Through the Wilderness
By Hettie Jones
Sunday, December 3, 1995; Page X10
"DON'T GET starry-eyed," civil rights activist Bob Moses was
warned. "Things are gonna get real ugly round here before they get
pretty." In the Mississippi of 1961 this was wise counsel, though it
proved no deterrent: Moses, envisioning the political effect of
thousands of new black voters, became the architect of voter
registration projects that forced changes in the South. His
determination, as well as the ugliness he was told to expect -- and got
-- are the subjects of this novel by William Heath, a professor of
English at Mount St. Mary's College in Maryland.
Told from the dual perspectives of Moses himself and Tom Morton, a
young white volunteer, The Children Bob Moses Led is a story of the
struggle for voting rights. Mention Freedom Summer these days and you're
likely to get a blank stare. Heath's book, though it never gets to the
pretty part, should help remedy that.
Morton, the book's fictional junior protagonist, is just out of
college and a veteran of the 1963 March on Washington. Like others of
his generation, he believes that the South must be liberated; hearing an
interview with Moses convinces him to join the Summer Project of 1964.
He and others like him will work in Freedom Schools to persuade black
people that only the ballot will deliver them from the intimidation and
fear in which they live.
By the time Bob Moses agreed to enlist these young whites, there
had been organizing in Mississippi for several years, along with church
burnings, firebombings, deaths. As is often forgotten, and as this novel
makes clear -- it is based on research Heath cites meticulously in his
acknowledgements -- the decision to bring whites in was political. It
took the deaths of white volunteers Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner
to focus national attention on the problem. But the death of an ordinary
black citizen like Herbert Lee never made the evening news, nor did the
fate of the baby who died of starvation when some county supervisors, to
retaliate for the voter registration drive, cut off a federal food
program that kept sharecroppers alive through the winter.
In Heath's design, alternating time frames are presented as well as
different points of view; we follow Bob Moses from 1961 to 1964 while
jumping into the immediate action of the 1964 Summer Project with Tom
Morton. Although this structure is confusing at first, it works
eventually. Morton himself is an engaging, intelligent character, as are
those with whom he spends this hot, often frightening time: "Feelgood,"
the young black man who is his boss; Esther, whom Tom lusts after but
who is in love with Feelgood; and Lenny, the friend whose sarcasm is a
foil for their sometimes self-righteous assertions.
This is Heath's first novel (he has published a book of poems) and
his inexperience shows in the sometimes polemical dialogues, the
unvarying pace, the sudden emergence and/or disappearance of minor
characters, and the fact that the voices of the narrators are too
similar. And it is wise to remember that only readers of a certain age
will be able to garner meaning from a line such as "Johnson was too busy
with Vietnam." Nevertheless the author clearly knows his subject and can
evoke a scene, and one is drawn into the action and compelled by the
events themselves. Heath also knows better than to tack a happy ending
onto the book, which closes at the point where the Democratic National
Convention refuses to seat the representatives of the Mississippi
Freedom Democratic Party, its members all those thousands of voters Bob
Moses had mobilized.
Heath is to be commended for giving Moses and others their due. Tom
Morton's final perception is of particular interest. He's walking along
the boardwalk in Atlantic City, where the convention was held that year,
while around him fireworks are exploding to celebrate a nomination that
ignored the votes he'd risked his life for. He has, in his words,
"sweat{ed} out a summer for racial equality," and he shares, finally,
some of the bitterness of those who are permanently disenfranchised. He
realizes that Mississippi is America, and that this knowledge will haunt
him "through the years." Although The Children Bob Moses Led is fiction,
with a lengthy disclaimer to underscore this fact, it reads like memoir.
It's tempting to pose questions for the fictional Tom Morton, who'd now
be a man in his fifties headed for the next millennium -- questions like
this: If America is still Mississippi, how do we find a way to get
people like him to stay in the struggle to change it, instead of leaving
after the summer is over?
Hettie Jones is the author of the memoir of the "Beat" 50s and 60s, "How I
Became Hettie Jones."
© 1995 The Washington Post Co.
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