There was a hogan close by. This hogan was a little ways from this lake; it was just a brush hogan, I guess. On this hogan was nothing but rags, all over, so that must have been a brush hogan, with some people living there. Then I thought to myself, “I’ll go over there to see who the people are.” I rode over there, thinking I might get something to eat. I was without anything, so I was really hungry. After the sheep had drunk they stopped there at the lake. They lay around there in the shadows; it was pretty hot. When they were still there, I rode up to this hogan. There was a woman; her clan was Bitter Water, but her father was the same clan as my father. Her name was The War Split.
As soon as she saw me, she said to me, “Where are you from, my son?” I was thinking about her, why she said that to me, but then she said to me again, “Where are you coming from? I am glad to see you, my father.” That’s what she said to me again. Her father was my father’s clan; that’s why she said to me, “my father.” At first she said, “my son,” to me; but I was really her father. Then I said to her, “I…I don’t know what I am doing; I don’t know where I am going; but I am going off someplace. I had a wife and she did a wrong thing with me so I left her.” Then she said to me, “Well, my father, I am so sorry about this. I know that sometimes you will be in bad luck. And that’s what you’re in now. And a lot of them, a lot of those people, say the same bad things. Because those people (Red Clay) are bad. They can do anything with you; that’s what they’ve done with you now. I know those people, and everybody knows them too. Those people who live there can do anything they want to with a man. That’s why any man who is married to those people doesn’t stay there long, because they do things like that. Even those with husbands go around with other men. That’s the way they are, that’s the way those people are who live there and that’s the way all of the Red Clay people are. They go after another man, for a husband to them.” And she said, “I just don’t know what to do about you. I am so sorry that you are all alone now, and that you’re going off away some place. Maybe you know where you are going, but even at that, I am sorry for you, because you are all alone now, with all those hurts. I have nothing for you; I can’t get a woman for you; I’ve got three girls living here, but they are real small, and they are good for nothing, because they are small.” That’s what she said to me.
So she had some milk there, left over; she put that on the fire for me, and she added a little, just a little piece of mutton, dry mutton. She put that over on the charcoal and roasted it for me. That was all she had, but I got enough, and there wasn’t any coffee at that time. There was coffee around but it was so scarce it was hard to get it. The stores were way off, far away. So that was all I had there, milk and a piece of meat, that was all. That’s the way she spoke to me. Then she said, “You are the only one that has got things to live on. No other man lives the way you live. I know they can’t find a man like you again. Maybe they will try their best to find a man like you, but they can’t get him, because just a few men are like you. I know you’ve got a lot of things to live on. And this woman you left, I know she can’t get another man just like you. But it’s all right, my father, you can just go ahead with your sheep; I know you’ll get another woman soon. That’s the way I am thinking about you, my father.”
Then I left that place. I went on with my herd, even though it was a really hot day. When I got to a place called Baby Rock, there was shade around the foot of these rocks, and the sheep were around these rocks where there was shade. I took the saddle off and hobbled my horse and went under the rock where there was shade and I lay there. I turned my horse loose there, hobbled and eating up the grass, and I was there in the shade lying down. I went to sleep, oh, quite a while, I guess. I don’t know how long I slept. When I woke up it was getting cool. Then I got my horse back to where the saddle was. I saddled up the horse and got on him and started up with my herd again. Down I went with my herd, going lower and lower all the time, toward Where The Green Valley Enters. There was a point there, I was just going straight for that point, a little ways above Where The Green Valley Enters. I was just going ahead for that point.
When I got to this point, on top of this high hill, the sun was pretty well down. I saw two riders coming up to this lower point. I saw them going up there. They went up to the foot of the upper rock point. They got down off their horses and they hobbled them there; I saw them coming down. It was a woman and a boy. They just kept coming towards me, and I was just going ahead with my herd. Soon they got down and they got behind the herd and they stopped there; I went up to them. I knew this woman. She was one of the clan of Red Clay again, and I knew her very well. When the herd went down, I went after them with my horse, and I put my horse in front of her. She stopped there, and stood there. I grabbed a hold of her dress, and asked her, “Are you the two who hobbled the horse way up on the cliff?” and she said, “Yes.” I asked them, “Where are you living?” and she said, “Way over there, across that wash, way over, some hogans across, above those hogans where there’s a brush hogan, that’s where we live.” And I said to her, “I hold you for good, and I mean it. I grab hold of you for good.” That’s what I said to her. And she said to me, “What do you mean by that?” Then I said to her, “We stay right here tonight. Then tomorrow we go back to your home.” She said, “No, no I won’t, because I am afraid of your wife. I know you’ve got a wife.” “No, I don’t have a wife, none at all. I don’t know where she went to. She went and left for good,” that’s what I said to her. “You’re a liar. I know you’re lying to me. I bet you she’s coming right after you now.” Again, I said, “I don’t have any wife, none at all.” And she said to me, “No, you’ve got a wife. I know it because you’ve got a sheep pelt with you. That means You’ve got a wife.” That’s what she said to me. “You’ve got a wife, because I know you’ve got a sheep pelt there with you. And a man who has a sheep pelt with him, that means he’s got a wife, so I know you’ve got a wife.”
