Pillar of Fire (10 page)

With Bernard Lafayette, the newlyweds shared a house of refuge with Bob Moses first in Jackson and then with their common mentor Amzie Moore in the Delta. Sharp differences often put awkward silences between them. Moses quoted the existential philosophy of Albert Camus, shunned publicity, and sought as a teacher to kindle a self-sustaining new passion for the vote. By contrast, the three Nashville students preached confrontational Christianity, shunned politics as corrupt, and sought to prove that nonviolent spectacles could work miracles among victims and oppressors alike. Moses saw them as too self-centered in their yearning for sacrifice, and, without the stability of Negro votes, too ephemeral in effect. They saw Moses as too intellectual for Mississippi farmers and too entangled in ramifications of leadership. As philosopher and moralist, Moses fought leadership's compulsion to dominate the common people even in democratic causes, but he tumbled through doubts that his anti-leadership convictions merely shielded him from inevitable responsibility. There was a haunted aspect to his constant self-examination—to what degree was he morally complicit in the death of Herbert Lee?—with a tone at once dreamy, fated, and cavalier. “After the hunting comes the killing,” Moses wrote the SNCC office in Atlanta. “And if we're all dead, I want to be cremated and snuck into the next sun-circling satellite for my last rites….”

They compromised on a practical experiment. Bevel persuaded Moses to manage a congressional primary race in Jackson while he managed another in the Delta, for the first Negroes to run in Mississippi since Reconstruction. The spring campaigns coincided with Diane Nash's first pregnancy, during which one of James Lawson's nonviolent precepts—that oppression requires the participation of the oppressed—turned in her mind until she saw her felony appeals as participation that soothed Mississippi with a false presumption of justice. Accordingly, she withdrew the appeal, activating her two-year sentence. At a bond revocation hearing on April 30, 1962, Judge Russell B. Moore first banged down an additional ten days for contempt when Nash refused to sit in the colored section of the courtroom. Bevel, serving as her lawyer, made a speech to the court, and Nash herself read from an apocalyptic statement on why she chose to give birth behind bars. “This will be a black baby born in Mississippi,” she declared before being led off to the Hinds County Jail, “and thus wherever he is born, he will be in prison…. I have searched my soul about this and considered it in prayer. I have reached the conclusion that in the long run, this will be the best thing I can do for my child.”

Judge Moore summoned Bevel some days later to recommend insistently a first duty in all his roles—as lay attorney, citizen, husband, and expectant father—to keep Nash
out
of prison, not in it. “You know, son,” he said ruefully, “you people are insane.”

“Judge Moore, you don't understand Christianity,” Bevel replied. “All the early Christians went to jail.”

“Maybe so,” said the judge. “But they weren't all pregnant and twenty-one.” Bevel held his ground during the odd standoff, assuring Moore that Nash would renounce any court-appointed lawyer who tried to reinstate her appeal. Moore eventually ordered her release and simply ignored the uncontested two-year sentence.

Speaking invitations for Nash drifted in from the North, where church groups and readers of the Negro press turned out to hear the young lady who had dared Mississippi to make her give birth in jail. Bernard Lafayette, who spent much of the summer riding buses between fund-raising testimonials, arranged to bring Nash to Detroit for a series of rallies in August. His anxiety over her advanced pregnancy diminished only after he concealed her belly beneath an enormous raincoat to smuggle her without medical approval aboard a flight bound for Albany, Georgia, where Martin Luther King struggled to salvage a prolonged campaign against segregation.

Bevel was already there, exhorting a dwindling supply of volunteers. Like Judge Moore in Mississippi, Albany city fathers found that having King in jail punished them far more than him or his cause. Twice they had expelled King to freedom—once by outright deceit and once by disguised fiat—but they proved quite willing to imprison ordinary, local Negroes in numbers upward of a thousand. As cumulative suffering and economic loss wore down the Albany movement, one of King's new assistants, Rev. Andrew Young, desperately tried to persuade Nash to lead a jail march even after the onset of labor.

