Coming of Age in Mississippi

by Anne Moody

  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.

  It had gotten to the point where my weight was going down to nothing. I was just skin and bones. My nerves were torn to shreds and I was losing my hair. I had been so happy when Doris first came to work with us, but now her presence only reminded me of what fear could do to a person. At this point, I would much rather have been in jail with her. When we were in jail, she had been one of the jolliest girls in my cell. She had been damn good at helping to keep up the morale of the high school girls when there were five hundred of us at the fairgrounds concentration camp. But so much had happened here in Canton that I guess the thought of working here had messed her up even before she came. Lenora was different. If she was really scared, she didn’t show it very much. Anyway, she was born in Madison County and knew a lot about the white people there. Sometimes we would get a threat and she would say things like, “If they were gonna kill us they wouldn’t do it like that.” I was always interested in her comments about the threats. I actually wondered sometimes whether she had been placed in the Freedom House by the whites. “After all,” I would think, “she is from this county and she doesn’t seem to be upset over the threats and things.” Whenever I found myself doubting one of the workers, I immediately dismissed the idea from my mind. I knew that kind of thinking could eventually destroy us. I knew the mind was tricky, and often the whites were smart enough to make our own minds work against each other to divide us. This I had learned from the Jackson movement, when they used the newspapers to play up a split in the organizations which did not exist.

  In order to sleep at night, I finally had to resort to sleeping pills. Doris began sleeping in the same bed as me—her rifle standing in the corner right at he
r head. Lenora slept in the back room with her pistol on the nightstand. At the sound of anything, they were up peeping out of the window with the guns in their hands. It had gotten to the point we had to wake each other up when one of us needed to use the bathroom. Doris slept so lightly I would just touch her and she would jump up grabbing for the rifle. Then I would call Lenora until she answered. I was scared that if I had gone to the bathroom and stumbled over something and Doris and Lenora heard me, they would have shot the hell out of me.

  In mid-October we attended a COFO meeting. COFO was a state-wide coalition of all the national civil rights groups in Mississippi. The meeting had been called to decide about running Aaron Henry, the state NAACP president and chairman of COFO, and Ed King of Tougaloo on a freedom ballot in the upcoming election for Governor and Lieutenant Governor of Mississippi. It was believed more Negroes would cast their votes in the freedom election than were registered already. COFO planned to rally up enough support so that thousands of Negroes in various counties might participate. This, they thought, would prove to the nation that Negroes wanted to vote and would vote if they were not afraid to do so.

  I couldn’t see us mobilizing the Negroes around a false campaign. We had enough problems getting them registered to vote period. As it was, they had shown very little interest in the gubernatorial election since Coleman, the liberal Democrat, had lost to Paul Johnson in the primary. Now that the only choice was between the Republican, Rubel Phillips, and Johnson, the Negroes just didn’t give a damn.

  At the COFO meeting Aaron Henry asked the workers for their opinions about the freedom vote. I voiced my opposition to the whole idea. Right after that, an NAACP member from Clarksdale got up and went on and on about how she thought it was such a good thing. She ended with, “I don’t think the young lady (meaning me) has worked with Negroes in Mississippi. To my knowledge, most of the Negroes in Mississippi would participate in such an election.” She made me so mad I was standing before she was seated.

  “For your information, Mrs. P ____, not only was I born in Mississippi, but I just happened to be born in Wilkinson County in southwest Mississippi, the toughest spot in the state. Because of my civil rights activities the last two years at Tougaloo, I have been barred from Wilkinson County. For the last five months, I have been working in Canton, another stronghold of the Klan. I think that should qualify me to have an opinion about the matter and a right to voice it.” I took my seat and an old man got up.

  “I think that young lady was right,” he said. “We should be thinking of some other way to impress upon the people of the county the importance of the vote. If we hold this freedom vote, all the white folks is gonna say is that we want to take over everything, that we want to rule things. I just want to be represented and given the right to vote in all the official elections. If I am asked to vote in an unofficial election, then that right is taken away by my own people.”

  Aaron Henry decided to select a committee to settle the issue. As it turned out, I was the only person on the committee opposing the freedom election. However, once it was decided to hold it, I reluctantly agreed to try to get votes.

  The following week, Dave came into Canton to move two of us out to work on the freedom vote in other areas. Doris volunteered to go to Natchez and Lenora was sent into Hattiesburg. Doris had only been in Canton a little over a month and she was glad to get away. I had become too valuable in Canton to be moved, since I was now well known by most of the Negroes. Besides that, I didn’t have the energy to go into an entirely new area. I would not have been able to stand the strain.

  We had only three weeks to rally up the Negro vote. Mrs. Devine and Mrs. Chinn helped me in Canton, while George, Mr. Chinn, and a few other men worked throughout the county. It was hard trying to explain the freedom election to the local Negroes. Most of them couldn’t understand what we were trying to do—they thought we were trying to trick them in some way.

