to send for you like you asked. But I am safe and have met a nice man who really likes me and treats me good. We are someplace nearby doing important work that’s gonna help us all live
the way we was meant to. Don’t worry about me. I am safe. I am afraid but not really scared, like I used to be. I am helping to fight for freedom.
Love,
Jessie
“The irony of all this is that without the vote we count for nothing, absolutely nothing. But if the vote is all we get, it don’t, by itself, mean didley squat.” Courtland Hightower spat out the words with a weary shake of his shaved head, his brown eyes tense and restless prowling Lincoln’s face.
“That doesn’t matter now, not to these people. They’re taking a walk to the courthouse to register and that may be the bravest thing they’ve ever done,” Lincoln said.
“Always the idealist,” Courtland laughed, leaning back in his chair and plucking a toothpick out of the pocket of his overalls. His laughter slid easily between the two men, like a balm. “I didn’t say voting doesn’t count, I said we’re in danger of canonizing the act. Hell, the people that really run this country probably haven’t voted in years, decades. No, they just determine which of their lackeys we choose.”
“I’m not arguing with your reasoning I’m just declaring it irrelevant,” Lincoln said, leaning close to Courtland, his face lit by an impish grin that savored the verbal joust the two friends had launched nearly an hour before.
“You hear that, Jessie, the boy done turned pro-found on me, declared me irrelevant. White folks have called me nigger, women called me dog, friends called me fool, but this hurts more than all those put together. Irrelevant.”
Jessie sat watching Courtland and Lincoln poring over a map of Mississippi spread out on the cracked, wobbly card table in the living room of the Freedom House. They had finished a meager dinner of black-eyed peas and corn bread and when Jessie cleared the table Courtland spread out the map and began dotting it with red stars to mark areas where voter registration programs were in place. She had sat listening to the two men, as she often did, soaking up information, ideas, the meaning of what she found herself in the midst of. When she first met Courtland, Jessie could hardly stop staring at his head—shaved, gleaming with perspiration. It seemed to Jessie a kind of crystal ball that was home to his subversive, militantly expressed thoughts. One day, catching Jessie staring at him, Courtland had said, “I guess you wonder why I cut off all my hair. I can think better this way.” He’d pointed to Lincoln, who sat beside him in the truck they were riding in, “Now you take a man like Lincoln, all that hair he’s got, no wonder he can’t think straight.” And then he had laughed, his broad chest shuddering, his usually solemn face alive with merriment.
Lincoln and Courtland had slept on the floors of sharecroppers’ houses in Alabama, sneaking off plantations before the sun came up. They had slept in a pickup truck as they made their way halfway across the state of Georgia, being fed by families who wanted to help as the two men searched for towns where they could work with local people. They had been afraid together, had been jailed together and when she watched them, Jessie felt a force of friendship join them like a silent, tough cord.
Lincoln had taken Jessie out with him that day, canvassing for voters and children for the Freedom Schools. Driving along the back roads, Jessie asked Lincoln to stop wherever they saw children’s clothes hung up on clotheslines in the back.
At some houses, the tenants refused to let them in. Women stood fearful and mute behind partially opened doors as Lincoln or Jessie asked if they’d register to vote, assuring them that they could take classes to prepare. When Jessie asked if they would send their children to the Freedom Schools, some told her harshly, “We ain’t got no chil’ren here,” even as she saw small hands tugging at the sides of the mothers’ dresses or saw curious, eager boys and girls walking down the dirt paths toward the house. They were chased away from one house by an elderly man who threw stones at them and shouted, “Somebody’s gonna git kilt, then I guess yall be satisfied. Go on away from here and leave well enough alone.”
“YOU SAY THE vote doesn’t count for as much as we think. But it sure as hell counts when we don’t vote,” Lincoln said.
“No doubt about that, no doubt,” Courtland conceded. “I’m just concerned about definitions. What we’re really talking about, what nobody wants to say, is that we want power. Not just the damn vote, but the power that’s supposed to go along with it. But you say power and whites go crazy. You say vote they just get scared.”
“How tough you think it’s gonna get?” Jessie asked quietly. “I’ve been hearing about the bombings and shootings in the other counties where registration is going on.”
“It’s gonna get real tough, Jessie,” Courtland said, his fingers entwined, hands flat on his chest. He told her this with a confidence that drove Jessie’s eyes from his face to her hands, nervous and twisted in her lap.
