Well, I didn't make it to the Eudora Welty house in Jackson, Mississippi today. And I didn't make it to the Vicksburg seige site / battlefield, and I didn't see the Mississippi River at Natchez.
All these things I had planned to do -- but I was so overwhelmed by my experience with Medgar Evers that, once I left his house, I just drove West to Beaumont, Texas, where I am staying the night.
You may recognize the house in this photo if you have ever seen film clips of Medgar Evers or if you have watched (I have begged you to watch :-) ) the series, Eyes on the Prize. (Actually, this series is currently being shown again on Monday nights -- PBS. )
The house is the site of Medgar Evers's assassination. He was killed in the driveway as he arrived home from a late-night meeting. His pregnant wife, Myrlie, and his three children were inside the house as someone shot Evers from across the street.
My GPS device, housed in my cell phone, is sometimes my friend and sometimes my enemy. I had entered the address of this house (on Margaret Walker Alexander Drive), and it took me through a labyrinth of streets in a rather delapidated section of Jackson. The GPS told me, "Your destination is on the right" -- but all I saw were houses that did not look like the Evers site, a couple of gas stations / convenience stores with bars on the windows, streets with potholes (a la Highway 240 in Asheville), empty lots with lots of concrete and no grass.
Several times I have found my White face in places where I saw only Black faces around me, but in those circumstances I have usually been with a friend. Today was different.
I drove for miles through small Black neighborhoods, carefully following the GPS instructions to "Turn right. Turn right again. Turn left, then prepare to keep right." I thought if I heard "Recalculating route" one more time I would throw my cell phone out the window into one of the grassless lots. Not only that, but I was very quickly running out of gas.
I stopped at one of those convenience stores to fill up. You couldn't use a credit card at the pumps -- cash only -- so I had to go inside to pay. I was going to ask the man behind the counter where the Evers house was, but he hardly spoke English, and I didn't want to spend time asking and explaining. My day was getting away from me, with all that turning right and preparing to keep left and recalculating routes through the neighborhoods for the past hour.
I almost decided to stop looking, but then I stopped at another gas station where a gentleman was putting gas into his car. I approached him, introduced myself (offering my hand to shake -- a habit I have learned from my job, I guess), and asked my question. He knew the Evers house was "over in that direction" but he wasn't sure of the street name. He asked another man who drove up in a pickup truck -- and who looked a lot like Taj Mahal -- if he knew the exact location. They gave me good instructions, and as I left them, the first gentleman said, "If you get lost, just go up there to Freedom Corner. Anybody standing around up there will know where it is, for sure. And they won't bother you none."
I didn't know what to say to that. I was embarrassed. Had I done something, indicated somehow, that I was frightened? I didn't think so. My embarrassment made me stumble over my response, "Oh, I didn't think anyone would bother me!" -- which seemed to embarrass him.
Why should such a simple exchange -- asking directions -- elicit such feelings from us both?
I pondered that as I drove back toward Freedom Corner -- which I couldn't find. I finally pulled over into a lot near a school and tried the GPS device again. This time it guided me directly to the house.
The Evers house was several streets from the neighborhoods I had been cruising. This neighborhood was neater, with lots of same-style houses surrounded by grassy yards and flower beds and trees. I recognized it immediately from film clips, from photos in magazines and books, from Myrlie Evers's book , For Us, the Living, which I had read in my mid-teens.
This street wasn't busy. I guessed that these houses were air conditioned and that their residents didn't have to sit on porches or in yards to try to escape the heat.
I parked across the street from the house. The internet had told me that the house was now a museum, but that it wasn't open except by appointment. I didn't have an appointment, but after searching all that time I didn't intend to make this a drive-by looking.
Then I noticed a woman at the house. She was sweeping the carport and driveway.
Minnie Watson is her name, and she is the curator of the house/museum. She told me that the only reason she was there today is that she expected a group to come for a tour -- a family reunion group. They were expected at noon (it was now about 11:45 -- Central Standard Time :-) ), and I was welcome to wait and tour with them, if I wanted.
She swept, we talked. The group didn't arrive.
"Come on in," she said, at about 12:10, "Let's get out of this heat."
She told me that Myrlie Evers (who was pregnant at the time of the killing but who lost that child) had sold the house after the assassination and moved with her three children to California. The house then fell into in disrepair -- and was getting worse every year -- until the producers of the movie, Ghosts of Mississippi, wanted to use the house in the film. They repaired it -- new roof, new floors -- and redecorated it much as it was when the Evers family lived there.
I stayed there, talking with Minnie Watson (age about sixty-seven?), for at least an hour and a half.
She had actually known Medgar Evers, and she knows Myrlie and Charles (Medgar's brother, who still lives in Jackson). She knows the ninety-five-year-old lady who still lives in the house next door, and whose husband it was who fired his gun into the air when he heard the gunshot in the driveway next door.
Minnie was a freshman in college when she met Medgar Evers. He often spoke to groups of young Black students about education, jobs, about the importance of registering to vote. "This is your country, too," he told them.
The first time he ever really thought about being Black -- about being different from Whites -- was the day his father seemed especially sad. When young Medgar (about nine or ten at the time) asked him why he was sad, his father answered, "Because they hanged one of my good friends last night." They.
The family reunion group never showed up. I toured the house, we talked.
I recommended a book I have been listening to on CD as I drive: The Help, by Kathryn Stockett -- and of course Minnie has already read it. Stockett grew up in Jackson, Mississippi and has written this astonishing novel about the relationships between the Black "help" and their White employers in Jackson in the early 1960s. A strange coincidence, that just last night I listened to the section in the novel about the killing of Medgar Evers and the effect it had on Jackson's Black citizens.
Seeing this site was worth the driving, worth the time, worth missing the other sites I had planned to see today. Except for seeing Amity and James, I think that seeing this house and talking with Minnie Watson mayh well be the highlight of this trip.
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