The Fog Machine

In the epicenter of the civil rights movement—Mississippi in the sixties—freedom is the burning question.

JOAN BARNES is twelve in the summer of 1964.

As the child of Catholic upper-middle-class Yankees in Baptist-leaning Mississippi, where family roots are as deep as those of the towering loblolly pines, Joan simply wants to belong.

It will take her years to understand that freedom means choices.

C.J. EVANS was born to a life of cleaning white folks’ houses in Jim Crow Mississippi.

This young Black Baptist woman believes what her waiting-on-heaven preacher and white-controlled schools have taught her—freedom takes a backseat to staying safe.

How will she fare as a live-in domestic in Chicago, where the rules are far more subtle?

Freedom is in University of Chicago law student ZACH BERNSTEIN’s Jewish faith.

He volunteers for the Mississippi Summer Project and finds himself teaching in the Meridian Freedom School.

There, freedom is also in the songs the volunteers sing to ward off the fear that they, too, will end up like Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, and Mickey Schwerner, missing since June 21 and presumed dead.

In the epicenter of the civil rights movement—Mississippi in the sixties—lives collide.

Love and heroism ensue as each person questions what freedom means and what price they’ll pay to have it.