Read Online The Ghosts of Mississippi by Maryanne Vollers - Free Book Online

insurance was the most important. While a person may have nothing in life, he would have himself a funeral, and it would be paid for. Evers and Moore figured they were selling dignity. And if they didn’t do it, some white insurance agent would be out there selling policies. Besides, they gave something back.
    If the white man wasn’t watching, Evers and Moore would call together meetings in those dark little shacks and start teaching the sharecroppers something about their history. It was a program they devised on their own, with the local NAACP chapter. Most of the sharecroppers couldn’t read, didn’t pay attention to the radio, and were almost cut off from the rest of the world. So Medgar Evers would pull a George Washington Carver commemorative silver half-dollar from his pocket and show the folks: “This is a colored man.” They could relate to that. He would tell them about Marcus Garvey, Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, Marian Anderson. People, heroes, whose names they never learned in school, if they ever went to school at all.
    On the long rides down those Delta back roads, Evers and Moore would talk about their lives. Medgar was always offering good advice to his younger friend, trying to make peace between Moore and his wife, who were having problems. The two men would talk about their dreams and their frustrations.
    Once Medgar swept his hand across the fiat horizon beyond the windshield and said, “This is like a virgin country, man. If everything got straight here, this would be the best place in the world to live.”
    Sometimes he would be angry, pumped up, frustrated over the beaten-down, hopeless sharecroppers out on the plantations. “We’ve got to get these people to do something,” he would say, bouncing his fist on the dashboard.
    For the past year, Medgar Evers had been toying with a wild plan to strike back at the white man in Mississippi. He was thinking about fighting fire with fire. Guerrilla warfare in the Delta. Black night riders, the Negro answer to the Klan, give the man a taste of his own fear, slip in and take out the bad guys in their sleep. The Mississippi Mau Mau.
    Evers, Moore, and every other informed black person in America were aware that something was happening on the other side of the world. Africans were starting to shake off their colonial masters.
    In Kenya a Kikuyu leader named Jomo Kenyatta was leading his people to fight British rule. He was in jail, but his followers were waging a campaign of terror in the African highlands. They called themselves Mau Mau. Dozens of white farmers were killed (the newspaper reports overlooked the thousands of Africans who died in the conflict).
    Kenyatta was Medgar Evers’s hero. His name, in Kikuyu, meant “Burning Spear.” He was an intellectual who had written books outlining the plight of his nation and the need for an end to colonialism. Apparently by any means necessary.
    Charles Evers had by then settled in Philadelphia, Mississippi. He and Medgar got to talking about it, and actually started making plans for a Mississippi Mau Mau. It was more than just a fantasy. They had guns and knew how to get more. They could have started the war anytime. But Medgar had a change of heart.
    Myrlie remembers that it was a close reading of the Bible and his mother’s influence that turned Medgar away from violence.
    Medgar was always a cautious, deliberate person. He thought it over and read and talked about it, and finally he came to the conclusion that a vigilante campaign would never work. It would only bring more violence, more misery. Instead, Medgar devoted himself to the work of the largest, and, at the time, most radical nonviolent organization available to him, the NAACP.
    In June of 1953 Myrlie gave birth to a boy, the Everses’ first child. Medgar was so happy and nervous he backed his car into a ditch on the way to the hospital. He already had a name picked out for his son. He would call him Kenyatta.
    Myrlie was mortified.