Behind the Magnolia Curtain: A Yankee in Mississippi

by Richard Boeth

PSYCHIATRY has been notoriously, if wisely, averse Uproviding precise definitions of the various categories of mental illness, but I think I can give an exact description of a schizophrenic. A schizophrenic is a certain kind of New Yorker a liberal Democrat, an Ivy Leaguer, a bookworm, an atheist, and a warm supporter of civil rights — who goes to live in a liny Mississippi town called Rosedale in the Year One of Our COFO, having sometime previously married into the oldest and most powerful faintly in the town. I used to know the guy very well, and I still see him now and then. His name is Richard Boeth.

It was just over fifteen months ago that my wife and I, with the tacit consent of our year-old son, began this madness. We had both been working for some time for newsmagazines, she for lime, I for Newsweek which led to a certain mendacity at the breakfast table and we concluded that perhaps we might disappear for a while to find out if I was a Writer or only office help. Where to go? One friend, with a house to sell in northern Vermont, suggested northern Vermont; another, who had successfully completed an unsuccessful novel on a mountaintop in Guatemala, extolled Guatemalan mountaintops. Sissy, my wife, remembered the three empty bedrooms in her grandmother’s huge old house in Roscdale. “And you won’t have to worry about your friends distracting you,” she said persuasively. “You won’t have any.”

And thus, on May Day, 1964, I began my career as the village freak. The town and I were not entirely strangers to each other. On several previous visits in the five years of our marriage, I had perched on a multitude of rosewood settees and bellowed rudely about Mississippi’s racial idiocies. This alone, or a combination of any two of my other alien qualities, would ordinarily have been enough for the cops to escort me to the county limits. But there was this business of family. The antediluvian Speaker of the Mississippi House lives in Roscdale, and when Sissy passes him on the street, she says, “Hello, Cousin Walter.” Her father, who lives twenty miles away in Cleveland, is a judge on Mississippi’s second highest court; her late mother had a highway and a junior high school named after her; and her grandmother, a laughing, tinkling eighty-eight-year-old marvel known to all as Miss Fanny, is quite simply the best-loved woman in the county. I may have been poison, and Sissy at least suspect, but we were in no immediate danger of being shot.

Nor did we wish to provoke a shooting. We knew that there was no avoiding the racial issue (as the late Senator Joseph W. Bailey of Texas once remarked, “Those people in Mississippi don’t wanna talk about anything but niggers”), but we hoped to keep it. tamped down to a kind of wary banter, as Between trusties and prison guards. I nurtured a second hope, which I don’t think my wife shared, I hoped that after I had lived here a few months the citizens would at least spare me the Con. The Con is a litany of lies that all Mississippians intone automatically to all Yankees, its main themes being that the Negroes are given every educational, legal, voting, and job opportunity on an equal basis, and that anyone who says different is a Commie or a Northern journalist or both. If you start waving evidence at them, they say, with a reassuring seasick smile, “But you just can’t understand the nigra unless you’ve lived with him like we have.”Well, by God, now I was going to live with him like they have, and I presumed to imagine that after a while, as they saw that I was there and I knew, they would cut out the nonsense.

On these two hopes rested our prospects of peaceful coexistence in Mississippi. The first crashed in two days; the second took somewhat longer. On our first Saturday night, we were invited to a party at which the conversation eventually turned to the position of the churches in the face of the coming “invasion.” (From the vocabulary used by the whites all summer, you would have thought that Mississippi was being visited by Grant’s Army of the West instead of five hundred scruffy, unarmed, not overly gifted college kids. The blame for provoking the hysteria goes to the state’s politicians and newspapers, with an assist to NAACP leader Aaron Henry, who promised in a speech that there would be ten thousand COFO workers in the state. This is the most transparently ridiculous statement Henry ever made, but the only one that the racist Jackson Daily News ever pretended to believe.) The Episcopalians and the Baptists had already made up their minds about what to do if a Negro appeared at a service - okay and nokay, respectively but the Methodists and Presbyterians were in a tizzy of indecision. Finally, a pillar of the local Methodist church—a large middle-aged lady with a vast ignorance of Methodist church law and a most un-Weslevan snootful reared back and declaimed: “If God had meant me to sit in the same pew with my cook, He would have made us the same color.” That did it. Sissy hit her high, and I hit her low, and our first resolution died a noisy death on the living room rug.

