by Anne Moody
“Breakfast is ready! Breakfast is ready!” I called.
Dave came running in the kitchen, yelling, “Mattie, shame on you. Today is Anne’s birthday and here she is cooking breakfast while you sleep.”
“Is today your birthday?” George asked, stumbling into the kitchen—as if he didn’t know after buying two gallons of ice cream and a cake yesterday.
“I’m sorry, Moody,” Mattie said. “I heard you cooking, but Dave wouldn’t let me get up.”
“You tell that on me, Mattie?” Dave said. “It was Mattie, Anne. She kept begging me, ‘Just once more, Dave, Just once more.’ Now who do you believe, Anne?” He was hugging Mattie and both of them were trying to look at me with a straight face.
We were all eating and listening to the radio when the music stopped abruptly in the middle of a record. “A special news bulletin just in from Birmingham,” the DJ was saying. “A church was just bombed in Birmingham, Alabama. It is believed that several Sunday school students were killed.” We all sat glued to our seats, avoiding each other’s eyes. No one was eating now. Everyone was waiting for the next report on the bombing. The second report confirmed that four girls had been killed. I looked at George; he sat with his face buried in the palms of his hands. Dave sat motionless with tears in his eyes. Mattie looked at Dave as if she had been grounded by an electric shock. I put my hand up to my face. Tears were pouring out of my eyes, and I hadn’t even known I was crying.
“Why! Why! Why! Oh, God, why? Why us? Why us?” I found myself asking. “I gotta find myself some woods, trees, or water—anything. I gotta talk to you, God, and you gotta answer. Please don’t play Rip Van Winkle with me today.”
I rushed out of the house and started walking aimlessly. I ran up a hill where there were trees. I found myself in a graveyard I didn’t even know was there. I sat there looking up through the trees, trying to communicate with God. “Now talk to me, God. Come on down and talk to me.
“You know, I used to go to Sunday school when I was a little girl. I went to Sunday school, church, and B.T.U. every Sunday. We were taught how merciful and forgiving you are. Mama used to tell us that you would forgive us seventy-seven times a day, and I believed in you. I bet you those girls in Sunday school were being taught the same as I was when I was their age. It that teaching wrong? Are you going to forgive their killers? You not gonna answer me, God, hmm? Well, if you don’t want to talk, then listen to me.
“As long as I live, I’ll never be beaten by a white man again. Not like in Woolworth’s. Not anymore. That’s out. You know something else, God? Nonviolence is out. I have a good idea Martin Luther King is talking to you, too. If he is, tell him that nonviolence has served its purpose. Tell him that for me, God, and for a lot of other Negroes who must be thinking it today. If you don’t believe that, then I know you must be white, too. And if I ever find out you are white, then I’m through with you. And if I find out you are black, I’ll try my best to kill you when I get to heaven.
“I’m through with you. Yes, I am going to put you down. From now on, I am my own God. I am going to live by the rules I set for myself. I’ll discard everything I was once taught about you. Then I’ll be you. I will be my own God, living my life as I see fit. Not as Mr. Charlie says I should live it, or Mama, or anybody else. I shall do as I want to in this society that apparently wasn’t meant for me and my kind. If you are getting angry because I’m talking to you like this, then just kill me, leave me here in this graveyard dead. Maybe that’s where all of us belong, anyway. Maybe then we wouldn’t have to suffer so much. At the rate we are being killed now, we’ll all soon be dead anyway.”
When I got back to the Freedom House, Dave and Mattie were gone. I found George stretched out on his bed.
“What happened to Mattie and Dave?” I asked.
“Dave was called for a meeting in Jackson, and they had to leave. Where have you been all this time?”
“Walking,” I said. “Was there any more news about the bombing?”
“No,” he said, “except that the four girls were killed, and the city is getting pretty tense, the closer it gets to dark. They’ll probably tear Birmingham to bits tonight. I pray that they don’t have any violence.”
“Pray! Pray, George! Why in the hell should we be praying all the time? Those white men who hurled that bomb into the church today weren’t on their knees, were they? If those girls weren’t at Sunday school today, maybe they would be alive. How do you know they weren’t on their knees? That’s what’s wrong now. We’ve been praying too long. Yes, as a race all we’ve got is a lot of religion. And the white man’s got everything else, including all the dynamite.”
“Hold it—is that Miss Woolworth, the Nonviolent Miss Woolworth talking like that?” he asked.
“Let’s face it, George. Nonviolence is through and you know it. Don’t you think we’ve had enough of it? First of all we were only using it as a tactic to show, or rather dramatize, to the world how bad the situation is in the South. Well, I think we’ve had enough examples. I think we are overdoing it. After this bombing, if there are any more nonviolent demonstrations for the mere sake of proving what all the rest of them have, then I think we are overdramatizing the issue.”
“You feel like talking about anything else?” he asked.