So I just started to play with her there for a while and I had a good time there laughing and playing with her. I didn’t do anything to her, so she didn’t become my wife at all. And the boy was there standing by us, looking at us. I wanted him to go ahead, I told him to go home, but he just stayed there, standing there looking at us. He didn’t go. Maybe if the boy had left, if the boy had gone home, maybe I could have done something to her, maybe we would have had a lot of fun. But the boy didn’t go. We were there for quite a while. It was just about getting dark then, and I was thinking about her, and her clan; she was Red Clay again. Then I thought to myself, “I’d better not bother her, because she is Red Clay. If I married her, she might do just the same thing again to me.” That’s the way I thought about her. So then I just let her go, and she went home. Then everything that was in me, in my head, and in me, was out. All the sorrow and the sadness disappeared from me. From there on, I had my mind back and everything was back to me. I was all right from then on. That was because I spoke to this woman and played with her a little. That’s what made me kind of happy again. I had all my mind back, and she was the one who brought everything back to me, because I had played with her there for a while, laughing and talking with her. So she chased everything away from me. While we were playing, the sheep were right there close to us. They lay there on the ground, and it was dark. After they left, then I started out with my sheep again, and I found that I was in good shape. I knew things then; I just went along from there in a happy way. Before that, I almost choked-like, my breast filled with something. And when I played with this woman, I don’t know how but all at once it disappeared. Everything that was in me was gone.
ANNE MOODY (1940- )
Anne Moody was twenty-seven when she wrote the plainspoken memoir Coming of Age in Mississippi (1969).
Working as a maid and waitressing, Moody had earned enough money to add to a basketball scholarship and enter Natchez College in Mississippi; she transferred to Tougaloo College. She joined the NAACP, organized and raised funds for the Co
ngress of Racial Equality, and took part in a Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee voter-registration drive. Her mother, back in Centerville, Mississippi, feared retribution. In 1963, Moody took part in a sit-in at a Woolworth’s lunch counter in Jackson, Mississippi, just before Medgar Evers was killed there.
Moody also wrote Mr. Death (1975), a collection of short stories. The Reverend King in this account is Ed King, a white man, the chaplain at Tougaloo.
from COMING OF AGE IN MISSISSIPPI
In mid-September I was back on campus. But didn’t very much happen until February when the NAACP held its annual convention in Jackson. They were having a whole lot of interesting speakers: Jackie Robinson, Floyd Patterson, Curt Flood, Margaretta Belafonte, and many others. I wouldn’t have missed it for anything. I was so excited that I sent one of the leaflets home to Mama and asked her to come.
Three days later I got a letter from Mama with dried-up tears on it, forbidding me to go to the convention. It went on for more than six pages. She said if I didn’t stop that shit she would come to Tougaloo and kill me herself. She told me about the time I last visited her, on Thanksgiving, and she had picked me up at the bus station. She said she picked me up because she was scared some white in my hometown would try to do something to me. She said the sheriff had been by, telling her I was messing around with that NAACP group. She said he told her if I didn’t stop it, I could not come back there any more. He said that they didn’t need any of those NAACP people messing around in Centreville. She ended the letter by saying that she had burned the leaflet I sent her. “Please don’t send any more of that stuff here. I don’t want nothing to happen to us here,” she said. “If you keep that up, you will never be able to come home again.”
I was so damn mad after her letter, I felt like taking the NAACP convention to Centreville. I think I would have, if it had been in my power to do so. The remainder of the week I thought of nothing except going to the convention. I didn’t know exactly what to do about it. I didn’t want Mama or anyone at home to get hurt because of me.
I had felt something was wrong when I was home. During the four days I was there, Mama had tried to do everything she could to keep me in the house. When I said I was going to see some of my old classmates, she pretended she was sick and said I would have to cook. I knew she was acting strangely, but I hadn’t known why. I thought Mama just wanted me to spend most of my time with her, since this was only the second time I had been home since I entered college as a freshman.
Things kept running through my mind after that letter from Mama. My mind was so active, I couldn’t sleep at night. I remembered the one time I did leave the house to go to the post office. I had walked past a bunch of white men on the street on my way through town and one said, “Is that the gal goin’ to Tougaloo?” He acted kind of mad or something, and I didn’t know what was going on. I got a creepy feeling, so I hurried home. When I told Mama about it, she just said, “A lotta people don’t like that school.” I knew what she meant. Just before I went to Tougaloo, they had housed the Freedom Riders there. The school was being criticized by whites throughout the state.
