Negroes and the Gun (45 page)

Fannie Lou Hamer is exactly the right name for the iron-willed sharecropper's daughter who, after getting death threats for daring to register to vote, quipped, “Well, killing or no killing, I'm going to stick with civil rights.” Hamer shared little with Daisy Bates in appearance, deportment, diction, or other markers of class stratification that have long been part of the black American experience. But she surrendered nothing to Bates in her commitment to the freedom struggle.
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Fannie Lou Hamer personified the grassroots of the movement. She grew up chopping cotton in the Mississippi Delta and told wrenching stories of how tenuous and desperate that existence could be. The despair is palpable in her account of the whole family scouring picked fields, hoping to find enough cotton scraps to buy dinner. Worse was the episode where a jealous neighbor poisoned the family's three precious mules. “We were doing pretty well. . . . That poisoning knocked us right back down flat. We never did get back up again. That white man did it just because we were getting somewhere.”
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Fannie Lou Hamer would indeed get somewhere. She would stick with civil rights through the storms of the 1960s, registering folk to vote, pressing the struggle as a leader in the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, capturing the hearts of callous politicians at two national political conventions, and founding the National Women's Political Caucus.

In some ways, Hamer epitomized the nonviolent theme of the movement. After discrimination, abuse, and beatings, she still urged a scriptural response, “
Baby you gotta love 'em
. Hating just makes you sick and weak.” But Fannie Lou Hamer also exhibited an earnest practicality that epitomizes the black tradition of arms.
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Asked how she survived so many years of racist aggression, Hamer responded, “I'll tell you why.
I keep a shotgun in every corner of my bedroom
and the first cracker even look like he wants to throw some dynamite on my porch won't write his mama again.” In this approach, Hamer followed the example of her mother, Lou Ella Townsend, who as a fieldworker at the turn of the century had been threatened, assaulted, and raped. Unbowed, Townsend soldiered on, comforted by a pistol concealed in a
bucket.
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There is some chance that this is the same pistol that Fannie Lou handed to her overnight guest, Stokely Carmichael, when he stayed at her home during a SNCC voter-registration campaign.
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Fig. 7.3. Fannie Lou Hamer, circa 1964. (Photograph by Warren K. Leffler, August 22, 1964. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.)

After-the-fact claims like Hamer's “I had a gun and was ready” are easily second-guessed. Who knows what would have happened on the alternate timeline. But on the basic preparations, Hamer's assertions are confirmed by other observers in at least one case where the community responded to a death threat against her. Neighbor Len Edwards recalled how, shortly after the Williams Chapel adjacent to Hamer's home was firebombed, the threat came that Hamer would be killed. Friends hustled Fannie Lou to a neighbor's house and “got shotguns and waited for the cars to drive by.”
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The image of a shotgun in every corner of Fannie Lou Hamer's bedroom may seem implausible until we consider that she was probably talking about a typical gun of poor folk—that is, the single-shot shotgun, which was generally cheap, durable, and, with the appropriate loads, versatile enough for self-defense, hog killing, and hunting everything from rabbits to deer.

We don't know whether Hamer's guns were passed down, bartered, or bought with scarce cash. But for people familiar with the culture, the image of a couple of single shots leaning in the corner or behind a door is quite common. And many folk, even poor folk, would save and sacrifice to buy or trade for superior tools.

Annie Colton Reeves of Pike County, Mississippi, describes this kind of saving and sacrifice. The Reeveses were as poor as anyone but had invested in a heavy-caliber Winchester rifle, a light-caliber .22 rifle, a shotgun, and two handguns. Annie recalled her father's advice that “it's better to have ammunition than to have food.” This was perhaps a calculation that with ammunition one could get food. And that calculation was evident in the training of the six Colton kids to be as familiar with guns as they were with the tools of the field. On the other hand, everyone understood the additional possibilities. This was apparent when Annie brandished a gun and chased off a party of menacing young men with the warning “whenever you get ready to go to hell, you come back.”
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Women like Annie Colton Reeves and Fannie Lou Hamer offered no high theories about armed self-defense versus political violence. They projected the black tradition of arms in simple words and deeds and in stories passed down of armed black heroes and defiant last stands. Prominently in the first biography of her life, Fannie Lou Hamer proudly recounted a tale from her childhood that had been repeated many times before.

The year was 1924. Fannie Lou was only eight, but the episode kept a hold on her for decades. The venue was a delta plantation where many black men were still working in essential peonage. Joe Pullum was one of them. Pullum was good enough with numbers to know that he had been underpaid. When the plantation owner handed him a wad of cash to recruit more workers from the countryside, Pullum took the money as his due and fixed up his house. The planter tracked down Pullum at his cabin, confronted him, and then shot him. Bleeding from his wounds, Pullum ducked into his house, got his Winchester, and killed the planter where he stood. As Hamer tells it, “a white man that was sitting out in the buggy saw this and he lit out for town. . . . The Negro knew what this meant. As soon as that man got to town, he be coming back with a lynch mob and they would hang him. So he got all the ammunition he had and went on out to Powers Bayou and hid in the hollow of a tree.”

