He has two daughters and a boy. The boy is fifteen now. His name’s Jim Scott. (He’s never been a James, either.) Jim Scott, who’s going to go to college and find an upper-middle-class life in another part of Mississippi, will see this photograph in Life on his own, not too long after it’s published. (It might be in the cellar of the family home.) He and his father won’t discuss it, which isn’t unusual, because Jimmy Middleton is an uncommunicative father. Not at all a bad father, at least in the son’s eyes, just one who can’t say what he feels. What the father can say is things like, “Leta, you take care of these kids. I’m going out to make a living.” Becoming sheriff would be part of making the living. Before he’s done, Middleton will have served two and a half terms as Claiborne County sheriff. He’ll get a total of ten years in the job. (He came in in 1950 to fill the unexpired term of E. L. McAnnis. He had his own term in the mid-fifties. He laid out for four years. In 1960, they elected him again.) Like almost everybody else who’s ever had it once, he’ll want that thing bad again. He’ll campaign hard for it in the back half of the sixties. But by then Dan McCay, Jimmy’s old deputy, is the man.
The sheriff’s wife’s name is pronounced LEE-ta. Every morning Leta Middleton gets up and bakes dog bread for her husband’s Walker hunting hounds. The sheriff lives with his wife and children on a farm outside of Port Gibson—he refers to it always as the Place. At the Place, on Route 547, the sheriff keeps about twenty of the hunting hounds in pens and brings them out for the annual shoot at the Whitehall Hunting Club. The Place is a handsome spread: white-frame house, dressed in stone on the bottom, sitting on a circular drive off the macadam. This might suggest that Middleton is some kind of country squire. It isn’t so. He’s out of Baptist hardworking stock. He’s self-made. Didn’t get very far in school. He’s part owner of a livestock auction barn and a trucking company. At his sale barn, he’s known among local blacks for giving fair prices. He loans money out of pocket to the blacks who work for him on the Place. If it’s more than he wishes to loan, he’ll drive the man to town and sign his note. He’s irascible when it comes to his cattle—whites and blacks alike seem to want to steer clear of him when he’s messing with cattle.
(Hezekiah Ellis, who worked for him in the 1950s and 1960s, was under an old car that was up on blocks when a reporter with a picture pulled into his dirt drive, which was far out into the countryside. He stood under a shade tree. “It was in him, it was in him. He didn’t show it much, but it was in him,” Ellis said. The antecedent of “it” was bigotry, and the subject had come up surprisingly fast. Despite this, Ellis spoke with a certain fondness. “He was a peculiar guy, but he was a pretty good guy.” And then Ellis said: “If he was in a crowd, he’d be a changed man. You could see it. You could just see that seg stuff start to come out.” The black man looked at the picture again. Suddenly, he hooted. “That’s him to a tee.”)
Port Gibson is just off the Natchez Trace. You come in from the Trace and drive down wide, leafy Church Street—so many churches and tended lawns and beautiful antebellum homes. But go two streets to the east and you’ll be in stark black Mississippi poverty. Port Gibson is one of the state’s earliest settlements. Its plantation economy was established in 1790, when white Virginians brought slaves up the river from New Orleans. By the eve of the Civil War, there were more than 12,000 slaves in this county—four times the white population. That 20 percent minority owned and controlled everything. Same old story now. There’s a black street of commerce in Port Gibson known as Nigger Street, even though on the sign it says Fair Street.
U. S. Grant came through in May 1863. “Too beautiful to burn,” was his verdict. He didn’t burn it. (The town has those words on its city limit signs.) After the war, during Reconstruction, the blacks of Claiborne County briefly ruled. Item from the Port Gibson Standard, November 17, 1871: “Negro barbers and bootblacks turned lawmakers, even though they cannot write their names, lord it over the intelligent and refined planters and merchants who were lately their masters.” By August 1876, however, God was back in his universe. The whites had regained political control. In place of slavery came sharecropping and tenant farming, other names for ownership of people.
Item from the Port Gibson Reveille, August 20, 1953: “First cotton bale ginned Friday. Grown by George Solman, negro, on the Sheriff Middleton Place.”
