Fallbacks. Retreats. A year before the fortieth anniversary, at Halloween 2001, Auburn University in Alabama made ugly national headlines when two fraternities hosted parties with racially offensive Halloween costumes. The same thing happened that year at Ole Miss, although for some reason the Auburn story seemed to have greater legs in the press. In Oxford, two members of the Alpha Tau Omega fraternity posed for a picture that went out on the Internet, on the Party Pics Web site. The photograph showed a brother, clad as a police officer, holding a gun to the head of a fellow brother who was in blackface and a straw hat. He was kneeling at the feet of this cop with a bucket of cotton. The fraternity was suspended for a year. The Daily Mississippian led the calls for punishment.
In 1962, the Daily Mississippian’s editor was a senior named Sidna Brower. She was a lone student journalistic voice seeking calm in that terrifying autumn. In a special edition on October 1, 1962, the morning after the riot, she wrote a signed editorial in which she accused some fellow students of bringing “dishonor and shame.” The following day, she wrote: “Banners stretch across the street in front of the Student Union Building to solicit the votes for Homecoming Queen. But what is there to come home to?” Three days later, she wrote: “Homecoming for the University of Mississippi would be the regaining of personal dignity and continuation of the integrity and quality of a fine old institution of higher learning.” Five days after that, she wrote: “I have received comments from students on campus and from letters in the mail that I have been brainwashed by the federal government. I most certainly have not been brainwashed nor have I received pressure from anyone. I simply, but firmly, believe in writing what I feel is right.” For such courage, the Scripps-Howard newspaper chain immediately offered Sidna Brower an internship up north for the following summer. She took it. Today, a native of Memphis, who found she couldn’t go home again, lives near Princeton, New Jersey.
Vondaris Gordon, from a small town in the Delta, has come home again, and again. He’s a former president of the Black Student Union. He has served on the sensitivity and respect committee, investigating campus racial incidents. He graduated from the university in 2002 but has found ways to stay close. One night several years ago, working the front desk in his part-time job at the Ramada Inn, he said: “I’m delighted to be a student here. I’ve lived out of Mississippi—in Montreal, in Detroit. I have family members up there. I’ve lived in Jackson. But there’s something about this town and this university. I love it so much. It always brings you back. If we can just tease apart the prejudice from the history, that’s the key.” Many nights, going to work, Gordon would find himself driving down Fraternity Row. “You go slow, you’ll see it,” he said. He meant the Confederate battle flag. “You’ll see it. It’s up in a little window or thumbtacked on a wall. You look in those windows, the beautiful windows of those beautiful fraternity houses, where all those frat boys live, and you’ll see the flag. The lights are on and you can see through the yellow windows and there it is. There’s a part of me that’s not even sure I want the flag to disappear. It’s just part of our history, like Meredith, like Emmett Till.”
The small Delta town that Vondaris Gordon is from is Moorhead. As a kid, he used to ride his bike around Moorhead, although never to the other side, across the railroad tracks, where the Southern crosses the Yellow Dog. Out that way, on West Washington, currently lives an old enfeebled sixties lawman going deaf, whose life has touched two overriding Mississippi myths: Meredith and Till. The second is far greater than the first.
Perhaps it’s remarkable only to an outsider, one who’ll never be a Southerner, that the ghosts of Emmett Till seem everywhere in Mississippi. It’s as if a fourteen-year-old Chicagoan, and what happened to him in 1955, haunts the air, the water of Mississippi. Roy Bryant, one of the acquitted killers, died nine years ago at Mississippi Baptist Medical Center in Jackson—but his kin and in-laws and cousins various times removed are said to be all over Mississippi. One of his three blood sons is up in the Carolinas, and another is reported to be in Texas, but there is a third son who lives in the state, as well as a daughter, as well as stepchildren, as well as sisters, as well as a half brother with the resonant name of Milam, as well as grandchildren and great-grandchildren. These family members and relations by marriage are said to live in towns named Ruleville and Sidon and Drew and Minter City and Eupora and Pontotoc. Bryant’s obituary in 1994 listed fourteen grandchildren and a great-grandchild: Many were in the Delta. His ex-wife, Carolyn Bryant, is said to be around that country yet. But if she is, she’s a hidden woman, with a different name, certainly hidden from anyone with a notebook and prying eyes. She is protected by those who love her. The former Mrs. Bryant must look nothing like that twenty-one-year-old rural beauty queen with the coils of coal-dark hair who used to live with her shrimp-hauling husband and small children in the back and upstairs of a Delta grocery. She’d be close to seventy now, if indeed she’s alive. In so many ways, she must have died decades ago.
