The trees know. Despite the deep freezes of past weeks, I notice dark rings forming around the larger tree trunks. The birch stems, rising from the mother roots of the huge tree that fell, flash this morning, each branch and twig encased in sparkling ice; the vibrant light refutes the chill breezes. Though the thermometer says 18 degrees, ice on the back shed is melting apace, creating an energetic, musical waterfall. Change is coming.
In January I read two biographies of Fannie Lou Hamer. She was the extraordinary civil rights leader who picked cotton from the age of six, her family encumbered by the heavy chains of poverty endured by sharecroppers of the Mississippi Delta. At age 42, she learned that she had a constitutional right to vote. She immediately tried to register, was denied, lost her job with the landowner her family depended on, and decided to join the crew of much-younger volunteers who had come to Mississippi with the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee. She became the voice of the disenfranchised statewide, and began challenging many other aspects of the choke hold system that ruled state and national politics under the leadership of people like Senators Eastland and Stennis.
To read the accounts of her life — the hunger, the physical abuse, the ill health, the constant humiliation and treatment as a less-than-human being — is to be confronted with what we don’t want to know about the history of our country and its origins. The sheer meanness and cruelty of the accepted system and its aftermath is difficult to absorb. Yet the astonishing determination and bravery of people like Mrs. Hamer call to us.
I had a chance to meet her once in the mid-60s. I don’t recall whether it was before or after her most famous appearance on national TV challenging the all-white Mississippi Democratic Party delegation at the 1968 convention. She was one of the Black leaders my father was working with to change Mississippi’s status as 50th in every category of national ran — income, health, education — all indicators shadowed by the legacy of slavery. Standing at her screen door, she impressed me as compact, fierce, strong, glowing with determination. She shook up the entire national political system with her rough and eloquent calls for change at great personal cost.
As a middle class teenager I was ill equipped to fully understand her situation or her accomplishments; I was still blindered by some naïve hopes for “change.” It was deeply disorienting to realize slowly that some of the cordial local white people we met in Jackson deeply believed that a Black person is sub-human. A lesser species. When my mother warned me not to get my hopes up that things would be different in Boston when I escaped north to college, I furiously asked why. She pointed out that senators from Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia among others, held power in Washington. When I later heard Louise Day Hicks of Boston anti-busing fame say in her high pitched voice: “You know where I stand,” I got it.
It can hurt to absorb the truth and sometimes we cannot fully acknowledge what we have been given to know until much later. Like breathing in the sharp February air, truth can cause pain. Like a seed, truth sometimes lies dark and dormant far too long.
I meet some remarkable leaders of that time: Dorothy Height (National Council of Negro Women); Dorothy Duke; Eunita Blackwell (another leader born of cotton fields who saved my emotional sanity with her compassionate support for a bewildered white girl); Marian Wright (later Edelman). These amazing people visited our home and offered an indelible example. All were excavating the truth with fierce dignity, passion and determination.
For white folks, facing truth doesn’t mean staying mired in guilt or in fear about retribution or in denial about personal responsibility. Few of us had anything to do with slavery; but many of us unwittingly accrued benefits from that system without awareness. Why not unearth the seeds of change right in front of us? Why not grow the world we need with equity, respect and compassion? We have the means, if not yet the will, to build a just society in which we finally plant our best selves for all to flourish.
“Walk with Me,” one biography is titled; “Until I Am Free,” the other. Mrs. Hamer is still waiting. The trees wait, too, but not for much longer. Neither should we.
Judy Wagner lives in Northfield. She was born in Wisconsin; raised in North Carolina, Georgia and Mississippi; attended college and graduate schools in Massachusetts to which she returned in retirement.