Item from the Reveille, November 15, 1951: “You’re not forgetting, are you, that your church or synagogue is the friendliest place in town? A warm-hearted welcome awaits you there. New interests, new friends, and most precious of all in these trying times, an opportunity to renew your faith, to restore your courage, to find peace of soul in the company of men and women of good will. Take someone to church this week. You’ll be richer for it.” This civic advertisement is signed and paid for by Patterson Furniture Company, Piggly Wiggly grocer, Abe’s Betty Jean Shop, Claiborne Motor Company, Lum’s Men’s Store, Allen Motor Company, the Jitney-Jungle, Claiborne Hardware. Sheriff Jimmy S. Middleton signs his name to this, which appears in the local paper just as the Port Gibson chapter of the NAACP is forming an underground membership.
They don’t pass around Klan “Hate Sheets” in Port Gibson. They don’t need to. Port Gibson’s bigotry wishes to mask itself as a kind of paternalism. You could imagine the paternalism of this place as a kind of thin-mesh netting draped over the very air of the county.
From another Sov-Com document, this one dated June 27, 1960, twenty-seven months to the day before the photograph at Oxford is taken: “… I proceeded to Claiborne County, Mississippi, accompanied by Investigator Tom Scarbrough, for the purpose of contacting state, county and city officials, as well as members of the Chambers of Commerce and Citizens’ Councils and advising them that as investigators of the Sovereignty Commission we were available to assist them in any way possible. Before leaving Jackson, we contacted Representative Russell L. Fox, Claiborne County, who furnished us the names of the following negroes that he classed as race agitators in Claiborne County.”
Three Negroes are named as agitators.
The investigators stop in at the office of the sheriff. “[Middleton] stated that Ernest Jones is an advisor for other negroes in this area. He advises them of their rights, how much to charge white people for their work, and the Sheriff states that he can definitely be classed as a race agitator.… Sheriff Middleton and Chief Doyle advised that Carl (Gold) Thompson, 48 to 50 years of age, who operates the Thompson Funeral Home, Port Gibson, is believed to be a member of the NAACP; that he is not a known race agitator, but he is believed to agitate under cover when the opportunity presents itself.”
Moving around town, the investigators check with the tax assessor, the circuit clerk, the president of the chamber of commerce, the superintendent of education, the chairman of the Citizens’ Council, the chief of police. Each of these is white, but probably that doesn’t even need be said. “Sheriff Middleton furnished a list of all negro registered voters in Claiborne County which are as follows.” On the sheriff’s list are eight blacks who live in District 1A; three who are in District 1B; two in District 4; two in District 5. That makes fifteen registered black voters as of June 27, 1960. By 1964, when Middleton leaves office, there will be 150 registered black voters in the county—progress. And after this will come aggressive voter registration drives and an economic boycott against white merchants, launched on April 1, 1966. The number of registered blacks will have grown by 1966 to over 2,600, and this will ensure the election of black officials for the first time in the county since Reconstruction. Some of the political changeover will be attended by violence. In 1969, the highway patrol will come in with tear gas. But the grassroots uprising by Port Gibson’s theretofore quiescent blacks will proceed, and by the start of the next decade, blacks will own the voting majority. In 1972, the first black circuit clerk in twentieth-century Mississippi will get elected in Claiborne County. However, the whites will still seem to own the very air, no matter who is in office. They will always manage
to have the money.
Bob Waller, beady-eyed picture taker, resting his jaw on the shoulder of Billy’s suit jacket. Well, it only looks like it.
Right now—not the “now” of autumn 1962 in this sun-splashed leafiness but the now of real time, as you’re reading this and gazing in—you could travel to the Waller Photograph Collection at the University of Southern Mississippi, which is in Hattiesburg, where Waller lived and died and served one term as county sheriff, and find thousands and thousands of his negatives. The shooter kept careful, precise entries in ledgers and daybooks: commercial work, portraits, weddings, funerals, aerial photography, car wrecks. It’s the contents of a life’s work. Hundreds of manila envelope jackets bear descriptive titles of what’s inside: Airport fire. American Legion Baseball Banquet. Courthouse Cigar Stand. Catholic Senior Play. Speedy Morrison’s 1947 Birthday. Hattiesburg Krewer of Zeus Ball. These archived negatives are arranged by year, from 1948, when Waller set up his own studio at home (he’d taken a correspondence course, following some work in a photographic lab during the war), to 1977, the year he died. It was a heart attack in his darkroom in the middle of the night. Rather than disturb his wife, Tina, he called the hospital and drove himself over. And it was the next day, or maybe the day after that, that he died in an ambulance as they were taking him up Highway 49 to the state university medical center in Jackson. He cried out and then he was dead. His death made page 1 of the local daily for which he himself had once worked as a sportswriter and staff photographer: “Bob Waller, Photographer and Former Sheriff, Dies” said the headline on the two-column story in the Hattiesburg American. This was November 18, 1977. There was a picture. He was dead at sixty-seven. He’d gone fifteen years past the picture in Life, of which there was certainly no mention that day. Elsewhere on the page were these headlines: “Police Chief Brings Controversy with Him.” And “Ku Klux Klan Turns to Slick Public Relations Strategy to Reach Goals.” And “MSU Officials Deny Discrimination Charges.”
