Freedom Summer - Bruce W. Watson [74]
“I didn’t try to register for you,” Hamer replied. “I tried to register for myself.”
Thrown out of her shack, Hamer moved to a neighbor’s where her bedroom was soon riddled by sixteen shots fired late one night. Yet she dug into herself and into the movement, becoming, as she called it, “a Snicker.” James Forman said of Hamer, “She was SNCC itself.” Hamer sometimes seemed a force of nature. When she threw her head back and sang, it was said you could hear her all over Sunflower County. When she spoke, she lifted audiences off their feet. When she moved, black Mississippi seemed to move with her. She often discounted the risks. “The only thing they could do to me was kill me and it seemed like they’d been trying to do that just a little bit at a time since I could remember.” A deeply religious woman, Hamer saw the movement in biblical themes. Bob Moses’ name, she often said, was no coincidence. Beatings and jail were crosses to bear. Summer volunteers were Good Samaritans, and freedom was her own Promised Land.
As Hamer had told volunteers in Ohio, she had been savagely beaten in jail in 1963, yet she refused to hate those who hated her. “The white man’s afraid he’ll be treated like he’s been treating the Negroes, but I couldn’t carry that much hate.” By 1964, her signature phrase—“I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired”—was widely known among Delta blacks, and her favorite song, “This Little Light of Mine,” kicked off every mass meeting she attended. Throughout Freedom Summer, her home would be a headquarters not just for volunteers but for freedom itself. Reporters looking for stories were told to go to Fannie Lou Hamer’s house. Hungry volunteers always found a pot of beans cooking in her kitchen, while those who needed shade found their way beneath her pecan tree. For decades, she had seen no future beyond Ruleville’s cotton fields. Yet in the spring of 1964, she waged a quixotic run for Congress and was profiled in the Nation and the Washington Post. That August, she would speak on national television. But for all her fire, it was her husband, a huge, hard-drinking stalwart she called “Pap,” who best expressed how the blend of volunteers and local heroes brought the movement in Mississippi to fruition that summer. Asked by a cop how he felt having “white boys” sleep in his house, Pap Hamer replied, “I feel like a man because they treat me like a man.”
At Hamer’s picnic, volunteers ate “special dishes” prepared by women in Jerusalem and Sanctified Quarters. The fare included cornbread, peas in bacon and onion sauce, potato casseroles, “and more and more and more until the pies and the cakes and the ice cream came and we could not refuse.” After the feast, four congressmen touring the Delta, one the father of a Ruleville volunteer, said a few words, but a local black woman said more: “These young white folks who are already free, they come here only to help us. They is proving to us that black and white can do it together, that it ain’t true what we always thought, that all white folks is booger men, ’cause they sure is not.”
Another week had passed in Mississippi, another week of hope and hatred. Prank calls now came to project offices asking, “Can I speak to Andy Goodman? ” But for all the hostility in the air, the second week of Freedom Summer saw half the violence of the first. Not even the most naive volunteer