Coming of Age in Mississippi (51 page)

There were about three hundred teen-agers in the church. I saw all those that had been on my canvassing teams and many more. After they finished the song, the room swelled with noise. I found myself carried away just being in their presence. Standing there looking at them, all of my hopes in the future came to life again. I could see them as men and women living a normal life as a real part of this world, as a group of people that belonged—belonged because they had fought the battle and won. My thoughts were interrupted as
some of the teen-agers recognized me standing in the back of the church. “Annie Moody!” They sang my name out and ran to me. Several of the girls swung around my neck almost pulling me down to the floor of the church. By this time the place was so full of noise that the sound waves rang like bells in my ears.

Just as we were about to leave the church, some flashbulbs went off. As the teen-agers began to thin out, I looked around and saw my favorite cop taking pictures of me and the teenagers. As the teen-agers noticed him, they began to pose before the camera. They were putting on all kinds of monkey faces. They embarrassed the cop, posing and carrying on so. “I don’t want y’all’s picture,” he said. “I want that gal’s there,” pointing to me.

“What gal?” one of the teen-agers asked.

“Oh! You mean Miss Moody, huh?” another one said.

“Go on, Miss Moody, pose for him,” one of the teen-aged boys yelled as all of them stepped back leaving me in front of the camera alone. And that stupid cop went click, click, click until he was out of film. He finished his roll of film and said, “Much obliged.”

One of the boys asked, “What are you going to do with them—sell ’em or put them up in your room?” At that point, I too began to wonder what he was going to do with them. Again I thought he must be from Centreville.

Mrs. Devine called me and I fell in by her side but I did not say a word to her as we walked back to the church where the adults were gathered. She had seen what happened, and I sensed she too was wondering about the cop.

Getting back to the church, we discovered that the adults had been granted permission to march to the courthouse. However, they could march only under the condition that they did so two at a time with ten minutes’ walking time between each couple. It was after one o’clock now and it was really hot. Those country cops were standing in the streets lined up all the way from the church to the courthouse. Now
that it was hot, they looked like they were mad as hell having to stand sweating out in the boiling sun to “guard a bunch of niggers.” Slowly the adults began moving down the road. They too looked like the heat was getting next to them. They were walking so slow it would have taken two months for them to get to the courthouse two at a time and ten minutes apart.

There were now about two hundred people sitting around on the church lawn. Most of them were teen-agers watching the adults march. I noticed Mrs. Chinn talking to some men and I went over to where she was standing.

“Where’ve you been, Anne?” she asked.

“I went over to Asbury with Mrs. Devine. They got about three hundred screaming teen-agers over there in the church. When are
they
going to demonstrate at the courthouse?” I asked her.

“They can’t,” she said. “Most of these kids here have already tried to get there. But they can’t get near the place. Those country bastards have formed a solid wall around it.”

As we stood there talking we were interrupted by a conversation between the teen-agers and two of the cops in the street.

“What y’all niggers marching for anyway?” one of the cops asked.

“Niggers? Niggers? Niggers? You don’t see no niggers out here,” one of the teen-agers said. “If you mean us
Negroes
, then we are marching because we are aiming to taste a bit of that freedom you white people are enjoying.”

“Freedom?” one of the cops asked.

“Y’all wouldn’t even know what to do with it,” the other cop said.

“Well, we are on the road to getting it. When we do, we’ll show you all what we’ll do with it,” another teen-ager said.

“That’s telling him, man,” someone shouted as others pitched in.

“Yes, we gonna eat in your restaurant, drive your police cars, vote, and everything else,” they were saying.

All of a sudden, the air was filled with laughter from the teen-agers on the church lawn. At that moment, the two cops jumped the little ditch between the street and the church lawn and began pulling a young man named McKinley Hamilton toward the street by both arms. When they made it as far as the ditch, they jumped it again, still dragging McKinley, who was stumbling along behind. They thought he was resisting them. One of the cops cracked him across the head with his billy stick, and the other one joined in. The licks were hitting hard and sounded loud against McKinley’s head. Two more cops joined in. The Negroes on the lawn began to move slowly toward the street.

