Freedom Summer - Bruce W. Watson [169]
A few days later, Chris was sitting downtown when four men bolted from a pickup. He barely had time to roll into a ball before they began kicking him. Robert Miles decked one man with a haymaker punch, sending the attackers fleeing, leaving Chris with a three-inch gash in his forehead. The next evening, Chris and Penny were in Miles’s living room, watching TV, breathing again. Suddenly the front window shattered. Chris shoved Penny to the floor as buckshot lodged in the wall. Chris was soon taking his turn on the Mileses’ all-night vigil, holding a rifle.
The mob, the beating, the shooting, left Chris more shaken than hurt, but Mississippi was no longer an “adventure.” “I felt I’d given it a good shot,” he remembered. “I had been involved in lot of different parts of it, I’d met extraordinary people, and maybe this was as far as it went.” Late that summer, Chris and Penny got a ride in a VW bus taking them out of Mississippi, but they did not head north. This was a different America, seemingly a different decade, and they wanted to be at the heart of it. By the fall of 1965, they were living in Berkeley. Penny, feeling “ragged and lost,” certain her years in the civil rights movement had come to nothing, took classes while Chris worked as a carpenter. He later studied agriculture at UC Davis and worked with César Chávez and the United Farmworkers of America. But before he could finish a degree, he and Penny heard the sixties’ next call.
In the spring of 1967, the couple moved “back to the land.” In Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom, where they had purchased one hundred acres, Chris, Penny, and other civil rights veterans built a house, planted gardens, and lived far removed from the America they had given up on. But white-out winters made close quarters seem even closer. Although Chris and Penny married and had a son, the commitments that had brought them together in Mississippi could not keep them together. They split up in 1970, setting Chris adrift again. To Jamaica. To Manhattan. To the edge of despair. Wherever he went, he kept designing, building, and in 1974, he began studying architecture at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn.
Married again and with two kids, Chris spent the 1980s as an architect in Manhattan. Then in 1989, he became director of architectural services at Williams College in western Massachusetts. Twenty-five years after hitch-hiking south, he had come home. And there he remains. Every now and then, as he looks toward retirement, Chris finds himself checking on the Internet for houses in Panola County. He wonders what it would be like to live there—“Mississippi without fear”—if only for a few years. Mississippi is a part of him in ways he could never have expected when he left high school to spend a summer there. “Other people went to Vietnam and that impacted their lives,” he said, “but Mississippi was the thing in my life that has resonated down through the years. I’m very clear that the person who got the most out of it was me. I feel grateful every day to have been part of it.”
Individual cameos vary, but taken as a group, Freedom Summer volunteers appear, as they did on arrival in Ohio, as a group portrait of American idealism. Almost without exception, the lives they led after their Mississippi summer have been as principled as the season itself. Whether they steered the sixties or were steered by them, a majority remained involved in social causes. Freedom School teachers continued to teach—many in college. Dozens of volunteers, having seen Jim Crow justice, became attorneys fighting for the poor. Others became full-time activists, running nonprofit agencies. And several became writers, including feminist Susan Brownmiller, Mother Jones cofounder Adam Hochschild, memoirist Sally Belfrage, and Village