See also Now She Flies: Dr. Charlotte Orange-Featherstone
As remembered by Chude Allen (Pam Parker)
See also "Would You Marry One?"
THANK YOU
For Ralph Featherstone (1939-1970)
He will not be there. His wife took his ashes to Africa 24 years ago. He did not want to be buried in this land of oppression; he wanted to return to his ancestors.
I am thinking about him as I return to Mississippi. Thirty years ago we met, both of us freedom school teachers in the Mississippi Summer Project, what everyone now calls Freedom Summer. Over a thousand of us, black and white, though mostly white, converged on Mississippi in support of the local freedom movement's attempts to break the racist stranglehold in the state.
I'm sure I wasn't the only white woman to fall in love with a black man during that summer of 1964. There've been things written about interracial sex, but little about love. I fell in love. Oh, we kissed and held hands, but ours was an innocent romance. The night before he left for the most dangerous part of that violent, racist state, I lay on his cot with him. He held me tight, kissed my face and I wondered if I would ever see him again. I knew he might die.
I could have died too. All of us faced danger. But everyone agreed that southwest Mississippi was the worst. The project house where he was going had already been bombed.
It has been thirty years since that summer romance in the freedom school; thirty years since we sat with other activists in the local black cafe eating our lunch and flirting across the table; thirty years since he held me close and then left to start a freedom school in southwest Mississippi. He did survive the summer, only to be killed six years later by a bomb. He'd only just married.
He wanted me to be the best freedom school teacher I could be. More important than being with him was that I prepare my lessons well. I'd been raised to serve a man. Women in my hometown quit their jobs when they married to serve their mates and raise the children. No man I'd known would have thought a woman's teaching was more important than him.
The racist whites were wrong. It was not black men's sexual prowess they needed to fear. It was rather the idea that men and women working together could change things. It was the dignity of human beings in the face of vicious discrimination, men and women standing up and saying no to state-sanctioned abuse.
In that powerful movement for social change I fell in love and if he were not dead and I saw him at this reunion, I could meet him with my head held high. I have stayed true both to myself and the struggle. There have been pitfalls, confusions and mistakes, but I have stayed true.
How I wish I could look him in the eyes and say thank you. Thank you for believing in me and thank you for never trying to use me. Thank you for the gentle love we shared and for showing me a new type of man who wanted women as partners in the struggle, not servants or playthings. I have carried you in my heart.
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Last Modified: April 5, 2005.
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