Hal’s account, with its grim matter-of-factness, chilled my heart.
“Then there’s no hope,” I said.
“They never had a chance. When that church was burned, the FBI should have known something was up—the bastards.”
Hal’s anger undercut my resolve. I had assumed the FBI would provide federal protection; I hadn’t realized that they simply didn’t care.
“In Mississippi they’re saying it’s a hoax,” Hal continued. “That our three guys are probably sipping Cuba Libres on Castro’s patio in Havana.”
“What do we do now?” I asked.
“Now we’ve got to find the bodies. A bunch of us are driving down tonight to start searching. If we don’t, they’ll deny and deny and deny. You wouldn’t believe how deluded those people are. You know the joke, ‘What’s got four eyes but can’t see?’ ‘Mississippi.’”
“I wouldn’t tell the other volunteers what I just told you,” Hal added. “We don’t want people to panic.”
“Tom here is already nervous enough to be Anthony Perkins’s understudy.”
“I’m scared shitless,” I admitted. “Do you know where Lenny and I are being sent? McComb.”
“I won’t kid you, McComb’s rough,” Hal said, “but I don’t anticipate some kind of bloodbath. The power elite in Mississippi doesn’t want violence; they’re into the politics of ‘let’s pretend’: Let’s pretend there isn’t any problem and there won’t be one. It’s the rednecks in the hick towns we’ve got to worry about.”
“Aren’t there a lot of them?” I asked.
“Enough. But if we can find the bodies and show the world what a hellhole Mississippi is, some of these crackers might have second thoughts. It’s a terrible thing to say, but you two might be safer because those three guys are dead.”
“I’m not sure I have the guts to go through with this,” I said. “I’m scared of the high dive; how am I going to cope with Mississippi?”
“Listen, we’re all afraid,” Hal admitted, “but we can’t let them kill the whole Summer Project. This is important. We can’t back down now. Nobody is safe. You could be walking along a sidewalk in your home town and get killed by a flying hubcap. Once you understand that, you’ll know what it means to put your body on the line. What do you want to do with your life: major in history or make history?”
I thought I’d rather take my chances with flying hubcaps, but Hal’s mentioning of history brought me back to the reasons I had decided to go to Mississippi in the first place. Somehow, I had to find within myself the courage to be like Bob Moses.
3
I was congratulating myself on the return of my appetite at dinner Tuesday evening when Bob Moses came to the microphone with ominous news:
“Two Choctaw Indians spotted the station wagon about thirteen miles northwest of Philadelphia. It had been doused with gasoline and burned down to the frame and hidden off the highway near the Bogue Chitto Swamp. Some footprints were found leading away from the car, but there was no sign of the three boys. Robert Kennedy has invoked the Lindbergh Law, ordering the FBI to treat the disappearance as a kidnapping. Agents are now on the scene, and they plan to begin a full search tomorrow. We fear they may be too late.”
My heart started pounding and a prickling sensation ran up my arms while the room broke into heated discussion. My unfocused fears had been replaced by specific terrors: a burned car, a fetid swamp.
“I thought they were last seen heading south,” I said to Lenny.
“They were lying,” Lenny responded glumly. “Remember what Hal said. They probably never got to head anywhere at all.”
After dinner I joined our Freedom School group for a rambling discussion of our duties once we got to McComb. Whatever Feelgood’s merits were as a project director, it was clear to me that organization was not one of them. He would skip from topic to topic and suddenly fall into a long silence that left me hanging. Unlike Moses, whose silences were always meditations, Feelgood would simply slip into a heavy funk. I sat beside Esther, breathing in the fragrance of dusky hair.
I fell into step with her after the session, and we began to walk and talk, eventually sitting together in a small, stone gazebo outside the chapel. She seemed to like the stories I told about growing up in Ohio and going to Hiram College. Her life had been remarkably different.
“I’m a red-diaper baby,” she said. “My parents were leftists. And I mean were, at least in the case of my mother. It was a classic Lower East Side story—pushcart peddler meets sweatshop seamstress. When my mother married my father, she was a Trotskyite, totally committed to the working class, a corned-beef-and-cabbage person. Now her idea of lunch is champagne and oysters. She thinks Las Vegas is the most fabulous place on earth.”
“I think it’s a waste of electricity,” I said, and Esther laughed in agreement.
I told her about growing up during the Mafia wars of the fifties, when Youngstown was called “Little Chicago” and gangland bombings and murders were common.
“When I was about ten, the Mafia shot a man on my street. One morning he stepped out his backdoor to go to work, and a sniper was waiting for him on the garage roof. I remember I ran down and looked at the house when I heard the news. The police and the ambulance had already come and gone, but I was curious, so I walked up the driveway. What I saw on the blacktop by the garage was a chalked outline of the body and a pool of blood. At that moment, a woman came out of the house (she didn’t see me), connected up the garden hose as if she were going to water the flowers, and began to hose the blood down the drain in the center of the driveway.”
“I suppose that’s what it means to be a Mafia wife,” Esther said.
“We probably shouldn’t be talking about such gruesome stuff. I can’t sleep as it is.”
“We’re all afraid. Now with those three guys missing, it’s even harder to admit how afraid we really are.”
“I know what you mean,” I said. Somehow, acknowledging my fear made it seem less terrible, and if Esther had the courage to go, I did too.
“I had a truly bizarre nightmare last night. It was so scary.” Esther hesitated a moment. “I took a long kitchen knife and slashed two tires. Suddenly there was an ugly man there with bony hands who had a longer knife, and he slashed all four tires on our family Mercedes. I was furious, so I ran to my mother screaming, ‘I only slashed two tires and he slashed four!’ and I held up four fingers for emphasis. ‘In this life,’ my mother said in an absolutely calm and controlled voice, ‘we must expect retribution.’ At that moment I looked out the window and I saw the man slash his stomach open. . . . Then I woke up.”
“I wonder what Freud would make of that.”
“Oh God,” Esther cried, “don’t tell me. I hadn’t even thought of it in those terms. It was just so terrifying!”
“How come your mom isn’t political anymore?”
“Money. It’s that simple. They made too much of it. She and my father used to do things, now they just discuss them. They think politics is a spectator sport; I think it’s acting on your beliefs.”
“What does your father do?”
“He’s in advertising. You know that line for Playtex: lasting stretch that won’t wash out? That’s his. He still subscribes to the I.F. Stone Weekly and gets angry when he watches the evening news. He’s big on cause and effect. If you do this, then that will happen, especially in terms of politics. My father still talks