Authors: Tracy Sugarman
Ted waited at the door and watched Jimmy limp to the stairs. His words sounded choked and shaky. “Be careful, kid. See you tomorrow.”
Dale and Jimmy climbed the stairs to their mats in the attic. “I’ll take the first watch,” said Dale. From their window they saw the reporter slip out the door and move swiftly across the moonlit yard.
Across the dirt road and parallel to it, the cotton on the Peterson spread ran from the west a quarter mile beyond the Freedom House all the way east until it touched Highway 49. From where Jimmy could see out his attic window, the endless rows of cotton resembled a vast dark sea, and the tiny twinkling lights of the plantation house far beyond looked like the lights of a passing ship, seemingly at the very horizon. In the moonlight the walls of cotton plants looked black, with only a pale luster where errant clusters of cotton caught the moon.
Behind the first row of plants, Percy Williams lay stretched flat on the ground. In his line of vision he had a direct shot at the edge of the porch. He had watched intently as the organizers left the meeting. “You see that, Thomas? No Jimmy and no Dale. They still inside. You comfortable, Thomas? Could be a considerable wait, even if Mendelsohn was right and they comin’ at all.”
Thirty feet down the row Thomas grunted. “Comfortable ain’t the word, Deacon. Didn’t say nothin’ about comfortable when you mentioned this hunting trip. Least when we went after possum we took some decent corn to make things prettier.” He chuckled. “When’s the last time you and I pulled picket duty? Outside of El Paso, wasn’t it? August 1917. Our reward for losing track of those sixteen stupid mules you thought we’d tethered that we didn’t!”
Straight across the road was the edge of the Freedom House. Anything approaching could be caught by either of them. Percy shifted his weight from his elbow, resting his shotgun on the hard baked earth. He smiled in the dark, his eyes moving along the road—waiting for what?
Percy said, “Wasn’t ’17, Thomas. Was ’18. After we got back from France. It was the same summer I met Rennie.”
“But it was the deacon that fouled up, right?”
“I wasn’t no deacon then. Just a lonely nigger who was thinkin’ about Rennie rather than tethering those damn mules. For a drinking man, you got a long memory, Doubtin’.”
It was nearly two o’clock when the headlights swept across their attic window as two pickup trucks pulled off the highway and turned into the dirt road. Dale watched them pass and in a moment he saw them edge onto the lawn. When their lights were turned off, they became silhouettes against the muted landscape of the endless cotton fields beyond. He heard the slam of the truck doors. As he strained to see, he was suddenly aware of the trilling throb of the cicadas. And then he saw the six figures move from the darkness. “Jimmy. Jimmy!” He nudged Mack with his boot. “Wake up. We got visitors.”
Percy’s gun tracked the two pickup trucks as they crept by their hedge of cotton plants. “Three men in each cab, Thomas,” he hissed. He’d seen the drivers carefully surveying the darkened house. A hundred yards past, they had curled off the road, backed up, and pulled onto the edge of the Freedom House lot. The trucks seemed poised for a run toward the highway. When the headlights went black, he edged forward, gently easing the plants aside with the barrel of his shotgun. He watched as three shadows descended from the cab of the truck and joined the other shadows from the second pickup. The moon had waned, but the starlight laid a pale patina of blue on the yard. The air had chilled, and Percy shivered slightly. When he peered over his shoulder, he saw that Thomas’s shotgun was aimed at the truck to his right. Beneath the drum of the cicadas, he heard Thomas’s soft whisper. “Locked and loaded, Deacon?”
Percy nodded in the dark. “Locked and loaded.”
The six men huddled at the rear of the truck. Suddenly, a reedy, rasping voice tore the silence. “Fore you touch the Cross, bow your unworthy heads!” In the half-light they could see a stooped old man with long white hair sweep off his wide-brimmed hat and lift his sunken face to the heavens. His voice rose in supplication. “Lord, make us your servants. Let us be your scourge and your sword. Give us the strength of soul to burn away this abomination. Help us, Jesus, to cleanse this race-mixing hell with your pure fire so that every Christian will know Thy will be done. We thank you, Jesus, and together we say Amen.”
Percy and Thomas could clearly hear the low murmur of “Amen.” Two men nearest the tailgate climbed into the bed of the truck and hauled off the greasy tarpaulin that had hidden a six-foot wooden cross.