He’s fifty-two here: born April 17, 1910. He lives at 207 North 22nd Avenue. It’s a white-frame rancher in a good neighborhood, with a carport and a darkroom off to the side. In the Hattiesburg city directories of the 1950s, he has advertised himself thusly: “Waller’s Photo Service. Commercial Portraits. Color Portraits. Aerial Photography. Photo Finishing. Albums and Frames. Air-Conditioned Studio.” He’s childless. What Waller has for immediate family is his good-natured fat-girl wife, Tina, who plays bridge once a week with seven other local fat girls—they call themselves the Big 8 Club. What the sheriff of Hattiesburg also has is two toy Mexican bulldogs. Waller loves these dang little pups, which is how he refers to them. They ride around with the boss on the front seat of the sheriff’s car. Waller will tie sombreros on their heads. He’ll stop to get them cups of water and watch them slurp it up. When he’s not in the squad car with the dogs, he’s riding with them in his 1962 Galaxie 500. It’s white and has 409 under the hood and four on the floor. Tina has a matching ’62 Galaxie 500, white, only hers has 390 horses under the hood and is an automatic. Tina doesn’t like Bob’s dogs very much, if you want to know.
How to describe Robert Benjamin Waller, who attended Tulane University in New Orleans for a few years and who had a brother who was a reporter for the New Orleans Times-Picayune and who, in the Lord’s due time, will come to rest beneath a pink stone in a corner lot at Roseland Park Cemetery next to a loblolly pine with a green birdhouse nailed to it? Describe him as charming, ignorant, friendly, suspicious, blindly loyal to the lost Confederacy, appalled by the present, and frightened of the future.
Since he’s a photographer who enjoys keeping his hand in, and has some sense of historical preservation, the sheriff of Hattiesburg will sometimes make an arrest and drive a cuffed criminal to the scene of the wrongdoing and ask the fellow to pose next to the crime—say, a robbed grocery, say, a dead man between sheets at the city morgue.
He has big blunt hands, which aren’t visible. They’re a farmer’s hands, although he has never farmed. (The hat and weathered face might make you imagine him right off as a farmer. And isn’t that a farm hat shading that unmistakable outdoor face? But it was a life lived largely in darkrooms, except for his four-year stint as sheriff. He was never even a deputy sheriff.) Waller hasn’t been caught in an atypical pose here—he often has a kind of stump-shouldered, forward-tilted, beady-eyed look about him. You can see the stance in other pictures. The sheriff likes barbecuing in the backyard on Saturdays with his three deputies—Frenchy Garreau, Gene Walters, and Willie Oubre. Frenchy’s a drunk, but he’s good company and an old pal of Bob’s. The sheriff keeps a weekly golf game with Harry Fridge, an M.D., and Joe K. McInniss, a local cutup. The three are fierce competitors and good friends. Joe K.—it’s what everybody calls him—is about the biggest joker in town, and once, as Harry Fridge was at the top of his backswing on the tee, the cutup let fly with an enormous fart. The doctor hung at the top of his swing and said, “Joe K., I see you still got that low hacking cough.” He came down and knocked Christ out of the ball. Bob Waller loves telling this story.
Forrest County is down in the southeast corner of the state, in what they call the Pinebelt region. Hattiesburg, qualifying as a city by Mississippi standards, is a post–World War II boomtown. It’s home to one of the nastiest white registrars in the South. That man is the circuit clerk and his name is Theron Lynd. He’s massive and crew-cut. (Waller’s photo archive has pictures of him.) Lynd makes sure blacks don’t get registered to vote. Since the 1940s, he has had each of the 285 sections of the Mississippi Constitution written on a note card. When a prospective black voter comes in, Lynd picks out one of the cards and asks the man to explain the section. The explanation is almost universally judged faulty and so gets a failing grade. In 1960—Waller’s first year in office—there are something like 22,000 white residents of voting age in the county, and nearly all are registered. There are about 7,500 blacks, and about 25 are registered.
