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Palouse Country, Eastern Washington – 2008

CLIMBING THE BUTTES above the house where my mother was born, Hilary saw a cluster of rocks, almost a statue. Looking down across the Palouse River we could almost see the house where my mother was born. “Your mother climbed these rocks,” Hilary said. “She sat right here looking down. I know it. I would have.”

Hilary McDevitt, my researcher, had come west to work on this book. She had become focused especially on Palouse Indian grave desecrations, spending months researching that history.

Some of my earliest memories of my mother were stories she told my brother Mikey and me about riding on these buttes.

My mother’s stories were adventures and lullabies. And when I finally saw the buttes for first time, ten years after she died, it seemed I’d always known them, the paths of my mother’s adventures. How she’d ride on trails through the rocks, and how her horse would pull up and shy when coming on a rattlesnake. That always scared me as a child, and now walking anywhere in the Palouse Country I’m still scared of snakes.

As a child I would think about how my mother wasn’t afraid. She had a good horse. When my mother was on the chase, the horse knew when to pull up. She trusted that horse to keep her safe. And when I was young, my mother was young too, her lanky McGregor beauty still inhabited her frame.

Those rides were my mother’s first great adventures, her freedom, her proclamation to the world that if she could ride the buttes on her Indian horse, like the Palouse Indians who had ridden the buttes for centuries, a too was a fearless warrior.

Sometimes she would come across a Palouse Indian grave that had been looted by whites. The graves were nestled in crevices. They were easy to find. And the whites lived along the the Palouse River, men who worked for the MacGregors, looted them for fun. She knew them by name. Hooper is a small town, then and now. Everyone knows everybody. They know the latest gossip. Some were the parents of her friends.

They were grave looters. Hooper was a “company town,” and because my mother was a McGregor and what happened on the McGregor Ranch meant that the family let it happen, for my mother, the McGregors, especially her father, were part of real evil. She didn’t know the word genocide then. But she knew that her family was part of it. Most of the Palouse had been killed, but there were still graves to loot, skulls and bones to throw around and piss on for fun. Then came the stories passed on for generations that claimed the McGregors treated the Palouse honorably.

You still hear some of those stories today. The denials. Even “facts” that prove there never really was a Palouse Tribe. Today we call this cultural genocide.

1978 was the first time I went to the ranch to find my mother’s lullabies, to find the source of the river that made her brave, to walk up the buttes to see the crevices where the graves once were. On that first visit I asked my cousin what he thought about the desecration of the graves.

Never happened he said.

He’s changed his story these days. He told Hilary and me that he knows where a Palouse grave is and that he protects it. Hilary asks, “where is it?” Hilary McDevitt is keen for facts. She likes maps. Like Lewis and Clark she likes coordinates. She wants my cousin to point on her map and tell her where that grave is. She wants to know if my cousin is telling the truth. Hilary wants the history. The real facts, not the ones that were made up.

“Where is it,” Hilary McDevitt asks again – after all she has maps, she knows the history. One thing about Hilary McDevitt, don’t ask her about something she already knows. Or suspects.

My cousin said, sorry, I can’t tell you. I’m protecting it.

My name is not McGregor. I am the son of a McGregor woman and cannot claim the name.

But blood is blood. And what is most telling now is that Scotish families had a history of interbreeding with Indians. And now that all the history is coming forth, that blood is the thickest node of history, a bloodline that will out over ego, land and false memory. There is history in the blood. Perhaps it speaks. Perhaps it sings. Bloodlines are sticky with truth.

Climb the butte today above the town of Hooper Washington and you’ll see the Palouse River. It’s only a stream now. It once flowed wide and deep and filled with fish down to Palouse Falls. The falls where my mother would race to alone, turn that horse and race to the house, her body in the wind.

The falls are still there. And deep in the way the earth commands you to knell.

The Palouse is still rattlesnake country. I’m afraid of snakes. So everywhere I walk in Palouse country, I always look down.