  By this time, I had finally realized that the future of the Negroes in Mississippi didn’t depend upon the older people. They were too scared and suspicious. It was almost hopeless to try and educate minds that had been closed for so long. All their lives their minds had been conditioned to Mr. Charlie’s dos and don’ts. If we wanted to educate the vote, I thought, we should have been working with minds that were susceptible to change—ones that were open, inquisitive, and eager to learn. (I had a feeling that the whites in Canton knew that too. Why else had those five teen-agers been shot at the beginning of our work in the area?)

  In addition to working on the election, we were planning to send five farmers from Madison County to the National Sharecroppers Fund’s conference in North Carolina. This project had my full support. Here were farmers with acres and acres of land who couldn’t make a living off it. If they were able to get larger cotton allotments or find some other use for their land, perhaps get FHA loans to build up their farms, it would provide them with economic stability. This possibility really excited me. If there were 29,000 independent Negroes in Madison County instead of 29,000 starving Negroes I was sure things would be different.

  We decided to call a meeting of the farmers. George and Mr. Chinn were in Greenwood the night it was scheduled, so Mrs. Chinn and I took charge of it. About thirty-five farmers and their wives showed up in the office. I was sitting by the window at a makeshift desk writing down names when I noticed that some of the farmers were shaking. They were facing the open door. I looked out of the window to discover about six cops standing outside peeping at the meeting. The farmers kept shaking as I tried to get the information out of them. They just muttered their names. Finally I got up and closed the door. When I did that, the cops moved to the side of the building and began peeping in the window. I immediately slammed it down. The panes in the window were painted black, but there was one missing pane. I covered the opening with one of the long sheets of paper I was writing on.

  “That’s a smart bitch,” I heard one of the cops comment.

  “Yeah, we gotta teach that black bitch a lesson,” another one answered.

  I got kind of worried about the lesson they might teach me, but I was pleased by the reaction of the farmers. The instant they could no longer see the cops staring them in the face, they relaxed. The names came through loud and clear now. To my surprise two or three of the farmers had already gotten FHA loans. Most of them, however, didn’t know anything about them. They were all eager to go to the conference. When the meeting was over, one of the farmers gave Mrs. Chinn and me a ride home. I was staying at her house, since George was away.

  As soon as we got to the office the next morning, a lady who lived across the street came running in.

  “Anne! I was sitting on the porch and I saw what you did to them cops last night. Honey, you don’t know these cops here in Canton. Last night after you slammed that window in their faces, they waited in the alley about two hours for you.”

  “Them dirty bastards,” said Mrs. Chinn. “I wish they had come by my house looking for Anne. I would have blown their heads off.”

  “I’m going to show you the one that wanted to beat you up, Anne,” said the lady. “You watch out for him. He’s a mean thing.”

  Before she could finish telling me who to watch out for, two cops drove up outside and started parking their car.

  “That’s him that’s driving, Anne,” said the lady.

  I looked them over. The one she referred to was slightly older than me. His general features were those of a pleasant person. However, those hating eyes of his were unbearable. I looked at him and wondered how a person that young could hate so much. Could he be so angry just because I slammed a window in his face? There was more to it than that. Maybe he was trying to prove a point. Maybe he was disturbed about something. He seemed more like the type that would rape me rather than beat me up, I thought.

  Mrs. Chinn walked outside with the lady who had brought us the news. She went over to the car and I heard her say, “You cops don’t have anything better to do than
set in front of this office all the time? If you don’t, I wish you would find something. I get tired of looking at you.”

  They looked at Mrs. Chinn and didn’t say a word. Had any other Negro woman in Canton said that, they would have beaten her down to the ground. But they knew she was C. O. Chinn’s wife, and no one, black or white, insulted C. O. Chinn’s people and got away with it.

  A few days later, Doris was back. She had tried to help get Negroes in Natchez organized and failed. From what she said, the Klan ruled the entire area. CORE didn’t get enough cooperation from the Negroes to be able to stay. Doris seemed to have undergone quite a change. She was twice as scared as before. Now she was jumping in broad daylight. She still insisted on sleeping with me, with her rifle in the corner.

  The county fair in Canton was the next coming attraction for Negroes in Madison County. Because the fair was segregated (a week for whites and a few days for Negroes), we thought at first of boycotting it. However, since we could use it as a means of contacting Negroes, we decided not to. Thousands of Negroes usually flocked to the fair from all over the county. We made special leaflets to pass out to them advertising the freedom vote.

  The first day the fair was open to Negroes, Doris and I found hundreds of them, just as we expected. We ran into a group of high school students who had worked for us, and soon we had lots of help distributing the leaflets. I was feeling good at first but I soon became disheartened as time after time Negroes shook their heads and jerked back their hands when we offered leaflets to them. On top of this, I noticed that my favorite cop was there. When he saw me, his eyes lit up. Instantly he began to follow me around. He really puzzled me. I began wondering whether he was someone from my hometown. Maybe he had been sent from Centreville to bump me off, I thought. Whenever he noticed me looking at him, he would put his hand on his pistol and watch my reactions. A few of the high school boys volunteered to act as bodyguards for me. They had heard of his threat the night of the farmers’ meeting. Until we finished distributing the leaflets, Doris and I were surrounded by these boys. The cop was only a few paces behind each step we made.