THERE is a danger here that I might seem to be presenting myself as some worthy champion of civil rights. The truth is that a Negro friend in New York called me the worst kind of comfortable, ineffective parlor liberal, and I suspect he was right. He said further that he preferred to talk to a redneck seg, with whom the battle lines were at least clearly defined. But this preference for clean battle lines works from the other end too. If I had been an anonymous field worker for COFO, the doyens of Rosedale would newer have known of my existence. The cops would have, but ihev do a good job of protecting the citizens from unsettling information.) But there I was, driving Miss Fanny around town, doing the Charleston at the country club, teaching tennis to their kids, and entertaining the state regent of the D. A. R. and the founder of the Women for Constitutional Government at cocktails everv once in a while. To cap matters, Sissy and I, in a moment when G. J. Mendel was dozing, had spawned an extremeh beautiful child, and in a town full of widows you can ask for no greater asset.

I thought, in short, that I was softening up the citizens, and they thought they were softening me up, at least to the point where a dialogue becomes possible. Certainly if such a dialogue were possible in rural Mississippi, it would require some such bizarre circumstances as mine, and few Yankees have ever found themselves in them not the civil rights worker, not the reporter on the wing, not the manufacturer’s agent looking for a plant site. If this saga of anger, frustration, and dark hilarity has any significance, it is that the better Rosedale and I got to know each other, the less vve had to say to each other. This expands into a hypothesis: the better any liberal gets to know Mississippi, the less Mississippi likes him. Editors such as Ralph McGill and Hoddmg Garter II and III, and journalists such as William Bradford Huie knowledgeable Southerners all are reviled here to an extent that innocent babes like Murray Kcmpton would no doubt envy.

Not that there were very many who read anything from outside the state except the Reader’s Digest and (with increasing dyspepsia) the Saturday Evening Post. The Garters’ Delta Democrat-Times, one of the lew reasonable voices in the wilderness, is published forty miles front Rosedale, but it is neither delivered in the town nor sold on the newsstand. Nobody will buy it. Instead, the pussyfooting Commercial-Appeal is imported front Memphis, one hundred miles to the north, and the vulgar, incompetent Daily News from Jackson, one hundred miles to the southeast. Rosedale fed on the Daily News, and the Daily News fed on the likes of Rosedale, until there was nothing too gross for the paper to print or its readers to swallow. The full extent of the paper’s culpability, and that of its sister, the Clarion-Ledger, for the state’s racial and legal chaos will be documented soon enough in somebody’s Ph. D. thesis. For now, it’s enough to say that as the FBI and the Navy were combing Neshoba County for the bodies of the three murdered COFO workers, the Daily News was printing pigsty wisecracks almost every day implying that the missing boys were undoubtedly laughing it up in New York, Miami, or Havana. Roscdale echoed the laughter.

I continue to brood about this more than about any of the wide variety of other depressing aspects of Mississippi society. The citizens have stopped reading because they wanted to stop reading, not because they don’t know how to read. Rosed ale is a wealthy town by Mississippi standards, with a ratheielegant white residential community tucked in beside the levee and the richest cotton and rice farms in the state stretching away to the north, east, and south. Almost everyone I know there has a college degree of one sort or another (although rarely from out of state) and regards himself as clearly a more rational and sensible person than his unlettered cousin in the piney woods. Rosedale’s scorn of the red-neck is as great as that of any Northern editorial writer, and several people in Roscdale told me at the beginning of the summer that they were far more worried about red-necks getting out of hand than COFO workers or Negroes. “Hell,” said one, “we can handle them kids and the niggers too, don’t care how many there is. But I’m scared that they gonna start gettin’ ideas down at the domino parlor that they wanna put a few notches on their rifles.”