A man’s voice grunted, “Goddammit, Harold, pick up your end! It’s a heavy son of a—”
“There will be no blasphemy!” The old man’s voice was full of rage. “This is the Cross He died on! Have you no Christian respect? Hand down the shovels and the pick. Fast! Gonna start gettin’ light soon.” The old man laid the pick on his bony shoulders and started across the yard. “Tierney, Holcomb, Gordon, bring the shovels.” The curt words were commands. Thomas could see the two figures in the truck bed as they struggled to unload the heavy cross.
“Goddam Preacher! Christ’s disciples and God’s messenger going to carry shovels and a pick, and you and me left to carry all the heavy shit! Least they coulda done was carry some of the gasoline.” When the two men got the cross to the ground, they leaned it against the truck. One of them handed a bottle from the truck bed to his panting companion. “Have a taste, Luther. Preacher gonna be digging for a while.”
Luther Lonergan took a long, thirsty swallow and handed back the bottle reluctantly, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. He stared across at the Freedom House. “Jesus Christ, Harold, what a fire that old farmhouse gonna make! Any jigaboos left inside gonna be toast!”
Harold guffawed. “Burnt toast!”
“Preacher would say ‘Burnt offerings!’” Luther Lonergan picked up his end of the cross and chuckled. “That’s what that Christer would say. ‘Burnt offerings!’”
From the attic window, Dale and Jimmy watched them plant the cross fifty feet from the porch. Two of the men returned to the trucks, carrying the bags containing the gasoline that they placed around the whole perimeter of the farmhouse. The third carefully delivered a dripping pail of gasoline to the site.
The preacher’s voice rasped its instructions; “Soak the beautiful Cross well. I want its light to touch the heavens. And when the defilers and fornicators come to this cesspool in the morning light, they’re going to see that Jesus never sleeps and never wearies. Pray with me. Dear Jesus, accept the work of these poor sinners and bless us.” He stepped back and nodded to the man with the pail. With a great heave the gasoline was poured across the lumber. “First His Cross,” said the preacher. “Then the pestilential sty.” He dropped a flaming package of matches at the foot of the cross. With the rush of flame, Dale and Jimmy could see every vivid detail of the six men as they stared, transfixed, at the spectacle.
Jimmy and Dale saw the first flashes in the dark field beyond the road. Then suddenly the startling explosions of firing. Pow! Pow! Pow! Yells now, and the shattering of glass. Christ, the trucks! The wind-shields. Shit! The hornet sound of bullets striking metal . . . From where? Goddammit! From the house? No—no, somewhere else!
The men were running across the yard, trying to reach their guns, ducking as the explosions continued. No one paused to hear the screamed entreaties of the preacher who ran after them. “Torch the house! It’s Satan’s work! Torch the house!” By the time they reached the smoking trucks and scrambled aboard, the firing—from where?—had ceased. Weeping, the preacher was hauled into the bed of the second truck. Its windshield shattered and a rear tire deflated, it limped toward the dirt road.
When the two trucks had reached the highway and were heading north, Dale and Jimmy came out to the smoking yard. They stared across at the cotton fields, but there was no movement. Grinning and shaking their heads, they put out the flames on the cross with the soaked remnants of a farmhouse rug. “Let’s pick up those bags of gasoline,” Dale said. “But leave the cross. Something for the kids to see.”
“Yeah,” Jimmy agreed. “The cross got burned but the Freedom House is open for business! When they ask us what happened here, what the hell do we tell the kids about nonviolence?”
Dale laughed. “Just say the Lord works in mysterious ways.”
Rennie was pouring coffee for Percy and herself when Mendelsohn joined them. “You stay overnight in Jackson, Ted?”
“No. Got back late yesterday and stopped over to see Jimmy at the Freedom House. He’s going to be okay. When I came back here the house was dark, so I tried to be quiet. Didn’t want to wake Sharon. Where is my roommate, Rennie?”
“Playing with the Allen child next door. Everybody here was sleepin’ late so Sharon and me ate without you-all. Let me get you some coffee. Mrs. Allen says she thought she heard shots middle of the night. Told her I didn’t. Either of you hear anything?”
“Shots?” Mendelsohn looked at Percy. “No. Not me. You, Mr. Williams?”
Percy shrugged. “Mrs. Allen ain’t always a dependable listener, Rennie. Wouldn’t give it too much worry what she said.”
