But not until today has there been another try at conversation with Joe Meredith’s dad, who once told an interviewer: “God’s role for me is similar to his role for Moses and Christ.” Who told another interviewer (and this, too, was long after America had mostly forgotten about him, or else was making a not-so-faint joke of him): “James Meredith is as foreign to me as he is to anybody else. You see, I created James Meredith to do certain things, so it was not a personal thing at all. I was never personally involved with him.” Who had told me, one time before, with much derision: “I was never one of those folks—I had my own divine responsibility.” By “those folks,” he meant civil rights folks, movement folks.
He had said then that he’d been sick for several years. It was easy to believe. He was so frail-looking. His waist seemed narrow as a girl’s. He said it was prostate cancer and diabetes and unspecified other ills he was trying to get over. He’d said, “Oh, man, I’ve gained ten, fifteen pounds, in the last month. As soon as I get my strength back …” He said he was trying to get well enough to go on with a biography of Cap Meredith, his father, “born in 1891, the same year the Constitution of Mississippi established white supremacy as the legal and official law of the land.” Moses Cap Meredith—a prideful, religious, autocratic scrub farmer and small landowner in the hills of Attala County, seventy miles north of Jackson—seems a huge part of the James Meredith riddle. Cap died in 1965. One of the things he taught his many children growing up—James was near the middle on the ladder of kids—was never to bow down to any white man.
He had picked up the phone on the first ring and had said to come straight over. It was a Tuesday morning in May; the whole state felt intoxicant with bloom. Fifteen minutes later, there was Meredith standing at his door, smiling, a ghost from the sixties, sixty-four years old, his hands so small and beautiful, his face so elegant and powerful and withered. Inside, he’d angled himself sideways in a straight-backed chair. It was primary day for municipal elections across the state, and he had put his name on the Republican ballot for mayor of Jackson. For the next two hours, the phone didn’t ring once. “If I win, no one will be more surprised than I,” he’d said, and it was about his only modest statement. (The next day, the Clarion-Ledger reported that he’d gotten 478 votes.)
Big watery tears had started lining either side of his nose, and he’d excused himself and gone to another room and returned chewing a wad of gum. “Hope my chewing gum doesn’t bother you,” he’d said. “I find it helps my allergies.” He’d begun working the gum in big smacks and pops. He’d left the room again and returned with a mimeographed pamphlet. On the cover it said, “James H. Meredith. Republican Candidate for Mayor. City of Jackson, Mississippi. MY PLATFORM AND POSITION.” Some of the pages were stapled in upside down, and there was typed material running sideways in the margins. One of these sideways typed-in marginalia said: “WHO I AM. In order to understand my perspective on Higher Education, it will be necessary to know who I am and from where I come. Since the first article was written about me in 1961, I have never read an article about James H. Meredith more than 500 words long which did not make some reference to some mythical, strange, divine, or other such reference. Many writers have tried to unravel this mystery without success. I am here today going to give you a two minute summary of a 10,000 year history of who I am and why the mysticism.”
He’d switched on a lamp at a cluttered table against a wall in the living room and moved aside a green vase of fresh-cut flowers, the better to look at the photograph. Those flowers had to be a woman’s touch—Judy Alsobrooks’s touch. Meredith’s second wife works in local public television. (She’s manager of a low-powered station at Jackson State University.) She wasn’t home that day. Meredith’s first wife, Mary June, died in 1979 at age forty of a massive coronary, leaving him with three sons who weren’t yet on their own. Meredith’s brother—who has worked as an auto mechanic at Kmart in Jackson, among other trades—once told an interviewer, “Losing his wife … I noticed the greatest change in James. He cried a lot, and I couldn’t remember him ever doing that.” Judy’s touch must also have accounted for the sense of elegance in the room: the glossy piano, the two fine wing chairs, a striped sofa, the throw rugs on polished wooden floors. And yet there was a computer set up next to the piano, and on top of the printer an athletic trophy of some kind, precariously balanced. It was as if the living room, by itself, was trying to suggest a certain scatter amid the seeming calm. It was as if Judy’s husband was getting lost in the confines of his own house, in the clicks and tumblers of his mind. The synapses would synapse, and then they wouldn’t. He’d say something piercing, and then he’d say something cracked. Some of it felt calculated—as if he wished to mess with his visitor’s mind, as if he enjoyed it. He once told a reporter: “I mean, I have been reading all my life that these people think I’m crazy. But you have to understand that I really thought they were crazy. I mean, they were out of their minds.” That’s behind him; today is another pained day in James Meredith’s life.
