Coming of Age in Mississippi (48 page)

“I will take Mama by there,” Adline finally said after she realized I wasn’t going to volunteer. Junior left, and Jennie Ann sat down and started looking through an old magazine.

“How do you like the apartment, Mama?” Adline said.

“It’s nice, but ain’t it too small?”

“For fifty dollars a month, it’s plenty large, Mama.”

Adline and Mama continued to make small conversation
about the apartment. Then they talked about the children. I had been away from home for five years. And I had only been back once in that time. I felt so left out hearing about the children. Since I had been home last, Mama had had two more. They were complete strangers to me. All of a sudden I noticed Mama held a baby in her arms. She had walked in and been here for about thirty minutes and I hadn’t even noticed the baby. “She must be feeling pretty bad that I didn’t say anything about it,” I thought. “That damn Adline is trying to be smart because she hasn’t said anything at all about the baby either.”

I sat there not knowing how to break the ice between Mama and me. I wanted to ask her a million questions about how they were treated in Centreville when I was going to jail and all. She had told me many times in her letters and Adline had told me even more since I had been in New Orleans. But it wasn’t as if it had come from Mama herself. I wanted to hear it from her while she was sitting there but I thought she might start crying or something. So I didn’t ask. I just sat and waited for her or Adline to start the talk again.

“Why don’t you lay the baby down?” Adline said at last.

“Is it asleep?” I asked, taking advantage of my chance to talk about it.

“No, she ain’t ’sleep. She is just a real good baby,” Mama said.

“Then put her on the bed,” I said. “I thought you were holding her because you didn’t want to wake her.

“How old is she?” I asked as Mama walked over to the bed.

“Three months. And you ain’t even looked at her.”

I felt so bad when Mama said that. I got right up and went to look at the baby.

“She is cute. How old is she?” I said.

“I just told you, she is three months.” Mama still sounded hurt.

“She is crazy, Mama. Don’t pay her any attention,” Adline said. “She sit around and talk to people for hours and don’t
remember a word they say. Since she been back here from Canton, she sleeps and groans in her sleep. She is crazy.”

“Mind your own business,” I shouted to Adline. “I have more to do than talk all the time.”

“Like what?” she asked me. “Like sleep all day?”

“Like think,” I said. “Think. Something you are not capable of doing.”

“Think, huh! Well, that’s what’s wrong with you now. If you don’t stop so much thinking you are gonna end up in a nuthouse.”

“When are you going back to Mississippi?” Mama asked.

“I don’t know if I am going back,” I answered her coldly to discourage her from talking further on the subject.

“Why don’t you settle down and get a job?” she asked.

“I have a job,” I said. “And at the moment I am settled.”

“That’s what you spend four years in college for—to wash dishes—to work in a restaurant? Why don’t you get a job teaching in New Orleans?”

“Teaching!” I said. “I am not the teaching kind. Furthermore, I wouldn’t teach in any of these schools here in New Orleans or in Mississippi if the job paid a million a year.”

I noticed tears forming in Mama’s eyes. But I couldn’t stand her telling me what to do with my education. When I was sick and starving in college she couldn’t get a dime from Raymond to send me to buy sardines or aspirins. I had finished only because of my own desire to do so without any encouragement at all from anyone. Now I felt as if I should please myself doing whatever pleased me.

Mama sat there for thirty minutes or so not saying another word to me. Then she and Adline left for Winnie’s house.

I had only five dollars left after making the down payment on the furniture the day before. I took it and went out to buy Mama’s birthday presents. I bought her a long flannel nightgown for $3.98 and invested another dollar in a bottle of sweet wine.

I was late getting to the party that night. It was at George
Lee’s place. When I walked in, there were about twelve people sitting around in the living room. Among them were Winnie and my Aunt Celia. All of them just sat there staring at me as though I were from Mars. I spoke, and they barely uttered a word. I went to the bedroom and put the presents I had for Mama on the bed where all the others were.