Marjorie Jean McGregor (1916 -1968) Photo - Hollywood 1940

Marjorie Jean McGregor was born in 1916 in Hooper, Washington, on the McGregor ranch. The McGregors had begun in the 1880’s building what would become a small empire next to last protected tribal lands of the Palouse Indians. My mother often told how the Hooper men after church would climb the buttes looking for graves to loot. It was Sunday afternoon recreation. She spoke also about a particular Palouse Indian named Sam Fisher, one of the last of his tribe, who, she claimed, was treated with derision at the family store.

Sam Fisher was his English name. He was Yosyóos Tulikekecíin in Palouse. It’s hard to write real Native American names, the mere appearance of the language so heavily draped in stereotyped imagery. Hard to mention Indians, to honor them as part of the lyricism of the land and its history without feeling somehow one is exploiting them. But Sam’s story is also part of my mother’s and certainly my own.

The earliest times I can place the sound of my mother’s voice were in stories about Hooper. They weren’t told in anger, but almost like fairy tales, told at night as my brother and I went to sleep, stories of the McGregor ranch in Hooper became my mother’s lullabies to her sons. How she rode among the buttes and across hills of grass, her horse sometimes shying away from rattlesnakes. Indian graves weren’t always looted. She might find them untouched, among on the buttes or in the valleys, along the dry cuts from old rivulets along the sheep trails across the expanse of McGregor land. My mother was always alone and free in these stories. I see her that way today when I’m on that land. Everywhere you look seems like forever.

Looking down from the rock, hearing my mother’s voice I thought: Here is the map where my mother’s journeys began, to Hollywood and New York, and to the politics of the Left. But that journey was more than mere politics. It was seamless with her dreams of living in the world. My mother’s journey became mine, also. And looking down from that rock from the butte above the house where my mother was born, I was at my own beginning on the way to Mississippi and my night with the gun.

The files of the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission– the state agency allied with the police and the Klan to preserve segregation — were declassified in 1998. I found my name online in the index. But I’d have to fly to Jackson to read the files- not just my files, but thousands that unveiled the secrets and the names. Recently, access to the actual files of the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission came online. Now, in a keystroke, I could see any files, including my own. Time and space reduced to electrons, history relieved from its occasional tediousness through this new mode of instant viewing.

The files showed how much the police knew about us. They had lists of civil rights workers, their addresses and phone numbers, and names of schools for the students. They knew that I went to a music conservatory in New York. I also had a guitar in Mississippi, a stereotypical standout for the police. Canton and New York. I existed then in two milieus: summer, a guitar- playing CORE worker singing freedom songs and Mississippi blues; winter, a piano, composition and conducting student. Which Side Are You On Boys and Bach’s B minor Mass. Two different musics and lives, but each held passionately, and without either I would have lost the sense of myself.

Canton, Mississippi 1964-65

Real history is the grand drama, its paths, signposts and places of remembering deeper than imagination.

In summer 1964 I’d been lucky with the violence. After three CORE boys, Andy Goodman, James Chaney, and Mickey Schwerner -pictured above in an FBI poster - were murdered in Neshoba, all of us were protected for a time. Two of them had been white. The unspeakable plan had worked. Only the death of white civil rights workers might force a change that centuries of black lynchings had not. The projected deaths of civil rights workers going to Mississippi that summer had been a hundred. But the first three stopped the killing for a few months.

My luck changed a year later in June 1965 during the mass arrests in Jackson. Several hundred demonstrators were held and brutalized at the Jackson Fairgrounds. One reason that writing about Mississippi would stall was my memory of that particular arrest. There were reasons to question it. Sleeping on concrete floors had made it easy to deprive us of sleep. A cop would hold a metal chair above his head and drop on to the floor throughout the night. Sound-shots to the head. Sleep without sleeping. Time -fast, slow. The vivid dream of no-time. You can’t write history from dreams.