He opens the door. There’s a child in his arms. He hesitates for a split second, recollecting who this knocker is. Those large black-brown eyes—they’d darted and flitted and bored in so disconcertingly before.
“Mr. Meredith …”
But he’s already turning away. “Come on in, I’ve got to feed this child.”
His face is still powerful and withered-looking. There is a kind of regality there, Choctaw or otherwise. His skin still seems to have a light box under it. When he squints, five or six furrows, with a crook in each furrow, seem to ride up his head. There’s a big vertical vein on his left temple. His tennis shoes are without laces, just as last time. Then he had on a pair of black socks that came barely to his ankles, and two outsized blue veins rode up his skinny shinbones. He’s got on white sweat socks now. He’s still got his wreath of gray-white beard. He’s wearing a silver wedding ring. His glasses are in a case in the pocket of his pin-striped shirt. It looks like the same shirt. He’s gained back a little weight—some.
“I’m the one writing a book about some Southern sheriffs—and their families. And I wanted to come back …”
“I know that,” he says, pointing at a chair, seeming barely interested.
The child’s name is Jenee. She is the child of his youngest child, Jessica. Jenee, very cute, looks about a year old and has pierced ears and a T-shirt that says SOMEONE WHO LOVES ME VERY MUCH WENT TO GULFPORT, MISSISSIPPI AND BOUGHT ME THIS SHIRT.” He’s got her on his lap and is spooning yellow puree into her mouth, catching the stuff at her chin in smooth swipes and putting it back in. “C’mon, child,” he says. “Eat your dinner. You getting real sleepy, girl.” He’s tended babies in his time, bathed them, changed them—you can tell that. He seems both very tender and very firm. “Well, it’s just me and her,” he says. “Take care of her a lot.”
A moment later: “Segregation was of no concern to me.” He’s catching the yellow goop before it falls.
“What was, then?”
“White supremacy. Segregation was like apartheid. There’s only one thing that mattered—citizenship. C-I-T-I-Z-E-N.”
Jenee is kicking at him.
“Where do you live?” he demands.
“Maryland.”
“And where were you born?”
“California.”
“And where did you grow up?”
“Illinois—although I also grew up …”
He waves it off. “Do you perceive there was a difference in bigotry between Illinois and Mississippi?” Before an answer can be given: “Maybe two degrees of bigotry in Illinois and ninety-nine in Mississippi. But it was all the same. No difference in what America was intended to be about.”
To his grandchild: “All right, all right. I know you’re sleepy, girl.”
Then: “Listen, do you understand what the difference is between the civil rights movement and James Meredith?”
“Well, maybe not completely.”
“All
right. You got to understand that first. Did you read my book Three Years in Mississippi?” Before the answer can be given: “The civil rights movement was about the right to use public facilities and the right to the franchise. When Dr. King adopted nonviolence as a tactic, that acknowledged second-class citizenship. But what I was about was the right to use violence to defend your rights.”
“You hold out for that?”
“I not only hold out for it. I assert it today. What do you think got me into Ole Miss? It was violence.” He smacks his foot on the floor. His voice is loud. His granddaughter is really fussing now.
When he was seventeen, scrawny and predestined James Meredith, seventh of thirteen children, possessed of divine responsibility, was sent to live with an aunt in St. Petersburg, Florida, and there, at his new home and segregated black school, he realized that if he was going to establish himself quickly, he’d need to beat up two bullies who ruled. And so he did, in the first case using a stick with nails sticking out of it, in the second with his bare fists. After high school, in 1951, he went into the service—he chose the Air Force, believing it to be the most integrated—and it was there that a military psychiatrist examined him for his chronic anxieties about race. From a psychiatry report, dated April 29, 1960, when he was close to being discharged: “This is a 26 year old Negro S Sgt who complains of tension, nervousness and occasional nervous stomach.… Patient feels he has a strong need to fight and defy authority and this he does in usually a passive procrastinating way.… He loses his temper at times over minor incidents both at home and elsewhere. No evidence of a thinking disorder. Diagnosis: Passive aggressive reaction, chronic, moderate.” Meredith quoted from his own diagnostic report in Three Years in Mississippi, which is the story of his entry into Ole Miss. It was published in 1966 by the Indiana University Press and is a moving and literate read, even as it’s an often absurd one, with statements like this: “My most stabilizing belief is that I have never made a mistake in my life.”
