Sons of Mississippi

by Paul Hendrickson

  Earlier in the same year, Scott had voted in the statewide referendum of whether or not to adopt a new Mississippi flag. He voted, distinctly in the minority, for a new flag. “My heart was clear on that one,” he said.

  Did he think that the country club—where almost all of of the social and leisure life of white Clarksdale takes place—might ever change its policies?

  “Forever is a long time,” he said. “I don’t think it’ll be soon. This is Mississippi.”

  “But isn’t it somehow wrong?”

  “I can’t really sit here and say that it is.”

  He said he struggles to think right and to act right and to fight the things in himself that are automatic. One day in his office, talking of the cotton mill, Scott said, “We work blacks here.” The air wasn’t dry on the sentence when he said, “I didn’t mean it to come out that way. I’ll apologize for that. Sounds like plantation stuff.” Another day he described a job interview, which had taken place two decades before. The man interviewing him for the position said, “Son, how do you feel about blacks?” Scott answered, “Sir, I’ve lived around them all my life.” Another day, after we had eaten lunch and had taken a brief tour in his car through nearby fields blossoming with cotton, Scott spoke of a black employee for whom the mill provides housing and payment of utilities. He’s an extremely good worker and has many years in. His father was there before him.

  “How is the condition of his house?”

  “Well, we have to get on him about that,” he said.

  Again, there was a look of pain, a seeming wish to stuff the words back into his mouth. “Well, we don’t get on him about that, it’s not what I meant to say. That sounds like I’m a damn overseer or something. We’re not trying to be paternalistic. But we do have to sort of say to him every once in a while, ‘Ricky, you’re letting the condition of your house slip a little.’ And then he spruces it up.”

  Imagine: A Mississippi backcountry farm family had traveled in one generation from a father who didn’t get beyond grammar school and defended a system that was an extension of slavery to a college-educated son who sits behind a desk and seeks to be fair to his black workforce while he makes his own handsome living, one token of which is membership in a country club that won’t admit blacks. In some ways, that seems about the right metaphor for Mississippi in a new century: all the shadows of the overhanging Confederate past, along with the new shoots so susceptible to quick loss, trampling.

  “So have you broken the chain?”

  “I have. I have. I’m proud to say I have,” Scott said. He wasn’t talking specifically of race but of how the prior generation of American fathers often seemed incapable of communicating with their children. Scott has three grown children from his first marriage—two daughters and a son. “Breaking the chain” sounded so freighted.

  All theories and hypotheses and suppositions about other human beings are suspect. And in another sense, maybe all theories and hypotheses and suppositions about other lives are equally true. How do we ever really know what the other is thinking, feeling, imagining, dreaming? We got up and shook hands and I drove through the utter flatness of fields, toward Memphis.

  Epilogue

  Hope and History Rhyming

  Every blade of grass has its angel that bends over it and whispers, “Grow, grow.”

  —From the Talmud

  We had the experience but missed the meaning,

  And approach to the meaning restores the experience

  —T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets

  Half a mile back, a dog with mottled fur slunk up out of a culvert full of water from the early winter rains. The animal’s appearance in the middle of the two-lane, forcing a swerve, only adds to the edginess of returning to an all-but-empty town for another look at the falling-down building by the side of the road that was once an unremarkable country store called Bryant’s Grocery & Meat Market.

  Money is still as a church.

  When Emmett Till took the overnight coach of the Illinois Central railroad from Chicago to visit his Southern kin, Money was a more going idea. The trains would make whistle stops for alighting and embarking passengers. Money was said to have a population of about 200 in 1955, but that must have included all those who lived in the shotgun cabins out in the cotton fields. The town still appears on the list of towns on the official highway map of Mississippi—but there’s no population given. A decent guess might be that a hundred live scattered hereabout now, counting cats.

  The building, stoving in on itself, functioned as a grocery and dry goods store until sometime late in the 1980s. It changed names and hands several times after the murder—which is one reason why the green lettering on the white tin sign above the front door makes no sense. What’s visible is the YOU of what once was YOUNG’S, partially obscuring the OLFE’S of what once must have been WOLFE’S.