“Stop beating that boy!” Mrs. Chinn yelled.

“We ain’t gonna take that!” someone yelled as every Negro on the church lawn began to move faster.

McKinley was down on the pavement in a pool of blood. By the time the Negroes reached the ditch, a jeep driven by a cop had pulled up. As McKinley was picked up bodily and thrown into it, big clots of blood dripped from his head and you could only see the whites of his eyes.

“They killed him!” some old Negro screamed.

“Jesus, they’ve killed the boy,” cried another.

I don’t know how I got there but I found myself standing on the edge of the ditch with the other Negroes. I realized that within a second or so all hell was going to break loose and that I, too, was going to be a part of it. I turned and looked at the rest of the crowd. Everyone in the church was now standing on the church lawn—about six hundred Negroes. They were all raging with anger.

“Come on, let’s get back inside!” Reverend Cox was yelling over the noise that filled the air. Almost everyone ignored him and continued talking. “We can’t handle this out here this way! Let’s go inside and discuss it.”

Suddenly there was a new commotion as I started back
toward the church. Two white men were standing in the street. Negroes were shouting at them. “What happened? What happened? You men are crazy,” a teen-ager yelled.

“Weren’t you sitting over there in that car?” shouted another teen-ager. “We saw you. And you saw what happened just like we did!”

Angry shouts from other teen-agers and adults forced the two white men to retreat to a red car that had been parked at the intersection by the church all morning. “Who are they?” I asked Mrs. Chinn, who was standing just outside the church door.

“FBI’s,” she said. “They were sitting over there and they saw it all just as we did, and them bastards had the nerve to ask what happened.”

Reverend Cox was praying and all the Negroes stood with their heads bowed as Mrs. Chinn and I entered the church. “I hope all of you realize what just happened out there,” Reverend Cox said to the crowd. “At any minute, violence could have broken out. And I stand here as a minister in the house of God and wonder if I would have actually taken part.”

Someone yelled, “We should all go to jail and stay there until something is done. For all we know that boy is dead.”

After this statement, everything really roared. It took about an hour to decide what to do. Many of these people couldn’t go to jail. Some had small children to look after, others had jobs. In fact I don’t think anyone had any idea of going to jail that day. Finally, Reverend Cox asked for volunteers. About eighty volunteered to go for no more than a week. After this a march was organized by the volunteers. An eighty-six-year-old man was chosen to lead it.

A short while later, the marchers filed out. I was now standing in the street across from the church. As I watched that eighty-six-year-old man leading the line walk, I could taste hot tears running down my face. He walked with the aid of a cane because of a limp in one leg. His head was held high and he was chewing tobacco and spitting every few minutes or so.
About a block and a half from the church, just in front of the railroad tracks, the cops had formed a solid wall along the entire street. They wore helmets and were armed with rifles, pistols, and billy sticks. As the old man got within a few yards of the wall of cops, he picked up his cane and seemed to walk straight up to them without a limp at all. I think every Negro who saw this happen was toughened by the way that old man faced those cops. I felt something and I knew that I was not the only one who did. All the marchers were stopped and made to wait in line until two large city trucks arrived. Then they were taken off to jail. We all went back inside the church, and Reverend Cox called for a moment of silent prayer for those eighty volunteers. Then we were dismissed.

Because of the tension that had built up around the Freedom Day, Canton had been placed under a 9 P.M. curfew, two weeks prior to the march. Dave’s car had been used to carry home some of the Negroes who lived far out in the country after they had participated in the march. Now we sat around the Freedom House and waited for news on McKinley’s condition. As soon as we had gotten news that he was unconscious but alive and the car was returned, we got out of Canton. Everything was so tense now that the whole town might go up in smoke after dark. The Negroes were still angry because of the cops beating McKinley. And the whites were mad because the Negroes were trying to get together at last.

