Coming of Age in Mississippi

by Anne Moody

  After handing out all the leaflets, we bought tickets to take a few rides. First, Doris and I decided to have a contest with the little race cars. We were surrounded by our group of high school students chanting to us. Since I couldn’t drive, I just kept holding up traffic and slamming into people. Doris drove along smoothly, all the time laughing at me. The boys kept yelling, “Come on, Moody! Wheel, Moody! Come on, show Doris up!” Each time I crashed into someone, they cracked up laughing.

  Next we played Pop the Whip. This game was on a wheel similar to a merry-go-round, but slanted to the sky. The person finishing up at the end of the whip seemingly would be thrown out of his seat. The wheel turned fast, and soon all the other passengers had had their turns at the end of the whip and were off the wheel. As Doris and I were about to come up to the end ourselves, all of a sudden the wheel stopped. We were now at the very top of the wheel. I looked down to see what was going on, to discover “my cop” talking to the man who operated it. My heart went blup, blup, blup, almost flooding on me. I couldn’t open my mouth. Doris looked down and got hysterical. She started screaming, “Mister, please don’t kill us! Oh, God help us! Please let us down.” She was about to jump out of the seat and I had to wrestle her to hold her in. The high school boys were at this point surrounding the cop and the operator. We were up there for nearly ten minutes before they brought us down to the platform and released us. As we stepped out of the seat, the cop laughed and laughed. The crowd that had gathered around the wheel slowly walked away.

  Back at the Freedom House that evening, I found another letter from Mama. As usual, it was full of pleas, begging me to leave Mississippi. I was mad with Mama and with Doris. Here was Doris driving me crazy and so was Mama. I took three sleeping pills and still was unable to sleep. I would have taken more, but I was afraid that one more would put me to sleep for good.

  The next morning, I got up feeling awful. I could feel myself choking. It was like the choking feeling I’d had around the time I left home. “Maybe if I can just go out in the woods it will go away,” I thought. I started thinking of how to get to the country and of a good excuse for going there.

  Finally, I decided to go out to Mrs. Chinn’s parents’ farm. Mrs. Dearon, Mrs. Chinn’s mother, had promised to organize the farmers in her area. It was just natural for one of us to stop in and see how everything was going. It always made me feel good to see Mrs. Dearon. She was the youngest, most energetic old woman I had ever known. When I suggested to Doris that we go out to the country to get some fresh air, she thought it was a great idea. After all, the Dearon farm was the most beautiful I had seen in Mississippi. It had huge cedar trees, a small lake and a lonely and delicious atmosphere. I was thinking that maybe a little fresh air might even cure Doris of the jibbies.

  We dressed in blue jeans, long-sleeved shirts and wore long socks and boots to keep the briars from sticking so badly. I couldn’t wait to get out in the woods and listen to the beautiful sound of the singing birds. As we were walking down the street to find someone who might drive us out to the Dearons’, I noticed that Doris was carrying her rifle and Lenora’s old pistol.

  “Where in the hell do you think you are going with those guns?” I asked.

  “We can do a little hunting while we are out there,” she said.

  “Hunting! Are you crazy?”

  “You like to hunt. You told me yourself you did. What’s wrong with us taking the guns out in the country with us? We might even kill a rabbit or something for dinner this evening.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with carrying the guns out in the country,” I said. “However, there is something wrong with you walking around with them in Canton. If one of them stupid-ass cops or some white cracker saw us, we would be two dead fools lying in the streets. First thing they would say after killing us is that we went berserk and shot at them. Leave the guns here, and if we can find someone reliable to take us, then we can carry them.”

  “Let’s find C.O.,” she said. “He’ll carry us.”

  “Yes, I know, and he’s reliable too, hmm,” I said sarcastically.

  Now that Doris had suggested that we take the guns, I was not so sure that I wanted to go. Then it occurred to me they might prove helpful if we ran into some white crackers out there. If we threatened to shoot them, or maybe gave them a warning shot, we wouldn’t be killed or beaten—or whatever they might do to us. “Maybe we just better take them,” I thought.