Mendelsohn finished his coffee. “And what are you doing home on a Monday, Mr. Williams? Thought you’d be out on the truck this morning. Not the Sabbath yet.”
“I had some unfinished business to take care of last night, Mr. Mendelsohn. Took longer than I figured. Was kind of wore out s’morning and decided not to go to the fields.”
Rennie wiped her hands on her apron and cocked her head. “Funny kind of business, Percy, that kept you and Thomas out till four in the morning. You think my man been cattin’ around, Ted?”
Percy chuckled. “Well, it’s a kind thought, Rennie, that you thought I might and that I could.”
“Never said nothing about might or could. But I got long memories about you and Thomas McCormack. Was a time, Ted, that for sure the deacon and Thomas coulda and probably did!”
“Blessings on both of you,” Mendelsohn laughed and moved to the door. “I’m going over to the Freedom House. Doing a story on the school. Anybody want a ride over?”
“No thanks, Mr. Mendelsohn,” said the deacon. “I’m a little old to go to the Freedom School. But tell Jimmy hello for me.”
Mendelsohn skidded to a stop in the yard and walked slowly toward the black skeleton of the cross. Jimmy watched him take out his notebook and the Leica, shooting it from every angle. Jimmy leaned against the door jamb as the Freedom School teachers begin to arrive, startled and aghast at the charred wreck of the burned cross in the yard. But by the time they drifted to the sagging porch, they were competing with gallows humor.
“You starting a new church, Jimmy Mack?”
“No, man.”
“It’s the Shiloh Church of the Parboiled Cross. Right, Mack?”
“No, man.”
“It’s sculpture, stupid. What the hell’s the matter with you? This is a statement! Correct?”
“No, man.”
“An attitude!”
“No, man.”
“A profound commentary on Freedom Summer by one of the great artistes, James Mack, well known primitive.”
“You got it.”
Mendelsohn laughed, scribbling in his book. Smart-ass kids!
Once they were all on the porch Jimmy turned to the reporter. “You were right on the money, Ted. We had visitors last night.” He scanned the attentive but impassive faces. He’d watched them like a shepherd, every step of the way from Ohio.
When he and Ted followed the volunteers into the Freedom House, Jimmy murmured, “They always surprise me. The Delta makes you a veteran real quick.” He shook his head and grinned. “Come on in and let’s get started. You want to use the phone to report our invasion, go ahead. Nobody but the Klan and us know anything about it.”
Max wouldn’t get off the phone when Ted called. “How do you know it was Klan? And what do the cops think? And ‘persons unknown’ shot up the trucks at the scene? Maybe you could get a few answers, for Crissakes? And is the mass meeting going to take place Sunday? And are the blacks walking . . . ?” It went on and on. “And are you okay, Teddy?” It was only the last question that he knew the answer to. Maybe.
For weeks, they’d been walking the dusty roads. Shiloh, Ruleville, Shaw, Drew, selling hope to folks who never had reason before to buy it. Dodging the highway patrols, the Klan, the sheriff, scratching every day to build support for the voter registration drive and to make the strike a reality. It had been tedious and dangerous work, and the un-warranted arrests of ten of them in Drew had tested their morale. They had been penned in a tiny old cement jail, just off Highway 49. The barred windows were easy targets for any firebomb coming from the highway, so there was a long, miserable night of waiting till dawn when they were transported to the odious work farm in Sunflower. After a week of cold grits and bed lice in the greasy mattresses, they limped back to the Freedom House and returned to work.
“They were one pitiful-looking group,” Ted told Max. “Filthy and lice-bitten. But these scrubbed kids I worried about back at Oxford are tough. Not a guy or a girl split and went home, and they had every reason to if they chose. Like Mack says, they surprise you.”
Watching the animated children at the Freedom School, Jimmy knew that the example of the optimistic volunteers was opening hearts and minds to possibilities that stretched way beyond their world of cotton fields. More and more local black high school students were joining the forays into hostile or indifferent neighborhoods. Buoyant now, Jimmy led them, knowing that no burning cross could rival this new, consuming fire that had been ignited.
For him, the ultimate prize had always been to carry this activity into the heart of Indianola, the very birthplace of the hated White Citizens Council. Through the sweltering summer, he tried to find any safe building that could accommodate both a Freedom School and a Community Center where political organizing could be held. The day he found the empty Negro Baptist School only one mile from the courthouse, he was like a kid at Christmas opening his first present.