One Night in Mississippi by Craig Shreve

Author:Craig Shreve
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dundurn
Published: 2015-02-04T05:00:00+00:00

◀ 13 ▶

Mississippi, 1964

One other thing happened that summer that had consequences, both immediate and lasting.

Seeing Graden stand calmly in the midst of the prison, seeing how the older people responded to him, seeing him step proudly out of the back of the state car: all these things inspired me immensely in the moment. But later at night, lying safely back in my bed and staring at the familiar criss-crossed beams in the ceiling, they troubled me.

My worries were twofold. First, there was the simple matter of safety. The warning my father had issued after the cotton-selling incident continued to play in the back of my mind. About the value of prudence. About the danger of courage. About survival. I knew now, though, that there was very little that I could do to protect Graden. He had chosen a path, and he had committed himself to it completely.

That led to my second worry. There was doubt in my mind as to whether or not I wanted to be a part of this. I felt the same stirrings of passion when Graden and the others spoke, the same anger at the rights and freedoms that had been denied us, and the same thrill at the glimpses they offered of a more optimistic future. But I lacked Graden’s surety of purpose, and I knew that this would always be so. This cause was his, not mine.

Graden and the others continued to meet after the failed rally, and I continued to go, but not as regularly and not with the same conviction. I never wanted to be on that bus again, never wanted to be in the midst of that mob. I told myself that Papa was right, that it was just common sense, but in my heart I knew that it was fear. I couldn’t bring myself to face those people because I felt that that they would look at me and know I was afraid.

Graden would get up in the darkness and wait for me to join him, but more and more often I would stay behind, and after he’d slipped away, I would get up and cross the woods to the gin shack at the top of the hill.

The shack was a small, abandoned grain shed when we had found it. The floor was filthy with bits of rotted corn and old mice droppings. We had scrubbed the floor clean and sanded the inside walls. We did not want to attract attention by changing the outside appearance too much, but we replaced a handful of the most damaged boards. We cut up old pallets and staked them down over the floor to make it a more level surface, but there were wide seams between the planks at some points, and at the end of a night of dancing, almost everyone was coated from the knees down in spilled drink and dust. The roof was composed of overlapping sheets of corrugated metal nailed onto crooked beams, and it pushed the music down onto us like a scratchy echo.

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