This sounded promising. The nice folks were pledged, however informally, to keeping the thugs in line, and the sheriff’s office shared this goal, at least to the extent that there were no public fights, beatings, or hosings in Bolivar County all summer long. But it took only the disappearance of the three COFO kids, with the attendant national publicity, for the nice folks to close ranks ideologically with the red-necks and take off on a paranoiac binge. Right after the COFO murders, for example, the FBI released its yearly crime figures, which seemed to show that Mississippi had the lowest crime rate in the country, lower by half than the second-best state. Mississippi newspapers chortled, and the citizens went bark with renewed faith to their claims that brutality and injustice in the state were only “isolated incidents.” One day I mentioned to a friend that those crime statistics were a hit suspect, since half of the state’s eighty-two counties including 78 percent of the rural counties hadn’t sent in any statistics at all.

“Where did you read that?” she said.

“ Time”

“Yeah,” she said, turning away, “I figured.”

And off she marched, with her vision of crimeless Mississippi intact. Now, Time is as capable as any publication of bending a straightforward factual bagel into an interpretive pretzel, but it doesn’t play skip-to-my-Lou with simple FBI statistics. I had hoped my friend would sec this; it was one of many disappointments. Of course, before leasing New York wc had signed on as Time stringers, an arrangement that would let us take a look now and then at what was going on elsewhere around the state. I suppose it was natural that some of the citizens thought wc had traveled a thousand miles just to libel them.

IT SEEMS, from this vantage point, to have been a time of some innocence. Terror and hysteria were in the air, to be sure, but I assumed that they would yield to knowledge and reason, and I proceeded very airily indeed. In May of 1964, Sissy and I drove to Jackson to cover a story for Time concerning the arrival of two representatives of the National Council of Churches. In the black night on a black road south of Yazoo City, we came on a Negro boy and girl standing beside a stalled car. I passed them by and went on for a quarter of a mile; then Sissy and I exchanged meaningful glances, and I turned back. Their car was kaput, so I offered them a lift to Jackson. Then we discovered that our car wouldn’t start cither, and I had to poke my lily-white face out into the occasional traflic and cadge a push before we could continue. The Negro kids sat in stark silence all the way to Jackson while I made jokes and small talk. I would pick them up again today, I hope, but I wouldn’t joke much, and I’d be sure the kids were on the floor whenever wc went through a town.

At the Jackson airport, where the press conference was held, an elderly man in white linen suit and black string tie called me a white nigger, and I thought of how envious Norman Mailer would be. Then this same old-school gentleman launched into a florid denunciation of the “nigger-Jew-Oriental conspiracy,” a triumvirate that was new to me. With many hearty chuckles, I related the story later in the day to an aunt of Sissy’s who lives in Jackson. She paused thoughtfully. “I hadn’t heard about the Orientals,” she said, “but I’m told it’s true about the Jews and niggers.”

It was along in here that I began to sense that rapport, if not communication, between me and Mississippi still lay concealed just over the horizon. Very well, then, these people did not consider any aspect of segregation amusing under any circumstances, and I would approach the subject with calm, judicious solemnity. I admit to occasional failure to keep a straight face, as when word came in that Martin Luther Ring had won the Nobel Peace Prize. Most of the time, though, I tried to take the townspeople seriously, to adopt their own premises, even, and follow them through to some sort of consistent conclusion, if only to find out just what they are so terrified of. This is the biggest mystery in the Deep South, and I am not much closer to an answer now than when I got here. Let me accept, for example, the Southerner’s argument that segregation is engraved in the very bones of the whites and that no amount of legislation or legal decrees is going to change it. Fine, I buy that. Then in the next sentence he’s tolling me that if his daughter is forced to go to school with Negroes, she’s going to be copulating with them in the school yard and mongrelizing the race. Well, you can’t have it both ways — Southern womanhood is either determined to remain separate from the Negro or determined to go to bed with him at the first opportunity — and Mississippians would clear the air quite a bit if they could make up their minds which is true.

The amount of fantasy indulged in is astonishing. One bright, alert young mother of two put it to me this way: “I’m not worried right off about my daughter sleeping with a colored boy — less than I am about her sleeping with a white boy. But tell me this. If white and colored go to school together, and play there together, what’s to prevent my daughter from saying one day, ‘Mom, I made this new friend at school, and she’s colored, and I’m bringing her home to lunch.’ Well I won’t have it, but what do I say to my child when she asks me?”

