The media people, cameras grinding, jumped at the chance to get some action shots for the six o’clock news. Afterwards, the CBS crew treated everybody to ice cream. At dinner I heard that a handful of volunteers had left. I was determined to stick it out. I looked around; the impending danger seemed to stimulate the hormones and spark the libido. In spite of the warnings we had received about interracial sex, people were pairing off and making out all over the place—on couches, in corners, on the grass, and down in the overgrown ravine.
“The bushes are shaking,” Lenny noted as we walked across the campus back to our dorm.
I was still riding a rush of adrenaline from the afternoon. I looked around for Esther. How I would have loved to make some bushes shake with her!
Although we were supposed to meet with our project leaders after dinner, many of us played hooky to watch a CBS news special: “The Search in Mississippi.” I squeezed into the crowded lounge just as Walter Cronkite announced that the nation’s attention and concern was now focused on the state because of the disappearance of the three civil rights workers. Next came footage of the orientation session for the voter registration volunteers the week before. It was strange to watch the same SNCC staff saying many of the same things we had heard to another group like us. The camera zoomed in on one volunteer in particular: a reflective-looking young man with a boyish tousle of black hair, a delicate, well-defined mouth, and eyes at once dreamy and receptive—as if they interrogated, even slightly doubted, what the speaker said, reserving to the last the right to agree or disagree. I envied his repose. It was Andrew Goodman. He looked a lot like me.
They showed shots of Goodman’s parents and Rita Schwerner. There was a distraught father pleading, “Please, David, come home; you don’t know what you’re doing.” They even had interviews with a few volunteers; interviews that had been held the day before in the very room where we sat watching the program.
“I was misquoted,” Lenny cried as the camera pictured him earnestly explaining why he wanted to spend his summer in Mississippi.
When Eastland was shown, claiming that all the darkies on his plantation were as happy as could be and didn’t have a care in the world and when Governor Johnson called us “beatnik-type weirdos,” we all shouted, “You’re lying!” I relished Governor Johnson’s slip of the tongue: “We have no racial fictions . . . I mean frictions, here.” The room rocked with laughter. Finally Fannie Lou Hamer related how, when the owner of the plantation where she had worked for eighteen years said, “We don’t need registered Negroes here,” she had responded, “I didn’t do it for you; I did it for me.”
The program closed with a shot of us singing “We Shall Overcome.” We stood up, joined hands, and began singing along with ourselves on the television.
“Let’s hum the next verse,” someone said. “Everyone hum softly.”
As I hummed, I was moved by a black voice from the back of the room speaking with conviction: “You know what we’re doing. . . . We’re moving the world. We’re here to bring all the people of Mississippi, all the peoples of this country, all the peoples of the world together. We’re bringing a new revolution of love, so let’s sing out together once again now, everybody hand in hand.”
So I sang again, more fervently than before,
“Oh, Oh deep in my heart, I do believe,
We shall overcome some day.”
I felt a warm glow as I walked out into the flower-scented summer evening. I wanted to find Esther and see if we could have another good talk like the one we’d had the other night. Then I saw her, arm-in-arm with Feelgood, heading down the path toward the lake.
5
Every evening we had dorm discussions about whether we should or shouldn’t go and what the chances of getting hurt were. As I sang the songs and listened to the speakers, I certainly didn’t become less afraid—if anything, I was more terrified—but something else emerged as well: a feeling of being a part of a united effort that truly mattered, so that personal doubts and misgivings diminished in comparison. By week’s end I was at once scared to death and anxious to see what Mississippi was really like.
On Friday evening, James Forman talked to us first. The SNCC staff realized that this was their last chance to instruct us, so they wanted to make every word count.
“I’d like everybody to stand up,” Forman said. “Put your arms around the person on each side of you and sing ‘We’ll Never Turn Back.’”
“We have hung our head and cried
For those like Lee who died,
Died for you and died for me,
Died for the cause of equality,
But we’ll never turn back . . .”
“The song you just sang is about Herbert Lee, who was killed for trying to help people register to vote. Louis Allen, who saw the murder, was shot down this past January. Medgar Evers was assassinated a year ago. Five other deaths in the last five months. I may be killed; you may be killed; the whole staff may go.
“We cried over you in the staff meeting because we love you and are afraid for you. We are grown men and women who have been beaten and shot at, and we cried for you. We want you to understand exactly what you are getting into. But one thing is sure: If anything happens to you, it will also happen to us. If you get beaten up, I’ll be standing right behind you. We are going to be there with you, and you know we’ll never turn back.”
Then Bob Moses asked if any of us had read The Lord of the Rings.
“The hero, Frodo, obtains a powerful ring, which he knows he must destroy, yet as he carries it, he becomes corrupted by it, so that he is in danger of destroying not the ring but what is best in himself. When you spend your time fighting evil, you become preoccupied by it. It consumes your energy; you become part of the evil, and terribly weary. . . .”
He stared at the floor a long moment, and then, in a voice so soft he seemed to be whispering to himself: “The kids are dead.”
He paused while the truth I knew but hated to admit sank in. He said he had known since Monday, but he had remained silent out of respect for Rita. He even said he hoped they found the bodies soon so that we would realize the danger we faced. I expected my heart at that moment to break into a thundering gallop, but I stayed surprisingly calm. Maybe I was better prepared to go to Mississippi than I realized.
“The responsibility for sending you into dangerous situations is mine,” Moses continued. “I justify myself because I am taking the same risks; I ask no one to do what I would not do. Negroes who tried to gain their rights, nameless men, have already been killed in Mississippi. Herbert Lee, Louis Allen—people who trusted me—have already died. We want each one of you to stop and think, to face head-on the question: Are you willing to risk your life or not? Do you know what’s important, really important, and are you ready to stand up for it? If the answer is no, we can say, ‘Later, later, it’s too dangerous now.’”
Could we? Could I? I believed that I had the courage to risk my life, and I knew for sure that I did not want to die. An undertone of pain in Moses’s voice and a hint of inward agony in his eyes suggested that he almost wished we would say, “No, let’s call it off; we don’t want to go.”
“Don’t come to Mississippi this summer if you think you are bringing sweetness and light to the Negro. Only come if you understand, really understand, that his freedom and yours are one. All our strength comes from the local people. If they want sewing clubs or cooking classes, that’s what we’ll help them organize. It’s their decision, not ours. Because they’re the ones who will still be living there after we’ve gone.
“Now I want to say a few words to the Freedom School teachers: Please be patient with your students. Don’t expect too much. Break off a little chunk