Nobody Said Amen (18 page)

“You were younger then, Percy, case you forgot.”

“Well, the Lord ain’t done with me yet, Sister Rennie. And Tom never been to church since the first day of his life. So it’s always inter-estin’ talking with Doubtin’ Thomas about the Lord.”

When he got outside Percy moved swiftly to the wired chicken pen in the rear. He moved the rooster aside with an impatient foot and reached into the ancient army footlocker where he kept the chicken feed. His hand felt the oilskin package and hauled it into the darkness of the yard. When he glanced at the bedroom window he could see Rennie bending over his sleepy granddaughter. Knowing he was alone, he unwrapped the well-oiled shotgun.

Thomas lived a quarter of a mile down the dirt road that curled past the Freedom House. Like Percy, Thomas and his wife Livia still went to the fields when the arthritis let them. Rennie didn’t go now that their daughter, Beccah, had left Sharon with them. Percy’s job as deacon of his church meant Saturday Vespers and Sunday services and a little Sabbath time with Rennie and Sharon. He owed them that. Thomas never came to church so Percy rarely had a chance for the long talks they had relished when they were young, single, and in the same colored unit in the cavalry. Only when work in the fields was over after the frost came would the two of them go into the hills south of Shiloh, looking for possum, squirrels, and, if they were lucky, maybe a bear to stretch the sparse harvest of the little gardens that Rennie and Livia cultivated. They enjoyed hunting, and they made each other laugh. Even more, they loved arguing.

When Percy rapped on the door, Livia greeted him with a broad smile and a hug to her very ample bosom. “Percy! How you doin? Thomas!” Her shout echoed in the still night. “Look who come callin’!” With a sudden look of alarm, she stepped back. “Sister Rennie okay?”

“She’s fine, Livia. Havin’ a time with Beccah’s Sharon!”

Thomas came to the door and the two men walked out into the moonlit yard, settling on a low wall made from the stones that had been removed years ago when Livia planted her garden. “Ain’t like you, Deacon, to come this late.” Thomas glanced at the moon. “Gotta be almost ten o’clock. You ain’t goin’ out tomorrow on the truck?”

“Maybe. Maybe not.” Percy shot a quick glance at his friend. “Got a lick of work to do tonight and it’s getting to be a little late. You might want to give me a hand, Thomas, even though it is work that the Almighty might think is okay. That something that’s against your irreligion?”

Thomas threw back his head and laughed. “What the hell you talking about, Deacon? You going through changes like Livia did? Just because I don’t join your quivering congregation don’t mean I’m irreligious. I just have a deep distrust of signing up for anything, ’specially since you and I got rolled by the United States Army, who kept us shoveling mule shit longer than any Christian or Hebrew or Muslim ought to shovel. Just what kind of work you got in mind?

“You don’t go to my church, Doubtin’ Thomas, but I’ve seen you at some of the meetings at Sojourner when Mrs. Hamer was preachin’ voters’ rights. You seemed more than interested, and singing, arm in arm with Jimmy Mack and those volunteers, ‘Ain’t gonna let nobody turn me ’round.’ Was you, wasn’t it?”

Thomas looked at his friend. “It was, Deacon. Something I never thought I’d see in Shiloh.” His eyes shone. “Young folks, black and white, made no difference, sayin’, ‘Stand up! We’ll stand with you!’ I like that Jimmy Mack. He walks and talks the same way in the Sanctified Quarter as he do in the middle of town. I like those kids who come down here, scared shitless and doin’ what they ought to be doin’ anyhow. If churches were like Sojourner Chapel and preachers were like Fannie Lou Hamer, I’d be leadin’ the choir, singing ‘We Shall Overcome.’ But most of those preachers aren’t like that, Deacon. They’re not like you.”

“Those kids are doin’ the Lord’s work, Thomas,” Percy said softly. “And Jimmy Mack and Dale Billings were beaten half to death by our Shiloh police earlier this week.”

“Goddam!” Tom McCormack stood up, the moonlight catching the ruff of white hair fringing his dark brown scalp. “Is Jimmy hurt bad?”

“He’s got some broken ribs and some loose teeth, Thomas. And Dale was banged up real good too. But they’re at the Freedom House tonight, workin’ out plans for the mass meeting Sunday and the walkout next week.” Percy stood up and joined McCormack as he paced the yard. “Our police and our Shiloh Klan really believe they got a license to ’liminate people who are peacefully trying to change Senator Tildon’s Magnolia County. They beat Fannie Lou Hamer in the jail over at Winona. Made two Negro trustees do the beatin’. Broke Mrs. Hamer’s heart, but never stopped her from keepin’ on. Now they beat Mack and Billings in our jail. And tonight, if Mr. Mendelsohn is right, Kilbrew’s people might be going to burn the Freedom House.”