You say glory hallelujah, friend, if you have any sense, but the sad, obvious, and wholly uncomprehended truth is that the problem won’t exist, and Rosedale ought to know this better than most towns. In Rosedale, segregation rages even among the whites; there is the nice part of town, and there is something called the Pasture, where the poor whites live in squalor and poverty no different from the blacks’. The Pasture kids go to school with the nice kids, and play there with them, but they never get invited home to lunch. It is not clear outside Mississippi how you break down the barriers of snobbery by adding the curse of a black skin to the curse of poverty, but here it is argued that the social miracle will somehow take place automatically.

A major part of the chaos in the state is caused by the white Mississippian’s failure to believe even what he claims to believe. Let me ignore the hypocrisy of his Christianity and stay with soeiolegal matters. The whites here claim that the Mississippi Negro is an inferior human being; on this the whites are right. For seventy-five years, every Negro with two ounces of education, brains, and ambition has got the hell out of the state as soon as he could raise bus fare. The resulting downbreeding, along with poverty, filthy living conditions, twelfth-rate schools, and the boot on the throat, has made the Mississippi Negroes, by whatever standard you want to judge them, the sorriest single group of people in the nation. It is a genetic puzzlement that so many bright Negro kids are born in each generation, but of course they get out too. The COFO volunteers found out last summer that education here is not simply a matter of opening a volume of Bertrand Russell and watching the parched minds bloom. The whole process of educating the Negro here is, in the words of SNCC’s Robert Moses, “so slow, so slow,”and one must begin from scratch or a little behind scratch.

Okay then, white folks, you’re superior. Agreed and agreed. But why in the name of all you believe in are you afraid to give the Negro a fair voting test? Make it as tough as you like, but administer it equally. Why not? “Because they’d just take over.” But they cant take over, not in any fair contest with the whites, because they’re not only outnumbered (57 percent to 43 percent) but inferior. Why do you have to lie and cheat, neighbors, when the house odds are already stacked overwhelmingly in your favor? What is it that scares you, neighbors?

At first I ran up against the bland denial that there was any discrimination in voter registration, but that myth, which some people seemed really to believe, has been exploded in the past year. One red-letter day came when my father-inlaw reported that three whites in a single group of veniremen, registered voters all, had confessed they couldn’t read or write. Others came as various idiot cops around the state began banging lu-ads together when the Negroes appeared at the courthouse. The whites now prefer not to discuss voter discrimination at all, and if the subject comes up, they dismiss it as a cliche, as last year’s movie, as a simple harassment. A few months ago a young mother asked me patiently, “Just tell me why you’re all picking on Mississippi.”

I decided to keep it simple. “Because for seventy-live years you have systematically robbed the Negro of his right to vote.”

“Oh, that again!” she said, as if repetition had made the matter unworthy of any further consideration.

The white’s sense of superiority falters again when you ask him serious questions about school integration. The segs argue that integration w ill mean the wholesale degradation of the school system, because the Negro is so far behind hereditarily and environmentally. Once again, friends, let us agree. But it would certainly be no startling educational innovation to run a fast sec tion and a slow section in each grade. According to everything that Mississippi holds holy, the Negroes would by their very nature populate the slow section, and the whites the fast. Right? Well, not quite. You see, there’s my nephew Johnny who was a breech birth, and the doc tor was very clumsy with the forceps, and Johnny has trouble tying his shoelaces. He’s really a lot smarter than any nigger, you see, but he has trouble showing it, and if he got put in a slow section with the niggers, we’d have to leave town, the shame of it all. All right-thinking Mississippians would rather destroy education entirely than go through that kind of humiliation.

This cringing self-doubt shows itself most clearly when the neighbors start talking about intermarriage, The Negro, let us not forget, is backward, childlike, flirty, and diseased, but the neighbors are worried about their daughters marrying him. I find this puzzling. I have a bright, charming little cutie of a daughter, named Jennifer, aged eleven, and f spend almost no time brooding about the possibility of her marrying anybody, of any race, who is backward, childlike, flirty, and diseased. I have quite enough confidence in my own superiority and in hers. I would like to share this confidence with the local folk, but they will have none of it. Sometimes I reach the point where I think that the first step toward racial justice in this state is for the whites really to start believing their slogans about the Negro, and to act upon them with absolute rigor. What are you afraid of, neighbors?

