see you’re already on CPT,” he said to me as soon as I sat down.
“I’m a little late,” I apologized. “I didn’t catch what you said.”
“That’s ‘colored people’s time,’” he replied sardonically, giving me a granite look. “Why don’t y’all say who you are?”
The girl was Esther Rappaport.
“My name is Raymond Fleetwood,” he continued after the introductions, “but my friends call me ‘Feelgood.’ We ain’t friends yet, but you can call me Feelgood too. Now listen up, we got things to discuss. I know y’all are scared because of what happened, but I want you to calm down and cool yourselves ’cause they’s a lot of people those crackers plan to kill before they get around to you. To survive this summer, we’re gonna hafta learn to love each other. Now that’ll be real easy for you, ’cause I’m very loveable.” He paused a moment to smile a splintered smile, which exposed a chipped front tooth. “But it’s gonna be a lot harder for me, you dig, because I was brought up to hate whites. Down South the people that’ve been beatin’ on me and abusin’ my people has all got white faces just like yours, so if you want to work with me, you’re gonna have to make your position very clear. I won’t trust you an inch until you show me why I should.”
“If we didn’t care,” Esther said, “we wouldn’t be here.”
“That’s right,” another volunteer added. “I’m more determined to go to Mississippi than ever.”
“What’s happened proves that something needs to be done,” I forced myself to say.
“Babies, don’t run those numbers on me,” Feelgood said. “You honkies is all the same; y’all talk a better game than you play. You got a hole in your soul, so you goin’ South to be with black folks so you can put a little soul in the hole. You think it’s gonna be a ‘rewardin’ experience,’ or some such jive. Listen, I’ve lived in both the North and the South, and you just don’t know the score. You don’t know how those peckerwoods think. I do. They haul you to jail, strip you, lay you on the cement floor, and ask you silly questions, and then they beat you and beat you until you’re most dead. You think you’re livin’ in a democracy? Y’all dreamin’. This is a kill-or-be-killed country.”
“I was told to expect violence,” Esther said, “and I certainly do expect it, but I have no concept of violence—I’ve never known any.”
“Well now, that makes you very fortunate, don’t it?” Feelgood looked at all of us with bemusement. “Where have you folks been all your lives?”
“In schools,” I answered for all of us with a guilty smile.
“How many black people in the South, do you think, don’t know about violence?”
“None,” I replied.
“That’s right. And, babies, that’s why y’all gonna need more than a summer to know what’s happenin’. It wasn’t my idea to bring in a bunch of honkies who don’t know where it’s at. Go down, Bob Moses, and such jive, that ain’t my kinda tune, man. Do you know what it takes to understand what it means to be black?” Feelgood asked me directly.
“No.”
“A life and a death—that’s what.”
Feelgood fell into a morose silence.
“All of us are apprehensive,” Esther said. “Who wouldn’t be? But we want to balance our fears against the good we think we can do. We want to hope for the best, but be prepared for the worst. Can’t you give us specific examples of what we may be in for?”
“You’re ‘apprehensive’; you want ‘specific examples.’ Babies, y’all too much.” Feelgood ran his falcon’s gaze over the whole group, but his eyes lingered on Esther, as if he were trying to estimate the impression he was making on her. “I’ll tell you what it’s like to be in the ‘hot box.’ Will that be specific enough for you?”
“Yes.”
“Me and Luvahn Brown got sent to the county farm for sittin’ on the white side at the county courthouse in Jackson. When we got to the farm, they signed us in as ‘Freedom Riders’ and issued us striped uniforms, not the T-shirt and blue overalls the other prisoners was wearin’. We were put in the maximum security cell. The next morning the warden calls us out and tells us the rules. He says, ‘When I tell you to do something, you do it. If I say grab a hoe, you get it. If I say grab a slang blade, you get it. You some of those smart niggers who tryin’ to change things, but if you talk back to me, I’ll take you behind the barn and give you a fist beatin’ you won’t forget. You see these other niggers here? They’ll beat you, too, if I tell them. They’re in here for decent crimes like boot-leggin’ and robbery.’ He asked them if he should beat us, but they said they thought we’d be all right.
“Then they loaded us in a truck and put us to work clearin’ a road. We were movin’ logs, two men to a log, but the guard told me to move one by myself. I tried and I couldn’t. ‘You damn nigger,’ he says, ‘move that log.’ He hit me with a leather strap across the face; then he says, ‘Peewee, cut me a stick.’ He come back with a stick about two inches thick and four feet long. He told Peewee and another prisoner to pull down my pants and hold my arms. Then he started wackin’ me as hard as he could on my back and thighs. After he let me up, he pulled out his gun and pointed it at my face. ‘Have you got anything to say to me, nigger?’ he says, ’cause I ain’t done with you yet.’
“When we returned, he told the warden, ‘I’d like to wrap my strap around this damn nigger’s neck.’ ‘We got a place for smart niggers,’ the warden says. ‘Put him in the sweat box.’ They took me to a hole in the ground, about nine feet by twelve feet, with a steel door and no window. ‘What did I do?’ I asked. They said, ‘Nigger, just shut up, pull off your clothes, and get in.’ It must have been a hundred and twenty degrees; the walls and ceiling dripped. It was pitch-black; the only time I saw a light was three times a day when they brought me bread and water. They left me in that slimy shit hole for over a week. If one of our lawyers hadn’t found out where I was, I would’ve been a dead man. That’s Mississippi for you, babies. They’ll kill you for just nuthin’.”
I stared at Feelgood, wondering if I could survive an ordeal like that. It was one thing to hear about atrocities on television, another to be told about them face-to-face.
“Do you think this Summer Project will make a difference?” I asked.
“If we really pulled off something big,” Feelgood said with a sarcastic curl to his lip, “like if some of you babies was to die, that might do it, that might crack Mississippi wide open.”
“I don’t see why anyone has to die,” Esther said, “to achieve something so basic as the right to vote.”
“Babies,” Feelgood said, “you don’t see a lot of things, but you will.”
I was lying in bed thinking about the harrowing events of the day and debating whether I should go or stay when Lenny showed up with Hal Zizner. He had been at the SNCC office in Atlanta and was furious at the FBI for not investigating the instant they learned that the three were missing.
“As far as I know,” he said, “they still aren’t on the case. And now it’s too late.”
“Why do you
