Freedom Summer - Bruce W. Watson [100]
United in spirit, volunteers also found fresh sources of support. Across the state, the spreading network of CB radios linked more SNCC cars with home bases. If James Chaney had only had such a radio. . . . Dozens of medical teams—doctors, nurses, dentists, psychiatrists—were making two-week tours of Mississippi, tending to volunteers’ health, giving black children their first medical exams, then going home to share stories from the “police state” of Mississippi. More than a hundred lawyers from across America had come to prepare more lawsuits. Celebrities were arriving, too, just to lend support. One afternoon, an attractive woman with bright red hair and blue jeans dropped in on Fannie Lou Hamer. Hamer did not recognize the “little white lady.” She was later surprised to hear that “a real movie star” named Shirley MacLaine was in her kitchen stirring the beans. Boston Celtics star Bill Russell was giving basketball clinics in Jackson, and within a few days, the biggest name in the civil rights movement, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., would tour the state. Yes, it had been only a month, and more than a month remained, but Freedom Summer rolled on.
The summer had not exhausted its surprises. In Itta Bena, the tobacco-chewing old woman whose spunk had amazed boarders way back in June was now showing off the tea set a volunteer’s girlfriend sent her. You could use the little cups for tea, she told friends on Freedom Street. Or you could use them for whiskey. But a month in Mississippi had finished off the naïveté that had frightened SNCC veterans back in Ohio. Light switches on cars were now taped down, lest an opened door illuminate a nighttime target. Host families no longer found their guests “plain cute.” Volunteers did not wash their hands in the water bucket; they were experts at outhouses, well pumps, and bathing in tin washtubs. They could eat whole plates of collard greens without a grimace. Their internal clocks were now set to the local time zone—Rural Southern Time. “If you want to start a meeting at 8,” one wrote home, “schedule it for 7.” And Fannie Lou Hamer no longer had to worry about white girls “out under the trees in the back yard playin’ cards with the Negro boys!” Still, there were near-misses and constant reminders of danger.
One Saturday evening, Chris Williams was in the Mileses’ backyard in Batesville. Volunteers were standing around trading jokes when the drone of insects was shattered by a rifle blast. Everyone began shouting, diving for cover, until Robert Miles, “laughing his ass off,” came out to explain. Another volunteer, unfamiliar with guns, had picked up a loaded rifle. “Someone shot at you from inside the house,” Miles said. The bullet buried itself in the field out back, near the hogs.
Fred Winn was still mired in Shaw. Since the Saturday night when they had “waited for the bombers,” volunteers had settled down, but the project had not. Like the town itself, strung out along a swamp flanking its main street, Shaw’s project was a backwater. With no local movement to build on, mass meetings drew just a few adults. Rumors rustling through the black community did not help.