He took college extension courses in the Air Force. He met his first wife, who was from Indiana. He served in Japan, where he instantly felt “that air of difference about being a Negro that you can never quite touch.” He got a reputation for being intensely thrifty—“nursing the dollar,” said those who knew him. A rating officer wrote that he was the most financially scrupulous individual he’d ever known.
But now he’s taking care of a grandchild and getting balled up in the story of one of his great-grandfathers, Mississippi Supreme Court Justice J. A. P. Campbell. “My father’s mother’s father,” he says. He was white but spent the last twenty-seven years of his life with his black family. He was eighteen years on the state Supreme Court. The jurist inspired him to “bring about the dismantling of everything he had set up.” He says that his own destiny and divine responsibility derive partly from the racist, and then unracist, meanings of this forebear’s life. But there are too many loops and turns to follow it completely. The child is going at serious decibel levels. “You real sleepy, girl, you real sleepy, girl, ain’t you? I’m gonna let you cry yourself to sleep. I will give you your bottle.” He takes her to another room. When he comes back, he looks at the photograph.
“Oh, I remember this picture,” he says. He’s standing in the middle of the room. He brushes the back of his hand across the width of the picture. “My goal was to convert them—and their descendants. All the ones who weren’t born yet.” He hands the magazine back. His interest has already died.
This tack is tried: “You’re not a liberal, are you?”
He seems flummoxed—ambushed on a quiz show with a trick question. He’s swallowing hard, squinting. A look of fear has passed over his face—which he’s trying to mask. “Well, I had a point,” he says. Then, “I have to agree with your last point. I am not a liberal. I’m not a conservative, either, at least as you go down one side or the other. Citizenship is my thing. You understand?”
He’s on the Choctaws again. His line goes back 2,000 years, minimum, he says. “Choctaw civilization was the highest form of civilization when the Europeans came. I’ve written twenty-five books and they’re all about that, in one form or another. And now I’m going to write my autobiography. Which I hope will be my biggest book of all.”
“Do you have a title?”
“No, but I’ve got the first sentence. Excuse me.” He goes to the back room. When he returns, the phone is ringing. “Hel-lowww,” he says deeply, sonorously. “No, it’s still for rent,” he says. “You want to go look at it?” It sounds as if someone is inquiring about an apartment rental. Does the person on the other end know he’s talking to that James Meredith? He hangs up and reads from a piece of paper in his hand: “Most of my life happened before I was born.” He looks over for a comment. “It took me four or five years to write that,” he says. “I considered the book half written when I wrote that sentence.”
He is asked how he spends the bulk of his day. Planning the writing, he says. Caring for Jenee. An occasional lecture or appearance. And lately, some part-time teaching at a Christian academy up in Yazoo City. It’s fifty miles each way. He and Jenee left at seven-thirty this morning and were back at midday. He’s been teaching them to read and write. Some are grown-ups. “Most satisfying work I’ve ever done,” he says, a softness in his voice.
“Later this summer, I’m going to take a bus trip across America, just to clear my mind. And then I’m going to go to Brazil. Doesn’t matter if I don’t talk to another soul, just so I can get my mind clear, to think, so I can come back and write. In order to get my mind prepared, I have to isolate myself.” He says he’s hoping God will let him live for five or six years, to finish this project. Most of his previous books have been self-published, in uniform blue binding. Some have beautiful titles and all of them contain patches of lucid and uncompromising prose—such as his Letters to My Unborn Grandchildren, in which he wrote on page 82 to Jenee and all the other Meredith offspring not yet in the world: “I returned to Mississippi in 1960 [from nine years in the Air Force] with a conscious purpose in mind, to attack what was considered the apex of White Supremacy in America, to strike it and destroy it.” Some of these hard-to-find books, in their uniform blue binding, contain highly erotic writing.
Asked if a copy of his biography of Cap Meredith is available for purchase, he nods and gets up and goes to the back room and a moment later returns with the book. Payment is rendered by check. “Won’t have this check long,” he says, weighing the piece of paper in his hand. “Right off to the bank.”
Trying to get it going again, thinking this will be an indisputable sentence, you say: “Guess Ross Barnett will figure a lot in the new book.” (Ross Barnett being the cowardly and face-saving and selling-out demagogue of a governor who presided over his state’s legal resistance to the desegregation of Ole Miss even as he kept inspiring the lowest-common-denominator race hatred that accompanied Meredith’s forced entry into the school. It was an entry that took almost two years to achieve, through lower courts and higher courts and some Mississippi kangaroo courts, before its culminating September weekend on the green lawns of Oxford, attended by canisters of tear gas and the stench of cordite and two deaths and hundreds of arrests and an occupying U.S. Army numbering in the thousands.)