DOUBT became paranoia when the COFO kids hit the state, even though they never got within twenty miles of Rosedale. (A few Negroes from other Mississippi towns came in to recruit fellow Negroes, but the cops quietly threw them out. And two volunteer beards appeared on Rosedale’s main street one hot August afternoon, causing a sensation.) I noticed that my neighbors’ resentment increased geometrically as it became apparent that the volunteers were going to make nonviolence stick and that the Negroes were not going to rise in armed rebellion. The whites were desperately eager for someone to start fighting back, but through the long devastating summer the whites managed to earn credit for every bombing, every knifing, every clubbing, every murder. Not one seg hair on one sog’s head was so much as mussed by anybody connected with the Movement, and the neighbors were beside themselves with rage.

In addition to the frustration of being swamped in nonviolence, the whites were also discovering that they had been played for fools. Whatever else may have been Con, the neighbors were genuinely convinced that they knew the Mississippi Negro, his thought patterns and aspirations. Maybe they did, once upon a time; I just don’t know. But they are almost totally in the dark today. Except for a few men whose farms are so large that they can still carry a few Negro tenants, no Mississippi.m has any meaningful contact with any Negro other than the cook-nurse. The whites’ whole estimation of the Negro’s drive in this state was derived, in thousands of homes, from the lady of the house asking, “Lulubelle, tell me honestly, do you want this integration of the races?” And Lulubelle ducked her head and said dutifully, “Tell you the truth, Miss Linda, ah don’t want nothin’ to do with it. Ah happy as ah is. Seems to me all these people doin’ is stirrin’ up trouble for cverbody.” And the lady of the house nodded smugly, and believed it, and between hands at the bridge club discovered that everybody clse’s cook had said the same thing.

When the truth began to come out, the shock was so great that the whites were left with nothing but a few irrelevant slogans, which they now began to repeat with the shrill insistence of the played-out sucker. I believe the shock was real. That is, if the whites had known all along that the Negro was waiting eagerly for the vote, for school integration, for the forms of social equality, they wouldn’t have reacted with the kind of hysteria they showed last summer. They would have resisted, grimly and no doubt brutally, but that threnody of betrayal wouldn’t have floated over the land.

As it was, the whites had to find some excuse for their gross misestimation of the Negro, and the scraggly bunch of five hundred COFO kids was the only thing in sight. It is comical really, this vision of a few hundred untutored youths overturning the cherished Mississippi Way of Life, but it was the only out the neighbors had, and they weren’t laughing. Instead, they invented the meaningless but loaded epithet of “outside agitator” and ascribed to him a power at once diabolic and inexplicable. They couldn’t get it down their craw that their niggers — their niggers! — were being led off to the courthouse by a ragtag band of teenagers. Their rage took some curious forms. I remember on several occasions being given a harangue on propriety that went like this: “Those outside agitators are just a disgrace. Why, they don’t even dress or smell as good as the nigras they’re supposed to be helping. Just look at them. How are you gonna raise a man up when you look worse than he does?”

“You mean you’re angry because COFO isn’t as effective as it might be?”

“It’s a disgrace, that’s all. My cook told me she wouldn’t have one of them beatniks in her house for ten seconds.”

EARLY in the fall we solidified our position in Rosedale by bringing a beatnik home for the weekend. He was an eighteen-year-old friend, a graduate of Andover and a student at Berkeley, who had spent the summer working at COFO headquarters in Jackson. Tommy was not only clean-shaven and well mannered, but he also wore a sport coat made of excellent tweed. We threw a party for him. The neighbors said that he was certainly a fine boy, and wasn’t it a disgrace about all those beatniks coming in here? Nobody in Rosedale— and very few whites in Mississippi, from what I gathered — ever came to understand anything about the COFO workers’ motives (which were for the most part above reproach), their power (which was extremely diffuse), or their tactics. The neighbors denounced the workers incessantly as “just a bunch of publicity seekers ‘ without realizing the deadly truth of the accusation. It was like an eighteenth-century colonial general scornfully dismissing Indian guerrilla tactics as “so many savages lighting from the trees,” his very scorn blinding him to the fact that the Indians were winning all the battles. Publicity was COFO’s single largest goal in the Mississippi project, and the segs, cursing and crying defiance, fell all over themselves helping COFO to attain that goal. The workers cared sincerely about education and about voter registration, but both these objectives could be (and were) attained a great deal more speedily if the segs would only behave according to stereotype. And the segs did, saying with exquisitely unwitting irony, “You gotta admit that these kids came in here just looking for trouble.”