Thomas halted abruptly. “Do Mack and Billings know the Kilbrew people are coming, Deacon?”

“Mr. Mendelsohn told ’em what he’d heard down at the FBI in Jackson.”

“Those boys ain’t Gandhi. And the Delta Klan ain’t the British. Nonviolence ain’t gonna stop those crackers. These kids got no guns to protect themselves!”

“Well, Thomas, they got mine. And I thought if it wasn’t against your irreligion, they might have yours.”

For the two months before Jimmy Mack headed for the orientation meeting in Oxford, Ohio, he had been deeply troubled. His conversations with Bob Moses had persuaded him that he could handle the coming Freedom Summer project in Shiloh. “You know every back alley and tractor path in Magnolia County,” Moses said. “Just find yourself a place for your Freedom House.” He had observed the young Mack from the first day he had come to Greenwood, impressed from the beginning with his quiet confidence and alertness. “You’re going to be a sergeant with green troops, so you need a place you all can care about. And a lot of those students have never been south of Atlantic City.” In his characteristically soft voice, he had added, “You’re going to have a busy summer, Mack. Keep us in touch. We’ve all got to make it to September.” But finding a place for a Freedom House in the fishbowl of Shiloh had worn him to a frazzle. The shambles of the farmhouse he discovered a half mile from Sojourner Chapel had come like a miracle. He had walked past the doddering building a hundred times, never seeing it for what it could be, only as the sad memory of a long-ago home. But as the trip to Ohio came closer, Jimmy’s vision sharpened as the possibilities for a Freedom House kept diminishing.

In the Sanctified Quarter only Sojourner Chapel had seemed large enough for any kind of meeting, but it could not work as an anchor for the every day, every night work of Freedom Summer. They’d need some rooms for classes, even a modest library since the Shiloh library was off limits to blacks. On a Sunday morning late in May, with Shiloh still asleep, he paused and examined the ancient building, then approached the drooping porch. He broke open the nailed front door and moved through the moldering rooms that had once housed two tenant families. Room by wretched room he tested the floors and struggled to open windows that had not been open since the Depression, when the last family had fled north.

When he explored the attic he found that the stifling rooms were dry, testament that the roof had remained intact over the decades. Filthy but relieved, Jimmy emerged knowing the decrepit place could be made to work. This could be the Freedom School! When he saw Bob Moses at Oxford, he was exuberant. “We got the place, Bob. Now all we got to do is teach the kids about America.”

When the Freedom School teachers arrived from Oxford, they had attacked the place with the enthusiasm of kids on a holiday. With soap, suds, mops, and brooms they’d transformed the wreck into a livable approximation of a headquarters. With saws, hammers, and lumber from the remains of an abandoned outhouse they built shelves for the mound of books they had brought from Ohio. Jimmy and Dale had watched the place emerge, thrilled that kids and the elderly were coming to meet the young invaders, discover the books, and join the classes. Black history and American history were becoming friends to these Delta residents who had known only the cramped and distorted versions in their old and obsolete school books.

All summer, from dawn to dusk, the Shiloh Freedom House was a noisy, exciting, and buoyant terminus for the volunteers who worked as teachers and those who moved daily out on the dusty roads seeking to enroll black voters. Dale’s desk inside the front screen door was the place where contact was vigilantly maintained with Freedom Summer headquarters in Jackson and bail sources in the North. But at night the Freedom House was usually deserted, a lonely farmhouse once again. Jimmy fretted because he knew that the building was too close to the highway. The only security they had to protect themselves from vandals was their own vigilance. There was no one to call if an attack were to come. Not the police. Not the Highway Patrol. Not the clergy. Not the press. Not the congressman. Not Senator Tildon. They knew they were alone.

On Wednesday evening, Ted Mendelsohn had been the first to arrive for the meeting with the blacks from the plantations. As he approached the Freedom House he could hear Dale Billings’s voice inside speaking on the phone to Jackson. “Two white cops. Harold Butler and Luther Lonergan. L.O.N.E.R.G.A.N. Yeah. Works on his days off at the Kilbrew station.”