The most violent feeling that I remembered from the Jackson Arrests in June 1965 was witnessing violence against someone else. Cops beating and kicking a pregnant woman. But had I really seen it? Memories of the events in the Jackson Fairgrounds were vivid but also scattered and blurred. When the files came online, I started looking for a document to support that memory, to prove that something so important for my book actually happened. I found it [Click on red to see]. As it came up on the screen I got nauseous. It was a newspaper account of the beating. The Sovereignty Commission collected newspaper articles from around the country about the civil rights movement in Mississippi. I couldn’t go on. Reading the account put me inside fairgrounds again, the first physical sense of those days I’d had since 1965. I emailed Hilary. Please continue with the files. Track the memories. I told her that something happened with my hands. The cops, a vat of boiling water.

The official purpose of that boiling water -a full-sized metal trash can over some kind of burning fire–was for prisoners to clean a metal plate after a meal. When the plate touched the water the metal went hot. Then the cop, on a whim, might grab your arm and push the hand holding the plate down into the boiling water. How long could you hold on? If you dropped the plate you had to reach down and get it. So, you held on. You waited for the cop to let your hand up from the water. Sometimes it happened sometimes not. How many times had my hand been in the water? Time. No-time. Hilary emailed back in an hour. She’d found another news clipping in the files [Click on red to see. There are two pages at the site. Use the small NEXT button at lower left of the first page to read the more important beyond the headline]. The beatings again, and how hands were forced down into the vats of boiling water.

I had new energy for the writing. Not only Mississippi, but for all of it. The great issue with a political memoir would be veracity. Would people believe what happened? Would it be just my stories? But in the next year, memories turned to facts. Documents. Pictures. Words in print. Stories of the blacklist, of people dead a hundred years, of actors and communists, heroes and informers- all seemed within reach.

Accurate history of the civil rights movement is dominated by the life and death of Martin Luther King Jr., and with nonviolence as the pillar of its moral center. Nonviolence was dogma for students who went south, taught as both tactic and belief. But it was always debated in the movement, especially among local blacks. Nonviolence worked when witnessed and reported. Images on national news of passive civil rights workers taking a beating made sense. But what did it mean on some back dirt road -no cameras, no reporters, no witnesses? Three months after the Neshoba murders, and after most of the white workers had gone home, the Klan kidnapped a fourteen-year-old boy wearing a CORE shirt in Canton, lynched him and left the body in the river. No mention in the press.

A year after Neshoba, a handful of CORE activists remained working Canton to Meridian, and in Canton, working within a strong local movement, among them Bill Hamlin.

Mornings, Bill and I would set out by jeep to rural areas of Madison County organizing black farmers. Forty percent of Madison County land was black- owned. But black farmers were shut out from voting for the local board of the Agricultural Stabilization and Conservation Service-the ASCS- that made the yearly allotments that determined federal crop support money. Bill was one of those farmers.

The jeep was army surplus, open with no canopy. We drove wearing CORE T- shirts -”CORE” on the front and “Freedom Now” on the back. “Two fools with targets on our backs,” Bill would laugh. But the bravado wasn’t personal. It was tactical. Show strength. Break through that part of fear that made blacks become invisible when “The Man” demanded subservience. We had a hand-drawn map of the countyfrom a previous organizer, showing which farms were owned by whites and which were owned by blacks.

Bill was quiet and funny, but could turn tough and mean when provoked. Once, we drove to a farm owned by an old black man. Maybe he was eighty. His parents would have been slaves. When Bill spoke, the old farmer looked at him. When I talked, he looked down. “Yes suh, no suh” he’d say as I talked. “Look up!” Bill demanded. “You’re a grown man. This white boy is the boy. Then the farmer looked down as Bill talked. “Yes suh, no suh.” I had a hard time with it. I talked apologetically and offered a leaflet as Bill made for the jeep. “No point here,” Bill said.

The farms were always a long way up from the main road, up one dirt road and then onto the farm a quarter mile or so to the house. We drove up on one of those long dirt roads marked as a black farm on our map. I was driving. As we got near the house a white man with a shotgun came out. I backed that jeep down faster than I thought you could drive backwards. Bill was laughing. Another day as we set out, Bill pulled a pistol from under his seat. “What if we get caught with that,” I said. “I’d rather be caught with it than without it. No cracker going to kill me on these back roads. And when I have children, they won’t kill them either. If you can’t be with me get out of the jeep and go home.”