When I came back to the living room, I pulled a stool up to the bar where Jennie Ann was sitting and began talking to her. I asked her what grade she was in and a few general questions. She just answered them as though I were someone she didn’t even know. I tried another approach. I started telling her how pretty she was, and asking her about boys making passes at her and all. Her eyes lit up then, and she started telling me things like “One boy in my class told me I was prettier than any brown doll he seen.” Then I got a little mad because here she was eleven years old and the only thing she knew how to talk about was boys.

While sitting there I could see Mama in the mirror behind the bar. She was looking at me with her eyes full of water. I sat there talking to Jennie Ann for about an hour and all that time Mama never took her eyes off me. I could see that a thousand questions were going on in her mind. I looked at her and wondered how she had brought me into this world and did not understand me or it. Maybe she understood Adline better. I looked at Adline. She was running all around the place tonight acting as content as anyone. Sometimes I hated her because she was so content with nothing. I hated her now as I looked at her. We were sisters, but there was no likeness between us. Junior walked in and I directed my thoughts to him. We looked a little alike. And sometimes when I was with him, I could feel that he was just as rebellious and discontent as I was. But his discontent would come and go. I had never been able to do away with mine like that. It was always there. Sometimes I used to try to suppress it and it didn’t show. Now it showed all the time.

I got tired of everyone staring at me so I decided to leave
the party. I told Mama that I had a terrible headache, and that I had left a present on the bed for her. I wished her a happy birthday and left. On my way back to the apartment, I was almost blinded by tears running down my cheeks. I couldn’t understand why I seemed so strange to everyone. At the party I felt like I had committed a crime and everyone was punishing me by not talking to me. All of a sudden, I found myself wishing I was in Canton again working in the Movement with people who understood me. Here among my own people, I seemed crazy because I was grieved over problems they didn’t even think about.

I walked around most of the next week wondering what to do about the Movement. At one point, I made up my mind to go back to Canton. But then I couldn’t think up any reasons for going. I had the feeling that I should be back in the Movement, but involved in some different way that I could not yet define. I decided to give up thinking about it for a while.

On Friday, November 22, 1963, I was headed for the pantry during the rush hour at the restaurant with a tray of dishes when Julian, the new cashier, a white Tulane Law student, walked up behind me and said, “President Kennedy was just shot!” Everything around me went black. When things were light again, I found myself sitting dazed in a chair with Julian holding my tray. Just that morning, I remembered, James had made a crack about President Kennedy coming to the South—I hadn’t even given it much thought. Julian went out front to see if there was any further news. A short while later, he came back and said that President Kennedy was dead. For a while I just sat there staring at everyone and not seeing a thing. “So much killing,” I thought, “so, so much killing. And when will it end? When?”

Miles away I could hear the other waiters talking:

“Where did it happen, Waite?”

“In Dallas.”

“What? He should have known better than to come to Texas.”

“Anne, there goes your civil rights,” James said. “The Negroes may as well start packing. Yes, I think I’m going to haul ass back to Africa or somewhere.”

All of us working there were Negro except Julian. I guess we were all afraid to even consider what his death meant to Negroes. I know I was.

After all the other waiters left the pantry, I somehow pulled myself together and walked slowly through the dining room. My customers were still there, all of them. I noticed how quiet it was. Usually during the rush hour it was so noisy. But right now no one was saying a word.

By the time I got to the front of the dining room, I was enraged. When I turned around and looked at all those white faces—all of those Southern white faces—fire was in my eyes. I felt like racing up and down between the tables, smashing food into their faces, breaking dishes over their heads, and all the time I would shout and yell MURDERERS! MURDERERS! MURDERERS! Then I wondered what was I doing in this segregated restaurant. What was I doing serving all of these evil-minded murderers? I stood there with blood gushing up to my brains, feeling the hot air as it came out of my nostrils. Tears were burning my cheeks. Mr. Steve noticed I was crying. He must have thought I was fainting or something. He walked me back to the pantry and asked me to take the rest of the day off. I looked at him and he had tears in his eyes, too. I wondered if he would be crying if he was a native white Southern American instead of a Greek. I didn’t remember seeing a single tear when I was out there—no, not one. All those stony faces were white as a sheet, but dry as a desert.

