FREEDOM HOUSE

We’d moved to Gaines, Mississippi, three years before, in 1952, when I was eleven. I didn’t want to leave our home in Merriweather, Illinois, anymore than Momma did, but Daddy said we had to; he said there were things in the world that had to be set right, and there wasn’t anything a man could do sitting on the side of the road watching it. Daddy was like that. He said a man had to do something if he wanted to make a difference in the world--and making a difference in one’s life was the only thing that mattered. It was a peculiar way for a man to be thinking Momma always said, but that’s what being a Baptist minister was all about for him, Daddy said.

Gaines wasn’t much of a city, and even less of a town I thought that first day when we arrived. It wasn’t much more than a spot on the map, if you could even call it that. I’d say there was at most twelve hundred people in town, and maybe another three hundred people that lived on the five big cotton plantations surrounding the town. There was a rail spur that stopped off at the edge of town, and it still had an old water tower--but I found out later it hadn’t been used in something like forty, or fifty years. It was a segregated town. There was a single car dealership for Whites only, and one farm implements dealer; the two grocery stores, single auction barn, drug store, and coffee shop were Whites Only as well. There was a large three story department store, two motels, and a five story hotel that sat mostly empty. There was a single, White, hardware store in the middle of town, three full service gas stations, two dentists, an optometrist, and a hospital--for Whites only--that had three White doctors, and seven nurses.

Daddy said there were at least a dozen White Churches overseeing God’s Commandments here in Gaines, the sure sign of a solid, God-fearing, community, he reminded us. And then he told us they’d even had a big city scandal some years back, seeing how the minister of the only Black Church in town, ran off with another man’s wife. It was a sordid affair, he said, and they burnt the Black Church down on account of it--that was when Daddy told us the woman was White.

Momma was shocked by the whole thing of course, and told Daddy she didn’t want him talking about that sort of thing in front of us children. But me and Maggie pestered Daddy about it later, until he told us everything he knew. It would always be a segregated world as far as Momma was concerned, and the less we had to face it, the better it’d be for all of us--after all Momma said, that’s why it was segregated in the first place, wasn’t it? Daddy didn’t think about things the way Momma did, but Daddy was from the North, and Momma grew up in the South.

A Nigger’d most likely get himself lynched in some places just for talking to a White woman, Momma said, and Daddy told her they didn’t do that sort of thing in the South any more. She called him a fool for thinking that way, and said as far as she was concerned, us moving down here, and Daddy thinking he could make his place into a Nigger church, was him just asking for trouble.

Daddy told her it wasn’t the Negro community we were moving into, and it wasn’t a Negro Church he was taking over, either. He was planning to invite Negroes into his Church all the same though. She asked him how many Niggers lived in Gaines, and he said--as near as he knew--the congregation didn’t number any more than one hundred. One hundred Niggers in a town of twelve hundred, Momma said, and what must life be like for them? That, Daddy said, was what he was aiming to change.

“You can’t come to a place like this and think you can change the way people think about things,” Momma said. “There won’t be no Whites comin’ t’ hear services if the Niggers come as well."

“I’m not trying to change the way they think about things here,” Daddy laughed. “But I think some of these people need to change the way they think about themselves.”

Daddy’s first sermon was called: “The Quality of Life Is Equal To The Quality of Love,” but I don’t think too many of the congregation understood just what he was trying to say. I know I didn’t, but I didn’t have to. I was just a kid. I had to sit with Maggie the week leading up to it, listening to the countless rewrites and revisions all the same though. Maggie said it was all sounding the same to her.

That was about the time when we first met Root. Daddy had promised to take us out with a small picnic lunch to a swimming hole he had stumbled across when he came down alone the week before--and Maggie pestered him about it until he did. It was just the three of us, Daddy, Maggie and me, because Momma never wanted to leave the house without first putting it into proper order. She was always changing things around, and that made it hard to know what she meant by “proper” order. One day, the couch and end table would be against one wall, and the next day, they’d be against the other wall. When Daddy asked Momma if she wanted to come out to the countryside with us, she said there was too much for her to do, and it’d be easier for her if we weren’t all in the way. She could wash walls, and floors, and clean the cobwebs around the light fixtures--she even offered to pack the picnic basket for us, and we let her.

Daddy rolled the window down as soon as we pulled out of the driveway, and tuned the radio to a small station he’d found the week before--something that played Negro music, he said. He liked to listen to a variety of things when we were in the car with him. He never made us listen to the endless ministers that seemed to fill the airwaves, saying we had enough to listen to at home. We only listened to the preachers when Momma was in the car with us, because he wanted her to think that we were well rounded, Christian children, and he knew she’d never accept listening to Negro music as a part of our education in life. He mostly wanted us to be kids and remember our growing years with fondness, he said.

