Freedom Summer (38 page)

 

 

Holding hands, dancing, sharing meals, teachers and students broke racial taboos. But outside the Freedom Schools, in crowded project offices and cluttered community centers, racial harmony was proving more elusive in August than it had been in June. As long as three men were missing, race had been just another cog in Freedom Summer. Black and white were working together, missing together, equally likely to be arrested, beaten, killed. But once Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney were found, mourned, eulogized with “bitter vengeance,” black and white were suddenly that again—black and white. And everyone on every project knew that within a few weeks, black would be staying in Mississippi, and white would be gone.

With equal alarm, blacks and whites noticed the rising tension. SNCC had integrated prior to Freedom Summer. Bob Zellner and Mendy Samstein, Sandra “Casey” Hayden and Mary King, had pioneered a small white contingent. But Freedom Summer had inundated SNCC offices with whites, and by August, their enthusiasm was wearing thin. “I saw the rug pulled out every day,” Holmes County project director Hollis Watkins recalled. “Suppose we needed some paper to make fliers. Mr. Local may have been going into town and could have brought it back. But a volunteer would say, ‘Oh no no, I’ll run and get it.’ Local people who had felt pride in operating mimeograph machines now saw
that
taken away. In meetings, very vocal volunteers automatically shut down a number of people who were struggling to come forward and talk.”

Recent news from the North was driving another wedge between the races. Profiling Freedom Summer, magazines such as
Look
and the
Saturday Evening Post
focused on whites, especially white women, making blacks feel their own struggles hardly mattered. And then there were the riots. The day after Harlem erupted, staffers and volunteers sat on the lawn outside the Holly Springs Freedom School discussing the news. With few exceptions, whites deplored the riot, but blacks said it was “about time something happened to force America to wake up to racism in the North.” Teacher Pamela Allen was shocked. Though she said nothing, she saw that “the project was polarized. I found it didn’t matter that I never condemned the riots. I hadn’t supported them.
And
I was white.”

Yet nothing was eroding racial harmony more than sex. From their first day in their sites, volunteers who had never thought much about interracial sex found Mississippi obsessed with it. All summer long, white terror of “mongrelization,” dating to slave days, had surfaced at every encounter. A Jackson cop asked a medical student if he had come south “to give abortions to all them white gals pregnant by nigrahs.” A white woman invited to visit a project office responded, “And get raped?” SNCC recruiters had tried to weed out whites who expressed sexual interest in blacks, and vice versa. In Ohio, Bob Moses had warned against pursuing “My Summer Negro” or “the white girl I made.” Yet all summer blacks and whites had worked together, gotten drunk together, faced danger together, suffusing the summer project with a wartime sexual tension. And the fact that it was 1964, with mores changing, birth control pills available (though not in Mississippi), and hundreds in their early twenties suddenly on their own far from the strictures of home . . .

Many have speculated on the sexuality of that summer. One observer claimed, “Every black SNCC worker with perhaps a few exceptions counted it a notch on his gun to have slept with a white woman—as many as possible.” But others remembered Freedom Summer as far too chaotic for sex. “I didn’t see any white women being victimized by black men,” volunteer Sally Belfrage recalled. “We were just too busy and crowded. I can’t even work out where they did it, where people went to be victimized. My greatest problem in Greenwood was the absolute impossibility of being alone.” Fred Winn offered tacit agreement in a letter: “Now, Dad, I know the I.C.C. might object to you sending certain things in the mail but would it be possible for you to send a local S.F. girl? ” Nonetheless, in late July, a visiting doctor had warned volunteers of venereal disease spreading through the ranks of SNCC and COFO. And although how much went on behind closed doors will never be certain, many volunteers were startled by a sexual frankness unknown back home.