It took me about an hour to change my uniform and another hour to get enough nerve to leave the restaurant. It was as though I was afraid to go out into that world that was waiting outside, that cruel and evil world. I had the feeling that when I walked out on the street everything would be pitch
black. “A world this evil,” I thought, “should be black, blind, and deaf, and without any feelings at all. Then there won’t be any color to be seen, no hatred to be heard, and no pain to be felt.”

Stumbling up to the corner, I picked up a newspaper as I waited for the St. Charles streetcar. The headlines of the New Orleans
States Item
read PRESIDENT DEAD in the largest print I had ever seen.

On the streetcar, I tried to look at the faces of the people. All I could see was newspapers. Every head was buried behind one. I looked especially for the faces of Negroes who had so many hopes centered on the young President. I knew they must feel as though they had lost their best friend—one who was in a position to help determine their destiny. To most Negroes, especially to me, the President had made “Real Freedom” a hope.

Sometime during that next week, James said to me, “Annie, ever since Kennedy was killed you have been walking around here as though you were in outer space. Why don’t you stop killing yourself over all these problems? You should never have come back to New Orleans. What you should have done was take a vacation from the States.” I realized he was right. But I didn’t even have money to cross the state line. I also realized that coming back to New Orleans was even worse than staying in Canton. Here I had nothing in common with the people around me except the color of my skin. Just to keep my sanity, I knew I had to get involved with the Movement again.

I called a girl I knew in the New Orleans CORE chapter, and the following week I went to my first meeting. I learned there that CORE had a voter registration drive going on in Orleans Parish and that teams were being organized to canvass on Saturdays and Sundays. I volunteered for one.

My canvassing partner was white—a quiet-spoken New York girl named Erika, who was managing editor of the
Tulane Drama Review
. I brought her to my apartment several times
and introduced her to Adline. Adline had never been introduced to whites before on a social level. She hated white people with a passion. Although she never did act up around Erika, I think Erika sensed how she felt. For a while Erika didn’t act comfortable around her, but before long, she and Adline were cracking jokes with each other. I hadn’t quite gotten Adline to canvass with us, but I could tell she was coming around.

After about two months, I found it as hard to persuade Negroes to register in New Orleans as it had been in Mississippi. In Orleans Parish the number of registered Negroes never exceeded 35,000—regardless of how many voters registered each year. To keep the number constant, a certain number of Negroes were purged annually from the voting list. The voting test was just as hard and the registrar flunked Negroes just as fast as in Mississippi. But most New Orleans Negroes were very content. The majority of them had come from rural Mississippi or rural Louisiana—in comparison, New Orleans seemed like a utopia; at least they were able to find work. The only big difference about canvassing in New Orleans was that here civil rights workers, Negro and white, could canvass together and not be threatened or openly assaulted.

The first weekend in March, Junior went home to Centreville. I was kind of sorry he was going. Every time someone went home and returned, they always brought back bad news. If Negroes weren’t being killed in Woodville or Centreville, the whites were beating them up or running them out of town. Late Sunday night, Adline and I had just gotten into bed when we heard someone knocking. Adline got up to see who it was. It was Junior.

“What are you doing coming by here this time of night?” Adline said.

“Mama sent y’all this,” he said, giving Adline a package
which consisted of two large feather pillows. “Essie Mae, you sleep?” he asked.

“No. Why?” I said, still in bed.

“Emma’s brother was killed Friday night.”

“What? Clift was killed?” I asked, almost daring him to repeat what he just said.

“You’re kidding,” Adline said.

“Why should I come by here at twelve at night to kid y’all,” Junior said.

“How was he killed?” I asked him.

“He was coming from work Friday night. They say his whole face was almost shot off. I went to Woodville to see Daddy and Emma and they is almost crazy now. They don’t know who did it.”