Freedom Summer - Bruce W. Watson [98]
Late that evening, a tap came on the wall of the white women’s cell. A small, flat panel opened, and a face appeared. A black face. Identifying himself as a “trusty,” the man passed in candy bars and a note from the black women. “We are not going to eat,” the note said. “Send us cigs. We don’t have light.” For the next hour, the women talked through the face-sized opening, talking with the trusty. His name was Patterson, and he was doing eighteen months for a crime he said he had not committed. The women gave him a dollar for cigarettes. They were thrilled to learn how many had been arrested that day. Then Patterson closed the panel and went to visit other prisoners. Toward midnight on the first day of the 1960s, the door opened for one final note. It came from the black men. “We won’t eat tomorrow,” it read. “We will sing loud about daybreak. Freedom.”
BOOK TWO
A Bloody Peace Written in the Sky
Some things you must always be unable to bear. Some things you must never stop refusing to bear. Injustice and outrage and dishonor and shame. No matter how young you are or how old you have got. Not for kudos and not for cash: your picture in the paper nor money in the bank either. Just refuse to bear them.
—William Faulkner, Intruder in the Dust
I wasn’t even sure, in fact, how voting was supposed to help me, but the more I heard about white people being so against it, the more I started thinking there must be something to this voting.
—Unita Blackwell, Barefootin’
CHAPTER SEVEN
“WalkTogether, Children”
Trembling, nauseous, and terrified, the remedial reading teacher rode the bus toward McComb.
In the two weeks since he had finished classes at P.S. 624, Ira Landess had crossed a cultural divide larger than a continent. After taking a bus from Manhattan to Memphis, he was welcomed to the South by a cabdriver who, upon learning his purpose, hurled his bags to the sidewalk. With other teachers in training, Landess had hung his head to sing, “Three are missing, Lord, Kumbaya. . . .” On the Fourth of July, his group had crossed into Mississippi. Stopping for lunch in “the other Philadelphia,” they stared out a café window, wondering which passing strangers might know where the missing men were. On their way out of town, they passed a billboard with a photo of John F. Kennedy splattered with black paint. Arriving that afternoon at the holiday picnic in Hattiesburg, Landess ate catfish, went on the tractor hayride, and took cover when the pickup with the gun rack passed. That night, he bolted awake, startled by strange sounds. Certain the Klan had come for him, he summoned the courage to look outside. A cow was rubbing against his shack. Later Landess met black kids who asked whether Jews like him had tails. And now here he was, riding this steamy, smoke-filled Greyhound, surrounded by blanched faces, crossing into Pike County with its kudzu-choked trees, its Klansmen in the hills, its bombs and burned-out churches.
When dynamite damaged the McComb Freedom House, SNCC had called for more volunteers to come “share the terror.” Because his former Brandeis classmate, Mendy Samstein, was a SNCC staffer in McComb, Landess signed up. A few days later, terrified at what he had gotten himself into, certain he had been spotted as an “invader,” a Jew, he arrived in the most dangerous town in Mississippi.
By mid-July, when nothing worse than fear had attacked him, Landess had settled in. Glad to be back in a classroom, he had shed his initial terror. But nothing made him feel more at home than the greeting he got one afternoon. He was walking through McComb’s black quarters when a bent, gray-haired