Self-defense meant standing shifts at night to protect the Freedom House. Not only did we live there, but also it was a gathering place for teenagers involved in the movement. We had an old farmer’s shotgun, doubled barreled. No one knew the last time it had been shot. The joke around the Freedom House was that the first one to shoot would kill himself when it blew up in his face.

The Freedom House was often a target. Drive-bys. Shots fired at the house. Firebombs. Hard to distinguish between the Klan and some of the local police. Local youth were shot at while walking to the house. Sometimes by police. The “boys” would call and say that they were coming that night. By summer 1965, when they called they got an answer. Come on then.

A few weeks later in Canton, The Klan called the Freedom House and said they said they were coming. Local teens set up barricades at the house. The second night a black kid came in yelling at me, “there’s a white guy in a car with a gun.” This was my responsibility. Not just the Freedom House, but the kids in the street.

I came out with the shotgun. A car drove slowly some twenty yards in front of me –some kind of Ford sedan maybe. The kind of car usually seen in a drive- by. But it wasn’t going fast. It moved in front of me to my right. I could see an arm hanging from the passenger window with a pistol pointing down and flat against the car door. There were two men. I don’t remember if I cocked a barrel. I don’t think I did. But I raised the shotgun and began tracking the car. Not the man, but the pistol. It drove to the end of the block, turned and came back. Slowly. I couldn’t see the pistol now, the passenger side out of view. The car stopped in front of me. The man on the driver’s side got out and stood up. As he did he called out my name. He said he was a policeman and that I was under arrest. He told me to put down the gun.

I lowered it immediately. He was up on me in a few seconds. He took the gun and cuffed me. One of the other workers -a law student from Connecticut who’d been sleeping- came out and tried to get arrested with me. They didn’t want him. I remember that tight feeling of the cuffs up from my wrists to my shoulders, wondering how long the ride to the jail would last. Street lights shone into the police car, I remember, each light moving back way past the window as the car rode the half mile to the city jail.

There were perhaps ten cops at the police station. We all knew each other by name. We had a history, after all. The cop in charge had a reputation as a moderate, someone who would go “by the book.” I looked at him and said I want my one phone call. Yes, I know it sounds like a movie, but that’s what I said. I probably only knew from the movies that I was supposed to get the call.

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“I heard Gloria Steinem tell a joke on T.V. about your father ,”  my friend said as he walked into the Claremont  Street apartment,  a few months after

Goria Steinem

Lisa had left the place for Chicago.

“Gloria Steinem didn’t know my father,” I said.

“No,  it was a joke that your mother,  Lee Grant, told Gloria  Steinem about  your  father.

“Lee Grant is not my mother.  She was my stepmother,”  I said. Why wouldn’t he remember who was who in my family?  He’d known me for years,  back when Lee was my step – mother, the wife of my father Arnold Manoff.

“Your stepmother,  right.”   But he continued as if my qualification meant nothing.  He was unable to slow down the delivery of the joke about my father. He said it.

“Gloria Steinem said that Lee Grant  said that first she’d married a communist and then she married a fascist and neither one took out the garbage.”

“Neither did Lee,” I said reflexively,  ” our black maid took out the garbage.”

He laughed at his punchline, I laughed inwardly  at mine.  No point  saying more.  He  heard the joke on television, and whatever was said on television becomes official.  The joke about my father was a celebrity joke,  words from the mouths of two famous  people,  (though today Lee’s fame is mostly forgotten, and she certainly never  ever attained the iconic  fame enjoyed rightly be Gloria Steinem.)

The appetite for celebrity creates new realities,  erasing others,  dissolving even shared memories among families and friends.

The joke hurt.

It was tough to hear anything dismissive about my father.  Arnold Manoff,  a blacklisted writer  who died of a heart attack at 50 only a few years earlier.
My father wrote for half his life through his early death under “fronts, “ not his real name.

