1965
I’d been dozing on the van’s long middle seat for a couple of hours when Chip called out, “We’re here, you guys! Wake up.”
I sat up as we bounced along a potholed driveway onto the campus of Morris Brown College in Atlanta, where our orientation would be held. The buildings looked old and weather-beaten, some of them brick, some wood. We checked in in one of the main buildings, where a woman handed each of us a folder, a black and white SCOPE button, and our dorm room assignment. Peggy was ahead of me in line and I could tell that she was not at all happy to discover that, of the hundreds of students at the orientation, I’d been assigned as her roommate. I heard her actually groan at the news. I didn’t like her any more than she liked me. My attempts at conversation with her and David in the van were often left hanging in the air. Chip, while not exactly warm, had at least made some small talk with me, but I had a bad feeling. If four white students couldn’t connect any better than this, how could we expect white and Negro to get along?
Together, Peggy and I lugged our belongings out the door and across the campus to the ancient girls’ dorm, Gaines Hall, where a sign on the door read NO SMOKING, NO DRINKING, NO MEN.
“Oh, this mattress!” Peggy said, once she’d dropped her suitcase on the floor of our tiny room and sat down on the squeaky bed.
I sat on my own mattress and felt the springs give way under my weight. “I think these mattresses have been here since the place was built,” I said.
I set my suitcase on the bed and began hanging up my skirts and blouses, while Peggy headed for the door. “Where are you going?” I asked.
“To find David,” she said without a glance in my direction.
She left and I stared at the door as it closed behind her. I felt very alone. Here I was, on a campus where I knew no one, with a roommate who didn’t like me. Would all the students treat me so coolly? There wasn’t much I could do about my accent or my heritage. I missed Brenda, whom I knew I was losing to Garner and a baby. I missed Aunt Carol, who would have cheered me on. And I missed Reed, who loved me more than I deserved. In that moment I would have given just about anything to feel his arms around me.
I wanted to go outside to explore a bit but thought I’d better read over the orientation material instead. Tonight was a welcoming session. Monday through Friday looked like very long days filled with speeches and training sessions and workshops. We’d learn about the history of Negroes in America and there would be a lot of sessions about the South with a capital “S.” I wondered what I had yet to learn about the land I’d lived in my whole life. The words began to swim in my vision and before I knew it, Peggy was waking me up to go to dinner and the welcoming session.
We filled the metal folding chairs in the sweltering gymnasium and listened to a number of speakers warn us of the danger in the weeks ahead. The head of SCOPE, Reverend Hosea Williams, whose name was familiar to me after all the reading I’d been doing, introduced what felt like dozens of other folks who had various roles in the program. Everyone who spoke gave us the same message: our work was important but dangerous. We needed to keep our wits about us, be sure to let someone know where we were at all times, and always be mature representatives of the program. And we had to produce. I knew that meant we needed to persuade people to register to vote. I looked around me at the serious faces—all those white students from up north and out west, as well as a good number of Negro volunteers who would help us connect with distrustful residents. I listened to the speakers and thought to myself, What am I doing here? I’d never felt so out of place in my entire life.
At the end of the evening, a gray-haired woman named Mrs. Clark taught us “freedom songs.” “You’ll know ’em all by heart by the end of the week,” she promised, handing out the mimeographed lyrics. I liked singing, but in that cavernous space, with unfamiliar melodies, my voice sounded as small and inconsequential as I felt. When we sang “We Shall Overcome,” our last song of the night and the only one slightly familiar to me, I felt so false. I had nothing to overcome. It wasn’t until I was lying, hot and exhausted, on my sagging mattress later that night, that I realized I carried a huge burden of my own creation—a burden it would take a miracle for me to overcome.
Monday afternoon, Hosea Williams announced that he wanted to speak with two students and I was surprised and unnerved when he spoke my name into the microphone. “Those two students, please meet me in the back of the gym,” he said.
Oh, great, I thought. This could not be good. I felt hundreds of eyes on me as I walked from my seat near the front of the gym to the rear. I waited my turn as Reverend Williams spoke to the other student, a boy, who looked angry by the end of their conversation. The boy stomped past me without making eye contact, and Reverend Williams waved me over.
“How are you doing?” he asked when I reached him. This close to him, I could see his neatly trimmed mustache and serious brown eyes.
“Fine.” I tried gamely to smile. “Though I’m wondering why you wanted to see me.” I glanced in the direction the angry boy had gone.
