FREEDOM HOUSE

A reading by the Author

  iv

It was hot, and the humidity was so stifling the sweat stuck to my body. I felt sticky. I decided having a swim wasn’t such a bad idea after all, instead of jumping into the shower, I mean. I’d shower after I told myself, when it was cooler, if it ever cooled down, I thought. The pool wasn’t big by any stretch of the imagination, but the water was a cool eighty-three degrees according to the thermometer bobbing in front of me. I lay on my back and floated for as long as I could, watching what few birds there were in the sky; making childhood designs with the billowing clouds above me; listening to the pounding of my heart in my ears and trying not to think about the past.

*

I started at Kent State University when I was twenty, back in 1963, a little late by most standards, but there were issues I had to deal with — and I’ll get to those later. By the time I was twenty-two, I was firmly established in campus life. I think a lot of us who went North for our schooling felt the same way about it — not that Ohio was as north as I wanted to go — but there was a freedom of expression and an expanding of the mind; it was something that had seemed stunted for me in the South. I didn’t care if I ever went back. You had to have a thick skin because of what they were showing on the evening news, with Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement building up, I mean. The media had a habit of shocking everyone with segments showing fire hoses spraying the marchers — water cannons, they called them. King’s passive resistance was making the Southern male look like every cliché movie Hollywood had ever made. I found myself trying to defend a way of life I didn’t even agree with, saying: That’s not what it’s like, but I was only fooling myself. That was exactly what it was like.

Segregation had been integrated into everybody’s brain; it was a fundamental, inherent right as far as the people of the South were concerned, and they refused to give it up: separate but equal meant more than just schools. They’d fought a war over it. Their daddy’s would be spinning in their graves at the mere thought of it. And whenever I thought of Gaines, and the South, and everything I saw on T.V., I thought of the Edgertons.

 Even before the Sixties began in earnest, I was a firm believer in Martin Luther King and his idea of what they had to do for Civil Rights to actually become a Movement. He came to visit Daddy early in 1955, telling Daddy that he admired him for what he was doing for the Negro in the South. That was before he became the man he was; before the boycotts and sit-ins; before everything. Four years after Daddy was killed, I stood up for the NAACP and the SNCC, even though Momma told me I was asking for trouble — a White girl standing up for the Niggers like that, she said. She didn’t have Daddy to turn to — or anyone else for that matter whom she thought might talk some sense into me — except maybe Root, but he said he had a hard time with it because he agreed with me. Momma said that we didn’t know what we were doing. We were just asking for it — both of us. There was too much of my father in me, she said.

I found myself isolated during my last year at High School — by teachers, students, and parents as well. I was harassed, hectored, and harried, for lack of a better expression. My grades dropped because I refused to back down from my beliefs, and when everything else failed, the “boys” came out for a visit one day after school, and I was raped. I was eighteen.

Nothing ever came of it; in a small town like Gaines, there isn’t much that goes on that people don’t know about — but nobody was talking. They drove me to the woods on the other side of town — Niggertown — and threw me out of the car. I’d been beaten up pretty bad; I was bleeding, sitting in the middle of a dirty lane holding my tattered clothes against myself, crying.

An old Black woman came outside to help me up, taking me to a small shack where she sent her grandson off to find Root as she cleaned me up.

“Women are always paying the price for a man’s needs,” she said to me knowingly, and when I looked up at her she smiled softly, and I wondered just how much she understood about what had happened. I wondered if maybe she hated me for being White as much as people hated her for being Black.

Momma never said anything about the rape. There was no, ‘I’m sorry you had to go through this, honey’; no hugs; no kisses — no tears spilt on my behalf — there was nothing. We didn’t speak until I left for university two years later. I believe she blamed me for what happened; even though she never said it was my fault, or said that I was asking for it because of my stubborn intractability, I knew that secretly — deep down inside her — she blamed me. Oh, she pretended that it mattered, and put up a good show saying how she wanted to bring Justice down on those responsible for what happened, but I knew she didn’t mean it. She never followed through with her threats because she was too afraid of what the consequences might be — there was Maggie to consider after all — and pretty soon Momma gave up trying.

At University, I became something of a radical by embroiling myself in the political issues of the day — it was more or less what everyone called you if you were favourably inclined to what the media was calling the anti-establishment. I thought the world was in need of a change — and though it was, now I think it was me that was more in need of a change. After my first year at University I found myself embroiled in the Civil Rights Movement, much the same as I had been back home in Gaines. I called Momma to tell her that I was coming back home to help register Black voters. It was Freedom Summer. She told me I wouldn’t be welcome in her home.

During my years at University I alternately believed in all of the issues of the sixties at one time or another. I believed in the Equal Rights Amendment just as much as I believed in Civil Rights — they were part and parcel for what society as a whole needed in order to move forward. I was on the Pill, and I was pro choice; I protested the war, which meant that I stood against the Government. But like everyone else my age, I didn't understand anything; even if I thought I understood. I dropped acid; I smoked dope — I tuned in, turned on, and dropped out. I socialized with a New World Order that consisted of revolutionaries and members of the SNCC — and I watched as it evolved and became the Black Panthers, and later radicalized. I spoke a hard line when it came to the South and what it meant to me, finally coming to the conclusion that I’d drifted through life with nothing to show for it. By the time the decade ended, King was dead, both the Kennedys were gone, and the Vietnam war was still wallowing along with the promise of an honourable peace somewhere on the horizon — as long as we didn’t have to say we’d lost. There’s something to be said for a Nation’s pride; I just don’t know what.

That was how I found myself back home in Gaines, Mississippi a dozen years after the fact. But now, it was different. I was different. It was as if everything that had happened to me before was a generation removed from itself. I was here to help register voters — both Black and White. Still, there was a part of me that wondered what I was even doing here at all.