When King was compelled to retreat from Albany, Bevel and Nash hitched rides with their infant daughter across Alabama back to Amzie Moore's house in the Mississippi Delta. Bob Moses was starting voter registration again, based from Greenwood, using a new placebo organization called COFO—the Council of Federated Organizations—as a channel for small foundation grants. Like the Montgomery Improvement Association for the 1965 bus boycott, and several umbrella groups since, COFO allowed civil rights groups to cooperate through a kind of truce office, and the new name also buffered white opposition because it lacked the fiendish stigma of the NAACP. Temporarily, at least, pastors who had been afraid to open their doors to the NAACP might be talked into hosting a COFO workshop.

Bevel returned in time for one of COFO's earliest church gatherings on Monday, August 27, at Williams Chapel Baptist in the tiny hamlet of Ruleville. Preaching from Matthew 16:3, he waved off individual fears of poor sharecroppers along with the presumed advantage of all-powerful Mississippi segregationists who, like the hypocrites denounced in his text, could not “discern the signs of the time.” Just as the biblical hypocrites could read the stars in the heavens but not hearts, cried Bevel, the segregationists could run the space program but not see that freedom was sweeping the whole world. In America, freedom meant the vote, and in Sunflower County, where nearly three quarters of the potential voters were unregistered Negroes, the vote meant that meanness and hatred and suffering could be reduced if only the least of these would step into the Indianola courthouse to register.

Among those answering the call for raised hands was Fannie Lou Hamer, the twentieth child of sharecroppers. Short and stout at forty-one, she walked with a limp and was semiliterate in all subjects except biblical wisdom. Hamer had come to see whether this odd Mississippi preacher fit the reputation spreading on the plantations, and having caught Bevel's fire, she showed up that Friday among eighteen volunteers for what amounted to a mass registration attempt and a major word-of-mouth news story. There was no violence at the courthouse, but the Highway Patrol arrested Moses again on his way back to Ruleville. That night, the owner of the Marlow plantation evicted the Hamers from their shack of the past eighteen years, not so much on his own account, he told the Hamers—he could understand why somebody might want to vote—but for the gossip her action instantly stirred against him among the neighbors. Hamer presented herself as a refugee at a registration meeting, never to return home. The hostile climate stifled any sympathy local whites felt for her, and clerks at the welfare office declined even to accept her application for emergency surplus food until Diane Nash fired off a letter to Washington on her behalf, reminding the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture that treatment of Hamer violated the laws under which Sunflower County received nearly all its public relief funds. The new Delta project registered practically no new voters, but reprisals gained recruits one by one.

 

T
HE
COFO
REGISTRATION
grants were slow to reach SNCC's tiny Hattiesburg project down in southern Mississippi. After their meager SNCC fund of $100 ran out, Curtis Hayes and Hollis Watkins spent more time earning their keep as farmhands for Vernon Dahmer, where they boarded when no family in town dared to take them in. Long before dawn each morning, Dahmer pounded a meaty fist on two walls of his bedroom to jolt awake sons and SNCC workers on the other side. “Let's go, bulls!” he hollered. They all tumbled out to the fields, and over breakfast several hours later Dahmer regularly pressed Hayes and Watkins for results on the previous day's canvassing—what area are you working, anybody ready to go down to the courthouse, how about the churches, any luck talking with the Negroes who come into the general store? Then Dahmer herded them all back to the fields or the sawmill. Already he had taught his seven-year-old daughter, Bettie, to drive one of the tractors, and while she did get help with the heavy fertilizer bags, he expected her to load the seeds by herself. Dahmer pushed himself and the hands so hard that his son Harold entered the Army that year and was writing home that his older brothers were correct—Army life was easy compared with the regimen at home.

Before the end of the summer, Curtis Hayes decided that he had not conquered his fear of jail for a mission so compromised by farm toil. He drifted back to Jackson just before a rescue letter finally reached Hattiesburg from SNCC headquarters in Atlanta. Unfortunately for Watkins, the long-awaited check was useless to him because it was made out to the departed Hayes. This was the sort of detail that paralyzed an early project for weeks. To request a reissued check by phone was a major logistical undertaking—a budget obstacle, a paranoia drama, and above all a location problem, as SNCC's fledgling new administrators usually were missing somewhere themselves, often in jail.