Reverend Williams nodded. “We have some concerns about you,” he said, getting right to the point. “First, you’re from North Carolina, and second, you haven’t been vetted by any of the universities that are working with SCOPE, nor have you been through the campus briefings on fieldwork. All the other students have gone through a thorough educational process to be sure they know what they’re getting into and to assure us of their … stability. The fact that you’re a Southerner’ll make it hard for you to gain anyone’s trust.”
“Reverend Filburn mentioned that,” I said. “But he thought it would be okay.” I didn’t know if I should address his concern about my stability. I wasn’t feeling very stable at that moment.
He nodded. “Yes, Greg Filburn persuaded me to give you a chance,” he said. “But I warn you, it’s going to be tough.” His dark eyes were unsmiling. “I’m going to make sure you’re assigned to Greg’s county. What is it? Derby?”
“Yes, sir.”
“He’ll be able to keep an eye on you. Assuming you make it through orientation,” he added. “If you decide you want to back out after this week, we’ll understand.”
“Okay,” I said. “Thank you.” I walked back to my seat, ignoring the curious looks from other students who were no doubt wondering what I’d done to merit Hosea Williams’s attention. I felt unsettled but determined as I took my seat again. I hadn’t realized that Reverend Filburn had gone out on a limb for me. I didn’t want to let him down.
It was a challenge to sit on those hard chairs for speech after speech, but I grew more alert with each one. Every speaker mentioned that President Johnson would be signing the Voting Rights Act in early July, making it easy—or at least easier—for us to register voters. The act would get rid of literacy tests and other obstacles to registering. I kept thinking of our former maid, Louise, and that dirt road through Turner’s Bend and all those run-down houses. I imagined myself going up to one of those houses by myself, knocking on the door, trying to persuade whoever answered to register to vote. The thought was outlandish, and I understood for the first time why we’d have Negro canvassing partners. No one would trust us otherwise.
During the breaks, I struggled to connect with people and I felt my old childhood shyness returning. It seemed that everyone already had his or her own little group of friends, which made sense, since nearly all of them had come from a college with their fellow students. I seemed to be the only loner, or at least that’s how I felt. It was like being in junior high school all over again.
Late into the night, Mrs. Clark taught us more freedom songs. There was one that I really liked—“I’ll Fly Away”—which I knew from church but which touched me in a new way all of a sudden, especially when all the harmonies kicked in in that big open space.
Mrs. Clark was a wonderful teacher. “Now you young folks from the North,” she said, “y’all need to learn how to sing Southern! There ain’t no ‘g’ in ‘i-n-g.’ It’s ‘singin’,’ not ‘singing.’” Finally, a skill that came easily to me.
She introduced us to a song called “I Love Everybody.”
“People who have nothin’—no runnin’ water, not hardly a thin’ to eat—still sing this song about lovin’ everybody,” she said. Then she led us in the song, which included, by name, people in power who’d beaten or killed civil rights workers. We even sang that we loved the racist governor of Alabama, George Wallace. I pictured Aunt Carol rolling over in her grave. She hated that man.
I began to really feel the emotion of the songs and by the time we ended with “We Shall Overcome,” I was more awake and joy-filled than I’d been all day.
Once the events of the evening were over, I crossed the dark campus, hoping Peggy would still be up. I felt inspired to make a new start with her, hoping she had the same positive feelings about the day that I did. She wasn’t in the room when I got there, though, and it was way past curfew. I climbed into bed, but was too fired up to sleep. Something had happened to me in the last twenty-four hours. I couldn’t name it. Couldn’t even understand it. I felt hope and fear, determination and cowardice, all mixed together. I wondered if that’s what all those speakers had wanted us to feel.
I was still awake when Peggy slipped quietly into the room an hour after I went to bed. I sat up.
“You don’t need to be quiet,” I said. “I’m awake. You can turn on the light.”
She flipped the switch and I blinked at the brightness. Peggy’s curly auburn hair glittered in the light. She dragged her suitcase onto the floor and ignored me as she rummaged in it for something.
“Today was really good, wasn’t it?” I asked.
She didn’t look up but I could feel her roll her eyes. “If you say so,” she said.
“I learned so much.”
She looked at me then. “They probably don’t teach you much in your little segregated schools in Podunk, North Carolina.”
I bristled. I was sick of tiptoeing around this girl. “First of all,” I said, “my high school was integrated.” Not by much, but it definitely had not been the lily-white school she was picturing. “And second of all, I got into the University of North Carolina, which was no easy feat, so I must have had a decent education. And third of all, can we please try to get along? Because that’s why we’re down here, right? To learn how to help people get along? And if you and I can’t even do that, there’s really no hope.”