“Yeah, let’s talk about that beautiful march on Washington,” I said, almost yelling. “It was just two weeks ago, believe it or not. And 250,000 people were there yelling, ‘We want freedom.’ Well, I guess this bombing is Birmingham’s answer to the march. But what’s gonna be our answer to the bombing? We’re gonna send more of our children right back to Sunday school to be killed. Then the President will probably issue a statement saying, ‘We are doing Everything in our Power to apprehend the killers. And we are in close touch with the situation.’ After which we will still run out in the streets and bow our heads and pray to be spat upon in the process. I call that real religion, real, honest-to-goodness nigger religion. If Martin Luther King thinks nonviolence is really going to work for the South as it did for India, then he is out of his mind.”
———
On Monday, the day after the bombing, the Negroes in Canton were afraid to walk the streets. When they passed the office, they turned their heads to keep from looking in. Every time I passed one of them on the street, they looked at me and almost said, “Get out of here. You’ll get us killed.”
I left the office shortly after lunch. When I got to the Freedom House, I played freedom songs and tried to analyze what had happened thus far for us in the Movement. I discovered my mind was so warped and confused I couldn’t think clearly. The church bombing had had a terrible effect on me. It had made me question everything I had ever believed in. “There has got to be another way for us,” I thought. “If not, then there is no end to the misery we are now encountering.”
I put a Ray Charles record on the box and he was saying, “Feeling sad all the time, that’s because I got a worried mind. The world is in an uproar, the danger zone is everywhere. Read your paper, and you’ll see just exactly what keep worryin’ me.” It seemed as though I had never listened to Ray before. For the first time he said something to me.
George came in later, bringing a girl with him. “Anne, I would like for you to meet Lenora. She might be working with us. She was kicked off her father’s plantation.”
“Why?” I asked.
“It seems as though she was thinking like you yesterday, after the bombing. Somehow it got back to her father’s boss man, and she left running last night.”
I knew that he brought her here because he wanted me to have some other person to talk to.
“If you can’t go home, then don’t go feeling like the Lone Ranger,” I said. “I haven’t been home since Thanksgiving of ’61. I know a lot of other people that can’t go home either. So you see, you have plenty of company.”
She grinned like a silly little country girl.
“Where are you living now?” I asked. “Are you working
?”
“In the project with an aunt,” she answered. “I had a job, but …”
“Then why don’t you move in with us?” I asked. “We need some help and maybe we can get you on the payroll. But you won’t be making much money.” I wondered, though, how long we could stay in the area ourselves, before the Negroes asked us to leave.
Chapter
TWENTY-SIX
Lenora moved in the next day. The only thing she had to move was a shopping bag. She didn’t come with any clothes, just Lenora.
That night she opened the icebox and found two gallons of ice cream. “Moody, what’s the ice cream for? Can I have some?” she asked.
“Sure, Lenora, help yourself. It was for my birthday, which was Sunday,” I said. “There’s a coconut cake in there, too, if you’d like some.”
“You want me to fix some for you?” she asked.
“No, thanks,” I said. “I don’t think I could eat it.”
But suddenly I had an idea. We could use the ice cream and cake to give a party for the high school students. Maybe a party would stir up their enthusiasm again. I couldn’t wait till George came in to ask him what he thought about it.
We gave the party Saturday night and it turned out to be a great success. There were so many high school students there that finally the party became a rally. We all went out in the yard and sat on the grass and sang freedom songs for hours. One of the students told me that the principal of the high school had forbidden anyone to come. I was glad he had—it seemed to have boosted attendance. Ten students volunteered to speak in church services throughout the county on Sunday and to spread the word about the clothes we were going to give out the following Wednesday. They did such a good job spreading the word that when Lenora and I turned the corner to the office early Wednesday morning, there were about two hundred Negroes already in line outside it.
The minute I saw them there, I got mad as hell. “Here they are,” I thought, “all standing around waiting to be given something. Last week after the church bombing they turned their heads when they passed this office. Some even looked at me with hate in their eyes. Now they are smiling at me. After I give them the clothes, they probably won’t even look at me next week, let alone go and register to vote.”
As Lenora and I opened the door, the crowd almost trampled us in the rush to get inside. We told them nothing would be given out until Annie Devine, a Negro insurance lady, arrived. She knew most of the families, and we hoped her presence would help prevent people from taking things they could not use. While we all waited, the Negroes were making comments about the clothes. Some said things like, “Them white folks in the North is some good,” or “Look at them clothes, just as brand new as they came outta the store.”
When I told them that I would like to have their names and addresses so we could inform them of the next shipment, they all looked like they were ready to leave the office. I heard one lady whisper, “It’s just a trick to get us to vote.” I found myself wanting to deliver a sermon, but instead I left a pencil and paper on the back desk next to the door and asked them to put down their name and address as they left. After this, the tension eased. I knew they would not leave their names. Just in case, however, I stationed Mrs. Chinn at the back of the office. Over and over again I could hear her saying, “You people needn’t be scared or ashamed to sign your names. We ain’t gonna use them to get none of you in trouble. All Anne and the rest of these CORE workers are here to do is help you people. They have even been trying to get food to some of you.”