“How you come to be in the movement?” Jessie asked Courtland, longing to hear him tell her something that would ease her fear, fill her with the boundless courage she imagined he possessed.
“You ever see a picture of Emmett Till?” Courtland asked her.
“You mean the boy that got lynched?”
“Yeah.”
“I heard about it. But I never saw no pictures.”
“Well, I heard about him and we talked about it in my school. And then one day I saw a picture of his body. I saw what you look like after somebody shoots you in the head, crushes your skull and ties a cotton gin fan around your neck before throwing you into the Tallahatchie River where you stay at the bottom for three days. I used to dream about Emmett Till,” he said, his voice pinched by pain at the memory, his eyes closing suddenly, quickly, as if to prevent the resurgence of the dream. “I was the same age as him when it happened. I’d go to sleep at night and he’d be sitting at the edge of my bed, his body all bloody and mangled. He was a corpse. He never said a word. Just sat there staring at me. Got so I was scared to go to sleep. Scared to wake up. Dreaming about Emmett Till taught me I could be killed just like him. Not because I tried to vote or to eat at a segregated counter, but just because I was black. I don’t dream about him anymore. But I haven’t forgotten.”
Listening to Lincoln’s friend, Jessie had learned that anger did not always have to be checked. Anger could transform, invigorate. Angry, you did things everybody said you couldn’t and you thought you never would. But you couldn’t get angry until you started thinking. That was the worst part, thinking about the wrong you’d been done. But you couldn’t move without it. Sometimes at night in bed, thoughts rampaged through Jessie’s mind. Some days she felt herself growing out of her skin.
Jailed eighteen times for leading demonstrations, picketing or just for getting on some sherifif’s nerves, Courtland came into a room and filled it up the way white men did, Jessie thought. Watching him lead meetings or plan strategy excited her, made her feel the kind of fear that moves you toward something instead of away.
“When’s Macon due back?” Lincoln asked, moving to the sofa to sit beside Jessie, throwing his arm across her shoulder because he could see how much she needed, at this moment, his touch.
“I go pick her up at the airport tomorrow afternoon. I talked to her last night. She said the Quakers in Philadelphia and the Unitarians in New York made impressive contributions after her speeches. I’m going over to see my mother,” he told them, rising and stretching his arms and back. “To let her know I’m still alive.”
“I’VE GOT SOMETHING for you,” Lincoln told Jessie when they were alone, moving closer to her, squeezing her shoulders and kissing her lightly on the cheek. He went upstairs to his room and returned with a large box wrapped in newspaper and tied with string. He handed it to Jessie saying, “Go on, open it.”
“What is it?”
“You’ll find out.”
Inside the box was a pair of blue jeans overalls, the kind that had been adopted as the unofficial uniform of the movement.
“I know that ten dollars a week we get isn’t much and those skirts you been wearing don’t seem real practical to me.”
“Why, Li
ncoln, I sure do thank you, I really do,” Jessie said, blushing happily. “How’d you know my size?”
“I asked Carolyn.”
Jessie reached for Lincoln’s hand and he leaned over and kissed her.
“I know I pressured you to come, Jessie, but I hope I don’t have to pressure you to stay.”
“You won’t have to do no such thing, Lincoln, not at all. I’m here now cause I want to be. At first I was just here cause I didn’t know what else to do.”
Lincoln lay his head on Jessie’s shoulder and she felt his body wired and tense, warm with a relentless trembling.
“Lincoln, what’s wrong?”
“I feel like a twig that’s gonna break in two, sometimes,” he whispered.
The air of the large, unkempt living room of the Freedom House with its musty used sofa and unmatched chairs was heavy with the evening’s sultry heat. Jessie heard her stomach rumble. She was still hungry. The black-eyed peas and corn bread were all she had eaten that day. The noisy, clanking refrigerator in the kitchen was nearly always empty. And they lived on a combination of handouts from neighbors, vegetables picked from the garden in back of the house and free meals sometimes at Booker’s Place. Still, Jessie had never been as hungry in her life.
“You don’t look like you getting much sleep at night,” Jessie said, her hands stroking Lincoln’s face, her fingers outlining the dark circles around his eyes.
And Do Remember Me Page 3