Friendly strangers, we sat and chewed on horsemeat and watched the aerial acrobatics overhead, and in a little while we were telling stories about what had happened to us separately that night, and a short time later we were laughing together.
August
We had come all the way from the campus of the Western College for Women in Oxford, Ohio, following the same route the three slain civil rights workers had taken at the end of June, stopping in Meridian, Mississippi, and then going on to visit the charred ruins of the Mount Zion Methodist Church in Longdale, the heat a sentient adversary, dust add mimosa mingled, the taste of death and the scent of fuzzy pink, the insects rattling in the scrub pine, the scorched iron bell lying mute in unforgiving ashes. We had then gone through Philadelphia, namesake of another town in another place where another bell had once sounded for liberty, and driven twelve miles northeast on State Highway 21 to the Bogue Chitto Swamp where the charred remains of the Ford station wagon had been found, three of its hubcaps already stolen by Choctaw Indians from the reservation, a final piece of irony. And then we had traveled in shimmering Mississippi heat, our pilgrimage taking us in the opposite direction to the Old Jolly Farm where the three men had been found six weeks after they’d disappeared, buried twenty feet deep in red clay, each of them shot to death. Chaney, the Negro, had first been viciously beaten. The New York pathologist who examined his body said later, “I have never witnessed bones so severely shattered.”
Now we rode westward toward the Louisiana border and a town called Clayton, where we hoped to continue our voter registration work. The man driving the car was a twenty-three-year-old named
Luke (no relation to the saint, but a divinity student nonetheless) Foulds from Brewster, New York, who had been one of the eight hundred students indoctrinated at Oxford during the week Chancy, Schwerner, and Goodman were there. He wore rimless eyeglasses, and he had a pale pinched face, a rather sharp nose, thin unsmiling lips. A humorless man by nature, he had become positively dour after learning that the three workers — he had known Schwerner casually — had indeed been killed. A rumor had circulated in the beginning, you sec, that the disappearance of the trio was a hoax, a stunt concocted by CORE to call attention to the voter registration drive. I knew right away they were dead, however, and I told my father that their murders only strengthened my resolve to go south with Larry Peters.
I was sitting alongside Luke on the front seat of his old Chevy, and Larry was in back with a girl named Jennifer Stott, who was a sophomore at Vassar, and who never let anyone forget it. Blond hair cut close to her head, busty in a white peasant blouse, thick-hipped in a pale denim skirt, meaty thighs flashing whenever she crossed her legs, she sat barefoot beside Larry and tried to convince him she had not been frightened when a gang of kids in Philadelphia had yelled “Nigger lover!” at the car. I knew she was lying because I myself had been scared half out of my wits. The only one of us, in fact, who had maintained his cool against the approach of what looked like impending disaster was old dour Luke. Which was perhaps proper and fitting, since Luke was our mentor and our boss, and the three of us were here only to serve as his assistants, having symbolically joined him on the Fourteenth of July, Bastille Day.
It had been some July.
I was willing to bet there had never been a July like it in the history of the United States.
“This July started in June,” my mother had said, and I think she was right, but I also think she was referring only to the temperature, which was the highest ever recorded in Talmadge for that month. Lake Abundance (ha!) fell a good four feet (which wasn’t very comical to the people who owned summer homes around it) and there were more brush fires in town than ever before, the siren on the firehouse roof erupting some two or three times a clay, volunteers popping into their cars and rushing all over the countryside, invariably arriving too late to save anything but the plumbing. Elsewhere, though, July had also started in June with the resignation of Ambassador Lodge in Saigon, and the disappearance of Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner in Mississippi. Of the two events, the one unquestionably most important was the disappearance of the rights workers. Immediately following the passing of a massive civil rights bill by the Senate, the scent of violence rising from that snake-infested southern swamp caused most thinking citizens to wonder what would happen when the bill passed the House and became the law of the land. The war, or whatever the hell it was, in Vietnam had been meandering along through four administrations now, and there seemed little danger of it changing its course for the worse, even with the appointment of an Army general as the new ambassador. In fact, President Johnson had told the press that Taylor’s appointment in no way indicated a change of policy in Vietnam. “The United States intends no rashness,” he said, “and seeks no wider war,” and there was every reason to believe him. We had our hands full right here at home without worrying about a limited commitment eleven thousand miles away. In fact, by the time the civil rights bill became law in July, we had lost only a hundred and forty-nine American advisers in Vietnam, which was not a bad average considering the fact that we’d been actively involved there since December 1961, when our first helicopter company went over to assist the Vietnamese army.
In Mississippi — where for the first time in history Negroes were protected by law when entering such heretofore exclusive places as polling booths, classrooms (though I had thought they’d settled that one back in 1954), factories, hotels, restaurants, movie theaters and even barber shops — they were dragging the Pearl River and trying to find the body of a Negro named James Chancy, who together with the two white men Schwerner and Goodman (“Are they Jewish?” my father asked) had disappeared on June 21. It made for confusion.
It even made for confusion in a place like Talmadge, which in all modesty had more than its proportionate share of intellectuals and influentials: professors, writers, editors, art directors, critics, performers, publishers, all of them eager and willing to tell the rest of the nation what to read, cat, wear, watch, enjoy, drink, feel, and think. Even the Talmadge brain trust, as exemplified by such sterling exhibits as Professor Robert Fitzhugh who taught film and film techniques at the university and who only the week before had reviewed Harlow for The New York Times Book Review, and who had written oh just countless critiques of other books for The New York Review of Books and anonymously for Time; or Leon Coopersmith, he of battle-of-bands fame, not to mention fortune in radio broadcasting earned through the popularity of his most ambitious show, a gem titled Hello, Mrs. America, which was beamed daily from a restaurant somewhere in downtown Pasadena, nor even the television producer David Regan, who had created a half-hour teen-age comedy show entitled Wing It! doubtless inspired by his beauteous wife Katherine Bridges Regan, acquired not four years ago, he being almost forty at the time, and she having practically gone through elementary school with me (I had, in fact, once had a terrifying crush on her); even those towering intellectuals — but no, seriously, even the really intelligent and creative people in Talmadge didn’t know quite what to make of that July.