We Had Sneakers, They Had Guns: The Kids Who Fought for Civil Rights in Mississippi

Ten. Drawing Conclusions

86 t e n Drawing Conclusions every night before going to sleep in the stifling back room of Jim and Rennie Williams’s house, I would struggle to write down my impressions of that day before falling deep asleep. The incessant heat, the tension generated by every confrontational crisis, and my strained focus on every drawing simply drained me and left me exhausted. Page after page in my tattered notebooks would spill over with the excitement and emotion of what I was observing. And in my sketchbooks I was recording the images I was determined never to lose. Old women learning to read for the first time. Young wide-eyed black neighborhood kids, kidding and laughing with the white volunteers. The volunteers, black and white, who refused to let fear dictate flight from the hatred and violence that threatened them. Instead, without fail, they continued to do their jobs every day with affection , humor, and dedication. White deputies and white registrars at the Indianola courthouse. Blacks in the Mississippi sun, waiting permission to mount the courthouse steps. Peaceful demonstrators in the hostile streets and the incensed response of the police who came to arrest them. Mrs. Hamer singing “Ain’t Going to Let Nobody Turn Me ‘Round” in a voice so loud and compelling that the Klan just across the highway could hear it, too. And drawings of Charles McLaurin, looking cool and confident behind his black sunglasses, laying out the strategy for the day, reminding us to be careful, excitedly leading the freedom songs in our little Williams Chapel that made us feel braver. By summer’s end the sketchbooks were sweaty and stained. But on the pages were more than one hundred drawings of that time in the Delta. Drawings I could carry back north. TheMississippiIhadimaginedwasanexoticmixtureofWilliamFaulkner ’s Intruder in the Dust, Billy Holiday’s “Strange Fruit,” B. B. King’s Delta 25. Charles McLaurin at Williams Chapel meeting. “We lit a lamp here in Ruleville—and it’s shining its light in the whole Delta!” 88   |   The Long, Hot Summer, 1964 blues, and Howard Fast’s Freedom Road. The truth I would learn over that “long, hot summer” was far less exotic. Recording and drawing the lives of the blacks I lived with in Ruleville, I came to know how banal evil can be. When I would sketch the Ruleville on the black side of Highway 41, my pad would fill with images of unpaved roads that turned to mud with each rain and became baked and rutted in the interminable heat. When I drew the pathetic house I lived in, no better or worse than all the others in the quarter, it was a dwelling with an iron roof that trapped the damp heat of the Delta until long after dark. I could only imagine how porous the flimsy walls and floor must be when the cold winds of winter would sweep across the cotton fields. Black Ruleville was unsanitary trenches rather than sewers , and unlit streets at night that robbed the blacks of any protection from anonymous night riders who wished to harass or intimidate. When I would cross the highway into white Ruleville, the streets were paved and well lighted. The houses were as proudly maintained as in any comfortably middle-class neighborhood of Rochester or Seattle. Old trees spread their shade over spacious and green lawns. It seemed that every day the drawings in my pads were a shocking reminder of what American apartheid really looked like. The first time I helped McLaurin carry apprehensive blacks to Indianola to have them try, yet once again, to get registered, I made a series of drawings of the event. I sketched our Ruleville neighbors as they walked silently toward the imposing courthouse. From time immemorial, this courthouse had been a symbol of the implacability of white power. As they waited permission from the angry armed deputies to mount the steps, they stood, uncomplaining, in the stifling heat. Finally, a few at a time, they were allowed to wait in the shade of the tall white columns of the courthouse porch. While the silent tableau was unfolding, I moved out on the broad lawn of the courthouse to start a drawing of the structure that soared above me. Curious deputies began to drift over to watch this “outside agitator,” distracted from their vigilant surveillance of these “uppity niggers” who were only out to give them...