some company for you, fellas,” he said. “One of those northern nigger-lovin’ agitators. Treat him nice now.”
“I’m certainly no troublemaker,” I said, stumbling to establish rapport. “Don’t you guys think Joe Namath is overpaid?”
Finally, we all assembled again on the lawn for instructions in passive resistance. I learned how to curl up like an unborn baby, using drawn-up knees to protect my vital parts, forearms to hide my face, and clasped hands to cover the nape of my neck. I followed directions, dropping to the ground and flopping on other volunteers for protection.
“Defend those family jewels,” Feelgood shouted at me, slapping at my exposed areas with a piece of rubber hose he had brought along to test our mettle.
“I’ve only got two hands,” I retorted.
“Swift, I don’t think you can take it,” Feelgood said, turning to Lenny.
“Look, I’ve suffered,” Lenny replied. “Ask my dentist.”
Forman then tacked a sign that read “COURTHOUSE” on a spreading oak tree and divided us in two groups. We determined “Niggers” had to march through a gantlet of angry “Rednecks” to reach the courthouse and have a chance to register. Emotions boiled up and over in a matter of seconds. Before I had taken five steps, I was smashed to the ground, kicked in the face, and smothered beneath a pile of writhing bodies. I shrieked with pain and cursed a blue streak as I tried to claw my way free.
“I’m hurt,” someone cried. “I think my ankle’s broken.”
“Keep it up,” Forman shouted. “Bundle together to cushion the blows.”
After what seemed like an hour, we were ordered to untangle and pull ourselves back together. I had a sore lip, a torn T-shirt, and lots of grass stains. We all looked the worse for wear, but there were no serious injuries—just bruises, scratches, and one sprained ankle.
I was more than a little shocked by the experience. The speed with which jeers turned to blows was astonishing. I was shaken by my own pent-up fury; I had been swept by a rush of rage to hurt others before they hurt me. Our violent impulses were all too real, and yet we had withstood the onslaught. I looked at my fellow volunteers with new respect, as if we were raw recruits who had survived our first battle. I had yet to walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Death, but at least I had taken a first step.
The media people, cameras grinding, jumped at the chance to get some action shots for the six o’clock news. Afterwards, the CBS crew treated everybody to ice cream. At dinner I heard that a handful of volunteers had left. I was determined to stick it out. I looked around; the impending danger seemed to stimulate the hormones and spark the libido. In spite of the warnings we had received about interracial sex, people were pairing off and making out all over the place—on couches, in corners, on the grass, and down in the overgrown ravine.
“The bushes are shaking,” Lenny noted as we walked across the campus back to our dorm.
I was still riding a rush of adrenaline from the afternoon. I looked around for Esther. How I would have loved to make some bushes shake with her!
Although we were supposed to meet with our project leaders after dinner, many of us played hooky to watch a CBS news special: “The Search in Mississippi.” I squeezed into the crowded lounge just as Walter Cronkite announced that the nation’s attention and concern was now focused on the state because of the disappearance of the three civil rights workers. Next came footage of the orientation session for the voter registration volunteers the week before. It was strange to watch the same SNCC staff saying many of the same things we had heard to another group like us. The camera zoomed in on one volunteer in particular: a reflective-looking young man with a boyish tousle of black hair, a delicate, well-defined mouth, and eyes at once dreamy and receptive—as if they interrogated, even slightly doubted, what the speaker said, reserving to the last the right to agree or disagree. I envied his repose. It was Andrew Goodman. He looked a lot like me.
They showed shots of Goodman’s parents and Rita Schwerner. There was a distraught father pleading, “Please, David, come home; you don’t know what you’re doing.” They even had interviews with a few volunteers; interviews that had been held the day before in the very room where we sat watching the program.
“I was misquoted,” Lenny cried as the camera pictured him earnestly explaining why he wanted to spend his summer in Mississippi.
When Eastland was shown, claiming that all the darkies on his plantation were as happy as could be and didn’t have a care in the world and when Governor Johnson called us “beatnik-type weirdos,” we all shouted, “You’re lying!” I relished Governor Johnson’s slip of the tongue: “We have no racial fictions . . . I mean frictions, here.” The room rocked with laughter. Finally Fannie Lou Hamer related how, when the owner of the plantation where she had worked for eighteen years said, “We don’t need registered Negroes here,” she had responded, “I didn’t do it for you; I did it for me.”
The program closed with a shot of us singing “We Shall Overcome.” We stood up, joined hands, and began singing along with ourselves on the television.
“Let’s hum the next verse,” someone said. “Everyone hum softly.”
As I hummed, I was moved by a black voice from the back of the room speaking with conviction: “You know what we’re doing. . . . We’re moving the world. We’re here to bring all the people of Mississippi, all the peoples of this country, all the peoples of the world together. We’re bringing a new revolution of love, so let’s sing out together once again now, everybody hand in hand.”
So I sang again, more fervently than before,
“Oh, Oh deep in my heart, I do believe,
We shall overcome some day.”
I felt a warm glow as I walked out into the flower-scented summer evening. I wanted to find Esther and see if we could have another good talk like the one we’d had the other night. Then I saw her, arm-in-arm with Feelgood, heading down the path toward the lake.
5
Every evening we had dorm discussions about whether we should or shouldn’t go and what the chances of getting hurt were. As I sang the songs and listened to the speakers, I certainly didn’t become less afraid—if anything, I was more terrified—but something else emerged as well: a feeling of being a part of a united effort that truly mattered, so that personal doubts and misgivings diminished in comparison. By week’s end I was at once scared to death and anxious to see what Mississippi was really like.
On Friday evening, James Forman talked to us first. The SNCC staff realized that this was their last chance to instruct us, so they wanted to make every word count.
“I’d like everybody to stand up,” Forman said. “Put your arms around the person on each side of you and sing ‘We’ll Never Turn Back.’”
“We have hung our head and cried
For those like Lee who died,
Died for you and died for me,
Died for the cause of equality,
But we’ll never turn back . . .”
“The song you just sang is about Herbert Lee, who was killed for trying to help people register