  Nobody seems alive here.

  A green van pulls up and makes a left turn. A man in a great hurry bounds out. He is delivering flowers. It turns out there’s going to be a wedding tomorrow at the small Baptist church in Money. The church, which serves a white congregation, is down a side street from the store about a hundred yards.

  The delivery man is opening the back of his van.

  “Hello.”

  You’re trying not to startle a white Mississippian with his back turned. You tell him you’ve been standing out front of the grocery store for about forty-five minutes, and he’s the first person to come by.

  “Emmett Till, huh?”

  “Yep.”

  “You sure you got the right building? I think it may have been one over there that got torn down. Folks like you want to make history sometimes when you ain’t got no history to make.” He says it with utter friendliness.

  He’s headed up the steps of the church with two large vases; you are falling in behind. “Let me tell you something else,” he says over his shoulder. “I was a year out of high school. I was walking past my grandmama’s bridge game. I just overheard one of the women say to the others that when Emmett Till’s mama—I think her name was Mamie—went into the mortuary for the first time to look at the body, she started screaming before she even got inside the door, ‘That’s my baby! That’s my baby!’ Now, I know that’s true. The undertaker himself told that story. You see, the body was so decomposed, you couldn’t tell it was him or not. But that didn’t stop her.”

  In Chicago, on September 3, 1955, which was the first day that the pine casket with its shockingly un-made-up contents were open for viewing, 10,000 people were said to have clogged the streets outside the funeral home.

  “But what about the ring he was wearing? They found it on the body and that helped identify him.”

  “Ring?” he says, half turning.

  “It had the initials L. T. It had a date on it: May 25, 1943. It belonged to Emmett Till’s father, Louis Till. It had a flat crown. Emmett had been wearing it when he left Chicago. There were pictures of the ring in the Memphis papers. It had been taken right off the body when it came from the river. An undertaker took it off. The sheriff who was at the scene is still alive. He lives in Moorhead. When Emmett was murdered, he was the deputy sheriff of Greenwood. He showed the ring to Emmett’s uncle, who said it was Emmett’s ring. There are pictures of him holding the ring up for newspaper photographers. Here, I’ll show you. His name’s John Ed—”

  “Don’t know about a ring,” he cuts in. “Never heard about a ring. You sure that came out at the time?”

  “Positive, sir.”

  But this is a man who’s unconvinced. Who’s got flowers to arrange inside for tomorrow’s wedding. Who’s got to get on to his other deliveries and then back into Greenwood. Whose turned back seems suddenly stiffer now, or is that something imagined? Who may believe deep in his white Southern glands that the past is nothing but the past and why stir it up and get folks thinking again about things that can’t be undone.

  “Write us a good one now,” he warns with all the prior pleasantn
ess.

  About a year and a half after I first got to know him, John Ed Cothran’s grandson and namesake—who said in the first conversation that he didn’t know who Emmett Till was, but that he did know about James Meredith—lost his double-wide mobile home to bankruptcy proceedings. This was in December 2000, not many months after John Cothran had made the first payment on his $68,000 dream in the all-white community of Strayhorn. He’d had so many improvement plans for that place in the countryside. But even though he lost his home almost as soon as he had bought it, and even though his work schedule remained crazy (often doing back-to-back shifts at two jobs), other things in his life seemed to perk up. On Thanksgiving Day 2000, stocking shelves at Kroger while other folks ate turkey and watched football games, John started making time with a cashier named Bobbie. She was five years older and maybe three inches taller, but they went home together that night and enjoyed their own leftovers and turned out the lights. He moved into her place a few days later. Bobbie lived a few miles from the strip mall in Southaven, just below the Tennessee state line, where she and John worked. She grew up in suburban Washington, D.C., and was a mother of two and had a thirteen-year-old son living with her. She had moved to the Memphis area a few years before with a husband, who had become an ex-husband. The son who lived with her was named Michael, and John tried to fill in as a kind of surrogate friend and instant authority figure, taking the boy for rides in his truck, but also threatening to take off his belt and go after him for his sass. Once, he threw water in Michael’s face when the teen failed to rouse himself for school after two calls from his mom.

