by Anne Moody
“I probably won’t live to tell you about it,” the boy said.
“So you see, it’s not that simple, and all of you know that,” I said. “Now that we know that we are not free and realize what’s involved in freeing ourselves, we have to take certain positive actions to work on the problem. First of all, we have got to get together. I was told that it’s twenty-nine thousand Negroes in this county to nine thousand whites. What’s wrong with you? Don’t you realize what you have going for you?” When I said this, those overseers outside began to pace nervously. I had touched a nerve in them and I felt good, but I decided to stop before I overdid it. I ended by saying, “I am looking forward to the work ahead of me. I will certainly do my best to help you get the message across to Mr. Charlie.” Then I took a seat.
George got up and said, “See, I told you she was all right. Now let’s sing a few more songs. Then go home and see what we can come up with to start on Mr. Charlie. All right, soul brothers and sisters.”
“All right,” Mrs. Chinn said. “We are going to get that freedom yet, ain’t we?”
A few shouts of Amen and Sho-nuff came from the teenagers. We sang three songs, ending with “We Shall Overcome,” and everyone went home. All that night I kept thinking about that pitiful meeting. We just had to get some more adults involved somehow.
The next day, Saturday, I went to the office to check over some of the reports by previous canvassing teams. I had been working for a few hours when George came in. “Come outside. I want to show you something,” he said.
I ran into the street thinking someone was being beaten by the cops or there was some other kind of Saturday night happening out there.
“Take a good look at that,” George said. “Just about every Negro in Madison County for miles around.”
It wasn’t hard for me to believe what I was seeing. I had seen it too many times before. In Centreville, my home-town, the same thing took place. Saturday night was known as Nigger Night. That’s how the whites put it.
“Come on,” George said, “let’s walk out on Pear Street” (the main street in Canton). As we walked there, we had to push our way through crowds of Negroes. On Pear Street itself, everything was at a standstill. There were so many Negroes, and they were packed so closely together, they could barely move.
“Look over there,” I said to George.
“Where?” he asked.
“At the two white cops standing on that corner,” I said.
“They look pretty lonely and stupid, huh?”
“They sure do,” I said. “Look just like they are in a completely black town at this moment.”
“Most whites don’t even bother to come in on Saturdays, I’ve noticed,” George said.
I stood there looking and thinking. Yes, Saturday night is Nigger Night all over Mississippi. I remembered in Centreville, when it was too cold for anyone to walk the streets, Negroes would come to town and sit in each other’s cars and talk. Those that didn’t believe in sitting around or hanging out in bars, like my mother, just sat or moved from car to car for four or five hours. Teen-agers who were not allowed in cafés went to a movie and watched the picture three or four times while they smooched. There was a special “lovers” section in the movie house on Saturday nights. Often you saw more stirring and arousing scenes in the lovers’ section than on the screen. Some Negroes would come to town on Saturday night just to pick a fight with another Negro. Once the fight was over, they were satisfied. They beat their frustrations and discontent out on each other. I had often thought that if some of that Saturday night energy was used constructively or even directed at the right objects, it would make a tremendous difference in the life of Negroes in Mississippi.
The next week or so, things went along fairly well. Within a few days, I had gotten to know most of the canvassers. They were more energetic than any bunch of teen-agers I had known or worked with before. There were about forty or fifty that reported daily. We kept running into problems. I found it necessary to keep dividing them into smaller teams. First I divided them into two teams, one for the mornings and one for the afternoons. Most of the eligible voters worked during the day, so a third team was organized for the evenings. Some of the teen-agers were so energetic that they often went out with all the teams. I usually canvassed with the last team for a couple of hours, then rushed to the Freedom House to cook.
It didn’t take me long to find out that the Negroes in Madison County were the same as those in most of the other counties. They were just as apathetic or indifferent about voting. Nevertheless, we had begun to get a few more adults out to rallies at night. Pretty soon the whites saw fit to move in. They wanted to make sure that more adults would not get involved. Since our recruitment and canvassing was done mostly by the teen-agers, they decided to scare the teen-agers away. One night after a rally, George, Bettye, and I had just walked back to the Freedom House when C. O. Chinn came rushing in after us. He kept repeating over and over again, “Five kids were just shot. Five kids were just shot.” We stood there motionless, not wanting to believe what we had just heard, afraid to ask any questions. Were they seriously hurt? Was anyone dead?
Before any of us said a word, Mr. Chinn was saying, “They are at the hospital now, George, let’s go over and see how they are.” George got his cap and headed for the door, with Bettye and me right behind him.
As we were all getting into Mr. Chinn’s car, Mr. Chinn said, “I’m going to leave you girls by my house with Minnie Lou. Anne, you and Bettye can’t go to the hospital. How do you know they weren’t trying to kill one of you? Maybe one of the girls was taken for you or Bettye.”
As we approached his house, we saw Mrs. Chinn standing in the doorway as if she was about to leave.
