In the summer of 1964, searchers combed through the rivers and swamps of Mississippi looking for three missing civil rights workers. They didn’t find them in the water. What they kept pulling up instead were other bodies: Henry Dee and Charles Moore, both 19. A 14-year-old boy still wearing his CORE T-shirt. Several men nobody ever identified.
Those rivers had been holding Black people for years, and it took a search for somebody famous before anyone thought to look. That is the country the rules were written for, and every Black person I know got the rules.
Leave with who you came with, and come back with who you came with.
Know how you’re getting home before you ever leave the house, and never let somebody else’s ride be your only way back.
Keep count of your people, and make sure somebody is counting you.
Text me when you get there.
Send me your location.
Call me when you’re headed home.
Don’t be the last one anywhere.
Don’t drink so much around people who aren’t yours that you can’t get yourself out of whatever situation.
Pay attention the moment you look up and realize you’re the only Black person in the room, the only one in the group, the only one for miles. Not because everybody around you means harm. In case something goes wrong, you’ll be the one with the least cover and the least benefit of the doubt.
If a place starts feeling wrong in your body, you don’t owe anybody an explanation. You leave. Immediately.
Nobody sat me down and taught me those. They arrived in pieces, on the way out the door, from the people who love me.
None of this is superstition. There’s a paper trail.
For most of the last century, thousands of towns in this country, and not only Southern ones, were what historians now call sundown towns. A Black person found inside the limits after dark could be run off or killed. That’s the reason the Negro Motorist Green Book existed, the guide Black families kept in the glovebox from the 1930s into the 1960s so a driver would know which towns had a filling station or a room that wouldn’t get them hurt. For generations, being the only Black face in the wrong place at the wrong hour was a real way to die.
Emmett Till was 14, visiting family in Mississippi, when he was left alone in front of the wrong white people. What his generation took from that killing wasn’t complicated. Don’t get caught out. Don’t be the only one somewhere nobody’s coming.
Those rivers had been holding Black people for years, and it took a search for somebody famous before anyone thought to look.
The rules work. They also take something.
For most people, a party is a party. For many of us it’s a party, plus who drove, plus where the door is, plus a running read on the room and how far I am from home. I have never been in a room where I was the only one and could fully relax. Not once. Most of the people standing next to me have no idea I’m doing any of that, and they never had to learn how.
We hand it down because we have to. A mother who tells you to leave with who you came with is giving you everything this country taught the people who didn’t make it back, and she would rather you think she’s overprotective than have to identify you.
I’d love to retire these rules. I’d love to tell the young people in my family that the country changed enough for them to move through it easily, the way it never let the rest of us. I can’t say that and mean it.
So they stay in rotation.
Keep count of your people. Leave with who you came with. Come home.
Sources:
The bodies of other Black victims recovered from Mississippi rivers during the 1964 search for Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner
Sundown towns from James Loewen’s “Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism”
The Negro Motorist Green Book (Victor Hugo Green)
(1955).
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.