One Night in Mississippi by Craig Shreve Page B

young men and women, mostly black, but some liberal-minded whites as well, wanted to know what it was “really like” in Mississippi. I thought of Graden, standing in the Townsends’ barn, lit by lanterns and encouraging an uncertain crowd of farmers and labourers to exercise their rights. I thought of the northerner in the brand-new coveralls that everyone looked at reverentially while he spoke of things he knew nothing about, and I knew now where his kind came from. I wanted nothing to do with any of them.
    I cultivated an isolationist persona, a deeply ingrained separateness. I would offer argument to any opinion, even to one I agreed with. I feigned indifference to the other students’ activities and blocked off any potentially probing conversations by simply shrugging and grunting, rather than giving real responses. I didn’t simply withdraw from people; I aggressively pushed them away.
    The students watched grainy footage of James Meredith entering Ole Miss under armed guard. They watched fire hoses and dogs turned on children. They stood in school halls and the courtyard and the cafeteria and shouted about injustice and about fighting to support their “brothers and sisters in the South,” and they couldn’t understand why I wouldn’t stand beside them. They began to whisper behind my back that I was a traitor and a coward. They finally began to avoid me like I avoided them. They held the most perverse of jealousies against me: they envied my suffering.
    I listened to them speak and looked at their faces and felt certain that they knew nothing about Mississippi. The ones who went down on buses to “help the cause,” came back quiet, stunned. I saw the same look years later on the faces of those white boys returning from Vietnam. They left convinced of their own invulnerability and sense of right, with dreams of glory, service, and heroism, and they came back having learned far too much about the world. The world is not a place of theory, not a place of ideas. It is a concrete slab that is cold, hard, and unyielding.
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    I met Anne in the college library. It was the way she moved that first caught my attention, an effortless gracefulness while she floated down the aisle, trailing the tips of her fingers across the spines of the books as if offering them her blessing. She wore a long cotton dress, grass-green, tied tight around her waist, and alternately clinging and loosening about her knees and thighs, offering a glimpse of her form, then taking it away. She seemed to move just a fraction more slowly than everyone else in the room, as if she knew that the world would wait for her.
    She tilted her head and smiled, then walked over to the table where I was reading and sat down, across from me. She was an array of colours — kinked black hair flowing over caramel skin, studying me with water-blue eyes.
    â€œDo you like jazz?” she asked.
    I had grown up listening to the country station out of Hattiesburg. I had heard a few jazz standards at the gin shack, but for the most part I had no idea what it was. I nodded anyway.
    â€œGood,” she said. “Otherwise this will never work.”
    â€œWhat won’t?”
    She smiled again. “I don’t think people can ever really love each other. But they can share a love for common things.”
    She stood and walked away without another word. It took me two weeks to learn her name, and another week before I was able to find her again. I spent hours in the jazz section of the library. I scoured nearby blues joints hoping for another glimpse of her. I visited record stores and finally found her working at one, just off campus. I spent most of the meagre amount of money I had saved on records by Sonny Rollins and Charlie Parker. She played them for me in the store, and she swayed slightly behind the counter while we spoke, making it hard for me to concentrate on her words.
    â€œThey say