When Dave dropped me off at Tougaloo it was after six o’clock. I was so tired. I hadn’t eaten anything all day and I was extremely hungry. Since they had already served dinner in the dining room, I decided to go to Reverend King’s for a bite to eat. Reverend King and a group of students were getting ready to go to Canton when I walked into his house. They had heard the news of McKinley’s beating on the radio along with an announcement of a mass meeting that night. I told them about the curfew and tried to persuade them not to go. However,
they went anyway with the intention of getting out of town before nine.

After I had helped myself to a sandwich and coffee, I went to the dormitory to get to bed early. I was just getting into bed an hour later when someone knocked on my door.

“Moody, did you hear the news?” one of the girls said as she peeped in the door.

“What news?” I asked.

“Reverend King them have just been beaten up in Canton. Someone just called. They are at the hospital in Jackson.”

I sat there for a while with my face buried in my hands. I was too tired to even think. Finally, I pulled myself off the bed and went back to the Kings’ house. Three other students were already there. I was told that no one was hurt except Hamid Kisenbasch, a Pakistani assistant professor of sociology at Tougaloo. They said that Reverend King had called and said that they would be back to the house soon.

It was about 11:45 when they came and told us what had happened. “Well, Anne, you were right,” Reverend King confessed. “We were on our way back. And just as we got on 55 headed back to Tougaloo, a truck and two cars came up from somewhere. We hadn’t noticed anyone following us when we left. Anyway, one of the cars swung around in front of us forcing us to stop. We quickly locked the car doors. Almost before we could get them locked, about fifteen white men were surrounding the car. They had clubs, guns of all sorts, and one had a large can. I think it was filled with kerosene or gasoline. When they were about to break the windows out of the car, Mr. Kisenbasch rolled his window halfway down to try and reason with them. He was hit on the side of the head at the same time two other men reached in to open the car door. When I realized they must have thought he was Negro because he was dark, I yelled to them, ‘He’s not Negro, he is Indian.’ Blood was now spurting out of his head. They let him go and talked among themselves for a while. I think they thought he was the Indian
that participated in the sit-in with us yesterday. Anyway, they let us go, warning us never to come back to Canton again.”

“If I have ever been close to death it was tonight,” Joan Trumpauer added.

“I think everyone in the car thought so too. I know I sure did,” Mrs. King said.

Then Reverend King told us how he had gone to the highway patrol headquarters to report the incident. He said they were handled like they had committed the crime.

I just didn’t feel like wasting any breath on Mississippi law officials. I had done it a million times before anyway, and I was exhausted. I said goodnight and headed back to the dorm, dreading the thought of practice marching tomorrow for the graduation exercises.

At ten o’clock on Sunday morning, I found myself standing in line in front of the college chapel. It was hard for me to believe, but within thirty minutes I would be marching through that door to listen to a college baccalaureate sermon as a member of the graduating class. Standing there at that moment, the whole campus looked different. The wind was blowing, and it was very humid. The moss hanging from the trees swayed back and forth with the breeze. The students in the line weren’t talking very much at all. In fact, there was a sense of sadness in the air. As we slowly began to move, the only thing that could be heard was the sound of marching feet.

Inside the chapel, everyone was standing and music saturated the air. The audience remained standing until the last graduate in line was seated. When I sat, I breathed for what seemed like the first time in years.

I didn’t realize that the audience consisted of parents of the graduates until the minister delivering the sermon addressed them. “Yes, parents,” I thought. And then I realized that not a single member of my family was present. Adline and Junior had said that they would come, but they hadn’t. “Here I am,” I
thought, “alone, all alone as I have been for a long time.” Then I had the feeling that now that I was out of college and couldn’t go home, I would be even more alone than in the past. Graduating, I thought, and I had no idea of where I was going or how I would get there. The only thing I knew was what I would have to face as a Negro trying.

After the sermon was over, we were asked to line up in the front of Galloway Hall for pictures. When all the pictures were taken, I went inside and went to bed. I couldn’t stand the sight of the other graduating seniors showing their parents around the campus. It made me feel funny—sort of like an orphan.