Freedom Summer - Bruce W. Watson [114]
COFO’s late-starting project thrilled black Indianola. “Where have you people been?” one kid asked. “We’ve been waitin’ and waitin’!” The new project also gave Fred the chance to do more than handiwork. Shortly after settling in, he became the project’s communications director. Late at night in the Freedom House, he fiddled with a CB radio, pulling in scratchy voices from cars and offices across the Delta from Greenville to “Greenwood Sweets.” He was not on the CB long, however, before its code name—Item Base—was decoded. One afternoon, cops burst into the Freedom House, walked to the CB, wrote down its channel number, and walked out. A few late nights later, a chilling voice came on the line—“Hello, Item Base. Hello, Nigger lover!”
With his new home and new responsibilities, Fred was starting to consider staying on into fall. Though he frequently called it a “hell hole,” he was coming to like Mississippi—black Mississippi, at least. Five weeks in the Delta had finally doused his fear. “To be quite frank with you all I am quite calm and un-nervous,” he wrote home. “After a while you get used to the idea of being watched and hated. Also I just don’t have the goddamned time to be nervous or worried. . . . I am in the midst of a revolution. This is the greatest revolution since the American Revolution.” By the way, he asked his father, how was his half sister? Could a black kindergartner in San Francisco understand the movement? Had he told her how her half brother was spending the summer? Before Fred’s move to Indianola, his father had hoped he might come home early. “Be very careful these last few days,” he wrote to “Freddy.” “I remember in World War II we dropped thousands of pamphlets—‘Don’t be killed on the last day of the war.’ ” But now the elder Winn wondered whether his son would come home at all. Still hoping, he wrote that he was counting the days until Fred left Mississippi, “counting them like a jail sentence.”
Fifty miles to the north, Chris Williams was branching out from Batesville. Panola County had become Freedom Summer’s political success story. Hundreds of blacks had become registered voters. Even the high school principal had taken the leap. Names of registrants were still listed in the Panolian , but blacks had begun pointing to them with pride. There were simply too many new voters now for each one’s house to be targeted. Yet if SNCC was to take full advantage of the federal injunction, all of Panola County had to be canvassed. In mid-July, Chris hit the road he loved so much. Each morning, the wisecracking teenager rose, donned a T-shirt and jeans, had a quick breakfast, then piled into a car already crammed with volunteers. Dust clouds trailed them through the cotton fields, past blacks in overalls, bent double, chopping, hoeing. Penetrating deeper into “the rural,” Chris headed for towns as hostile as the snakes that slithered along the griddle roads. Sardis, Mississippi. Como. Crenshaw. Papers and pamphlets in hand, Chris spoke at juke joints and churches, talking up the Freedom Democrats and the upcoming convention in Atlantic City. Occasionally he ventured onto plantations but was usually run off, once by a planter who swore he “wasn’t going to turn the government over to a bunch of monkeys.”
In each town, Chris asked where a mass meeting might be held and if anyone wanted to host a volunteer. He managed to schedule a few meetings, but blacks