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81 n i n e Fannie Lou Hamer when we had all arrived in Ruleville from Oxford, we had assembled with Charles McLaurin in the shade of Mrs. Hamer’s pecan tree. “Sorry Mrs. Hamer isn’t here to meet you. She’s up north meeting the teachers, singing, raising funds for the movement,” Charles told us. “Be back tomorrow, Vergie,” he called to Mrs. Hamer’s little girl who sat on the porch step. “She’s gone a whole lot of the time,” he said, his voice lowered. “Hard on her husband, Pap, and Vergie.” That summer of 1964 I came to know Mrs. Hamer, and I recall the very first time I saw her. With a decided limp, carrying her suitcase, and shining with perspiration, she made her slow way up the path to her porch. At the step, she turned to watch the excited chattering of the volunteers on the lawn, and her large head turned slowly to look at the gas station across the highway where a tight knot of whites was standing on the pavement near the pumps, silently watching. And she knew now that the night riders would be coming again. When you had grown up in the Mississippi Delta, you knew it. You knew it in your bones. They came whenever a black stood up and said, “No more.” And she had done that. And now the students were here, and the faceless men at the gas station knew they were here. So now the unmarked trucks with the shotguns would be coming again. Every night during the angry times, in the early years of the movement, they had moved ominously through the quarter where Fannie Lou Hamer lived. She’d watch them from her darkened porch and sip a long glass of cold water. They were long, lonely nights. Frowning, she turned to the porch and broke into a wide grin when she saw Vergie. She dropped her valise and opened her arms. “Hey, baby!” 82   |   The Long, Hot Summer, 1964 The child leaped from the step and rushed happily to embrace her. “Mama! Mama! You been away so long!” Perhaps because our ages were much closer than those of the other volunteers who arrived in Ruleville, she felt comfortable in sharing her thoughts and concerns with me. I felt equally at ease sharing mine with her. It was the cement that bound our friendship that lasted until her death in 1977. The time we spent together in Mississippi and on her trips north at our home in Connecticut was a rich gift to me and to our life as a family. To me she was the bravest, most formidable single person I met during my years with the Freedom Movement, and the most memorable. Extraordinarily bright, passionately Christian, and devoted to freeing both blacks and white Mississippians from their tragic legacy of racism, she had become the voice and the soul of the struggle. When this seventh of twenty children of a black sharecropper’s family grew to lead the nonviolent fight against the repression, she became the target for every kind of economic and physical violence. “Although I get threats,” she told me, “I still feel great, knowing for the first time in my life that I can stand up with dignity. I feel more free than some of the worst segregationists down here. Because I can go to bed and sleep. But they’re restless because they’re studying up another scheme, and wondering what they can do next.” And then her great mahogany head tilted back, and a deep, rumbling laugh echoed across the scarred porch with the torn screen. At last the unfettered laughter ceased, and her large yellow-tinged eyes locked on mine. She nodded. “With dignity, Tracy.” For daring to register to vote, both she and her husband were banished from their plantation home where she had served for seventeen years as the head timekeeper. They were declared “unhirable” throughout the Delta for her presumption. Their home was attacked by faceless night riders who fired and fled, and their church, Williams Chapel, was torched shortly after we volunteers arrived. And after being stopped on the highway while returning from a civil rights conference, she was arrested. In that Winona jail, she was beaten nearly to death. In a summer when the whole nation’s attention was riveted on the lynching of Andy Goodman, James Chaney, and Mickey Schwerner in the [3.146.105.194] Project...

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