Freedom Summer - Bruce W. Watson [126]
When the convention ended on August 9, students returned to their hometowns to face summer’s meanest days. If July had been an oven, August was a blast furnace. Ninety-plus heat and 90 percent humidity draped a thick gauze over cotton fields and made swamps and the Piney Woods shimmer. Heat hung like a curse, making the slightest motion seem like drowning in quicksand. Although each day seemed endless, Sundays were the longest because nothing happened. Locals melted into the stillness, happy to hunker down for the Sabbath, but for volunteers, Sundays set internal engines grinding. With little to do but go to church, then sit and swelter, they lived the old Delta blues lament—“minutes seem like hours and hours seem like days.” A turtle plodding across a road was a monumental event. A letter to or from a friend was a lifeboat. A lone figure spotted across a field seemed to flutter like a ribbon rising from a heating vent, walking, walking on without moving, like Sunday itself.
Yet unlike July, August offered surprises. Now it might not rain for a week. Dust clung to leaves and turned to slime on sweaty skin. Then in the middle of the night, rain would spatter and pound on tin roofs. And when the sun rose, Mississippi awoke to greens as glistening as the first day of creation. In mid-August, a “cold wave” dropped temperatures to a record low—63 degrees. In Vicksburg, Fran O’Brien felt comfortable for the first time all summer, but her students shivered and complained of the cold. Yet the bonfires were soon rekindled, making everything—cars, coffeepots, human hands—sizzling to the touch.
Throughout the Delta, it was “lay by time.” The cotton had been cleared of weeds, and for the next several weeks, there would be no sharecroppers in the fields, just tightly packed green bolls baking until they burst into fluff. The coming cotton crop was expected to be bountiful, the boll weevils reduced by generous sprayings of DDT. Across the rest of Mississippi, “lay by time” was simply known as August—the month when only a fool or a Yankee went out in the noonday sun. Volunteers knew the daily schedule now, but still they were counting the days.
“I am tired,” a man wrote home. “I want to go very much to a movie or to watch TV even. I want to be in Berkeley and do stupid things and don’t look behind me in the rearview mirror. I want to look at a white man and not hate his guts, and know he doesn’t hate me either.” A Connecticut woman admitted she missed the luxury of Westport—“sailing and swimming and my friends”—yet wrestled with guilt at the thought. A few pleaded with parents to let them stay on into fall:
I have been here nearly two months. I know the drudgery, the dangers, and the disappointments. I know what it’s like to eat meatless dinners, to be so exhausted you feel as though you will drop, to have five people show up at a meeting to which 20 should have come. Yet I also know what it’s like to sing “We Shall Overcome” with 200 others till you think the roof will explode off the church. . . . I know what it’s like to have a choir of little girls sing out, “Hi, Ellen,” as I walk down the road and envelop me in their hugs. . . . I’m going to spend the rest of my life being a white liberal; let me have one year to see what lies below that veneer.
(At her parents’ insistence, Ellen Lake went back to Radcliffe, then returned south the following summer.)
But most were ready for summer’s end. Clarksdale volunteers held a “depression session,” griping about how little they had accomplished. Elsewhere, a woman confessed, “If I stay here much longer, I’ll become hard. That’s what happens. . . . You lose patience with anyone that’s not right square on your side, the liberals and the moderates and ‘the good people’ caught in the middle, and the