had a truly bizarre nightmare last night. It was so scary.” Esther hesitated a moment. “I took a long kitchen knife and slashed two tires. Suddenly there was an ugly man there with bony hands who had a longer knife, and he slashed all four tires on our family Mercedes. I was furious, so I ran to my mother screaming, ‘I only slashed two tires and he slashed four!’ and I held up four fingers for emphasis. ‘In this life,’ my mother said in an absolutely calm and controlled voice, ‘we must expect retribution.’ At that moment I looked out the window and I saw the man slash his stomach open. . . . Then I woke up.”
“I wonder what Freud would make of that.”
“Oh God,” Esther cried, “don’t tell me. I hadn’t even thought of it in those terms. It was just so terrifying!”
“How come your mom isn’t political anymore?”
“Money. It’s that simple. They made too much of it. She and my father used to do things, now they just discuss them. They think politics is a spectator sport; I think it’s acting on your beliefs.”
“What does your father do?”
“He’s in advertising. You know that line for Playtex: lasting stretch that won’t wash out? That’s his. He still subscribes to the I.F. Stone Weekly and gets angry when he watches the evening news. He’s big on cause and effect. If you do this, then that will happen, especially in terms of politics. My father still talks a good line, but what has he ever done? He thinks if he nods to the doorman, he’s done his duty by the workingman.”
“Do you think going to Mississippi will change things? Before I came here, I thought for sure it would, but the more I learn about how bad it is, the more doubts I have.”
“I feel sure that going to Mississippi will change me. Someday I’d like to be a mother—I’m really curious to know what having a baby is like—but right now I want to give birth to my self—I want to be a new woman, a new direction, a start at something better. I want to become what I truly am. Feelgood’s right about white people having a hole in their soul. People see their imperfections as holes, and they try to fill those holes with another person. But we need to make ourselves whole.”
“What do you think about Feelgood?” I blurted out.
“Why do you ask?”
“I don’t know; I saw him watching you.”
“He’s not the only one,” Esther said, smiling over at me.
“Oh,” I responded with a guilty laugh. “I guess the question is, ‘Has anyone ever not told you that you’re beautiful?’”
“Lots of people, but thanks. I don’t see my body as so great. I just walk around in it. The only thing I like about my looks are my eyes.”
“I wouldn’t touch a thing.”
“Oh, wouldn’t you?” Esther broke into a throaty cackle.
“Feelgood has demons,” she remarked, returning to my question. “He’s been through a lot. All those SNCC guys have experienced incredible things. They are terrifically interesting, much more exciting than anybody I met in college. They aren’t afraid to show their feelings, to laugh, cry, shout, sing. They don’t just sit back and label life; they go out and confront it. That’s what I want to do, too: I want to live with people who have solved some of life’s simple problems. I’ve never felt so vitally alive as I have these past few days. This may sound crazy, but I think the fear adds to the experience.”
I longed to kiss her and make that her next experience, but clearly her mind was elsewhere. We sat in silence for a while, watching fireflies flicker in the ravine. Then we stood up and hugged.
“You’re a good listener,” she said, smiling up at me. “I can tell that you’re one of those people who remembers and mulls over everything they hear.”
“Only if it’s interesting.”
“Well, don’t think about things too much. Get some sleep.”
4
After a night of tossing and turning to horrendous dreams—complete with poisonous snakes, quicksand swamps, and sadistic sheriffs—I welcomed James Lawson’s topic for Wednesday morning: nonviolence. But his presentation left me cold. Although he was thoughtful and articulate, there was something aloof, pedantic, and off-putting about his manner. He was a mystical idealist who used abstract words as if they had absolute meanings. Listening to him, I was reminded of an anecdote Abe Ravitz, my American lit professor at Hiram, once told me: when Melville read one of Emerson’s more vaporous essays, he felt impelled to scrawl in the margin “To one who has weathered Cape Horn as a common sailor, what stuff is all this!” Rather than being inspired by the philosophical underpinnings of nonviolence, I felt superior to its unrealistic expectations.
The early Christians in the catacombs may have kept their spirits clean, I thought, but did the lions in the arena appreciate their accomplishment? I didn’t like the idea of nonviolence as a tactic to provoke white violence, shock the nation, and create a crisis only the federal government could resolve—that made us victims of the very mass culture I was in revolt against. Just because the media had become jaded and responded only to blood, did that mean that I had to bleed? Impulsively, I stood up and stated a part of my inner debate: “If putting my body on the line will make this a better world,” I said, “I’m ready to do that. I just don’t want my sacrifice to be in vain.”
There was a long silence. Finally, from the back of the room, came Moses’s slow, soothing voice. As usual, he had the last word:
“Politics without morality is chaos, and morality without politics is irrelevant. You must understand that nonviolence is essential to our program this summer. It is academic whether you embrace nonviolence philosophically or not. But if you are going to work in Mississippi with us, you must be prepared to accept the ground rules. Whatever your reservations may be in this, you can only act nonviolently in the Movement. If you can’t accept this, please don’t come with us. In the end, you see, everybody has to live together. In the end, Negroes and whites will share the land, and the less overlay of bitterness, the more possible an accommodation. I think nonviolence leaves the door open to reconciliation.”
Hal had advised Lenny and me to go into town and buy some bib overalls and a denim jacket—the kind Bob Moses wore—to prepare us for Mississippi. He said the SNCC outfit wasn’t just for show, but it also offered good protection if a cop took a notion to drag you down the street.
We all gathered on the grass behind one of the dorms to be instructed in security precautions, role-playing situations, and passive resistance. James Forman, the executive secretary of SNCC, was in charge. He calmly smoked his pipe as he issued multiple warnings about the dangers we faced. His instructions were daunting in their completeness, ranging from the normal precautions of locking doors and watching for suspicious cars to telling the men to shave their beards if they didn’t want them pulled out hair by hair and the women not to wear earrings if they didn’t want their earlobes torn.
Then we broke into small groups and acted out more complex scenarios. The SNCC staff played their roles in these situations to the hilt, falling instantly into character—from Klansman to sharecropper—and making the scene come unnervingly alive. For them, this was no mere exercise in stereotyping and melodrama. We volunteers, on the other hand, could only grope in the dark and try to imagine what we might do or say.
In