As a blacklisted  writer, Arnold Manoff  was in a real sense nameless.  And in Lee’s joke,  Daddy had no name again.  He was just “the communist.”

As others in the early 60’s from our circle of communist families had done, Lee Grant came back from the blacklist to act under her real name.  Many blacklisted writers lived long enough to write under their real names and see their names restored to their scripts.  But not my father.  Arnie Manoff lived long enough to see his ex-wife get off the blacklist,  while he still wrote under his last front, “Joel Carpenter.”

Nameless daddy. Blacklisted, and  now “joke-listed, “  a set-up man for Lee Grant and Gloria Steinem on T.V. He wouldn’t have liked that. I didn’t like it. My loyalty for Daddy has always been strong when it came to his scripts and his name. I am a Manoff, too.

Lee never made an effort to restore my father’s name to his scripts after he died.  I would do that in 1993 with the help Robert Siegel at NPR, and my family stopped speaking to me for years because of it.  And I’m off my family guest list again for writing the truth about my brother’s death. Lee had a part in that and my sister Dinah too.

Nothing to be done here. Truth is the truth. Let’s just tell it.  Love is a deep truth.  Blood is love sometimes.  But blood is always truth.

Lee’s joke was funny because she’s funny, and in the broader cultural context, the message of the joke has truth. Lee’s joke has become part of official feminist lore,  as it should. Arnold Manoff  was an abusive man to Lee, and also  to my mother Marjorie Jean McGregor (his third wife.)

Daddy was famous as a womanizer. Once in Hollywood the communist party called him before a Stalinist- style committee on  charges of womanizing. He got off. Daddy had charm and smarts. He wasn’t brave in the traditional way. He was absent when anything really dangerous (a war, for example) was going on.  But he could handle any political fight.  A committee ? Christ, Daddy lived for that kind of thing !

My father’s worst history with women was with my mother. When she moved the our small family (my mother, brother Mikey and me) to New York to be near him, Daddy refused to support her.  He (and by consent his new wife Lee Grant) kept my mother and us kids poor.  Mikey and I lived in slums for a time. That was a tough time, especially for Mikey. The tenement in Hell’s Kitchen.He was always scared.

As the older brother by 13 months, I took care of him. And with my mother working all day, I was responsible for us until she came home. Long days then for Mikey and I. I was in Kindergarten. He was in whatever came before that. Mikey once peed in his pants at school and the teacher called me in. I took us both home early, embarrassed and waited for hours at out apartment door (had no key) from my mother to come home. It was a long time, those hours at the door waiting for Marjorie Jean.

Lee talked about her cooperation with my father’s economic abandonment of my mother when I wrote the music for Lee’s first documentary for HBO 1986.  She said that Daddy’s “plan” was keeping my mother poor,so that he and Lee would get us kids. Lee talked rthen about helping with my book which would tell the real history of my mother, Marjorie Jean McGregor.

That offer fell a part a few years later. We’re not friends, Lee and I, her last words spoken to me in 1993 about my book were quite clear: “Fuck you, Tommy. I don’t care what you write.”

Anyone who knows Lee’s career knows that  her suffering during the blacklist is a central issue. The story goes that when called before HUAC in the early 50’s,  Lee was asked to name one name — her husband’s, my father, Arnold Manoff.

Daddy had already been named many times by informers.  HUAC was just exacting blood. Lee refused (true) to name Daddy and became blacklisted for it.  She became a HUAC blacklist martyr. That was the story. And it was partially true.

But during their bitter divorce , my father told Mikey and me that Lee named him to HUAC to get off the blacklist in 1961.

I have lived with Daddy’s words for many years — he died Feb, 10, 1965. The issue was never resolved.

What had really happened with Lee and the committee ?  It was clear that she had made some kind of “deal” while Daddy was still alive.

She spoke openly of meeting with Washington insiders and celebrities in the Fall of 1964, a few monthes before Arnie died. Had she really named him ?

Just as I wanted to know and write about the real history of the McGregors and Sam Fisher (see opening of the book), I wanted to understand and write about the full pattern of Lee and the committee, of a wife who, ieven in divorce, could name a husband to the House Unamerican Activities Committee.