By the end of the summer, despite the continuance of outward pleasantries between us and the town, the bloom had left the magnolia. One can live with one’s neighbor’s prejudices, but one cannot live with his stupidity. The issue in Mississippi is presented, Id gullible citizens as well as gullible outlanders, as being one of preserving a cherished Southern way of life, even if it means defiance of federal courts, national laws, and a bleeding-heart liberal press. But in not one case, not one incident, in the past decade has Mississippi done, or, through its public figures, said, anything that didn’t help to destroy what it was trying to preserve. They abandoned their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor to keep the nigger in line -and failed ignominiously. You don’t very often come across a society that dumb.

The election campaign in the fall was a time of desperation for the neighbors and much jollity for me, since LBJ was a shoo-in. I had to send away to New York for an LBJ sticker for the car, as there were none to be had in Bolivar County. Our political radicalism was treated gently. Sissy was at a tea one morning at which one of the ladies said firmly, “You know, I don’t know a single person who’s going to vote for Johnson.”

Sissy said, “I am.”

“Oh, but you’re voting in New York,” said the lady with a sigh of relief.

Another time, another lady came by to collect dues from Miss Fanny for the Women for Constitutional Government, founded by Rosedale’s own Florence Ogden (a cousin, naturally). Phe collector explained that each of ten volunteers had been given a list of names to canvass. Suddenly she stopped and looked sheepishly at Sissy. “I’m sorry, dear,”she said, “but you’re not on anyone’s list.”

On election night we did the only decent thing: we went over to Cleveland to watch the returns with a couple of Democrats we knew there. When the neighbors take a pasting like that, it is best not to sit at their side and gloat.

There was even some comedy attached to my reporting for Time. I journeyed to Philadelphia, Mississippi, when Sheriff Raincv and the others were arrested, and spent a miserable three days. The town was tense, the hotel unspeakable, and I went sleepless for two nights without being able to find out much more than that “Sheriff Rainey is really a very kindly man.” The whole venture was god-awful from every possible point of view. In the Roscdalc paper the following week, sandwiched in the social notes between news of shopping trips to Memphis, returning vacationers, and a tea for somebody’s engaged daughter, was the indomitable item: “Mr. Dick Boeth spent a couple of days last week in Philadelphia, Miss.”

Mostly, our function was to supply the town with juicy rumors. As Mississippians are too polite to put a direct question, the ladies never came to us directly with them but simply debated their probable truth or falsity among themselves. One of my favorite rumors had us on the federal payroll, assigned to integrate Roscdale. Another had Sissy addressing a COFO rally on the very night that a dozen of the town’s leading citizens were getting pleasantly smashed with us at our farewell party. (We observed all the amenities.) The sad part was that the intelligence came from the aunt of a woman who had been one of the last to leave the party; our guest told her aunt that she couldn’t remember which night the party had been on.

At times I was called on to witness the fairmindedness of all, as when a matron cried one day, “Dick, you’ve been vindicated!”

“Of what?”

“Of trying to integrate the café.”

“What?”

“Yes. They were saying yesterday at my bridge club that you had led three nigras into the café. Well, one of the ladies f won’t tell you who said, ‘I don’t know about that, btu I’ve been hearing so much about Dick Boeth that I dec ided to ask the police. I went up to Mr. Baker and said, “Mr. Baker, you know everything that goes on in this town. Is Dick Boeth spending his nights down there stirrin’ up the nigras?” And Mr. Baker said, “I don’t know where Dick Boeth spends Ins nights, ma’am. I assume he spends them at home. But I can assure you we have the nigras under surveillance, arifl Dick Boeth isn’t with them.” ‘ So you you’re cleared !”

