“I feel sure that going to Mississippi will change me. Someday I’d like to be a mother—I’m really curious to know what having a baby is like—but right now I want to give birth to my self—I want to be a new woman, a new direction, a start at something better. I want to become what I truly am. Feelgood’s right about white people having a hole in their soul. People see their imperfections as holes, and they try to fill those holes with another person. But we need to make ourselves whole.”
“What do you think about Feelgood?” I blurted out.
“Why do you ask?”
“I don’t know; I saw him watching you.”
“He’s not the only one,” Esther said, smiling over at me.
“Oh,” I responded with a guilty laugh. “I guess the question is, ‘Has anyone ever not told you that you’re beautiful?’”
“Lots of people, but thanks. I don’t see my body as so great. I just walk around in it. The only thing I like about my looks are my eyes.”
“I wouldn’t touch a thing.”
“Oh, wouldn’t you?” Esther broke into a throaty cackle.
“Feelgood has demons,” she remarked, returning to my question. “He’s been through a lot. All those SNCC guys have experienced incredible things. They are terrifically interesting, much more exciting than anybody I met in college. They aren’t afraid to show their feelings, to laugh, cry, shout, sing. They don’t just sit back and label life; they go out and confront it. That’s what I want to do, too: I want to live with people who have solved some of life’s simple problems. I’ve never felt so vitally alive as I have these past few days. This may sound crazy, but I think the fear adds to the experience.”
I longed to kiss her and make that her next experience, but clearly her mind was elsewhere. We sat in silence for a while, watching fireflies flicker in the ravine. Then we stood up and hugged.
“You’re a good listener,” she said, smiling up at me. “I can tell that you’re one of those people who remembers and mulls over everything they hear.”
“Only if it’s interesting.”
“Well, don’t think about things too much. Get some sleep.”
4
After a night of tossing and turning to horrendous dreams—complete with poisonous snakes, quicksand swamps, and sadistic sheriffs—I welcomed James Lawson’s topic for Wednesday morning: nonviolence. But his presentation left me cold. Although he was thoughtful and articulate, there was something aloof, pedantic, and off-putting about his manner. He was a mystical idealist who used abstract words as if they had absolute meanings. Listening to him, I was reminded of an anecdote Abe Ravitz, my American lit professor at Hiram, once told me: when Melville read one of Emerson’s more vaporous essays, he felt impelled to scrawl in the margin “To one who has weathered Cape Horn as a common sailor, what stuff is all this!” Rather than being inspired by the philosophical underpinnings of nonviolence, I felt superior to its unrealistic expectations.
The early Christians in the catacombs may have kept their spirits clean, I thought, but did the lions in the arena appreciate their accomplishment? I didn’t like the idea of nonviolence as a tactic to provoke white violence, shock the nation, and create a crisis only the federal government could resolve—that made us victims of the very mass culture I was in revolt against. Just because the media had become jaded and responded only to blood, did that mean that I had to bleed? Impulsively, I stood up and stated a part of my inner debate: “If putting my body on the line will make this a better world,” I said, “I’m ready to do that. I just don’t want my sacrifice to be in vain.”
There was a long silence. Finally, from the back of the room, came Moses’s slow, soothing voice. As usual, he had the last word:
“Politics without morality is chaos, and morality without politics is irrelevant. You must understand that nonviolence is essential to our program this summer. It is academic whether you embrace nonviolence philosophically or not. But if you are going to work in Mississippi with us, you must be prepared to accept the ground rules. Whatever your reservations may be in this, you can only act nonviolently in the Movement. If you can’t accept this, please don’t come with us. In the end, you see, everybody has to live together. In the end, Negroes and whites will share the land, and the less overlay of bitterness, the more possible an accommodation. I think nonviolence leaves the door open to reconciliation.”
Hal had advised Lenny and me to go into town and buy some bib overalls and a denim jacket—the kind Bob Moses wore—to prepare us for Mississippi. He said the SNCC outfit wasn’t just for show, but it also offered good protection if a cop took a notion to drag you down the street.
We all gathered on the grass behind one of the dorms to be instructed in security precautions, role-playing situations, and passive resistance. James Forman, the executive secretary of SNCC, was in charge. He calmly smoked his pipe as he issued multiple warnings about the dangers we faced. His instructions were daunting in their completeness, ranging from the normal precautions of locking doors and watching for suspicious cars to telling the men to shave their beards if they didn’t want them pulled out hair by hair and the women not to wear earrings if they didn’t want their earlobes torn.
Then we broke into small groups and acted out more complex scenarios. The SNCC staff played their roles in these situations to the hilt, falling instantly into character—from Klansman to sharecropper—and making the scene come unnervingly alive. For them, this was no mere exercise in stereotyping and melodrama. We volunteers, on the other hand, could only grope in the dark and try to imagine what we might do or say.
In one, Feelgood, as a jailor, grabbed me by the collar and shoved me into a cell with four SNCC guys playing rednecks.
“Got some company for you, fellas,” he said. “One of those northern nigger-lovin’ agitators. Treat him nice now.”
“I’m certainly no troublemaker,” I said, stumbling to establish rapport. “Don’t you guys think Joe Namath is overpaid?”
Finally, we all assembled again on the lawn for instructions in passive resistance. I learned how to curl up like an unborn baby, using drawn-up knees to protect my vital parts, forearms to hide my face, and clasped hands to cover the nape of my neck. I followed directions, dropping to the ground and flopping on other volunteers for protection.
“Defend those family jewels,” Feelgood shouted at me, slapping at my exposed areas with a piece of rubber hose he had brought along to test our mettle.
“I’ve only got two hands,” I retorted.
“Swift, I don’t think you can take it,” Feelgood said, turning to Lenny.
“Look, I’ve suffered,” Lenny replied. “Ask my dentist.”
Forman then tacked a sign that read “COURTHOUSE” on a spreading oak tree and divided us in two groups. We determined “Niggers” had to march through a gantlet of angry “Rednecks” to reach the courthouse and have a chance to register. Emotions boiled up and over in a matter of seconds. Before I had taken five steps, I was smashed to the ground, kicked in the face, and smothered beneath a pile of writhing bodies. I shrieked with pain and cursed a blue streak as I tried to claw my way free.
“I’m hurt,” someone cried. “I think my ankle’s broken.”
“Keep it up,” Forman shouted. “Bundle together to cushion the blows.”
After what seemed like an hour, we were ordered to untangle and pull ourselves back together. I had a sore lip, a torn T-shirt, and lots of grass stains. We all looked the worse for wear, but there were no serious injuries—just bruises, scratches, and one sprained ankle.
I was more than a little shocked by the experience. The speed with which jeers turned to blows was astonishing. I was shaken by my own pent-up