Daddy could have been lying about Lee. They were vicious and abusive to each other during that divorce in terrible ways. What was worse ? A father who lied about his ex-wife informing on him before HUAC, or a step-mother who really did it ?

Chase the White Horse is my search for answers for what happened to my family and me beyond what we were told and beyond the official sanitized history, as told especially by the Left.

I have always known that betrayal is a constant pattern in my family.

Betrayal is part of the human pattern. But is it an inevitable for all humankind? What ancient myth tells that joke ?

Lee’s story has become part of official feminist lore, as it should. And Arnold Manoff, who who kept my mother poor , is finally doing his bit for feminism as Gloria Steinem’s unnamed communist. That’s fair. He owes us all that much. And even Daddy might have laughed, if the story were about another man.

I miss Arnie Manoff, my father, dead in his coffin now almost 50 years. He was not without charm.

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By the time Charney was arrested in Scott County, he’d been organizing there for a month. Tall, red-headed and with a Jewish name, he was easy to spot. Especially driving a new Chevy pickup truck. Charney was the kind of outside agitator who triggered deep revulsion in Mississippi whites. Especially in a truck. Pick-ups were a symbol of manhood for Mississippi whites, and a Jew in a truck who’d come south to challenge segregation, that most basic tenet of their racist moral code, was a target.

__________________________

Dale Tooley, the city attorney for Philadephia who had defended me on the gun charge, and another lawyer drove down to Morton to deal with Charney’s arrest. That seemed a special kind of power to me, sending two “big-shot” lawyers to a small town jail in Mississippi. There wouldn’t be a trial I thought. Probably just bail. I expected Charney back in the Freedom house in a couple of hours.

Late afternoon, Tooley and the other lawyer drove up Boyd Street in their rental car – a Ford perhaps. As they turned onto Lutz Avenue and drove into the yard next door to the the Freedom House, I saw they were alone. No Charney.

They’d been to the Morton jail, and arranged that Charney could be released on $500 bail, but hadn’t bailed him out. Why didn’t you write the check I said. Not sure what they said when I protested. Perhaps that wasn’t the kind of thing they did in Philadephia. Write a check for a client’s bail. But they had left Charney Bromberg, the six foot Jew in a Chevy Truck in a Morton jail on the night of a Ku Klan Klan rally in Scott County Mississippi.

Late afternoon. I started asking who would go with me to bail him out. There weren’t many people around and no one was especially excited about the trip. C.O. Chinn Jr. would go. He convinced a kid named Pee Rooney also. Neither Chinn or I had a car. But there was a fellow who did.

_______________

The Reverend had come to Canton a few weeks before. He’d been in the city at some time during the Freedom Summer of 64. I didn’t like him. He seemed uptight and prim in his formal minister’s garb, its white collar emerging from some black minister’s shirt, uplifting the head as if he had personal access to morality. The outfit seemed silly to me also because the Reverend was short.

One day without notice, the Rev drove to the airport and, to the surprise of the rest of us, returned to the Freedom House with his fiancée. The arrival was met with many tongue comments, some with tongues in cheeks, others not. This wasn’t the kind of act that would endear the Rev to our rag-tag assemblage. But we liked his woman. She was quiet, even reticent. Her name was Anna.

The first thing I remember about the Reverend was his vehicle -–an odd looking German camping van. Something like a VW bus. But more exotic back then. I’m not sure that I’d seen a VW bus in 1965.

The Reverend agreed to drive. So, the Rev, Pee, Chinn, and I left Canton to try and get Charney Bromberg out of jail on the night of a Klan Rally in Morton, Mississippi. I sat in the front with the Rev. Chinn and Pee hidden in back. That was the way to make this trip the safest. This wasn’t about a show of moral force. The idea was just get to Charney out of Morton Mississippi.

We pulled out from the Freedom House. I hadn’t been in Reverend’s strange van and was curious about the gears. Some kind of shifting lever up from the floor but not the American stick configuration. I still see the Reverend today, shifting those strange gears decisively as if he were driving some special machine that only he had tamed.