Jimmy had stood waiting on the step for Ted, eager to explain the night of the beatings to him. “I know you heard from Dale. He’s been passing the word. But don’t write a word yet, Ted. Please. Don’t make the sheriff antsy with a news story. Nobody’s got to know that doesn’t know already. I’ve been working toward Sunday’s mass meeting all summer. People are already scared. Wait till Sunday’s meeting is over.”

Mendelsohn blanched at Mack’s swollen face, and was shocked by the pleading in the youngster’s voice. He so easily became his son, Richard, more vulnerable than he would ever admit. He studied Jimmy’s face in the dusk. “They did a job on you, didn’t they?” He swallowed hard. “If you don’t tell Max, my boss, I won’t. Not yet, I’m a reporter, Jimmy. But not yet.” Mack said nothing but turned and led the way into the house.

By nine o’clock the plantation people were all there. Hollis from the Wilson place in Inverness; George Purdy from the Milton spread in Indianola; Billy Jamieson from the Shott plantation in Drew; Marcia Hudson from the Stevens plantation in Ruleville; the Gator twins from the Gordon spread in Cleveland; Sharia Thompson, very uncomfortable in her pregnancy, from the Claybourne plantation; and Tucker Livingstone from the Tilton plantation. Dale Billings watched attentively from his small table, and Jimmy stood, his back to the door. Mendelsohn sat on the steps leading up to the attic, his notebook on his knee.

Jimmy said, “Before we start, you all heard about Mendelsohn by now. He’s been our lifeline up north, gettin’ our story out all summer. Said he wants to talk to you all.”

Mendelsohn scanned the group, struck once more by how young these serious faces were. “I’m not the only one in Magnolia County that’s been keeping track of you all summer,” he said. “It’s not a secret that you all have been working to get out the vote on your places. The Klan knows it. White Shiloh knows it. And everybody is betting on whether you walk off the plantations to protest the apartheid or don’t. I’ve been taking the temperature of the town as the pressure’s been building toward your walkout, so I wasn’t really surprised when those two cops grabbed Jimmy and Dale. They want to make folks’ minds up for them if they’ve been thinking of coming to your Sunday meeting. And tonight, on the way here, it looked at the Kilbrew station that something was coming down, probably soon.” Mendelsohn’s voice was staccato in the silent room. “Pickup trucks with shotguns flitting in and out like flies on sugar. Now that the FBI found Mickey and James and Andy, those rednecks are worried. I think it’s a sure bet they know you might be meeting here tonight. But I wouldn’t advertise it with your lights on. I left my car behind the Chapel and came here through the backyards. I don’t think anyone saw me, Jimmy. But I can’t be sure.” He paused, aware that his role as a reporter, not a participant, was now on a fragile line. Frowning, he settled back on the stair, his eyes riveted on his notebook.

Jimmy spoke sharply. “Kill all the lights except the one on Dale’s table and stay away from the windows. Give me your numbers of folks that will be coming on Sunday. Make it quick and Dale’ll get them down. Hollis?”

“Seventeen families, Jimmy.”

“George?”

“Eleven from Milton.”

“Billy?”

“Shott’s twenty-two coming to dance, Jim!” The roll call stopped as Jimmy held up his hand for silence. Dale snapped off the light. In the sudden silence they could hear the racing of a motor as a truck wheeled from the highway, turned into the connecting dirt road in front of the Freedom House and skidded to a halt 20 feet from the porch. Out of sight at the edge of the window, Jimmy watched as two men left the truck and slowly circled the house.

“Dark as a Scotchman’s pocket,” one of the men was saying. “Not a single pussy in sight.” They remounted the pickup and cut across the yard to the road. In another moment the men and women in the Freedom House watched the tail light of the truck swerve back on to Highway 49, heading north. Jimmy gave a long relieved whistle, then resumed the roll call.

“Marcia? How many are coming?”

“Ten for sure. Two maybes.”

“Twins?”

“Fifteen if they really come. Some folks heard about you and Dale.”

“Sharia?”

“Lucas Claybourne gonna shit when we come, Jimmy. Twenty-eight!”

“Tucker?”

“We’re all coming Sunday. And it’s gonna make people drop their drawers in Washington when Massa Tildon’s darkies go public and demand the vote!”

They filed quickly out of the house and melted into the darkness of the Sanctified Quarter. Mendelsohn was the last one. “You need anything, Jimmy?” He stopped short, laughing at the absurdity of his words. “Like give you a blood transfusion?”

Jimmy simply grinned and grimaced. “I look that bad, huh?”