The Spanish moss draping softly over the limbs of stately trees provided a lacy canopy over the main road. That, combined with the almost suffocating humidity that dampened every scrap of fabric on their bodies, was reinforcement of the fact that they weren’t in Wisconsin anymore. The five visitors from Ripon College were on Day 3 of their exchange experience at Tougaloo, College. It was 1964.
The Tougaloo students were understandably proud of their bucolic campus. They were also anxious to show off their academic prowess, so the Ripon students and their professor attended several classes with them. As a result, more friendships emerged, their temporary social circle expanded, and if there had been any hesitance or uneasiness about having these four white and one black alien-beings from the storied north moving about, there was no trace of it that day.
Every evening to date had been spent at the juke joint. Rayne, who earlier was careful to hide her smug amusement at the three guys’ utter lack of rhythm, was delighted to see them loosening up on the dance floor, swinging and swaying to the sounds of the blues and jazz tunes played by the house band.
The plan for after classes that day was for a group to go shopping in downtown Jackson. Rayne thought she’d better snag some kind of souvenir to give to her mother, who was not exactly pleased with her eldest daughter at the moment. The night before, Rayne finally ran out of excuses and called to let her mom know what she was up to.
There was no need to go into specifics – like Rayne’s adrenalin-soaked tour of the Jackson White Citizens Council, or the harrowing trip from Wisconsin to Mississippi. “Mama would have a cat if she knew any of that,” she told herself. She thought it best to just play it down and fess up in a few decades.
After classes, a group of students from both schools piled into cars owned by Ripon’s Doc Alexander and two Tougaloo students. Their parent-provided cars made Doc’s look like a front-runner candidate for some junkyard. Rayne had been surprised to discover that many of Tougaloo’s students came from aristocratic *Negro* families who lived in palatial homes on hyper-tended grounds. Houses like that were visible everywhere as one drove out of the boonies into Jackson. They looked like the mansions along Lake Michigan that Rayne fantasized about owning some day.
Typical of college students, everyone was talking at once when they stopped spilling out of the three cars onto the scalding sidewalk in Jackson. Some wanted to eat lunch. Some wanted to shop. Some wanted to stroll. So they divided themselves accordingly, agreed to a meet-back-here time, and set off to have a little fun.
Rayne and Reid were still smitten from their discovery of each other during the trip down from Wisconsin. They decided to be a group unto themselves so they could have some time alone. Strolling side-by-side, Reid lightly placed the palm of his right hand along the small of Rayne’s back in his typically protective manner. They weren’t holding hands, and there was nothing else that smacked of a public display of affection. They were two people enjoying each other’s company.
Standing in front of a department store window, the couple saw the reflection of a large figure standing behind them at the very moment that it yelled, “What the hell is going on here?”
Rayne was so sure the police officer with the face reddened to a strange shade of purple was speaking to someone else, she barely turned around. That’s when he put his hand on her shoulder and turned her around.
Reid’s face suddenly matched that of the obviously irate cop. He puffed up to his full six feet of height and barked, “What’s your problem, Officer? There’s no need to put your hands on my… her.”
“Listen, here, Sonny. We don’t do this kind of thing down here, do you hear me?”
“Do what kind of thing? We were standing here window shopping. Is window shopping against the law in Jackson?”
Rayne’s alarms, which had really been working overtime these past few days, went off again. This wasn’t going to turn out well, she was pretty damn sure of that. With a swift poke of her elbow into his Canadian rib cage, she hoped to remind him that they weren’t in Canada anymore either!
That policeman was by then apoplectic. His thick, red neck spilled over his stiffened shirt collar, and his carotid artery was fully visible, pulsating dangerously. He literally spat his next words.
“Listen, boy. You can take your little nigger gal back to where you came from or you can go to jail. It’s up to you.”
The word jail was all that was needed to bring Reid back to his senses. He assured the cop that jail wouldn’t be necessary, that it was all just a misunderstanding with us not being from around here and all. He vowed to keep his hands to himself and to rejoin the rest of our group, so as not to look so conspicuous.