One must light at such moments to hold back the tears. Our contact with the local Negroes was, like everyone rise’s, limited almost exclusively to those who worked for us. We paid wages rather higher than the going rate of fifteen dollars for a six-day week, and got along amiably with one and all, but my few ventures into active uplift were ludicrous. One girl who had baby-sat for us told us that she was going to get married, but hoped to finish school without getting pregnant. I told her I’d do my part by getting her a diaphragm for a wedding present. The local doctor refused, however, to fit her for one, and only after some bullying by me explained that the state of Mississippi has a free birth-control program using the Pill. I sent the bride-to-be scurrying off for a signed slip from the doctor. I then ran into a couple of shocks. One was that not one of the neighbors, for all their bitching about the nigger birthrate and the burden of relief payments, had even heard of the contraception program, much less tried to educate the Negroes to it. The second, perhaps inevitably, came four weeks later when I found the authorization for pills jammed in a corner of the baby buggy, unused and forgotten.

I wasn’t any help to COFO either, although I think I could have been. Sissy’s father, for all his traditionalism, has a happy habit of regarding the law as the law, even to the extent of abiding by the rulings of the U.S. Supreme Court. And I, for my part, carried with me the threat of national publicity. With both factors working, I have a certain leverage, if no real power, and I gave COFO my number to call if ever one of their kids got himself in a jam here. To be sure, the cops have played it extremely gently in this county, at least by Mississippi standards. The kids are subject to constant harassment they arc tailed everywhere, their phones may be tapped, they suspect their mail is being opened but they have not been given the ultradeluxe Mississippi treatment. I did find out, after the fact, about a quaint custom of picking up COFO workers for spurious traffic offenses and trying and sentencing them in one telephone call to the local justice of the peace. I called the county attorney about it. expressed surprise and mortification, and promised to call me back. Two months later I saw him at a Little Theater performance, and he shuffled his feet and looked at the ground and said the practice was only a matter of “isolated incidents.”

None of the workers has ever called me, and it is easy enough to understand why. Unless he’s in danger of a bad beating, a COFO worker does more for the Movement, and more for his own reputation within the Movement, by going to jail on a phony charge than by pulling influence to stay out. On one occasion, though, my invisible protective shield was of real help. I was driving a Negro girl, a COFO worker, to the town of Mound Bayou, where her sister, also a COFO worker, was in the hospital trying to find out the cause of the severe headaches that had been coming on her ever since she got hit with a policeman’s billy last summer. We hadn’t been on the highway two minutes when a cop hit my tail and hung there like a white banner. He stayed there for two miles, babbling intently into his radio, before he zoomed his car around mine and sped off down the road. Poor officer! I mean, when you’ve got a couple of race-mixing outside agitators right under the gun, so to speak, and you radio headquarters for a check on the license plates, and you find out that the car belongs to the presiding judge of Mississippi’s Eleventh District, it can befoul your whole afternoon.

I also rather enjoyed leading a gang of Roscdalc children, plus their Negro nurses, plus my own two older children visiting from New York, in a march down the main street of Rosedale, all of us singing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” I hadn’t intended anything subversive. The children wanted a parade, and had made some paper hats and American flags. As we trooped toward the drugstore to forage for Cokes, it became apparent to me that we needed a marching song. My singing voice is uncertain at best and unbearable at worst, and I knew that I could never manage the complexities of “Dixie.” So I broke into “ The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” the children joined in, and traffic stopped for blocks around. Rosedale may never see its like again.

I hold to the hypothesis that it is possible for a writer to work anywhere, but I wasn’t proving it in Rosedale. Two months ago my family and I left Rosedale and moved twenty miles cast to Cleveland, a town of some 10,000 population versus Rosedale’s 2300. The difference would not seem to be great, but in a town the size of Rosedale you can’t walk to the post office without meeting three people you know, and in Cleveland you are permitted a certain sense of privacy and anonymity. An illusory sense of privacy and anonymity, of course. Our best friend here owns a clothing store. Two weeks after we moved to town, his salesgirls requested an audience with him, at which they solemnly told him that he was endangering business, home, and reputation by being seen with us. I keep thinking back to Sissy’s reassurance that I wouldn’t have to worry about friends distracting me, because I wouldn’t have any. Quite right, my dear, but with enemies like these, who needs friends.