The night before the convention started, I made up my mind to go, no matter what Mama said. I just wouldn’t tell Mama or anyone from home. Then it occurred to me—how did the sheriff or anyone at home know I was working with the NAACP chapter on campus? Somehow they had found out. Now I knew I could never go to Centreville safely again. I kept telling myself that I didn’t really care too much about going home, that it was more important to me to go to the convention.
I was there from the very beginning. Jackie Robinson was asked to serve as moderator. This was the first time I had seen him in person. I remembered how when Jackie became the first Negro to play Major League baseball, my uncles and most of the Negro boys in my hometown started organizing baseball leagues. It did something for them to see a Negro out there playing with all those white players. Jackie was a good moderator, I thought. He kept smiling and joking. People felt relaxed and proud. They appreciated knowing and meeting people of their own race who had done something worth talking about.
When Jackie introduced Floyd Patterson, heavyweight champion of the world, the people applauded for a long, long time. Floyd was kind of shy. He didn’t say very much. He didn’t have to, just his being there was enough to satisfy most of the Negroes who had only seen him on TV. Archie Moore was there too. He wasn’t as smooth as Jackie, but he had his way with a crowd. He started telling how he was run out of Mississippi, and the people just cracked up.
I was enjoying the convention so much that I went back for the night session. Before the night was over, I had gotten autographs from every one of the Negro celebrities.
I had counted on graduating in the spring of 1963, but as it turned out, I couldn’t because some of my credits still had to be cleared with Natchez College. A year before, this would have seemed like a terrible disaster, but now I hardly even felt disappointed. I had a good excuse to stay on campus for the summer and work with the Movement, and this was what I really wanted to do. I couldn’t go home again anyway, and I couldn’t go to New Orleans—I didn’t have money enough for bus fare.
During my senior year at Tougaloo, my family hadn’t sent me one penny. I had only the small amount of money I had earned at Maple Hill. I couldn’t afford to eat at school or live in the dorms, so I had gotten permission to move off campus. I had to prove that I could finish school, even if I had to go hungry every day. I knew Raymond and Miss Pearl were just waiting to see me drop out. But something happened to me as I got more and more involved in the Movement. It no longer seemed important to prove anything. I had found something outside myself that gave meaning to my life.
I had become very friendly with my social science professor, John Salter, who was in charge of NAACP activities on campus. All during the year, while the NAACP conducted a boycott of the downtown stores in Jackson, I had been one of Salter’s most faithful canvassers and church speakers. During the last week of school, he told me that sit-in demonstrations were about to start in Jackson and that he wanted me to be the spokesman for a team that would sit-in at Woolworth’s lunch counter. The two other demonstrators would be classmates of mine, Memphis and Pearlena. Pearlena was a dedicated NAACP worker, but Memphis had not been very involved in the Movement on campus. It seemed that the organization had had a rough time finding students who were in a position to go to jail. I had nothing to lose one way or the other. Around ten o’clock the morning of the demonstrations, NAACP headquarters alerted the news services. As a result, the police department was also informed, but neither the policemen nor the newsmen knew exactly where or when the demonstrations would start. They stationed themselves along Capitol Street and waited.
To divert attention from the sit-in at Woolworth’s, the picketing started at J. C. Penney’s a good fifteen minutes before. The pickets were allowed to walk up and down in front of the store three or four times before they were arrested. At exactly 11 A.M., Pearlena, Memphis, and I entered Woolworth’s from the rear entrance. We separated as soon as we stepped into the store, and made small purchases from various counters. Pearlena had given Memphis her watch. He was to let us know when it was 11:14. At 11:14 we were to join him near the lunch counter and at exactly 11:15 we were to take seats at it.
Seconds before 11:15 we were occupying three seats at the previously segregated Woolworth’s lunch counter. In the beginning the waitresses seemed to ignore us, as if they really didn’t know what was going on. Our waitress walked past us a couple of times before she noticed we had started to write our own orders down and realized we wanted service. She asked us what we wanted. We began to read to her from our order slips. She told us that we would be served at the back counter, which was for Negroes.
“We would like to be served here,” I said.
The waitress started to repeat what she had said, then stopped in the middle of the sentence. She turned the lights out behind the counter, and she and the other w
aitresses almost ran to the back of the store, deserting all their white customers. I guess they thought that violence would start immediately after the whites at the counter realized what was going on. There were five or six other people at the counter. A couple of them just got up and walked away. A girl sitting next to me finished her banana split before leaving. A middle-aged white woman who had not yet been served rose from her seat and came over to us. “I’d like to stay here with you,” she said, “but my husband is waiting.”