Freedom Summer - Bruce W. Watson [68]
SNCC’s canvassing handbook was explicit. “Know all roads in and out of town.” “If a person talks but shows obvious reluctance, don’t force a long explanation on them. Come back another day to explain more.” Don’t overwhelm people with possibilities—focus on a single hope. A registration class. A mass meeting. A trip to the courthouse. But Mississippi native Lawrence Guyot saw canvassing in simpler terms. Canvassing was “surviving and just walking around talking to people about what they’re interested in. And it didn’t make any difference. If it was fishing, how do you turn that conversation into ‘When are you gonna register to vote?’ If it was religion, that was an easier one to turn into registering.” Guyot’s cardinal rule was common sense. “You don’t alter the basic format that you walk into. Let’s say you’re riding past a picnic and people are cuttin’ watermelons. You don’t immediately go and say, ‘Stop the watermelon cuttin’, and let’s talk about voter registrations.’ You cut some watermelons.”
As summer progressed, canvassers would see doors gently closed and doors swiftly shut. They would have men nod and swear they would “sure enough” show up for registration classes and then never appear. They would hand pamphlets to old black men, only to realize the men could not read a word. And every now and then they would be welcomed inside a sharecropper’s shack. There they would try not to stare, try not to cry. Blinking back waves of heat radiating from tin roofs, they saw walls patched with yellowed newspaper, bare bulbs hanging from frayed cords, barefoot children playing on the floor—with bottle caps. Many homes had a single picture—of Jesus, John F. Kennedy, or Martin Luther King. “The whole scene,” one volunteer wrote, “was from another century.” One in twenty locals might open their homes. The rest stayed on porches, scratching salt-and-pepper whiskers, furrowing washboard brows.
“I just can’t get my mind on all that. I just never voted and I’m too old now.”
“I don’t want to mess with that mess.”
“I can’t sign no paper.”
And if a volunteer said, “Negroes have to do something to—”
“I ain’t no Negro. I’m a nigger. The Boss Man, he don’t say nothing but ‘nigger girl’ to me. I’m just a nigger. I can’t sign no paper.”
On to the next shack. A black snake slithers across the road. A train whistle floats by. The sinking sun serves as both time clock and barometer of their mood. If one in twenty invite them in, only one in a hundred decide that voting is worth risking a job, a home, a life. Registering to vote had always carried grave risks in Mississippi, but Freedom Summer saw those risks stalk the streets. Canvassers were often followed by a police car, inching along, shotgun on display, tires popping the gravel. One look at a cop was enough to send weary bodies scurrying inside. Volunteers loathed the police on their tail, but a cop could ward off other dangers.
Outside Batesville, Jay Shetterly and Geoff Cowan were canvassing along the Tallahatchie River as it flowed past cotton fields. Speaking to field hands with hoes propped on their shoulders, the two wondered why the men just stared. Cowan talked about voting. The men stared. Shetterly talked about the need to unite. Nervous grins. Finally, the two turned around to see a pickup, a tight-lipped white man, a shotgun on the rack behind him, a pistol on the seat.
“Did that nigger invite you in here? ”
Cowan and Shetterly, both articulate Harvard students, said nothing.
“Did you know Mississippi law allows me to shoot trespassers? ”
No, they did not know.
“Are you gonna get off this plantation? ”
The men left without a word. The pickup roared off.
Numbers alone made the canvass worth the frustration. If a dozen teams went out for a dozen days in a dozen towns, even one out of a hundred added up to