Freedom Summer - Bruce W. Watson [112]
Aluminum skiffs no longer dredged muddy rivers, but hundreds of sailors were still scouring remote hamlets. Piling out of military buses, search parties set up day camps near Ma and Pa stores, cleared shelves of snacks and bug repellent, then set out into swamps and fields. Locals were shocked. The men didn’t actually expect to find the bodies here? Here in Kemper County? Here in Jasper County? Sailors often answered that they expected to find the three somewhere close by, but they were just bluffing. Aside from the basics—the Sunday-afternoon arrest, the hours in jail, the late-night release, the blackened station wagon—rumors were all searchers had to go on. The most recent said the bodies had been buried in quicksand or thrown into the grinding “hog” of some backwoods sawmill.
FBI agents, having roamed ten counties beneath the Mississippi sun, joked of becoming “real rednecks.” They had learned little about Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney but they had learned all they cared to about Mississippi. Questioning reputed Klansmen, they had learned how the Neshoba klavern had grown since spring, tripling, quadrupling, its membership. They had gathered ample evidence of bootlegging—moonshine, sour-mash stills, and jugs sold on the sly—a vast web of corruption that enriched Klansmen, ranchers, and above all, Sheriff Rainey. And they had learned how routinely “everyone who had been in the county jail had had the stuffing beat out of them.” Yet the FBI could not find three missing men. The latest lead came from a local white woman—“Ask Fannie Jones about her son, Wilmer.”
When FBI agents tracked Wilmer Jones to Chicago’s South Side, his story might have described the first night of summer. Three weeks before the disappearance, Jones had returned to Philadelphia to visit his mother. He had called a store to ask about resizing his high school ring. The next thing he knew, he was accused of asking the store’s pretty clerk out on a date. Taken into custody, Jones met Sheriff Rainey. “Nigger,” Rainey shouted, “did you call up that white girl and ask her for a date?” When Jones shook his head, Rainey lashed out with his meaty hand. Deputy Price got in his own licks before hacking off Jones’s goatee with a pocket knife. Jones trembled until released—at midnight. Waiting outside were five men with pistols and shotguns. While Price and Rainey looked on, the men shoved Jones into a car. In the moonlight hours, they drove him all over winding roads, a pistol jabbed in his neck, shouting questions about the white woman, the “COFOs,” and the NAACP. Finally, the men took Jones to “the place”—an empty well just inside a barbed-wire gate—somewhere in Neshoba County.
The FBI did not care that Wilmer Jones had finally been put on a bus and told never to show his face in Neshoba County again. They wanted to find “the place.” Agents began driving Jones all over the county. Still terrified, he wore a cardboard box on his head, with holes cut for his eyes, until the heat made him groggy. The search went on for two days.
Agents were also tracing a lead from comedian Dick Gregory. In answer to his $25,000 reward, Gregory had received a three-page letter, rife with backwoods grammar: “the tipoff boys were waiting between Meridian and Philadelphia Mississippi and surrounded by a sum of