Freedom Summer - Bruce W. Watson [64]
Volunteers who had been in Mississippi since the first day of summer were getting used to the place. Now the fresh arrivals struggled with each new annoyance. One woman hated the gnats that swarmed everywhere, even up her skirt. Another couldn’t believe how he took a shower, dried off, and within minutes had damp armpits, a sticky shirt, and a halo of sweat. A third bristled when his host family treated him “as if I was some strange god, and I mean a dangerous one as well as a good one.”
For carpenter Fred Winn, the hardest thing to get used to was midnight. Daytime kept him busy, building bookshelves, reviving rotting shacks, but each midnight he lay awake on the floor of his new home—the Ruleville Freedom School. Two weeks earlier he had been in his native San Francisco, where nights were deliciously cool. Now he lay in the muggy dampness, mulling over how one thing had led to another, leading finally to Mississippi.
Fred had learned of the summer project when SNCC’s spring speaking tour came to his college in Marin County. Many students had given SNCC money, but friends were dumbfounded when Fred Winn decided to give his summer. A gregarious twenty-year-old whose Sausalito apartment was a notorious “party pad” hardly seemed a likely civil rights worker. Only a few friends knew that behind Fred’s firm handshake and salty speech was a family secret. A year earlier, Fred’s father, a respected San Francisco lawyer, told his family he had another child—a black child. Fred’s mother threw her husband out. Siblings wanted nothing to do with the four-year-old girl, but Fred met her and was charmed. Suddenly the color line between the Winns and their black maid had blurred. And all his father’s lectures about never using “that word” to describe Negroes made sense. “Now it wasn’t just these ‘Negroes’ or ‘coloreds’ or whatever everyone was calling them, but people to whom I’m related,” Fred recalled. “That’s a consciousness changing thing.”
Fred’s father, worried that he and his party-loving son had nothing in common, was pleased by “Freddy’s” decision to go to Mississippi. Fred’s mother called the college president and threatened, if anything happened to her son, to sue for allowing SNCC on campus. The president called Fred into his office, but there was nothing an academic or a mother could do—Fred’s father had signed SNCC’s permission form. During the next two months the college “court jester” became insufferable, arguing on the quad about civil rights, signing his letters “We Shall Overcome.” Some friends said Fred was crazy to go, others called him heroic, but he just felt righteous anger, tempered by the first cold feelers of terror. Having heard SNCC’s stories, he knew what might happen to him in Mississippi. He was not sure he could take a beating without fighting back. The idea of rolling into a helpless ball while being kicked and hammered went against his every instinct. And who knew what else Mississippi had in store? Shortly before leaving for Ohio, Fred sat down to write his will. After designating who should have his car, books, and other belongings, he signed, “My spirit lives on. Wherever there is a fight of equality, whenever a person is deprived of something that is his, I will be there. The truth is behind me—We shall overcome.”
Other volunteers brought white-collar expertise to Mississippi, but Fred Winn brought tools. SNCC had asked for handymen, and Fred, though a lawyer’s son, had always felt an affinity for the building trades. So a few days after writing his will, he packed a toolbox, then threw in paper and crayons for Freedom Schools, his father’s Bible, and a first aid kit. Boarding a Greyhound, he crossed the Sierras and rode on toward Ohio. En route, he cracked the books SNCC had recommended to volunteers—Black Like Me, The Mind of the South, The Souls of Black Folk. But three books could scarcely prepare him for the culture clash ahead. Naive and untested—“a young twenty-year-old