“Say,” he says, with a look something like contempt, “if there was one thing Barnett loved, it was black people. I don’t think there were but two people who understood that whole game, and that’s me and Ross Barnett. Every time I ever saw him after that, I shook his hand.”
“So you don’t hate Barnett?”
“Why would I hate Ross Barnett?”
“But he said such awful things about black people—about you.”
“Listen here, Barnett would do whatever it took to get elected. My mother had fourteen brothers and sisters, and the last one alive, he knew Barnett like his own brother.” (Meredith, it turns out, has taken to telling people around Jackson in the last few years that he and the late, lamented Ross Barne
tt, governor of the state from 1960 to 1964, were distantly related on his mother’s side.)
Trying to get him interested in the photograph again: “All dead now, these sheriffs, except this one—his name is John Ed Cothran and he’s up in the Delta, just been to see him.”
Any discussion of the photograph is dead. There’s a deeper knot of silence in the room, a deeper knot of defiance in his face.
“The pressures on you from all that. The pressures when you were getting in must have been nearly unbearable.”
“None. Absolutely none.”
“Okay, but what about after you got finally admitted? Those Ole Miss students froze you out, they banged their meal trays on the tables when you came into the cafeteria. They set off cherry bombs in your dorm, they pelted you with eggs, they threw water balloons at you out of windows, they referred to your wife as ‘Spider’—you know, that she was going to end up a black widow. They bounced basketballs for hours on the floor over your head in the dorm. They’d see the marshals who were taking you to class and call out, ‘KKK—Kennedy’s Koon Keepers.’ ”
“None. Absolutely none.” His arms are crossed.
A moment later, he says this: “My goal was to make them what they oughta be. It’s like a baby. A baby can’t insult me. Anything they did, I saw as my shortcomings. I hadn’t reached them. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
He shakes hands goodbye. In the other room, Baby Jenee must be in far dreamland.
Go back to the late summer of 1959, almost exactly a year before a black noncom “with a mission and a nervous stomach” came out of the United States Air Force. Self-proclaimed bigots and defenders of their granddaddies’ way of life were running hard that summer for county and state offices. Mississippi voted for its sheriffs and other high officials in all eighty-two counties, and the results of the August primaries made the big local headlines in the dailies of Natchez and Hattiesburg and Greenwood and Grenada and elsewhere. But the larger headlines in every town and county belonged to the governor’s race, said to be the bitterest campaign in state history to that date. Winning the Democratic runoff primary on August 25 was tantamount to winning the November election in this one-party state. In the days preceding the second primary, it was a commonplace to see increasingly louder ads in almost any weekly or daily: “Ross Barnett Is the Strongest and Most Vigorous Segregationist in the Campaign for Governor. Roll with Ross!” And over on the facing page: “I, Carroll Gartin, Lieutenant Governor, Am a Total Segregationist. With the Record of the Past Four Years, We Have Every Reason to Believe We Are Winning This Segregation Battle.” Gartin was really a racial moderate—he was just doing what he had to do in hopes of securing votes. His opponent, Barnett, sixty-one, was from a hamlet called Standing Pine, in east-central Mississippi (not far from James Meredith’s home ground). He might not have believed it so deeply himself, but it didn’t matter, for he’d already run twice for governor, in 1951 and 1955, and had lost, and no one in his state was ever going to “out-nig” him again for public office. Barnett had grown up the youngest of ten on a farm. He’d worked his way through school as a barber, janitor, logger, and kitchenware salesman. City folks down in Jackson liked to say that the candidate was “about two bubbles off plumb” in the smarts department. Many regarded him as bone-stupid, less a political demagogue than a genial old country fool. They loved quoting his malapropisms. It was true that by his third run for governor he’d already earned a considerable fortune in the capital city as the state’s leading damage-suit lawyer. It was also true he’d been willing to defend blacks in his practice and that blacks were happy to have him as their attorney: Barnett could get them off. There was a wily not-to-be-underestimated quality about Barnett—which Robert F. Kennedy, for one, was going to underestimate at Oxford. It was said around Jackson that Barnett had a $100,000-a-year law practice.
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