From a letter he’ll write a couple of months hence (January 11, 1963) to the director of the Sov-Com on his sheriff’s letterhead: “Dear Mr. Jones:—There is strong evidence that Paul Weston is a member of the NAACP and probably CORE and all the others. However he is too smart to be active enough for us to be able to point directly at him.” (This information will go all the way to the governor.) From another Sov-Com document, written by one of the agency’s investigators, dated November 22, 1961: “I personally contacted Robert Waller, Sheriff of Forrest County, Mississippi. I was informed by Sheriff Waller that neither the NAACP nor any other subversive organization has caused him any trouble in Forrest County at this time.… Sheriff Waller was very nice and cooperative, and he expressed his appreciation for my visit, and the good work that the State Sovereignty Commission was doing over the State of Mississippi.… Sheriff Waller further stated that he was not anticipating any trouble from any of the colored citizens of Forrest County who have made it their home for a long time. He stated that if any trouble developed, it would come from outside sources—possibly the NAACP or other subversive organizations—who would encourage the younger Negroes to create this disturbance in an effort to break down the laws of the State of Mississippi.”
From a Klan Hate Sheet that will be distributed a few years hence in Forrest County, which some people in Mississippi think of as “progressive” in race relations: “The NAACP, The Communits, The COFO and other Jew backed subversive organizations now have a perfect system of infiltrators in your homes.… Without apparently realizing the grave dangers involved, many white citizens take the nigger maids into their homes, to care for their innocent children.… They are trained to undermine the christian morals of your children, while they pretend to be ‘a good ole nigger mammy’ to your face.… If you think that it just couldn’t be your maid, Let us remind you of this: You are dealing with decendants of savage africa, who will, like a wild animal, turn against you at a moments notice. In Africa they eat each other. Once they have been subjected to the communi
st doctrine of the NAACP and COFO or CORE they will cast aside any loyalty that years of kindness on your part may have brought about, and seek to destroy the hand that has fed them for so long.”
There is a book called Southern Journey, which was published a few years ago and never found enough readers. Tom Dent, its author, deceased now, was from New Orleans, with a deep love of jazz and the blues. He was a black activist in the movement, and nearly a generation after the battle was won, he went back to the site of some of the old struggles, such as the F. W. Woolworth five-and-dime in Greensboro, North Carolina, where the first sit-ins occurred. One of the places he traveled to was the Mississippi Delta. At the end of his book, Dent writes: “During the civil rights years blacks had achieved the miraculous by kicking open the doors—but once inside, well, there was hardly anything there. It was almost laughable, a kind of special blues truth.” He is talking to Unita Blackwell, black mayor of Mayersville, Mississippi. It’s a beautiful spot on the river. Mayor Blackwell suggests that they go look at the river. “What did it all mean?” Dent asks. Blackwell tries to answer. “Well, we didn’t gain much. We changed positions. The river changes positions; it’s constantly moving, you know, taking on new routes, cuttin’ off old ones. It may not look like it, but it is. Any powerful force will make a change. I suppose what we really gained is the knowledge that we struggled to make this a decent society, because it wasn’t. And maybe it still isn’t now, but at least we tried. That’s history.”
On one of my first trips into the Delta, I stayed at a Hampton Inn in Greenwood. It was a comfortable and friendly place. On the morning I checked out, I went down to ask the desk clerk if I could see a copy of the bill before paying it, since I’d made a lot of long-distance calls and wanted to be sure the charges were correct. I looked at the sheet and saw the word “Foreign” written alongside amounts for $1.24, $2.47, and $8.51. “But this can’t be right, sir,” I said. “I didn’t make any international calls.” “Oh, that just means out-of-state calls,” he said. That afternoon, I stopped for a grilled cheese sandwich and an RC Cola at a gas station–café on Highway 49W. A three-hundred-pound man was sitting at a table with a thermos cooler. Besides myself and the cook, he was the only other person in the place. While I waited for my takeout, he mopped himself with a blue bandanna and talked of how hot it was and of how Mr. Tackett has 2,000 catfish ponds in the Delta and how blacks hereabout just plumb won’t work. “You got lot of ’em like that up there where you live?” he said. I paid for my order and tried to smile and kept moving past him toward the screened door. I may have nodded imperceptibly at his question, already hating myself for it but afraid to do otherwise. “July going to be a burner, buddy,” he said, waving.
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