The mob did indeed pursue Joe Pullum. “But he was waiting for them,” said Hamer. “Every time a white man would peek out, he busted him. Before they finally got him, he'd killed 13 and wounded 26. . . . The way they finally got him was to pour gasoline on the water of the Bayou and set it afire. . . . When they found him, he was . . . lying with his hand on his gun.”
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On Fannie Lou Hamer's telling, the story of Joe Pullum sounds fantastic, perhaps apocryphal. But outside reports confirm the basics and show that Hamer
was not alone in her admiration of Joe Pullum. From Harlem, the widely circulated
Negro World
, voice of Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association, reported the incident under the headline, “Negro Tenant Farmer Shot to Kill and Should Have a Monument.” The editors apparently assumed the headline would resonate for the half million readers of the
Negro World
.
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For grassroots folk like Fannie Lou Hamer, the story of Joe Pullum was part of the community fabric. The details, perhaps embellished over time, run in stark contrast to the familiar narrative of black victimization. The theme continues in the 1954 account of Holmes County, Mississippi, legend Eddie Noel, preserved in the oral history of Noel's neighbor, T. C. Johnson.

It started in a little country store that was popular with black folk but owned by white men. Eddie Noel's wife worked there as a cook. Someone objected to Noel hanging around, and then there was a fistfight. Soon it was two against one. Noel finally broke loose but was pursued by one of the men brandishing a gun. Noel ran to his car, grabbed his rifle, and killed his pursuer.

Having just shot a white man in rural Mississippi, Eddie Noel knew the drill and fled. The word spread quickly, and Noel's next altercation was against three carloads of pursuing “Klansmen” and a deputy sheriff that Noel fought to a standoff in a roadside shootout.

Noel then retreated home, where reports of his prowess with the gun seem embellished. Noel was an army veteran, transformed by legend into a sharpshooter. One account describes how, “That Sunday . . . they had scattered around the house. This guy was making his move up on the porch and . . . Ed shot him. . . . He got out in the yard, he whirled, flipped the gun over his shoulder, and hit one on top of the house by the chimney. There was another by the car, and he shot that one.”

Black oral histories lionize Noel's running fight against hundreds of pursuers, purportedly inflicting multiple casualties, before surrendering in order to spare his family and neighbors the wrath of the mob. White newspaper reports, on the other hand, say that a handful of men went to apprehend Noel and he killed two of them and wounded two others.

Even in exaggerated form, the carnage was secondary to the change in attitude that followed. According to T. C. Johnson, Noel's fight “did give some of the black peoples the idea that they didn't have to take the beatin' and runnin' and the abusement like they had been. I've heard a lot of 'em say it was good that somebody had the courage and the nerve to stand tall like a man.”
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While many of the fighters in the freedom movement have faded into obscurity, Medgar Evers, one hopes, is still a familiar name. Medgar, his wife, Myrlie, and his brother, Charles, were drawn into the movement by the prodigiously armed T. R. M. Howard. After Medgar sacrificed his life to the struggle, Howard preached his eulogy.
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When Medgar was killed, Charles Evers moved from Chicago back to Mississippi and assumed the leadership of the Mississippi NAACP. Indeed, on his telling, Evers took the position by force of will, over the objection of cautious souls like Gloster Current, director of branches at the national office. Based simply on their pedigree, it was fair to worry about the temperament of both of the Evers brothers.

Charles and Medgar grew up in the home of Jim Evers. In Decatur, Mississippi, in the 1930s, that meant something. Within the space of just a few years, at ages when they were trying to figure out how to be men, the Evers brothers witnessed their father's fighting spirit swirl into incidents that ended with the three of them sitting up nights, clutching guns and waiting for lynch mobs.

Jim Evers could not read or write much but was a natural at basic arithmetic. When a local grocer tried to cheat him in settling the week's accounts, Jim Evers called him on it. It was an affront that sent the shopkeeper boiling over. Aiming to avenge the insult of being called a “liar” by a “nigger,” the shopkeeper bolted for his pistol, raging at Jim Evers, “I'll kill you, you black sonofabitch.”

As his boys looked on, Jim Evers picked up a Coke bottle and warned the man, “Move another step, and I'll bust your damn brains in.” The commotion drew a crowd, and Charles and Medgar grabbed bottles and stepped in behind their father. Charles wondered, decades later, why his father wasn't lynched then and there. He speculated that those men knew that Jim Evers was ready to die on the spot and they were not. Not yet ten-years-old, Charles certainly was not ready to die and admitted his instinct to run as the three of them backed out of the store. Later he would repeat his father's calming mantra that “mobbers are cowards.”