  After the first of the year, John told his superiors at the Home Depot that he didn’t want to run the kitchen and bath department anymore. This time, they listened. He transferred to plumbing, working nights. He decided to quit Kroger—the measly paycheck wasn’t worth his time, he said. He and Bobbie were making ends meet with their semipooled paychecks—sort of. At the Depot, he put in a request to work the overnight shift, handling incoming freight, unloading pallets. This way, he wouldn’t have to deal with the public anymore, wouldn’t have to supervise anybody. The new work and hours suited him fine.

  On weekends, he saw his twins, who were down in Senatobia with their mom, about forty minutes away. The twins loved going to Burger King, so that’s where their dad took them when he came to visit. Often he just watched while they ate, because there wasn’t enough money in his pocket for him to eat, too. One summer evening, with a few hours to kill before clocking in, he drove down to Senatobia to try to find a ball field. The twins were in a T-ball league and he wanted to see them play. He couldn’t find the field. He drove around for an hour, cursing, then got back on the highway and drove back to Southaven and went into work. “My life,” he said.

  One winter night, returning to Southaven from a visit with his kids, John’s vehicle broke down. He got out and started walking northward into the sleet. Three black guys in a pickup, going the other way on the interstate, did a U-turn and picked him up. He squeezed in beside them and couldn’t stop trembling. “You all right, man?” they said. They wanted to pull off somewhere and buy him coffee, but he said, no, he’d be fine. His teeth chattered all the way to Bobbie’s place. He went inside and got twenty-five bucks from her and brought it back out to them. “I swear I’ll make this up to you someday,” he said. “You already have, man,” one of them said. They awkwardly embraced.

  The following August, John brought the twins’ stepsister, Ashley Nicole, from Tupelo to live with him. His daughter was an overweight teenager, a sweet child of his third marriage, who’d been left back in school a couple of times and was talking of quitting. Her father wasn’t going to let that happen. He said he’d damn well see to it that she’d have a chance at a better life than his. When he told her he’d screwed up so many things—had been a drunk and a doper at sixteen—Ashley said, “Don’t worry, I ain’t going there, Daddy.” She didn’t have a lot of things to pack when she left Tupelo and moved in with her father and his girlfriend and his girlfriend’s son. She brought her diary and dolls and scrapbooks and clothes. One page of her diary had a drawing of a Confederate flag, and the words “It’s a Rebel thang” written beside it. Another had a drawing of crosses and a Bible, and beside the Bible and the crosses there was a poem that she’d composed. It was entitled “Thank You Jesus.” Its last lines: “When I get to Heaven, I will see you / We will begin anew / I want to say: / Thank you for dying for me / and taking my sin / and setting me free. / When I get there I’ll be glad / because I won’t have to worry / about being sad.” She signed it, with little hearts: “By Ashley N. Cothran.” John’s daughter barely knew her great-grandfather on her paternal side—she said she knew he had been a Mississippi lawman in a bad time. “I’d like to know more about all that someday,” she said. “We’ve heard some of it in school.”