“Where do you think you’re going, Minnie Lou? You’re goin’ to stay right here with Anne and Bettye,” Mr. Chinn said.
Mrs. Chinn didn’t answer—the voice of authority had spoken. Mrs. Chinn, Bettye, and I simply did as we were told. We sat around the house talking until about 4 A.M., and then we all tried to get some sleep. I didn’t sleep at all. I kept thinking of what might possibly happen. This was probably just a warning. Something else was coming on. I could feel it. Finally, it was daylight and Mr. Chinn and George still hadn’t returned. Maybe they didn’t want to face us and say So-and-so died.
“Anne! Anne!” Mrs. Chinn was calling me. “Are you asleep?”
“No,” I answered.
“Let’s go down to the office. Maybe C.O. and George are there,” she said. We all got up and headed for the office. We arrived just as Mr. Chinn and George were getting out of the car. “They’re O.K.,” Mr. Chinn told us. “They were released from the hospital about five-thirty this morning.” He explained that they had been hit with buckshot.
That afternoon when the five teen-agers came to the office to fill out affidavits to be sent to the Justice Department, I heard the full story. They had been walking home down Pear Street after last night’s rally when the incident occurred. As they passed the service station on the opposite side of the street, Price Lewis, the white owner, had been standing in the doorway. This did not seem unusual—they generally saw him there. Then just as they were crossing the railroad tracks to the left of the service station, they heard a loud noise. They looked back and noticed that Price Lewis was now holding a shotgun pointed in their direction. At this point, one of the girls said she looked down and discovered blood was running down her legs into her shoes. She realized she had been shot and saw that the others had been wounded by buckshot pellets too.
Price Lewis had been arrested at the service station and taken to jail during the morning. Immediately he posted a small bail and was released. Within an hour or so he was back to work at the service station, carrying on as though nothing had happened. His Negro service attendant was still there too. He acted as if he really hated being there and he must have known how other Negroes were looking at him, but I knew he couldn’t afford to leave his job.
The shooting really
messed up our relationship with the teen-agers. Within two or three days they had stopped coming to the office. I knew that their parents were responsible for most of them not coming back. From the beginning most of the parents had not approved of their participation in the voter registration drive. Several kids had told me that they came against their parents’ wishes, but they always refused to let me go home with them to talk things over with the adults. They took too much pride in the work they were doing with us to let me do that. I think they knew as well as I that it was for themselves and themselves alone that they were working—because within a few years they would be the ones who would have to deal with the whites.
Now, however, I felt I had an obligation to go and see their parents. I did so with very little success. Some flatly refused to see me. Those that did gave made-up excuses as to why their children had to stay home. One sent her little boy to the door to tell me she was not home; “Mama say she ain’t heah,” he said.
I hardly knew what to do. I was not prepared to cope with this situation. I kept trying to think of some way to get the teen-agers involved again. For one thing, we would not be able to get our work done without them. Bettye and I tried canvassing alone for a day or so and ended up almost dead from exhaustion.
During this lapse in the project, I got one of those weeping letters from Mama again. As usual, she was begging me to leave Mississippi, and as usual she peeved the hell out of me, but I couldn’t take lightly what she said about Wilkinson County. I knew too well what I was up against.
The next day, in an attempt to forget her letter, I decided to busy myself with cleaning the office. I got the one teen-ager that still hung around to help me, and sent him to the café for a pail of water. When he came back, he said, “Anne, there are two white men outside in a car asking to see the person in charge of the office.”
“Are they from Canton or around here?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “I’ve never seen them before.”
My heart almost jumped right out of me. It was not until then that I really began to think of some of the things in Mama’s letter. She had said that the white folks in Centreville had found out that I was in Canton, and that some Negro had told her he heard they planned to bump me off. She had been pleading with me this time as she had never done before. Why did I want to get myself killed? she kept asking. What was I trying to prove? Over and over again she said that after I was dead things would still be the same as they were now.
Now here I was standing in the middle of the office trembling with fear, not wanting to face the white men outside. Maybe they were here to tell me something terrible had happened. Maybe they came just to make sure I was here. George was out in the country talking to some farmers, and Bettye was cleaning the Freedom House. How I wished one of them were here now, so they could go outside instead of me. Finally I stopped shaking long enough to make myself walk out of the office. “You can’t be getting scared without finding out who they are or what they want,” I kept telling myself.
As I approached the car, and took a good look at the two men inside, I was almost positive I didn’t recognize them from Centreville. Feeling almost limp from relief, I walked up to the driver and said, “I was told you would like to see the person in charge.”
“Yes, we are from the FBI,” he said, showing me his identification. “We are here to investigate the shooting. Where can we find the five kids who were involved?”
I stood there mad as hell. “The stupid bastards!” I thought. There I was getting all flustered and scared because of my mother’s letter, not knowing who they were. “Why didn’t you come inside and present yourselves as officials from the FBI?” I asked angrily. “We just don’t happen to run out into the streets to see every white man that drives up in front of this office, you know. After all, it might just be someone ready to blow our heads off.”