Whoa, it felt good to get all that out, and for a moment she just stared at me.
“You’re probably right,” she said, “but it doesn’t matter. I’m leaving.”
“You’re … already?”
“David and I split up.” I thought she was crying, but she turned her head away from me so I wouldn’t see as she went back to digging in her suitcase. “And I was never so bored as I was this morning listening to those speeches. You sat through them all day? I couldn’t stand it. So I know I’m in the wrong place for me. I’m leaving in the morning.”
I was quiet for a moment, taking this in. “You were doing this because David was?” I asked.
“I thought I could get into it but it’s just not how I want to spend my summer.”
“Can I … can I help you with anything?” I asked.
“Just go back to sleep.”
I lay down and rolled onto my side facing the wall. I heard her open the door to the closet as sleep finally found me, and when I woke up early in the morning, she was gone.
Peggy was not the only student who left. Over breakfast, I heard whispers of at least two other students leaving. It was probably good they left now, before the hard work began. I was determined not to be one of them.
I was sitting across from a guy as I ate, and he smiled at me. “I love the food in the South,” he said, nodding to the biscuits and sausage gravy on his plate. My own plate held scrambled eggs and grits. My usual breakfast.
“Where are you from?” I asked.
“New Jersey, where I’d be eating pork roll and eggs and hash browns.” He grinned. He looked as though he wore a perpetual smile. “You’re from down here, obviously. With that accent.” He had a pretty significant accent of his own.
“You could tell from that one sentence?”
“Oh yeah,” he said. “South Carolina?” he guessed.
“North,” I said.
“Well, good for you.” He took a forkful of his biscuit. Chewed and swallowed. “They told us Southern students wouldn’t work out, though.”
“I’m beginning to wonder,” I said, thinking of my conversation with Hosea Williams.
“Maybe you can lose that accent.” He looked doubtful.
“Is it really that strong?”
“Wow. Yeah.”
“Wow. Yeah,” I repeated, trying to imitate him. “How was that?”
He seemed to find it uproariously funny. “What’s your name?” he asked, when he’d finished laughing.
“Eleanor. Ellie.”
“Well, Ellie,” he said. “You look like you’re up for a challenge. What’re you doing with SCOPE?”
“I want to help,” I said simply. “Same as everyone else.”
“Cool,” he said. “I’m John. Happy to meet you.”
“You too.”
“Actually, this is my third trip South this past year. And to be honest, I’ve gotten to really crave biscuits and gravy.”
I gave him a quizzical look. “Third?”
“I was in Mississippi last summer, doing civil rights work. And I was out here just a few months ago for the Selma march. The third march. The big one. The one where no one got killed,” he added soberly.
This guy didn’t just talk about doing the work, I thought. He actually did it. “It must have been … it must have felt so good, being in that Selma march. Knowing what it meant.”
“It did indeed,” he said.
“You’re courageous,” I said. “You didn’t know how that march would turn out. That you’d be safe.”
He smiled. “I’m committed,” he said.
“Are you a student?” He looked too old, but how else would he have time to be a civil rights worker?
“Seminary,” he said.
I nodded. I could picture him as a preacher.
We were quiet for a moment. I swallowed a mouthful of grits, looking around the cafeteria. “I think I’m the only Southern white person here,” I said finally to break the silence.
“You may be right,” he said. “Your accent’s nice, but it does make you more … vulnerable. You’ll have to work harder to let people know you’re on their side.”
“I’m nervous,” I admitted.
“I understand,” he said.
“Were you nervous? Last summer, knowing other workers had been killed? And in the march, knowing—”
“Yes, of course.” He smiled at me with sympathy. “By the end of this week, you’ll feel less jittery, but you need to keep some of those nerves. Don’t let your guard down. There are people down here who’d just as soon kill a civil rights worker than look at one. The trick is to stay focused on the goal. Keep your eyes on the prize, like they say in the song. That’s all you can do, Ellie May.”
I hated when people called me “Ellie May,” after the dumb-blonde character Elly May Clampett on The Beverly Hillbillies, but coming from John, who I liked a lot even though I’d known him mere minutes, the name made me smile.
John sat next to me for that morning’s session, which was about nonviolence. There was a lot of talk of Jesus and Gandhi and I imagined John was remembering that peaceful, powerful march from Selma to Montgomery. “Nonviolence is healing,” the speaker said.
One young man in the audience raised his hand and the speaker called on him.
