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By Root 1773 0

—beatings, blackjacks, shotguns. But none of the horror stories in Ohio had prepared them for this. They had been warned about white Mississippi, but on this first day, black Mississippi overwhelmed them. Along with swarms of well-wishers, sounds swirled around them—the drone of insects, the rumble of passing trains, a baby’s cry from a shack that looked empty and abandoned. Savory odors of fried food mixed with the foul stench of outhouses. Sights from a distant past surprised them: washed-out ads for Camels and Lucky Strikes painted on splintering wood; women bent over washboards; laundry on a line. They were charmed by the folk art of poor folk desperate for finery. Ornate hub-caps were nailed to walls. Blue milk-of-magnesia bottles hung glittering from trees. Rotting porches were graced with pink geraniums in rusted tin cans. This new world also attacked their skin. Mosquito bites were nothing new, but what were these things called chiggers? Why couldn’t you even see them? How could anything itch so much? And if the sun was this mean in June, what oven temperatures awaited in July, what furnace would fire up come August?

But despite the heat, the bugs, the swarm of sounds, nothing startled the volunteers as much as the destitution all around them. Raised in “the affluent society,” where poverty had supposedly been conquered, they walked that day into its shadows. Most were appalled; some were enraged. Where was the pavement? The plumbing? The streetlights? Their hosts, with their modest two-bedroom homes, were rich compared to those living in the shacks just down the gravel road and around the corner. “There are people here without food and clothing,” one volunteer wrote home. “Kids that eat a bit of bread for breakfast, chicken necks for dinner. Kids that don’t have clothes to go to school in. Old old people, and young people chop cotton from sun up till sundown for $3 a day. They come home exhausted, it’s not enough to feed their family on. It’s gone before they earn it.” Many children running to greet volunteers had open sores on their limbs. In doorways of the more desperate shacks, some infants were too weak, too bloated, to run at all. Ancient black hands reaching out to shake a white hand—for the first time—were callused or crippled. For every smiling face, another on some distant porch was vacant, broken, defeated. On the newcomers walked, past homes “I could kick down with my feet and a small hammer.” Some shacks had raw sewage out back. Others, propped on cinder blocks, seemed sunken in their own stench. This was America, many had to remind themselves. This was “the most appalling example of deprivation ever seen.” Against these odds, what could one volunteer—or a thousand—hope to accomplish? And yet they were in Mississippi now; they had nothing else to do but try.

Returning to their homes, volunteers found everyday heroics. In the town of Itta Bena, in the heart of the Delta, two young men marveled at their hostess, a sixty-seven-year-old woman living alone beside the railroad tracks that ran along Freedom Street. Limping on a leg long ago broken and badly set, Rosa Lee Williams was “a fiery and fast moving old woman.” A retired midwife, she had lost her children in the 1918 flu epidemic, her husband some years later. Happy to have the four dollars a week each volunteer paid her, she kept an immaculate house, constantly sweeping dust stirred by passing trains, battling horseflies with insecticides she sprayed from aerosol cans. When the men moved a bed into the living room, she was quick to put a can under it—for “spittin’.” She chewed tobacco, didn’t they?

Soon they would get used to Mississippi, sooner than black Mississippi expected. College students would sit at tables piled with fried chicken, collards, even “chitlins”—spicy pig intestines—and eat their fill. A woman from Long Island would plunge her chigger-infested legs into a bucket of gasoline, and the nasty bugs would be gone. “And the outhouse that we had to use?” remembered Greenwood author Endesha Ida Mae Holland. “I was really surprised because