  We looked for Mr. Chinn for about an hour before we found him. After we told him we were going hunting, it took almost another hour to convince him that we could handle the guns. Finally, though, he agreed to drive us out to the country, and around noon we were walking up on the Dearons’ porch, guns and all.

  Mrs. Dearon greeted me with a hug and kiss, saying that she was glad we had decided to come out and pay them a visit. But then she just kept looking at me as though she knew something was wrong. It was not like me to run out in the country and take a whole day off from my work in Canton. After we told her why we were paying her an unexpected visit, she seemed to understand. Anyway, Doris and I were off in the woods before she got around to questions like could we use the guns. Just as we were running down the hill from the house, C.O. yelled, “Don’t you all kill each other! I’ll pick you up about five-thirty or six.”

  “O.K.,” I answered, and we were on our way.

  It was so peaceful walking through the woods. We walked for about an hour before realizing we were supposed to be looking for rabbits. We started looking, and soon enough we found them. They were jumping up all around us. Every time one jumped, we jumped too—and here we were, dressed like men, with guns in our hands. I realized how nervous we actually were. Finally we gave up the idea of killing rabbits and just walked some more. We found all sorts of interesting things, an old graveyard, a running brook, and some bright yellow and red autumn leaves. When we could barely pick up our feet, we headed back to the Dearons’ house.

  As we came through the yard, we could smell the chicken frying, but we were too tired to walk up the steps. We just sat on the edge of the porch and fell back. I found myself falling asleep smelling that chicken. Suddenly I had the feeling someone was standing over me. As I opened my eyes, I heard Mrs. Dearon saying, “Well, you two look wore out. What did you kill?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “But we saw pretty near fifty rabbits, though.”

  “I didn’t hear no shots. Then I started wondering what you all were doing.”

  “We just walked and walked until we couldn’t walk any more,” I said.

  “You two come on inside,” Mrs. Dearon said firmly. “You should be pretty hungry by now.”

  By the time I finished two or three hot pieces of chicken, some good collard greens, and homemade cornbread, I felt like a new person. Especially behind two good cups of coffee. I felt so good that I sat there and told Mrs. Dearon how good her chicken was, that I hadn’t had a good home-cooked meal in years. I found myself flattering her just like one of those Baptist ministers would do. However, I really enjoyed that chicken dinner—unlike most ministers. With me it wasn’t routine.

  When Doris and I finished eating, we went outside and sat on the edge of the porch again. Then I discovered why Doris really wanted to bring the guns along. She suggested that we try some target practice.

  “Come on, Moody, I bet I can outshoot you,” she said.

  “I don’t feel up to it, Doris. But go ahead, let’s see how good you are.”

  She picked up a can, placed it on a fence post, then backed away from it and fired.

  As soon as Mrs. Dearon heard the shots, she came to the door to watch. Doris was good. She was cutting a round hole in the can with the rifle. “Can you beat that, Moody?” she asked. “I think so,” I answered. Doris stepped back as I used the pistol to change the shape of the hole to the shape of an apple by adding a stem to it. “Want a bite?” I asked teasingly.

  “You girls are real tomboys,” Mrs. Dearon said. “There might be some go
od watermelons down in the patch. You wanta go see?”

  “Which way is the patch?” I asked, running in the direction she pointed as Doris fell in at my side. We found watermelons, lots of them. They were good too. We just picked them up and dropped them letting them burst wide open as they hit the ground, and then we dug into them. On our way back up the hill with our watermelons, we saw Dave Dennis parked in the yard talking to Mr. Dearon. He looked as if he was as mad as hell with us, but I couldn’t have cared less. I knew he wouldn’t say anything to us. After all, he never spent all of his days cooped up in Canton. And he was well aware of the hell we were going through daily.