He pulled out a cigarette package he kept hidden in the glove box, and lit one as he leaned his arm out of the window and drove. Maggie said Daddy looked like James Dean with his sleeve rolled up his arm that way, and the way he tilted his head to one side with his cigarette hanging out; I said he looked more like Bill Haley, because they both had the same curling hair. Daddy just laughed and said he looked like his daddy.

It was a hot August day--the kind of day, Daddy said, where it felt like the Anvil of God was striking down against the earth, whatever that was supposed to mean--and my dress was already sticking to the under part of my thighs. I was sitting on my hands though, because it was the only way I could kick my feet freely without them hitting the floor mat. I could feel the sweat trickling down my arm pits, and running down my sides, but I didn’t care, knowing we’d be swimming soon enough. Maggie was in the back seat holding the picnic basket so it didn’t slide across the seat and fall whenever we went around a corner.

Out on the main hi-way, we could see a huge puddle as big as a lake sitting at the end of the road and shimmering in the heat. Maggie asked Daddy if that was the watering hole we were going to. Daddy laughed gently, shaking his head. He said that road pools weren’t nothing but God’s illusions--something that looked like it was there, but really wasn’t. When Maggie said it looked pretty real to her, Daddy said you had to take something like that on Faith.

“You mean like believin’ in baby Jesus?” Maggie offered, and Daddy laughed, nodding his head.

“Exactly.”

We drove along the wide open fields of the larger cotton holdings--endless rows of back breaking drudgery, Daddy said--but all I could think of was the wind and sun burning my right arm and naked shoulder. I could see men and women labouring in the fields--White men and some few Negro men too--and I found myself thinking of our old life back in Illinois, and how I wished we were there again. Daddy said it was cotton that served as Gaines’s only real means of working for a living--everything else in town was secondary. I didn’t understand cotton then, and I didn’t want to--I still don’t. I suppose I was thinking that if I knew and understood how cotton worked, that would mean I’d given up on ever leaving Gaines, and had settled myself in living here full time. Instead of listening to Daddy, I told myself that I missed my friends in Illinois. I still wrote to a few of them, but that wouldn’t last long, considering how old we all were.

Daddy found the watering hole easy enough, after driving for about an hour or so. We turned down a small dirt lane that seemed to disappear into an endless vacuum of green brush that promised choking dust, and Daddy told us to roll the windows up. The dust cloud behind us disappeared into itself quick enough--like smoke from a distant fire--so that after a while, all we could see was a foggy powder that lined the leaves and branches along the side of the road. The dust coated the bigger blades of grass like white wash, and the blades were bent over like they were tired of it. There were tall trees that towered up over top of us, protecting us from the hot sun, and they made the light and shadows flash and strobe inside the car like an old time movie. But it was hot with the windows rolled up, and I felt myself curling up like I was a limp piece of paper drying up in the oven.

When we finally reached the swimming hole, Daddy told us we could get changed in the back seat of the car. He took the picnic basket with him, and climbed up a small table of smooth rocks that spread out under a span of four weeping willows. The trees gave off into a nice shaded grove. Daddy sat Injun style with his note book on his lap, working on the same ten page sermon he’d been toiling with for the past week. Maggie followed me up the rocks and we leaped into the water with screams of "Geronimo".

There was a shock of cold water as we plunged in, and we both called out to Daddy telling him it was too cold to swim. He laughed and told us we’d have to stay in until he said we could come out. We’d get used to it, he said, and then he bent his head back down to his notebook and began writing again. It didn’t take long for us to get used to the water, and when Daddy called for us to eat lunch, we asked him if we could stay in longer. He said we could go back in after we’d eaten something--of course, he didn’t say that we’d have to wait before we could go back in, or that he’d use that time to read his sermon to us again.

Momma had packed a big lunch. She made three sandwiches for Daddy, and one each for Maggie and me. By the time we got around to eating them though, the sandwiches were already soggy with the tomatoes Momma had sliced into them. Maggie complained because she didn’t like soggy bread, and she made Daddy peel the wet crust off. Daddy said there was nothing wrong with them, and ate the wet crusts to show her they were still good. I saw Maggie gag, and told Daddy he shouldn’t tease her like that.

When we finally left the watering hole, it was late in the afternoon, and Daddy said that maybe we’d stayed out too long. The sun was still high, but falling below the taller trees, and the shade felt cool as we made our way back. Daddy looked at his watch and shook his head slowly.

“Momma ain’t gonna be none too happy with us,” he said with a practiced Southern drawl as he put the picnic basket on the back seat.

“You mean you,” I laughed. I had a long willow switch I was waving around me like a whip, listening to it cut through the air with a quick whistle. I asked Daddy if I could take it home with me, and he nodded easily, not really paying attention to me. I could see his mind was still on his sermon and knew that he would be re-writing it once we were home.