“I was in the march from Selma to Montgomery,” he said, “and there wasn’t nothin’ those troopers in Selma could’ve done to me that would make me act as ugly as they did.”
I found myself shivering although the air in the gym was hot and thick and sticky. How did you do it? How did you not fight back when you were being attacked? How did you not want to kill someone when they were killing you? How did you sing that “I Love Everybody” song when someone was pouring ammonia over your face?
During a break, I told John about the protests in Chapel Hill. “I was covering them for the campus newspaper,” I explained. “First I thought they were kind of stupid and then … I began to understand why they were doing it. And one day, I joined a protest. The police came and I didn’t fight them but I didn’t go limp, like a lot of the protesters did. I couldn’t make myself be so vulnerable.”
“It’s more than just ‘going limp,’ Ellie May,” John said. “It’s more about focusing on that feeling of love for everybody. Like the song.” He winked at me. He made it sound so easy. John had a little Gandhi in him, I thought. I was glad to be sitting next to him. He made me feel safe and strong. I knew, though, that I was going to have to learn to find those feelings inside myself.
John became my buddy for the rest of the week. The long days and evenings were exhausting in the most wonderful way, with each day ending the same way as we broke into our enormous circle, crossing arms, holding hands with our neighbors, and singing our hearts out. I was glad I no longer had a roommate and I’d walk back to my dorm room, brush my teeth, strip off my clothes, fall onto my bed, and be unconscious before I had the chance to notice the lumps in the mattress.
On Thursday evening, Martin Luther King, Jr., came to speak to us. Oh, how I wished Aunt Carol could have been with me! I’d seen grainy images of Dr. King on the TV news and recent pictures of him in the paper after the Selma march, but to see him in person, close up—I was in the fifth row of that huge space—was truly thrilling. We’d had good speakers that week, but this was different. Dr. King seemed to speak in waves, almost chanting at times. I stopped taking notes and just listened to him. I didn’t need to write down his words to remember them. He was frustrated that President Johnson hadn’t yet signed the Voting Rights Act. “A state that has denied opportunity for quality education for Negroes has no right to demand literacy as a prerequisite for voting,” he said in that mesmerizing voice that touched my soul. “The fact that the Voting Rights Act is not yet the law of the land will make your work harder,” he said, turning his head left and right to take us all in, “but I know you’re not here because the work is easy.” I glanced up at John and saw tears in his eyes. Only then did I realize I had tears in my own.
That night, I dreamed about Mattie Jenkins. We were together, deep in the frigid water of the lake at the end of Hockley Road, and I was trying to pull her to the surface. I struggled to grip her in my frozen fingers, but she kept slipping through them.
I woke up choking, gasping for air. I needed to walk outside in the thick, dark Georgia humidity before I could shake the dream from my mind. It wasn’t the first time I was tortured by that dream. I only wished it could be the last.
On Friday night, we were split into two groups: male and female. A handsome man named Andrew Young talked to us—the white girls—and he was kind but very firm.
“Avoid being seen in integrated cars or walking in integrated groups whenever possible,” he said. I’m sure I wasn’t the only girl in the group who wondered how we’d be able to follow that rule, since most of us white canvassers would be working side by side with our Negro partners.
“Be aware of your surroundings at all times,” he continued. “If you see white men in a truck while you’re canvassing with a Negro partner, get to safety immediately.”
I thought of Reed and “Mildred,” his white and blue 1955 Ford truck. It was weird to think that I should be afraid of a guy like Reed.
“Dress conservatively,” Reverend Young said. “Don’t drink and don’t date. Don’t fall in love with anybody.” His eyes grew wide with the warning. “You fall in love, you’ll be tempted to put the welfare of that person ahead of the good of the team,” he said. “Don’t go to parties, and absolutely don’t get involved with Negro boys.”
I nodded along with the other girls as he issued his warnings, knowing I had no intention of going to parties or falling in love. That was not why I was there.
When we sang our freedom songs that night, I realized that I knew every word of every song, and when we sang “We Shall Overcome,” I broke into tears, unable to sing as I clutched the hands of John on my left and a girl I didn’t know on my right. She nodded at me, gripping my hand harder. That song—all the songs really—felt so different to me now than they had earlier in the week. I felt the history behind them. The emotion. I felt full of love for everyone in that huge space.
John squeezed my hand and when I looked at him, tears running down my cheeks, he smiled at me through the words of the song. When the singing was over, he hugged me tight.
“You’re going to do fine, Ellie May,” he said.
I hoped he was right.