“Can you tell me where I could find those five kids that were shot?” he asked again, a little indignant.
“I’ll see if I can find the addresses for you,” I said sweetly. “Why don’t you two come inside for a minute?”
I knew they weren’t particularly interested in getting out of their car and coming into the office. However, I gave them a look that said, “You’ll never get those addresses unless you do,” so they followed me. They stood around impatiently, looking at our broken-down chairs and sofa, as if to say, “What a shame these niggers have to come into a place and open up a joint like this and cause all this trouble for us.”
“I can find only three of the addresses for you,” I said. “I would like that you wait and see George Raymond, our project director. He should be back soon and he’ll be able to show you where they live. Why don’t you two have a seat until he comes?”
“What time do you expect him?” one asked.
“Within fifteen or twenty minutes,” I said. Realizing they had to wait that long, they decided to sit. They placed themselves carefully on the sofa, as if it was diseased or something. They must be from the South, I thought. “Where are you two from?” I asked.
“New Orleans,” one said.
They waited restlessly until George returned. He spent a few hours driving around with them and they saw all the kids and questioned them. That was the extent of their “investigation.” The same afternoon they left town and we never saw or heard from them after that.
By the beginning of August when the teen-age canvassers still had not returned, Dave Dennis decided to bring in three other workers—two girls, who were students from Jackson, and a boy called Flukie, a CORE task force worker. There were now six of us, but there was still more work than we could handle. George and Flukie went out in the country each day to talk with farmers and to scout for churches to conduct workshops in. The rest of us were left to canvas and look after the office.
So far we had only been able to send a handful of Negroes to the courthouse to attempt to register, and those few that went began to get fired from their jobs. This discouraged others who might have registered. Meanwhile, we were constantly being threatened by the whites. Almost every night someone came running by to tell us the whites planned to bump us off.
One evening just before dark, someone took a shot at a pregnant Negro woman who was walking home with her two small sons. This happened in a section where a few poor white families lived. The woman stood in the street with her children, screaming and yelling for help. A Negro truck driver picked them up and drove them to the Boyd Street housing project, which was right across the street from the Freedom House. She was still yelling and screaming when she got out of the truck, and people ran out of all the project houses. The woman stood there telling everyone what had happened. She was so big it looked as though she was ready to have the baby any minute. As I looked at the other women standing around her, I didn’t like what I saw in their faces. I could tell what they were thinking—“Why don’t you all get out of here before you get us all killed?”
After this incident, Negro participation dropped off to almost nothing, and things got so rough we were afraid to walk the streets. In addition, our money was cut off. We were being paid twenty dollars a week by the Voter Education Project, a Southern agency which supported voter registration for Negroes. They said that since we were not producing registered voters, they could not continue to put money into the area. It seemed things were getting rough from every angle. We sometimes went for days without a meal. I was getting sick and losing lots of weight. When the NAACP invited me to speak at a Thursday night women’s rally in Jackson, at one of the big churches, I tried to prepare a speech that would get across to them how we were suffering in Canton. Everything went wrong the night of the rally. Ten minutes before Dave arrived to pick me up, Jean, one of the new girls, had a terrible asthma attack, and we had to drop her off at the hospital in Jackson. I arrived at the church exhausted and an hour late, still wearing the skirt and blouse I had worked in all day; they looked like I had slept in them for weeks. The mistress of ceremonies was
just explaining that I was unable to make it, when I walked straight up on the stage. She turned and looked at me as if I was crazy, and didn’t say another word. She just took her seat, and I walked up to the mike. By this time I had completely forgotten my prepared speech, and I don’t remember exactly what I said at first. I had been standing up there I don’t know how long when the mistress of ceremonies said, “You are running overtime.” I got mad at her and thought I would tell the audience exactly what I was thinking. When I finished telling them about the trouble we were having in Canton, I found myself crying. Tears were running down my cheeks and I was shaking and saying, “What are we going to do? Starve to death? Look at me. I’ve lost about fifteen pounds in a week.” I stood there going to pieces, until Reverend Ed King walked up on the platform, put his arm around me, and led me away.
Outside he said, “You touched them, Anne. I think you got your message across.” He was still standing with his arm around me, and I was drying my eyes when Dave came up.
“What’s wrong with her?” he asked.
“She just finished a speech which I think was tremendous,” Reverend King said. “But I think she needs a rest, Dave.”
Dave took me to his apartment in Jackson and said I could rest there a couple of days. I didn’t really think about what had happened during my speech until I was in bed trying to sleep. Then I realized I was cracking up, and I began to cry again.
———
When I got back to Canton on Sunday, I discovered that a tub of food had been brought in from Jackson. We arrived just in time to find Flukie helping himself to some golden brown chicken. He gave me a note that had been left with the food:
Dear Anne.
Brought some food for your people. Your speech was something Thursday night. However, you need a rest. Why don’t you come spend a week with me? See you next week. Let me know if the food runs out before then. You take care of yourself.
Mrs. Young