  After the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, John put a flag on the front license plate of his Chevy Silverado pickup. He pasted a LET FREEDOM RING decal on his back bumper. How goddamn dare they do that to my country were the words that often seemed to be in his head. Despite the general anxiety in America, John said he felt more stability in his own life than he’d known in years. He seemed to get along with black employees at the store better than with the white workers. He and Bobbie were trying to buy a new house together—maybe the banks would float a loan despite the recent bankruptcy filing. On the night shift, there were twelve employees, plus a supervisor, and they’d have to hump anywhere from 100 to 180 pallets of freight. By that October, John had held his job at the Depot for four years, something he was quite proud of. He’d moved from lumber to plumbing to the head of kitchen and bath, back to plumbing and then to overnight freight. The head of overnights was a woman named Dawn. “John knows how to work,” she said of him early one morning several weeks before Christmas 2001. John was clocking out, putting his gear away. He and I were going to breakfast, and we had agreed to meet at the store. John lugged out to his pickup a twelve-inch miter saw that he’d just bought for his dad as a Christmas present, and while he was gone, Dawn said: “He’s a very hard guy not to like, really. I do think he’s carrying a lot inside. You can always sense that anger. I don’t know what it’s about.” John’s left arm was in a soft cast; he’d injured it while helping a buddy move a water heater on a day off. All the lifting on the overnight shift was aggravating the injury, but what could he do about it?

  He was even more buoyant than usual at breakfast that dawn, pushing his sunny-side-up eggs into his hash browns and sausage patties and then churning it into a soupy mix. He and Bobbie were renting a new place in an adjoining town called Horn Lake, corner of Grace and Cliffwood. It was just a coincidence that his parents lived on a road called Grace.

  What could he do about the bubbles of rage that still dizzied him when he least expected? One night he flared so suddenly at Bobbie’s boy that he whispered prayers of gratitude afterward that something irreversible hadn’t happened. He’d picked up a baseball bat and gone to Michael’s room. “I won’t have this sass and disrespect,” he said. His hands and voice were shaking. When it was over, he told Bobbie that he wouldn’t have hit her son with the bat, although in another minute he might have gone out and smashed the shit out of her car or his car or anything else that was handy. A few months later, he did smash the bejesus out of her car—not with a bat, but with his fist. He and Bobbie had had an argument, and Bobbie had stalked off to her Hyundai and sat inside it with the windows rolled up and the doors locked. John followed her out to the carport and kept yelling at her through the glass. She wouldn’t look at him. He was standing in the narrow space between the side of the house and the windshield. There was no room to rare back and swing, so it’s still a mystery to him how he ended up breaking her windshield. “My intention was to hit the window to get her attention—not break the damn window,” he said. “It was just contained aggression, I guess. I splintered it. Sometimes I wonder if this anger stuff wi
ll ever leave me alone.”

  John’s life continued to seem a study in extremes. He totaled his pickup early one morning after work. He was so wound up from the shift that he couldn’t go home to sleep, so he decided to drive around for a while. He dozed off at the wheel and awoke to find the truck out of control. He wasn’t hurt, “only pissed.” So now he was back to driving—barely—a beat-up sedan.

  He spoke with affection of his new neighbors, a black husband and wife, who lived directly across the street from where he and Bobbie were now renting. He would nod to them and wave when he saw them bringing in groceries from the carport. One day John was standing in his own driveway, trying to carry on a conversation with “the Mrs.,” whose name he didn’t yet know. “She and I were calling to each other, and she said, just easy as anything, ‘Well, why don’t you come on over, so we don’t have to shout at each other. Let me show you what I’m planting in the back.’ ” John went over. He went inside and was invited to sit down in their living room.

  Not long afterward, John gave Bobbie a ring. “I told her, ‘We’ve done about everything but hit each other with frying pans—but I hope to marry you,’ ” said John the next time I saw him.

  As for John’s dad, Billy Cothran, who lived with his deeply faithed wife, Alice, in the backcountry village of Gore Springs, well, he had changed his business card. He wasn’t a car salesman any longer; he was running the whole department at Grenada Nissan. The new card read: “The Car & Truck Store. W. T. (Billy) Cothran. Sales Manager.” Billy didn’t have that job very long, though: In early 2002, the owners let him know they had someone else in mind for the job. In his mid-sixties, Billy retired to his Shangri-la in the woods to take up full-time fishing and wood carving and lawn tending and of course churchgoing. “This retirement thing’ll kill you,” he said on the day I stopped in to see him. He’d been out in the yard for hours, fussing with tools, just as his own father, a couple of counties over, closing in on ninety, was trying to do the same.