From Little Mozarts, Little Kings

VII: CARMEN (2)

(Mississippi 1964)

Mississippi was your state, Carmen, not mine. “In Mississippi every white boy is a Lucas Brantley.” If I had some idea of what you meant when you said that to me years before, it was not in the way I would know–years later.

Lucas was a white boy from Ohio. And so was I. Both of us white-boy ignorant. The difference was he didn’t recognize who you were. I did. He was cruel. I wasn’t.

I was . . . naïve. As Bob Moses said to us at the orientation, a college student from Ohio knew more about Vietnam than about Mississippi. Vietnam was on the TV news seven nights a week. Mississippi one night a month.

Mississippi, for you, Carmen, wasn’t TV news.

As Elsie and I drove in our little Valiant south, an image came to me of you in the library back in 7^th grade– you raising your head, turning it to the side, and rolling your eyes upward in a way that showed you were embarrassed and impatient because I couldn’t seem to understand . . . that I just didn’t get it.

Here it was, seven years later–the morning of June 27, 1964—and in all honesty that image of you was the first time you’d risen to the level of my conscious mind the whole of the previous Freedom Summer Project orientation week. Stark reality had taken over–in the form of what had most likely happened to Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman and what could happen to us. And that reality, that Truth, had somehow gotten wedded with another obvious truth staring me in the face: I was never going to find you, Carmen. Not in the vast, hostile world called “Mississippi.”

All those hours we drove–crossing over into Kentucky, then Tennessee–that night in the motel in Memphis, I couldn’t get rid of it. The real. Too much right there–a thick numbness I’d never felt before. Even . . . fear. Just as in your neighborhood back in Ohio. A world I really didn’t know or understand. The hugeness of what lay before us. A culture of some 300 years in which slave ships, slave plantations, Jim Crow, and lynching were not the stuff of history books or newspaper accounts but of everyday life. It seemed from what the orientation leaders had told us, every Negro family in Mississippi had been victimized: an uncle murdered, a brother beaten, a mother fired from her job, a share-cropping family deprived of government subsidies—all for trying to get a decent education, for trying to vote. And from what I’d read in James Silver’s book—Mississippi: the Closed Society—the caste system oppressing one race was a cancer in the other.

Yes, it seeped out of my sub-conscious now and then, that somewhere out there—in Sunflower County or Holmes County, in Jackson or Vicksburg or Natchez–was, perhaps, Carmen. You. But even if by some miracle we did find you, how would it be between us now? Would you still be the feisty Carmen who scrapped with Lucas, the saucy Carmen who put down Sister Mary Jo? Or had age and the South sucked all of that out of you? We were no longer 13. In a culture so foreign to me. If I didn’t understand the Carmen of 1957 Ohio, how much less so the Carmen of 1964 Mississippi?

Nothing around me was waking up Amirah, to inspire my old sense of “the prophet,” the “oracle.” Just that seemingly interminable highway– dusty weed-infested shoulders, huge smiling billboard faces telling me about Camels and Schlitz and Wonder Bread, Gulf and Sinclair service stations, small groceries, churches too large for the towns we were in, then miles and miles of farms growing I didn’t know what except when it was the obvious stalks of gleaming corn.

And hot. Jesus, the oppressive heat and humidity–like a tight heavy plastic bag tied over us. Elsie’s gray hairs were sticking to the sides of her face. I was itching all over. For a while it was so damned hot in that car my mind’s wondering what horrors were ahead was losing out to my body’s plain old wilting, till finally we stopped at a grocery in a small town and bought some ice and I held it outside the car window so the wind would fan the cold water on us.

The air conditioning in our Memphis motel that night was the last cool night I would experience that summer.

“I’ll take the cot, you take the bed,” I announced. Elsie didn’t object.

I slept well. But somewhere in the night, in my dreams, I rocked again. Not in the way it had lulled me as a child, though. Each toss of my head, this night, got heavier, the air around me thick with humidity, pasty and clammy, until I found myself immersed in actual water–a warm stagnant river.

My senses would need resetting.

“Welcome to Mississippi, the Magnolia State,” the sign said.

I’d got it in my head, I think, that it was going to feel like a foreign country—a Congo. That an ominous pall would be palpable as soon as we crossed the line. But the sky was rosy. Nature itself was not part of the “closed society.” Besides, it was early morning so it was much cooler.

I admit, I peered into the wooded areas and scanned the farmlands with far more interest and anxiety than I had in Tennessee.

A lot of low green plants with white blossoms. Cotton!

Here and there, set back, log cabins with sagging porches, and further back, a large white house or two.

Mounds of red clay rose up obscuring our view for a while.

Then more fields.

Soon, in some of them, dark figures, feint in the early dawn, began to appear. Men and women in baggy clothes covering their entire bodies, straw hats, carrying baskets and cloth sacks.

No, Carmen, it was not a foreign country, but it had a very foreign feel to it, and I decided it was because I hadn’t ever worked it, farmed it, and I was coming to it by way of a highway that I hadn’t built.