From Company Man: My Jesuit Life, 1950-1968:
Once I was in Mississippi, I spent half the day on pay phones trying to get the local bishop’s permission to say mass at roadside. When the bishop nixed it, I went looking for the local priest nearest the marchers’ camp for a place to say mass.
The local man, a foreign-born Irishman (“FBI priest,” we called such, who were more prevalent in the Protestant South and rural areas than elsewhere), gave me access to his little church for mass.
I visited him in his rectory in the white part of the small town where I was to spend the night, rather than at the camping grounds, where most stayed. The black man who was putting me up drove me to his house and waited outside. The priest and I had a good long talk, 45 minutes or so.
He was not in favor of what I was doing and tried to talk me out of it, alleging publicity-seeking as my motive. It was for a good cause, I said. But our conversation was not acrimonious.
My black driver did not wait in the priest’s driveway—partly, I figured, because he did not relish being asked what the heck he was doing there. The priest drove me back to the black part of town, to a general store which offered “sundries,” where I reunited with the family whose house I was to stay in.
I got into a car that took me to a neat, comfortable house and was shown my room with its clean and comfortable bed, towels laid out for showering, and the like. Between me and the black folks there was almost no conversation, not even at the hearty breakfast in the morning in a pleasant kitchen. This was Southern hospitality with caution.
SLEEPING IN PARK? I was staying in town rather than in the park where the marchers camped overnight in a bowl-shaped area. The several hundred marchers had congregated there after the first day. In the Jesuit car which I had driven, parked back in Memphis, was the sleeping bag I had borrowed from my nephew, telling my parents I was going camping, saying nothing about the Meredith march and Deep South Mississippi, with its reputation as murderous resister of civil rights activities. They didn’t have to know, I reasoned.
Without the sleeping bag, sleeping in the encampment was not a good option. In addition, we had heard tales of locals taking pot shots at us from the edge of the bowl. We also knew of cars pulling alongside and peppering white and black occupants or just clubbing them in the street, as in the 1964 “freedom summer” murders. In any case, when the call went out for those who would rather sleep in town, my hand went up. I bade adieu to my confreres and signed up for a bed in a house.
After my night in town, before resuming the day’s walking, I said mass in the small local church for a few marchers, giving my homily to eight or nine people, including a Newsweek reporter from Chicago. Then it was back to the camp grounds. I had got from Memphis to the marchers—protected by state cops since the Meredith shooting—driving with some West Side Organization dudes in a Cadillac that hit 95 m.p.h. along the way.
Yes, there was Father Bowman speeding on a Mississippi highway in the company of black ex-cons. Is this what Sister Alfred and Father Regan had in mind for their eager students?
— To be continued . . .
Blithe Spirit 