  Now that I was on my way back to Canton, I began to feel choked up again. I hadn’t been cured after all, and this meant something to me. Before, the woods had always done so much for me. Once I could actually go out into the woods and communicate with God, or Nature or something. Now that something didn’t come through. It was just not there any more. More than ever I began to wonder whether God actually existed. Maybe God changed as the individual changed, or perhaps grew as one grew. Maybe my upbringing in Church had had a lot to do with the God I knew before. The God my Baptist training taught me about was a merciful and forgiving God, one that said Thou shalt not kill, Thou shalt not commit adultery, Thou shalt not steal, and a number of other shalt nots. Since I had been part of the Movement, I had witnessed killing, stealing, and adultery committed against Negroes by whites throughout the South. God didn’t seem to be punishing anyone for these acts. On the other hand, most of the Negroes in the South were humble, peace-loving, religious people. Yet they were the ones doing all the suffering, as if they themselves were responsible for the killing and other acts committed against them. It seemed to me now that there must be two gods, many gods, or no god at all.

  That weekend I went to Jackson and stayed with Doris and her parents. While I was there, I stopped in to see Bobbie, one of the high school girls who had worked with us in Canton part of the summer. It was at Bobbie’s house that I had one of the most horrible scares in my life. She showed me a Klan leaflet that she had gotten from a friend of hers who lived near a white neighborhood. (Often in Jackson, Klan leaflets were thrown up on Negro porches by mistake, because the lines between Negro and white neighborhoods were pretty confusing.) I couldn’t believe it, but it was a Klan blacklist, with my picture on it. I guess I must have sat there for about an hour holding it. Bobbie told me that she had planned to come into Canton to tell me. There were pictures of Medgar Evers, James Meredith, John Salter, Bob Moses, Joan Trumpauer, Reverend Ed King, Emmett Till, and two Jackson ministers. There were also pictures of other Negroes who had been killed, with X’s marked across their faces. Medgar’s face was also marked out. This piece of paper shook me up worse than all of the letters Mama had sent me. She had been warning me, and I had ignored her. Not only that, I had even stopped answering her letters to discourage her from writing. The only reason I could see that I was singled out on this list was that I was the only one from my hometown working in the state. Perhaps they thought that I would somehow encourage the rest of the Negroes in Centreville to speak out. Now that I had stopped writing to Mama, I didn’t even know exactly what was going on.

  Most of the people on this blacklist were already out of the state. Medgar had been killed; James Meredith, Joan Trumpauer, and John Salter had left. One of the ministers was in Africa. He had made such a sudden exit that I had wondered at the time if he was running from a serious threat. Most of the people didn’t worry about the daily threats, but making a Klan blacklist wasn’t taken as lightly as that. This meant much more. In spite of the fact that I didn’t want to worry about it, I did. I began to wonder even more about that cop in Canton, the one that looked at me so hard. I wondered how long the leaflet had been out. All that weekend I thought about it. I wanted to tell Doris about it, but I knew better. She was scared enough already. She would drive me crazy. “No, I just better keep it to myself,” I thought. “It’s better that way.” These were my troubles, and each of us had our own load.

  We headed back to Canton on Sunday evening. Next weekend would be spent on the freedom vote; therefore, we had plenty of work to do during the week. Monday we were up bright and early trying to rally up a little more support. The rest of the days we spent pushing and begging people to participate in the election. November 1, 2, and 3 were the three days delegated by COFO for casting freedom ballots. The state’s gubernatorial election was to be held on November 4, a Tuesday. COFO held the freedom vote just prior to the state election so that the freedom votes could be tallied and publicized the day of the state gubernatorial election.

  During the week leading up to the vote, there was too much confusion, too many threats, and too much work. The whites in Canton as well as throughout the state had, by this time, heard about the freedom vote. They were as confused about it as many of the Negroes were. However, they weren’t so confused that they didn’t try to counter it with violence. Twenty-five cops were added to the Canton police force. They were buzzing all over the place.

  On Friday, I was walking around in a daze. I didn’t only feel choked up, as I had been feeling for two weeks, I felt I was carrying the weight of the world on my shoulders. It was too much of a burden for me. I sat around in the office and made sealed boxes with holes in the tops to be used as ballot boxes at our polling places. I felt like a robot, and worked like one, too. We got everything set up for the voting and went back to the Freedom House.