Black men raised with an exacting terror—“jus’ one boy touch a white girl’s hand, he be in the river in two hours”—now met white “girls” whose gaze they did not have to avoid. And white women, suddenly the object of obsession and desire, were confused, flattered, charmed. A strange and enticing courtship dance sometimes began, driven as much by taboo as temptation. The dance accelerated when female volunteers wore makeup, earrings, and décolletage that marked them as “easy” in a state where men did not even wear shorts in public. Approached again and again, some surrendered to curiosity or a need to prove they were not racist. The result, Mary King recalled, was that some white women “fluttered like butterflies from one tryst to another.” For much of the summer, black women seemed to look the other way. The same could not always be said of black men. “All these black guys were dating the white volunteers,” one woman remembered, “and then one of the black girls . . . had one date one night with a white guy.” The next morning, four black SNCC men “were over at her house chewing her out.”

But beyond the novelty of interracial sex, how many fell in love during Freedom Summer? “I’m sure I wasn’t the only white woman to fall in love with a black man during that summer of 1964,” Pamela Allen (née Parker) wrote years later. Allen went on to describe “an innocent romance” of holding hands, holding each other, then bidding good-bye to the black man just transferred to McComb. In small-town fishbowls where they dared not be seen together in public, how many other men and women, black and white, courted, touched, dared to cross one line or another, then came home changed? “There’s a very good chance that a large number of white women had good friendships [with black men] that might have developed into something else in a different time,” Allen recalled. “But given the times, it didn’t. Still, that’s much more profound than whether or not you had sex. The heart connections are the ones you remember without ambivalence.”

Fran O’Brien speaks cautiously about her “heart connection” that summer. Like her, the black man she admired worked with children in the Vicksburg Freedom House. Like her, he had come from a college in the Northwest. She walked with him whenever possible, spoke quietly in quiet moments. More than once he stepped into her classroom to handle older children she could not control. He had written home, telling his parents about this woman he liked. This
white
woman. They warned him, and he told Fran about the warning. When she wrote home and mentioned the man she liked, she was afraid to reveal that he was black. Throughout the summer, Fran wanted more to happen between them. Nothing did. And nothing more was said. She never saw the man after the summer, but she never forgot him. In her memories, he remains the sweeter side of that summer, easily, fondly recalled. The savage side would prove harder to summon.

Fran had spent a rather quiet summer in Vicksburg. Despite all the threats, the flashes of violence, she had seen none of the bedlam that scarred the summer elsewhere. One afternoon, two white men barged into her classroom. Students froze. Fran hesitated. But the men just stood, glared, then walked out. By the time she deftly handled the bomb threat on the phone, Fran had become blasé about violence. She was too busy to worry. Her children loved her classes, especially chorus. One Saturday, her singers entertained the whole school with “This Little Light” and “America the Beautiful.” Fran found the latter “a trifle ironic,” but her students made the song their own, changing verses to honor Herbert Lee and Medgar Evers. And when children whose dreams had long been deferred came to the last verse—“O beautiful for patriot dream that sees beyond the years”—Fran realized, “we’re all dreamers or we wouldn’t be here.”

Evening conversations with Mrs. Garrett were teaching Fran more about children than she would ever learn in college. Each evening, Mrs. Garrett, her iron hair in a bun, her stout body resting comfortably in a housedress, welcomed Fran home. Over dinner, they talked about the day in class. About simple activities that worked. About “slow learners” only starting to make progress, and others so promising or so troubled. By early August, Fran had come to cherish these talks. Other volunteers might frequent juke joints or stay at the Freedom House long after classes had ended. But every evening, Fran caught a ride home in time for dinner and discussion. Back on her Oregon campus, she had imagined doing her part in the civil rights movement. She had not expected to make a lifelong friend.

With just two weeks left, Fran was thinking more about going home than about any danger. She planned to leave on Monday, August 17. She hoped to go through New Orleans and do a little sightseeing. “I could stay longer but there doesn’t seem much point,” she wrote her parents. “I wish we had done more for the kids.” Though complacent, Fran still recalled that morning in early July when she was confronted by cops after rushing out to her ride. She had never repeated the mistake. Each morning she waited inside with Mrs. Garrett until the SNCC car arrived. Each evening, she walked down the long driveway of the Freedom House in a group. Obeying SNCC rules, she could not imagine that Mississippi could concoct dangers impossible to foresee.

