Cecil Price had only thought he was scared shitless before. Not letting anybody know he and his friends were in jail was bad. Going to see the Priest was a hell of a lot worse. The Priest was a tall, scrawny, bald black man who hated whites with a fierce and simple passion. He was also the chief Neshoba County recruiting officer for the Black Knights of Voodoo. Trouble followed him the way thunder followed lightning.
Price wondered whether Muhammad Shabazz and Tariq Abdul-Rashid knew enough to be as frightened as he was. The Priest had been trouble for years, while they’d been down here only a couple of months. The Priest would still be trouble long after they went back to the North… if they ever got the chance to go North again.
It must have been about half past five when the phone at the front desk jangled loudly. "Neshoba County Jail," the deputy there said. He paused to listen, then went on, "No, I ain’t seen ‘em. Jesus Christ! You lose your garbage, you expect me to go pickin’ it up for you?" He slammed the phone down again.
"Deputy!" Muhammad Shabazz called through the bars of his cell. "Deputy, can I speak to you for a minute?"
A scrape of chair legs against cheap linoleum. Slow, heavy, arrogant footsteps. A deep, angry voice: "What the hell you want?"
"I’d like to make a telephone call, please."
A pause. Cecil Price looked out of his cell just in time to see the deputy sheriff shake his head. His big, round belly shook, too, but it didn’t remind Price of a bowlful of jelly-more of a wrecking ball that would smash anything in its way. "No, I don’t reckon so," he said. "You ain’t callin’ nobody."
"I have a Constitutional right to make a telephone call," Muhammad Shabazz insisted, politely but firmly.
"Don’t you give me none of your Northern bullshit," the Negro deputy said. "Constitution doesn’t say jack shit about telephone calls. How could it? No telephones when they wrote the damn thing, were there? Were there, smartass?"
"No, but-" Muhammad Shabazz broke off.
"Constitutional right, my ass," the deputy sheriff said. "You got a Constitutional right to get what’s comin’ to you, and you will. You just bet you will." He lumbered back to the desk.
In a low voice, Cecil Price said, "We’re in deep now."
"No kidding." Muhammad Shabazz sounded like a man who wanted to make a joke but was too worried to bring it off.
"They aren’t gonna let us out of here," Tariq Abdul-Rashid said. "Not in one piece, they aren’t."
"We’ll see what happens, that’s all," Muhammad Shabazz said. "They can’t think they’ll get away with it." To Cecil Price, that only proved the man who’d come down from the North didn’t understand how things really worked in Mississippi. Of course the deputy sheriffs thought they’d get away with it. Why wouldn’t they? Blacks had been getting away with things against whites who stepped out of line ever since slavery days. Times were starting to change; Negroes of goodwill like Muhammad Shabazz and Tariq Abdul-Rashid were helping to make them change. But they hadn’t changed yet-and the deputies and their pals were determined they wouldn’t change no matter what. And so…
And so we’re in deep for sure, Cecil Price thought, fighting despair.
The first deputy sheriff, the one who’d arrested them, returned to the jail not long after the sun went down. He walked back to the cells to look at the prisoners, laughed a gloating laugh, and then went up front again.
"What’s the Priest got to say?" asked the man at the front desk.
"It’s all taken care of," the first deputy answered.
"They comin’ here?"
"Nah." The first deputy sounded faintly disappointed. "It’d be too damn raw. We’d end up with the fuckin’ Feds on our case for sure."
"What’s going on, then?"
The first deputy told him. He pitched his voice too low to let Cecil Price make it out. By the way the desk man laughed, he thought it was pretty good. Price was sure he wouldn’t.
Time crawled by on hands and knees. The phone rang once, but it had nothing to do with Price and Muhammad Shabazz and Tariq Abdul-Rashid. It was a woman calling to find out if her no-account husband was sleeping off another binge in the drunk tank. He wasn’t. But it only went to show that, despite the struggle for whites’ civil rights, ordinary life in Philadelphia went on.
