CHAPTER 2
The Road to Heaven
There was a ferry once.
A flat-bottomed skiff, it wasn’t much more than Huck Finn’s raft. And when Mary Lee was born, its pilot was a cranky old-timer
named Uncle Linzie, who would pole you across the 600-yard river like a Venetian gondolier--if he felt like it.
Benders would ride the ferry into Camden , the sun-bleached country town across the river, for groceries and medicine. Camden, the seat of Wilcox County, was the only source Benders had for basic needs, the ferry their only link.
Still, Benders knew to use the ferry sparingly, because Camden was nearly all white, and most of its 1,000 residents meant to keep it
that way. ‘You’d have to run through Camden,’ says Lucy Mingo, 68, who lives up the road from Mary Lee, by the swamp. ‘They was
dirty people over there.’
Camden was the kind of town where the newspaper got its start in the early 1800s, printing ads for slave-catchers. It was the kind of
town where the manager of the Wilcox Hotel would tell a government worker in 1941, ‘A nigrah is a nigrah. And if you go and try to
fix’em up, make somethin’ out of ‘em, put ‘em to livin’ like white folks and try to treat ‘em decent, you don’t do anything but make a
mean nigger out of ‘em that somebody eventually will have to kill.’ It was the kind of town ruled for a third of this century by a pearshaped
sheriff named Lummie Jenkins, whose pastimes included hunting quail and tormenting Benders. His thick glasses, Mary Lee recalls, turned his black eyes into burnt corn kernels.
Then, Martin Luther King Jr. appeared.
New York World-Telegram and the Sun staff photographer: Albertin, Walter, photographer. [Public domain]
In the early ‘60s, King’s voting rights crusade took aim at Wilcox County, where no black had ever cast a ballot, though blacks outnumbered whites four to three. When King called for Benders to march on the Camden courthouse and demand their right to register, whites heard him crying, ‘Revolt!’ while Benders heard him saying, ‘Cross that river for freedom.’
They heard, and they crossed. The ferry nearly capsized as Benders swarmed into Camden, clapping hands, singing. They didn’t always stop at Camden, either. Often they stomped onward through Alabama, joining King in the most famous protests of the civil
rights movement.
Some braved the nightsticks and bullwhips of Bloody Sunday , 1965, when marchers crossing the Alabama River at Selma were overrun by state troopers. It was one of the horrific moments of the era, a peaceful demonstration meeting a wall of brute force on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, and it turned America’s stomach. Among the thousands of river crossings, it was one that led to change.
Five months later, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law the Voting Rights Act .
Trampled, beaten, teargassed, jailed, Benders never backed up. (‘No white man gonna tell me not to march,’ Lucy says, jutting her
chin. ‘Only make me march harder.’) If they seemed fearless, reckless, the reason was the river. At night, they could slip back into its sheltering arms, where whites didn’t dare, or bother, to follow.
‘I loved to go over there,’ Mary Lee says, giggling. ‘Just so I could tell the white folks, and Mr. Lummie, ‘You can’t jail us all.’ ‘
State Library and Archives of Florida
King heard about Gee’s Bend and had to see it. He came one cold February night, three weeks before Bloody Sunday, weak from a
virus, ignoring the warnings of his security staff, who feared for his safety in a county run by Sheriff Lummie. Through a sidewaysblowing
rain, his caravan of cars made slow progress along the mud roads of Gee’s Bend, and by the time he reached Pleasant Grove
Baptist Church, a sagging barn with planks for pews, the hour was past midnight.
A pot-bellied stove gave off scant heat. A bare lightbulb hanged from the ceiling. Cold rain blurred the windows, and Sheriff Lummie lurked against the back wall. Then King stepped through the front door, and Pleasant Grove became the warmest, brightest, safest place on Earth.
‘They had a little prayer,’ Mary Lee says. ‘They sung a song. And then they turned it over to him.’
There was something about King that made Mary Lee’s blood race, something she’d never seen in a black man before, a quality beyond her powers of description. ‘It was just like, like . . . .’ She searches for the word, shyly, the faraway look falling across her
face. Then the look lifts. ‘It was power.’
King had been losing his voice for days, but he still managed to shake the walls of Pleasant Grove with a sound like nothing Mary Lee had ever heard, or else like everything she’d ever heard blended into a song that gave her goose bumps. It was a thunderclap before a lightning storm. It was a steamboat horn conjuring far-off places. It was Gabriel’s trumpet calling her home.
‘He was a God-sent man,’ Mary Lee says. ‘He said he was gonna make it better for us colored people, and that everybody could have
some of what they want to have.’
"Tears filed his eyes as he shouted, 'I come over here to Gee's Bend to tell you -- you are somebody.' No one had ever said that to Mary Lee before."
King delivered a message that amounted to Revelation for Mary Lee: He told her that she might not speak with perfect grammar,
might not own more than one dress, might not be more than a dirt farmer descended from slaves, but she was every bit as good as
those white folks across the river. Tears filled his eyes as he shouted, ‘I come over here to Gee’s Bend to tell you--you are somebody.’
No one had ever said that to Mary Lee before.
Another time, Mary Lee saw King in Camden and gave him a big hug. She met him again in Selma and watched in awe as he drank
from a ‘whites only’ fountain.
‘I never saw a black person do a thing like that!’ she says. ‘I was so glad. I said, ‘I’m going to get me a taste my own self.’ My sister
tried to hold me back by the coat. I said, ‘You’re welcome to that coat. I’m getting me some of that water.’
She savors the memory.
‘You know,’ she says, ‘it was no more different than other water. But it was colder.’
Her heart drummed hardest when King described the future. Like Mary Lee, he saw the future in his dreams. I have a dream, he
kept saying, I have a dream.
I have them too, Mary Lee thought.
It was around then that white folks got together and decided the ferry had to go. Maybe they couldn’t stop King, or his movement,
but they could sure as hell keep a bunch of troublesome Negroes on Gee’s Bend.
There was no public meeting, no notice in the newspaper. Mary Lee and others just went down to the river one day and found their
link to Camden cut. Though cars were rare, and the dirt roads of Gee’s Bend were impassable much of the year, Benders now would
be forced to drive around the river whenever they needed to buy a hoe or see a doctor.
‘We didn’t close the ferry because they were black,’ Sheriff Lummie was rumored to have said. ‘We closed it because they forgot they
were black.’