It took us all day to give the clothes out. I had never in my life seen people who were so much in need. After we gave out most of the best coats and things, people started coming up to me telling me that they were desperate for a coat, a pair of shoes—anything. At five o’clock, I was exhausted. I looked at Mrs. Devine and Lenora and saw that their hair was white from the dust and the lint from the clothes. When I looked in the mirror, I discovered mine was too.
Around five-thirty, a group of people who had just gotten off work came to the office. I told them that everything was gone. A lady looked at a box of clothes in the corner and asked, “Can I look through these? I might find something I can use in there.”
“If you would like to, yes. But these things aren’t that good. Most of them are just rags,” I told her.
Before I could finish answering her, she had begun to search through the things. About five other women and two men joined her. They turned the box over on the floor, pulling everything out. They were snatching for old rags and panties and bras. The men were taking shorts that didn’t even have elastic in the waist or were without seats.
When they left, Lenora burst out laughing. “You see, Anne, I told you they weren’t rags.”
“I see that,” I said, “and I don’t think it’s funny. It’s a damn shame people have to be this poor in America—the land of plenty.”
“Well, Anne, we’ve started them now. We have to get some more clothes, else a lot of Negroes will be plenty mad because they were left out,” Mrs. Devine said.
“We’ll never get enough clothes to supply all of the Negroes in Madison County,” I answered. “I think we would do better trying to get them jobs so they can buy their own.”
“I could sure use one,” Mrs. Chinn sighed. “I ran out of food three days ago.”
“How many signed their names, Mrs. Chinn?” I asked, deliberately changing the subject. Every time she talked about her financial condition she got terribly depressed. I not only got depressed, but felt guilty about the way she and C.O. exerted themselves to help us and how much they had suffered because of it.
“Only twenty,” she said. “It’s a shame. Some of them had the nerve to tell me, ‘Minnie Lou, I can’t sign my name, but you know me. Let me know when you people get some more clothes in.’ I felt like killing them. If it was left up to me, I wouldn’t give them anything. That’s all niggers is good for, looking for something for nothing.”
When Lenora and I opened the office the following morning, people were constantly dropping by to see if we had any more clothes. However, when I asked if they were registered to vote, the answer was always no. And none of them had any intentions of trying to register in the immediate future. I began to have the feeling that either we came up with an idea or project better than voter registration or we would have to get out of Canton.
A few days later, a Negro high school girl, picking cotton after school out in the country, was raped by a white farmer. The news was whispered throughout Canton. All the Negroes thought it was horrible, but none of them stopped sending their children to pick cotton. They had no choice—the little money the teen-agers made from picking cotton kept them in school. In Madison County, the use of teen-aged labor during the cotton-picking season was an institution. The Negro schools actually closed at noon the first two months of the school year, so that the students would be available to work for the white farmers. Their own parents, who had almost as much land as the whites but received much smaller allotments from the government, practically starved. Most of them couldn’t even afford to give their children lunch money and buy them school supplies.
This fall the cotton picking in Madison County continued as usual, and the man who had raped the girl went around talking about it and saying things like, “Them niggers even got the nerve to complain about getting rid of a little pussy since that damn organization [meaning CORE] moved in.” One of his friends remarked, “I used to could pick up a nigger anytime; now they is all scared somebody might see them.”
Because the girl came to the CORE office and filled out an affidavit, her father had to resort to packing a gun to protect his family. After that, several open assaults were made on young Negro girls by the white men in the area. The assaults provoked a lot of talk concerning other affairs. For about a week or so the talk went on and on about what white man was screwing which Negro woman. It came out in the open that some of the top officials of Madison County had Negro mistresses
that they lived with almost full-time. It was Centreville all over again.
It was now three weeks since the Birmingham church bombing, and during this time the Klan had been extremely busy. What I feared most was that the threats would stop, and action would begin—that I would see a bunch of Klansmen riding through Canton. If this ever happened, I was sure the streets of Canton would flow with blood for days. We had been through enough to know that as long as the threats kept coming, nothing was immediately planned to terrorize the Negroes.
Out of compassion and sisterhood for me, Doris Erskine, my old jail buddy from Jackson, had finally consented to work with us in Canton. Once she arrived, there were four of us working in the area, and we again attempted to set up the nightly workshops. We also planned another Saturday night party for the high school students.
One day Doris and I went over to the high school campus to announce the party. The principal was one of the worst Toms in Canton. He had placed some informers on the school grounds to let him know if any CORE people came around. As Doris and I were making our way through a crowd of students, he came running up to us.
“May I speak to you two ladies in my office?” he said angrily.
“Oh! Mr. Principal,” I said, as if I hadn’t even noticed him before. “Why, we were just leaving. I would love to chat with you for a while, but I’m afraid I don’t have the time. I have a meeting in about five minutes at the office. Maybe we can get together one day next week.”
“Good evening, Mr. Principal. We’ll be leaving now,” Doris said.
As we walked away, he just stood there with his mouth wide open, not knowing what to say. Some of the students snickered at him. I thought it was pretty damn cool, the way we left him hanging there.
