Freedom Summer - Bruce W. Watson [61]
That evening, volunteers and locals gathered at the Williams Chapel, just around the corner from Hamer’s house. Four days earlier, a Molotov cocktail had charred the small church, but flames somehow missed plastic sacks of gasoline laid around the perimeter. The Ruleville fire department put out the blaze, leaving blackened concrete and a congregation feeling blessed. By the time Sunday’s mass meeting began, a hundred people were crammed into a single room. Bare bulbs cast thin shadows on a photo of Jesus and a banner reading “We Shall Overcome.”
“Be strong and of good courage,” the preacher urged. “God sometimes likes us to feel we can’t go any further . . .”
“Yes, yes.”
“That’s because God only helps us with the impossible things we can’t achieve by ourselves . . .”
“Yes, yes.”
When the preacher finished, a volunteer from Illinois announced the FBI arrests in Itta Bena. The FBI had not acted “because it wanted to,” he said. “They did it because they had to. . . . The whole nation is watching you and admiring you, and you must keep on and you must stand up.” Then came the songs, swelling and surging. Uplifted faces, black and white, glistened as they sang.
Nearly five hundred volunteers were now in Mississippi. A few would be gone within a week, leaving in terror or despair. The rest would stay on for what would be either a breakthrough summer or, as the New York Times now feared, a “racial holocaust.” That Sunday morning in Neshoba County, black parishioners prayed in makeshift pews beside the rubble of the Mt. Zion Church. FBI agents again piled into skiffs to drag the Pearl River. In Philadelphia, agents were preparing to question Sheriff Rainey. Posters with mug shots of Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney below the words “Missing—Call FBI” were now posted all over the South. Rita Schwerner was on her way to meet President Johnson, while mayors throughout Mississippi talked of heading to Washington, D.C., to protest “the invasion.” At dusk, a candlelight vigil for the missing men marched in silence outside the White House. Back in Mississippi, a few more volunteers, having driven their own cars from Ohio, arrived in their towns. All the way down, one kept saying, “I don’t know what all the fuss is about. It’s still the United States of America.”
Integrity can be neither lost nor concealed nor faked nor quenched nor artificially come by nor outlived, nor, I believe, in the long run, denied.
—Eudora Welty
CHAPTER FIVE
“It Is Sure Enough Changing”
On his first full day in Mississippi, Fred Winn tore down an outhouse and turned it into bookshelves.
The outhouse stood behind a two-room shack on a dusty road skirting Ruleville’s cotton fields. The road divided black sections of town whose names—Jerusalem and Sanctified Quarters—spoke of spirit, not scenery. The flatness of the Delta made the shack, the quarters, and the railroad tracks nearby seem like some tabletop model train set. Like many Mississippi shacks, this one looked as if no one had lived there since the birth of the blues. Four sunflowers leaned alongside a sagging porch. When the front door creaked open, cockroaches bigger than pecans scurried for cover. Inside lay musty rooms strewn with broken bottles, splintered furniture, and rusted box springs. Cobwebs draped corners. Walls wept with mildew. And out back stood the outhouse, angled like some ancient sundial in the morning glare.
Twenty volunteers traipsed through the house that Monday morning, in shock or dismay. This was to be Ruleville’s Freedom School? This? But in a scene mirrored throughout Mississippi that week, women tied their hair back, men stripped off shirts, and all began swarming over the house like the insects swarming around them. Bearing brooms, buckets, and bottles of Lysol, they revived the dying shack. Women carried white rags inside,