Nineteen Years

‘Rip van Winkle’ is the story of a man who fell into an enchanted sleep and woke up twenty years later to a world transformed by a revolution. In 1984, I looked out the window of the Admiral Benbow Inn in downtown Jackson, Mississippi, and watched as an integrated group of businessmen entered the hotel for what looked to be a working power breakfast. It was my first return to Mississippi since 1965, when I had returned home from working in 1964’s ‘Freedom Summer’ campaign for voter registration and Black empowerment and its aftermath. I felt like Rip van Winkle. During my two-decade-long sleep a revolution had occurred, and now I had awakened into that new world.

The motivating purpose of coming back to Mississippi was to research a novel I was trying to write, one that used many of my experiences in 1964 and 1965. I wanted to catch the emotions and ambiguities of that time, emotions and ambiguities I had never included in my original letters north, partly because those were crafted as conscious propaganda for the Movement, but also because I was not capable then of putting my own complexities into prose.

In deeper fact, I was trying to reclaim that experience through fiction, writing that set me to external as well as internal research. The fiction drew heavily on memory, memory so unconscious but still so vivid that it served surprisingly accurate as a roadmap when I returned to the landscape of the northern Delta. Driving south from Memphis in a rented car, I stopped on the shoulder of one road and let myself recreate the roads of ...