Staying on alone at the farm, Watkins gradually learned that the Dahmer family's Faulknerian bloodlines wandered across racial boundaries and taboos. Vernon Dahmer's mother, Ellen Kelly, had been one of four light-skinned mulatto daughters born during Reconstruction to a white plantation owner named Kelly, for whom their farm region north of Hattiesburg was named Kelly Settlement. Old man Kelly had no wife or other children, and he honored his mulatto family far beyond accepted custom. In the 1890s, Ellen Kelly caused something of a family crisis by entertaining a marriage proposal from George Dahmer, a most unusual white man—born illegitimately in 1871 to a transient German immigrant and a white woman who, during the chaos and destitution that followed the Civil War in Mississippi, had gone on to marry an ex-slave with whom she produced eight dark-skinned children raised as George Dahmer's younger siblings.

To the ex-Confederate planter Kelly, the problem with George Dahmer as a suitor for his daughter Ellen was not so much his bastard status or the racial confusion of a genetic white man living within Negro culture, but his lack of higher education. Kelly withheld consent until young George Dahmer completed courses at Jackson State, Mississippi's Reconstruction-built Negro college, but then he blessed the newlyweds with a full share of his estate: forty acres, a cow, two calves, and a feather bed. Although some of the surviving white cousins contested these gifts to Negroes as the folly of a lunatic bachelor, the bequest stood, and in time George and Ellen Dahmer gained possession of additional Kelly acreage.

In December of 1908, four months after Lyndon Johnson was born in the Texas Hill Country, Vernon Dahmer arrived as the eighth of twelve Dahmer children. He may have become the superior farmer of the lot in any case, but competition decreased significantly when three of his five brothers married “out of the race” into white society in the North, one as a church pastor. Not all family members on either side of the color line were aware of the secret. Among Vernon Dahmer's most delicate tasks as an adult was to maintain ties among the witting ones even while engineering an innocent extinction of bonds in the next generation. Life's passages—births, marriages, deaths—posed the most difficult decisions about which distant ones could be notified, and how to do so without risking the fateful curiosity of the unwitting. With time, the simplest family communications across the color barrier became trying and dangerous. On the Negro side, parents faced the crippling issue of whether to acknowledge the possibility that especially light-skinned children might cross over, and if so, whether it was mutually safe and emotionally tolerable to seek the counsel of those who had gone before.

Vernon Dahmer narrowed such dilemmas by choosing successively darker wives. After fathering three sons during the Depression who grew up to look like him and his father, George—that is, by all appearances as white as the governor of Mississippi—he married a darker woman who bore three discernibly Negro sons during the 1940s, and two years after the second wife died, he married Ellie Dahmer in 1952 and produced a son, Dennis, and a daughter, Bettie, his young tractor driver, also clearly of African descent. In public, Dahmer learned to expect different reactions according to which sets of children were in his company. Among strangers, he could pass with his eldest children as a white family so long as Ellie was not along, whereas with her and the younger children he functioned separately across the color line as an ambassador. On Southern highways, he easily picked up food from the first-class “white” side of segregated restaurants if his family remained hidden in the car. Less pleasantly, white strangers who encountered the entire family assumed sometimes that Dahmer was a white boss among servants. Some made collegial remarks to him about his niggers.

Closer to Hattiesburg, where people tended to know one another, the complexities of color shifted. Most local whites considered all the Dahmers respectable for Negroes because of their prosperity and manners, but on some hidden level the children were perceived as less of a threat because of their defining dark skin, whereas Vernon Dahmer attracted a combustible undertone of resentment for “trying to act like a white man.” Very few white people had any idea what a strenuous effort Dahmer made to stay in Mississippi and
not
be one of them. Dahmer himself remained wary of irrational traps near the point of acceptance, where some quirk of identity could turn all his industry and attainments against him. In the old days, his father, George, had invoked his lifelong motto—“You don't want to be too big too fast”—against Dahmer's plans to buy a tractor conspicuously beyond the means of most white farmers. A mix of frontier ruggedness and acute racial sensitivity shaped George Dahmer's identity until death claimed his Caucasian body for the country graveyard behind Shady Grove Baptist Church in 1949. (His wife, Ellen Kelly Dahmer, was buried there just after the
Brown
decision of 1954.) Although his traumatic expulsion from Shady Grove made the church alien territory in 1962, Vernon Dahmer took Hollis Watkins by the family plot to explain one of his inherited precautions: never buy vehicles with the fancy new automatic transmissions.