Started to go dreamlike as we left Canton. A rocking motion on the winding roads. Rural Mississippi is ravishing as the light changes in the evening. Red and green go darker into deeply tinged colors on their ways to greys and blacks. Machine, road, rocking, sky.

_______________

We arrived at Morton about seven in the evening. The police station is on a public square that was lit with street slights, stark lighting, and a bit surreal. The square was empty. We parked across the street from the jail, maybe fifty yards. The Rev and I got out and walked to the police station. Chinn and Pee stayed hidden in the car.

The inside of the station had an odd layout, very narrow, with the reception desk running back away from us. We sat in chairs on the left a few feet away from the desk. No one was there. We just sat and waited. A cop came out after a bit. Didn’t say anything. Just looked. Rev was in his minister’s garb. I’d already told him to just sit there and be quiet.

I said in the meekest voice something like officer we’re here to bail out Charney Bromberg. I had the five hundred dollars in cash. The cop, still completely unanimated, said he would check on the situation and disappeared down the corridor to the back of the jail. We waited. Ten minutes or so, nothing. The sense of real trouble set in. Nothing to do but play it out. Charney was somewhere down that aisle in the back of the jail.

The cop came back, said nothing, sat down and started reading a newspaper. Silence. After a bit, and my best excuse me officer voice I asked what happened. He said that we had to wait on the “processing” and went back to the paper. It was an explanation. I thought we might get out of this in a few minutes.

Silence again. I felt the odd interplay of something and nothing happening at the same time. And then, as if this surreal dream needed another layer, the Reverend started to speak. At first the words werincomprehensible to me, only jolting into the pressure of the hot silent air. Then I hear him more distinctly. He asks the cop if he thinks segregation is morally justified. Am I fucking dreaming ? I try to shut him up, but Reverend Euro-van in his self-reightous whie collar keeps on. The cop looks up from time to time silent and glaring. I’m just waiting for this cop to go back and get Charney, hoping to that red-beard come down that aisle.

Time started going soft in that feeling when you’re close to inevitable chaos. I kept telling the Reverend to shut the fuck up. We need to get Charney. Stop picking a fight with this guy. The collar preached on now provoking the cop, asking the same questions and getting no response. I write this today, amazed how pissed off at this guy I still am.

The police station had picture windows looking out on the square. The blinds were open, and occasionally I looked out to make sure that Jr. and Pee Rooney were still hidden in the van. I began to notice that some men were starting to gather in the square. And then the cop went to the window and closed the blinds. I’m not sure, but maybe the Reverend shut up. All came clear. We’d been stalled to allow a mob to gather. When Charney came out, we’d have to get through them to the van.

Things went back to silence. Finally I ask the cop again about Charney.He handed me some paperwork. He’s not here he said. He was at the Leak County jail in some 30 miles from Morton. But no point in going there that night he said. We couldn’t get Charney without giving the bail to the local magistrate and having him sign the papers.

Took the papers, thanked him, and opened the door to the square. Ten or fifteen men. Some had bottles. They were right between us and the van. But as we walked out, Chinn opened the door of the van and started walking towards. Mobs can be easily distracted momentarily for some reason. And as Chinn appeared their attention turned, and it seemed we had a kind of opening through them. We ran. Stuff were thrown but we made it to the van and started to drive. Bottles and rocks missed the curious machine as we pulled out. Maybe the machine had luck, it’s mission to save its master.

In minutes we were out of the town on some back road so we could stop and breath. Jr. said that once he saw the blinds close, he’d decided to wait ten minutes, and if we didn’t come out, he’d come in and try to get us. And that’s what he did. If you knew Mississippi then you would understand how extraordinary this was, a lone black man walking into a white mob to get his friends. That was C.O. Chinn Jr. in the Summer of 1965.

We had to find this magistrate. His home address was on the paperwork. I went to a phone booth, looked up the number, called and asked if we could come by with the money. He agreed. I think we had a map.