Around half past ten, the first deputy came tramping back to the cells again. To Cecil Price’s amazement, he had a jingling bunch of keys on a big brass key ring with him. He opened the door to Price’s cell. "Come on out, boy," he said. "Reckon I’ve got to turn you loose."
Price wanted to stick a finger in his ear to make sure he’d heard right. "You sure?" he blurted.
"Yeah, I’m sure," the deputy said. "I been askin’ around. You weren’t at the church when it went up. Neither were these assholes." He pointed into the cell that held Muhammad Shabazz and Tariq Abdul-Rashid. "Gotta let them go, too, dammit."
"You’ll hear from our lawyers," Muhammad Shabazz promised. "False arrest is false arrest, even if you think twice about it later. This is still a free country, whether you know it or not."
Although Cecil Price agreed with every word he said, he wished the Black Muslim would shut the hell up. Pissing off the deputy right when he was letting them out of jail wasn’t the smartest move in the world, not even close. But Price walked out of his cell. A moment later, Muhammad Shabazz and Tariq Abdul-Rashid walked out of theirs, too.
The deputy with the wrecking-ball belly at the front desk gave them back their wallets and keys and pocket change. "If you’re smart, you’ll get your white ass outa Philadelphia. Go on down to Meridian and never come back," he told Cecil Price. "You cause trouble around here again, you look at a black woman walkin’ down the street around here again, you show your ugly buckra face around here again, you are fuckin’ dead meat. You hear me?"
"Oh, yes, sir. I sure do hear you," Cecil Price said. That was how you played the game in Mississippi. Price hadn’t promised to do one thing the deputy said. But he’d heard him, all right. He couldn’t very well not have heard him.
"Go on, then. Get lost."
The first deputy walked out into the muggy night with the white man and the two Northern blacks. A mosquito buzzed around Price’s ear. Price slapped at it. The deputy laughed. He watched while Price and the Black Muslims got into RACE’s blue Ford wagon. Price started up the car. The deputy went on watching as he put it in gear and drove away. In the rear-view mirror, Price watched him walk back into the Neshoba County Jail.
"Maybe they really are learning they can’t pull crap like that on us," Tariq Abdul-Rashid said.
"Don’t bet on it," was Muhammad Shabazz’s laconic response. "They don’t back up unless they’ve got a reason to back up. Isn’t that right, Cecil?… Cecil?"
Cecil Price didn’t answer, not right away. His eyes were on the rear-view mirror again. He didn’t like what he saw. This time of night, driving out of a little town like Philadelphia, they should have had the road to themselves. They should have, but they didn’t. One, then two, sets of headlights followed them out of town. Price stepped on the gas. If those cars back there weren’t interested in him and his black friends, he’d lose them.
"Hey, man, take it easy," Tariq Abdul-Rashid said. "You don’t want to give the law a chance to run us in for speeding."
"We’ve got company back there," Price said. Speeding up hadn’t shaken those two cars. If anything, they were closer. And a third set of headlights was coming out of Philadelphia, zooming down Highway 19 like a bat out of hell.
Tariq Abdul-Rashid and Muhammad Shabazz looked back over their shoulders. "You think they’re on our tail, Cecil?" Tariq Abdul-Rashid asked.
Before Price could say anything, Muhammad Shabazz said everything that needed saying: "Gun it! Gun it like a son of a bitch!"
The old Ford’s motor should have roared when Cecil Price jammed the pedal to the metal. Instead, it groaned and grunted. Yeah, the wagon went faster, but it didn’t go faster fast enough. The two pairs of headlights behind the Ford got bigger and bigger, brighter and brighter, closer and closer. And the third pair, the set that got the late start, might almost have been flying along Highway 19. That was one souped-up set of wheels, and the rustbucket Price was driving didn’t have a prayer of staying ahead. Before long, whoever was driving that hot machine got right on the wagon’s tail.