One Night in Mississippi Read Free

Love That Forgives.” In 2005, Edgar Ray Killen was found guilty of three counts of murder in the 1964 slaying of civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner in Mississippi. He received three consecutive twenty-year sentences. He was eighty years old.
    I expanded my letter-writing campaign to include newspapers and television stations, and that’s when things took off. Etta was swamped with mail, and I received new packages from her almost every day. The official agencies were still cautious in their responses, but the reaction of the media and the public was overwhelming. I began to give interviews.
    My elder sister, Glenda, called from Baltimore, where she had settled to be close to the nursing home where our mother lived.
    â€œMama and I saw you on the news today. You know she’s not well.”
    â€œHow is she?”
    â€œShe’s not well, I just told you. Then she sees all this stuff about Graden on the news all over again. It’s not good for her.”
    â€œThen why are you letting her watch it?”
    â€œDon’t do that. Don’t you talk to me about taking care of Mama! I’m the one that’s here. Do you even care?”
    Glenda raged at me for stirring things up, but I doubted that I was having the impact on our mother that she claimed. I had visited Ma a few times, and although there was the occasional spark of recognition, more often there was just a confused stare. Once, when I was standing in the doorway with the sunlight streaming in from the hallway window behind me, she smiled wistfully and called me “Graden.” I allowed her a moment of illusion, then backed out of the room and left the home. I never went back.
    While Glenda shouted at me through the phone, I listened quietly, having no justification to offer her.
    After a while Etta set up an email address for me, although I had no idea how to use it. She sent me printouts of the messages at first, but as they started to come in greater numbers, she insisted that I learn. And so I did. I received messages of support from blacks and whites alike, and I received messages of hatred from blacks and whites alike. I didn’t find the former encouraging or the latter troubling. There were eight men’s names in my folder, and one by one they were found. Six were still alive.
    Daniel Olsen was the first. A television reporter from a local station tracked him to a run-down trailer park outside of Mobile, Alabama. The station paid to fly me in for the arrest. The last time I’d seen him, he’d been at the back of the group walking down the courthouse steps. His son, Earl, who’d been charged as a minor, was beside him. Daniel had his hand on the back of his son’s head, and neither of them looked up. They didn’t smile and wave like the others, and they weren’t dressed like them either. The six men in front of them were wearing expensive suits and ties and polished shoes. The Olsens were dressed shabbily by comparison, in plain brown shoes with simple pants and starched white shirts.
    I stood on Daniel’s front lawn with a cluster of news cameras behind me. The driveway was cracked, and the pieces of pavement jutted up against each other like ice floes. The lawn was littered with small clay pots, some holding plants, others seemingly just filled with dirt. Grass was sparse. Neighbours opened their trailer doors to watch, standing half-in, half-out, gawking at the crowd approaching Daniel’s front step, but ready in a moment to duck back into safety. I stayed back while they knocked. When Daniel answered the door, he seemed bewildered at the sight of the cameras and the officers. He was wearing pyjama bottoms and slippers, and the few strands of white hair that remained flicked above his head in the wind. I could hear the TV playing behind him, but I couldn’t make out the show. An officer read the charges and handcuffed him on the front step. I