The Hands of Peace by Marione Ingram

Author:Marione Ingram
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Published: 2015-03-23T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eight

Freedom Ways

I managed to carry out Mrs. Parker’s first-day assignments without visibly embarrassing her. The children seemed surprised but pleased when I criticized the Constitution on Constitution Day for having permitted slavery. Their teachers apparently had treated the founding document as being above reproach, like the Holy Bible, which also condoned slavery. But afterward, the head teacher thanked me for making the point and thanked Mrs. Parker for bringing me.

At the Baptist church, a raspy-voiced minister asked me what I planned to tell the congregation on Sunday. Lacking a plan, I told him I would say that I was a Jew born in Nazi Germany and that I had come to America to find freedom, but had found that many people here aren’t free. I said I would remind them that the Israelites of old had crossed the Red Sea without a boat to get their freedom, and I would suggest that the voter registration office was their Red Sea to cross. This seemed to go over well enough. At least Mrs. Parker seemed satisfied. But after I spoke on Sunday, I discovered that some of the congregation thought I was still a teenager.

Four of us worked out of the COFO office in tiny Moss Point, which was about ten miles from the Gulf of Mexico, in the southeast corner of Mississippi. From Mama Scott’s house, the office was a fifteen-minute walk alongside a shaded swamp that made me remember the three civil rights workers whose bodies had been found a few weeks earlier under a newly constructed earthen dam. Although they had been killed a hundred miles away, an earthen dam sounded to me like something that would be located on the edge of a swamp. When possible, I timed my walk to work to avoid the boisterous arrival of youths at a white school across the street from the office. The looks and curled-lip comments of students as they passed our office told me not to risk close encounters with them. Seeing some of them through the office window while I was writing a letter to Daniel, I told him how discouraging it was to think that they might become Mississippi’s leaders.

Despite the persistent violence against rights workers, fear was not always uppermost on my mind. It could be pushed deep into my brain stem by feelings of joy, love, or anger, or by the mental exertion demanded by a complex task, such as teaching someone twice my age how to read and write. But it was always there, somewhere in the shadows, even when I felt most secure. And Daniel and close friends far away also felt it, as I was reminded by Martin Puryear, the DC artist whom Daniel and I had persuaded to join the Peace Corps instead of the army. Living alone in a primitive hut in the interior of Sierra Leone, Martin wrote to say how concerned he was for my safety.

To keep my cool, I would sometimes remind myself that, as

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