Still not sure if this was another set-up, we found his house in a rural area outside of town. I remember the porch light going on as I walked to the door. The porch was screened in and the magistrate and I talked on its steps. He turned out to be straight forward and accommodating. There were a lot of common sense people in Mississippi. He was an official. He went by the book. I gave him the money, he signed the papers and we headed for that county jail. Might have been ten o’clock by them. We were on automatic. Jr., Pee and I intended get Charney home that night.

The Leake county is a somewhat large building for a small town with two stories. This time I went in alone. Green walls I think. A receiving desk was at the left and a flight of stairs at the right. At the top of that flight of stairs, a corner turned left. Politely I handed the officer at the desk Charney’s release papers. He told me to wait. Some minutes later, five or ten perhaps, but not a long time, I see Charney’s red hair come out from around that corner at the top of the stairs. He’s walking down the steps towards me with a cop behind him. There was a group of men gathered in the parking lot. But nothing happened. We were in the van and quickly gone, driving and laughing back to Canton. Well, not sure that the Reverend was doing anything but driving that machine.

In the decades that followed, Charney and I would recount this story and laugh through it. As I got serious about this book, he’s nailed down more detail:

After the trial in the general store, somewhere between Morton and Forest, the sheriff and his deputy took me to some out- of- the- way place to wait for “them,” who were going to “take care of me.”

Charnrey ended up in the county jail. In his cell he heard chants from men gathered outside to bring him out so they could lynch him.

And when the police came and got him from his cell the night we bailed him out, he thought they were taking him to be killed. Forty years later, he said, and then I saw your face at the bottom of the stairs. We had a movement, come on now, all of you come on.

_____________

Back in Canton, I found out that something that perhaps made the Reverend’s attempt at martyrdom more comprehensible.

The Reverend’s fiancée made a good impression on me when she came. She was taller than he was, and bigger in frame, attractively zaftig in simple dresses that had the “I-sewed-this-myself” look. While he was quiet and sullen, she was quiet and nice. Back in Iowa she was somehow connected to his church. When she’d arrived, she couldn’t stay at the Freedom House. She was sent off to a local residence. White women living in a house with black men was a provocation.

Not long before we went to get Charney, and maybe a week into her visit, she was arrested having sex in a motel with a prominent local black civil rights worker on the project, a person quite close to the story told here.

Considering the “crime,” the local black civil rights worker could have been lynched. But a behind-the-scenes relationship between his father and the white police establishment must have come into play. He went free.

The Reverend’s lady went back to Iowa right.

Charney told me later that George had walked into the Freedom House while everyone was talking about it and said if a man and a woman are going to have sex, that’s just the way things are, it’s going to happen so stop talking about it. And people did. Especially those involved.

The Reverend tried to work things out with her, apparently, but eventually she called the marriage off. Most of us had our craziness about liaisons. Charney, me and certainly Jr. Chinn. The Reverend had some powerful reasons apparently in his quest for manhood and in Morton, Mississippi.

I never liked the Reverend. I’m not sure anyone on the Canton Project really did. He left Canton and went to other projects in the state. He remained an activist for civil rights and for the poor. He leaves Canton out of his official bio. But he’s still in Mississippi, fighting the good fight.

God bless the Reverend, and Anna too, Jr. Chinn, Pee Rooney, and Charney the red-headed Jew. God bless all of us who remember and forget that night.

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Reviewed Dec. 30 on All Things Considered, Shai Wosner’s new CD - Brahms: Fantasies, Op.116, 19 Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Handel op.24; Schoenberg:Suite fur Klavier op.25,6 kleine Klavierstucke op.19 – reached #3 on the Amazon Classical Chart that same evening until Amazon ran out of stock.

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LISTEN TO THIS REVIEW AT NPR’S ALL THINGS CONSIDERED

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God Shall Be Praised: Music From the Lüne Convent

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Reviewed on 5/13 by Tom Manoff on All Things Considered, Music from the Lüne Convent, an independent recording from Germany, reached the #1 position at Amazon.com overnight and remained there for several days.

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