  Late that evening I tried to go for a walk and my feet felt as if heavy iron bars were attached to them. I could barely move them. I got a block away from the Freedom House and turned around. I went back and sat on the steps. It was there, on the steps of the Freedom House that I decided to leave the project for a while. I sat there trying to analyze what was going on, and discovered that I couldn’t even think anymore. It was like my brains had gone to sleep on me or frozen.

  On Saturday, the first day of the freedom vote, I volunteered to serve as a vote taker at a polling place. I was too tired to go out on the streets and canvass. Dave came into Canton and brought in a few more people to work during the vote. Several high school students volunteered to work also. There was lots of fresh young blood around to work. This pleased me. Dave had hoped that Madison County would get more votes than other counties participating. He felt as many of us once did, that perhaps one day Madison County would be looked upon and serve as a model for Negro progress in the state.

  I sat there in the office all morning and only a few Negroes came in, although the teen-agers on the streets with ballot boxes were having better luck. Some of them came in a couple of times leaving a full ballot box and carrying out an empty one to fill up. The longer I sat there, the madder I got. I didn’t feel as if we should be going out in the streets with ballot boxes. If Negroes truly wanted to vote, they would have come in the office and done so. “They know it’s just a freedom vote,” I thought. “They also know Aaron Henry is a Negro. After three weeks of walking and talking until we were collapsing in the streets, these are the results we get. I knew it from the beginning. Until we can come up with some good sound plans to help the Negroes solve their immediate problems—that is, a way to get a little food into their bellies, a roof over their heads, and a few coins in their pockets—we will be talking forever. They will never stop being scared of Mr. Charlie until we are able to replace the crumbs that Mr. Charlie is giving them. Until we can say, ‘Here is a job, Sam. Work hard and stand up to be a man.’ Not until we can do that or find some way for Sam to do that, will Sam stand up. If we don’t, Sam will forever be a boy, an uncle or just plain Sam, the recipient of crumbs.”

  I sat there on that stool until I couldn’t take it any more. I picked up one of the sealed ballot boxes and walked out in the streets. Now the streets were completely saturated with cops. They were following the workers everywhere. Some of the teen-agers practically ignored them. But I could see their effort wasn’t helping much. The tee
n-agers might ignore the cops, but the Negroes whose votes they were soliciting weren’t. In fact they were so much aware of their presence that they almost ran when anyone held the ballot box before them, and asked had they voted. I made several attempts to get people to vote and gave up. I went over and sat on a bench in front of a grocery and just looked at all those Negroes. I could estimate there were about five thousand in the streets and maybe more. It was Saturday, and they were out, almost all of them.

  After three days of walking and pleading with Negroes to demonstrate their desire to vote, our polls closed. Polling places had been set up all over the county in churches, small Negro groceries, and even in some of the Negro homes. When all the results were in and counted, to my surprise 2,800 Madison County Negroes had cast votes in the election. The largest number of votes came from polling places out in the country where voters were not openly intimidated by the cops. However, several of the poll managers reported incidents with local whites.

  The total number of votes cast by Mississippi Negroes was 80,000. This was about 60,000 more than the number of Negroes officially registered in the state. But since there were more than 400,000 Negroes of voting age (twenty-one and older) in Mississippi, the 80,000 votes didn’t greatly impress me—even though Negroes had not voted in Mississippi in significant numbers since Reconstruction. “If it took this much work to get 80,000 votes,” I thought, “then we’ll be working a lifetime to get the 400,000 and some registered.”

  The last evening of the freedom vote, I told George and Doris that I planned to leave the project for a while. They didn’t take me seriously, though. They just sort of brushed me off. However, after I told Mrs. Chinn and a few other Negroes the next day, they believed I meant what I said. No one seemed to see that I was on the verge of a breakdown. I think the fact that I found myself on the Klan’s blacklist brought it on faster. Had I stayed there another week, I would probably have died from lack of sleep and nervousness.