One evening, Fran and five others stood at the end of the driveway, waiting for the car to take them home. But when the car pulled up, it had seats for only five. Deferring as always, Fran let everyone else pile in. There would be room, she thought. But when she asked if she could squeeze in, the driver cut her off. They could not risk overloading the car, drawing attention, giving cops an excuse for another arrest. “Don’t worry,” she was told. “Someone else will be along in a minute.”

Standing alone, Fran felt a shudder, but told herself not to be such a baby. Another car would be along soon. And there it was, headlights beaming down the road, slowing, slowing, stopping. Eager to get home, Fran rushed past the twin beams. Before she could draw back, she saw four men inside—in white robes and hoods. She was not imagining this. She was not dreaming. She was in Mississippi, and the quiet of her summer had ended early.

Before Fran could turn and run, one hooded man leaped out. Clamping a beefy hand over her mouth, he dragged her into the car. It roared away. She was not imagining. She was not dreaming. Rumbling over the dirt road, the four men laughed and joked. Fran could barely see their eyes through the holes in their hoods. Look what they had captured, they seemed to say. A pretty little “invader.” A “little girl” who needed to be taught a lesson. Darkness had engulfed Mississippi by the time the car pulled into a vacant lot or empty field—Fran could not tell which. From that point on, terror veiled her memory. The car lurched and stopped. A deep, drawling voice barked in her ear.

“Now you just be a good little girl and do what we say. We’ve gotta teach you a little lesson so you’ll go home to your Mama and Daddy and mind your own business after this.”

Dragged out of the car, Fran tried to drop into a ball as she had been taught.

“No you don’t, little lady! You bend over that hood and don’t try any more funny business!”

Fran found herself shoved against the car. Somehow she recalled what Bob Moses had told female volunteers in Ohio—that their modesty was not as important as their lives. She clamped her hands over her head. Her cheek pressed against the warm hood. She inhaled the car’s odor of gasoline and dust.

“That’s a good little girl. Stay nice and still now, so we can whup you.” All four men laughed. One said they were going to make her sorry she had ever come to Mississippi. But if she got down on her knees, he said, if she begged forgiveness, they might stop. Any time she wanted. On her knees. Fran vowed she would be thrown in the Mississippi River first. She steeled herself, clenched her teeth, felt warm air on her legs as a hand lifted her skirt. Seconds later came the searing lash of a rubber hose. Breath seized in her throat. Her eyes stung. An acrid odor emerged from nowhere. The hose lashed out again. And again, each time harder than before. Her burning legs turned red, then blue, then purple. The blows continued as the men passed the hose around, taking turns. Time slowed and stopped. The world condensed to this empty lot, in Mississippi, on a quiet summer night. More lashes fell. But there is a God, Fran knew, and so she was spared further suffering. Voices and laughter dimmed, the throbbing faded. The next thing Fran knew, she was lying in the driveway of the Freedom House. Scorching heat flushed her face and seared her body. Sitting up, she struggled for the dignity that had brought her this far. She checked herself, seeing bruises but no blood. Thinking she must have been gone for hours, she ran up the long driveway to find several people on the porch, talking and joking.

“Oh hi, Fran. I thought you’d left.”

Fran started to blurt out what she could—the ride . . . no room for her . . . another due any minute . . .

“You should have come back right away,” someone said. “Don’t you know it’s dangerous to wander around alone at night? This is Mississippi, you know. A lot of things could happen.”

That was when Fran burst into tears. No words would come, not even when others gathered around.

“Her dress is all dirty.”

“Did she fall down the hill? ”

“There was a car circling around here about a half an hour ago—right after those other guys left. Was that it? ”

With her head bowed, Fran nodded but could say no more. Her secret remained inside, a private, purple horror. Even in Mississippi, where a lot of things could happen, no one guessed what had just happened to the shy teacher with the devout love of children. Finally, the woman whose children Fran had befriended on her first day in Mississippi returned the favor. Approaching Fran, putting an arm around her, Bessie whispered, “It’s okay. It’s okay.”