They turned to retrace their steps back to the car. There was a commotion about a block away on the other side of the busy street. Rayne, still shaking from fright and from the sting of hearing the word nigger shot directly at her for the first time in her life -- that she could hear, anyway -- mouthed the words, “Oh my God.”
A paddy wagon was parked catawampus to the curb. A small group of young men and women, black and white, were yelling, the women screaming and crying. Every so often a police baton would be raised above the heads of the onlookers, then disappear again. When it did, the girls screamed louder.
As Rayne and Reid got closer, he was first to realize what they were seeing. Their classmate, Larry and Tougaloo student Michael, were being rousted, beaten with a club! The now familiar red-faced look of fierce hatred was etched on the faces of two Jackson officers. There was one white girl, not known to the couple, standing mute near the action. The rest were black Tougaloo students, two girls, one guy all visibly terrified and poised to run.
Rayne fell to her knees, also screaming. Reid pulled her up and begged her to be silent to avoid attracting the attention of the cops. Rayne saw nothing but the blood gushing from a gash in Dick’s head, near the hairline. He looked dazed and confused and was not fighting back. She thought they were killing him.
Larry was trying to reason with the cops. That’s the way Larry confronted most things – with reason. But Reid could see it was for naught. Finally, with two lifts and a dual shove, Dick and Michael disappeared into the paddy wagon. The monsters slammed the doors, jumped in the van and sped off, presumably to jail.
Rayne and Reid dashed across the street, dodging traffic, to talk to the remaining, shell-shocked students. The white girl, who they would learn had joined the group spontaneously somewhere along the way, spoke in a rapid, almost maniacal cadence. She spoke with a distinctly New York accent.
“I was walking with Michael, talking about school. This wild-assed cop squeals up in his big, bad, paddy wagon, and jumps out like he’s going to a fire or something. The ugly one starts hollering at Michael – something about Michael molesting a white women or some such nonsense. I thought he was talking about something that had happened in the past, because there was no molesting going on here!” Amy was her name. Her eyes were dark brown and huge with shock.
“What were you guys doing? Why did they stop?” Rayne asked. She was still seeing Dick’s blood running down into his eyes.
Leon, the other *Negro* student, shook his head violently. “Nothing!” he shouted. “We were walking down the street. Period. But the police saw Michael walking next to Amy and decided he must have been molesting her or kidnapping her or who knows what?”
What was left of the student group sent Amy on her way and ran back to the cars. They had to get back to campus to tell Doc what happened. He had to save Dick and Michael, before they beat them to death.
When Doc entered the police station about 40 minutes later, he was greeted with a warm smile from the desk officer. “Yes, suh. How can we hep yew?” As soon as Doc uttered the first few words, displaying his Wisconsin accent, all bets were off.
“Oh you’re the one who carried them students from up north down here to meddle in our business, huh? You should have stayed up there where you belong, but if you were comin’, you should have taught them young’uns about our ways. That nigger was asking for trouble and you know it. He’d a never have tried that shit if y’all hadn’t filled his mind with Yankee bullshit.”
While making this speech, the desk officer grabbed a ring of keys and left the room. He returned with Dick and Michael in tow. Although the jails were segregated too, in this case they ‘punished’ Dick by throwing him in a cell full of *Negroes.*
What a sight they were. Doc later told Rayne that he nearly vomited when he saw how they had beaten those boys. Michael had gotten the worst of the deal, but Dick was in a bad way. They both stared at the floor – nowhere else.
When they returned to campus, the Ripon group gathered in the dining hall to de-brief. They were all beside themselves, Doc included. “We have to pack our things and leave before dark. We have been ordered out of Mississippi and instructed to drive straight through back to Wisconsin. Just like before, we will be followed. We can only stop long enough to get food and go to the bathroom. Let’s get the hell outta here and go home.”
Rayne buried her face in her hands and sobbed.
THE END