Ghosts. Touchstones. Breathing witnesses. I’ll close with three. In the Delta town of Tutwiler, five miles north of Sumner, where the trial was held, there’s a black mortician named Woodrow Jackson. He’s lost track of his age, but the good Catholic nuns who run the small medical clinic in that Tallahatchie County town estimate him to be on the other side of ninety. In 1955, Woodrow Jackson worked for Tutwiler Funeral Home. He embalmed Emmett Till.
“Oh, Lord, look what I got here,” he said to himself, studying the bloated corpse. He had just driven down to Greenwood in a hearse to pick up the body from a Negro mortician named Chester A. Miller at the Century Funeral Home at East Gibbs and Walthall Streets. Woodrow Jackson loaded up his cargo and drove back to Tutwiler and went to work at four o’clock in the afternoon and didn’t finish up until five the next morning.
“Did it make you sick?” I wonder.
“No. ’Cause I took a few drinks,” he says. Jackson’s got on gold-framed glasses, black wing-tip loafers, white socks, a blue uniform shirt with blue serge pants. “See, it’s hard to do a body wet. Emmett, he was decomposed, ’cause he laid in that water so long. It was rough. I took that first look at him down in Greenwood, I said, ‘That’s it, all right. I guess they done it to him, all right.’ ” He remembers that he drove Emmett back to Tutwiler, worked on the body through the night, put the body into a wooden casket, loaded the contents into his hearse, then drove to the depot in Clarksdale in time to get the coffin on the afternoon train to Chicago. “And that’s all there was,” he says.
Although he must have been at least eighty-nine or ninety on the day when we met, Woodrow Jackson was still an embalmer. He worked for Delta Burial, in Marks, Mississippi. “I been doing it since I was thirteen, working on the bodies,” he said. “Emmett was just one of them.” He said he had gotten up at 2:30 A.M. on the morning we met to get ready to go to work at 6:30.
And then there is this touchstone to a story that keeps rising from the dead. The witness’s name is Ernest C. Withers. He lives in Memphis and was born in 1922, which would make him past eighty as you’re reading this. “Pictures Tell the Story,” it says on his fuchsia-colored business card. In sixty years of photography, he has shot Elvis Presley and B. B. King and Martin Luther King, Jr., and Howlin’ Wolf and Johnny Cochran, too. For years, he drove around his bluesy hometown with this advertisement painted on the side panel of his 1941 woody: ERNEST C. WITHERS. 519 VANCE. PRESS & PUBLIC PHOTOGRAPHERS. HOME PHOTOS. “A Shutter That Clicks to a Blues Rhythm” is the way the New York Times headlined its feature on the man a year or so ago.
And this morning the man is here, a monument on the other side of time, reminiscing, taking his breakfast in a thumpy little joint called Java, Juice & Jazz on Elvis Presley Boulevard. He’s got two freelance jobs today; can’t waste time. He’s ordered ham and eggs over easy, grits, stacks of toast. His red Park Avenue Buick is parked outside with a bumper sticker that says SOULSVILLE USA. He’s been married to his sweetheart, Dorothy, for six decades. “
Same wife,” he says. They raised seven boys and a girl.
“My mother was a seamstress,” he says. “She gave me a finite eye.”
In 1955, Withers went to Sumner to record the Till trial. He was sent by Defender Publications, a national chain of black newspapers, and in particular he was sent by the Memphis Tri-State Defender, and it paid him thirty-five dollars for that scary week. The Tri-State Defender has been publishing Withers’s pictures since the end of World War II: Memphis nightclubs, Negro League baseball, churches, fish fries, proms, the more-than-occasional city homicide. And of course the civil rights struggle.
In the Sumner courtroom, the photographer made pictures of the defendants and their lawyers, including John W. Whitten. After the acquittal, he made pictures of Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam leaving the courthouse in their open-collared white shirts, with their big grins and little boys saddled in their arms. A full record of Withers’s work from the Till murder appeared in a little booklet that Withers printed up and sold for a buck apiece across black America, by mail order and direct outlet: Complete Photo Story of Till Murder Case. Authentic Pictures Taken on the Spot. Designed to Meet Public Demand.
“Your subject has to be true to the view in the viewfinder. It’s not a tape measure, it’s a visual measure,” he says.
“Well, it took stamina. In the craft, stamina is required,” he says.
“I went down there with L. Alexis Wilson,” he says. “Alex was the top black civil rights reporter in the nation for Defender Publications. He later got promoted to editor of the Chicago Daily Defender. But he died too soon. Anyway, Alex and I went down to Sumner and Tallahatchie County. Naturally, we were a little worried about where we might sleep. We thought we might get killed if we stayed overnight in Tallahatchie County. So we stayed up in Clarksdale, which was a bigger place, closer to Memphis, and even had streetlights. We stayed with some black folks. There was only one bed in the room. I told them folks, ‘I don’t sleep with no man.’ Well, they dragged a couch in. I got the couch.”
“What is it about the Till story that bumps up past all the others?”
“I don’t know. I’ve thought a lot about that. I guess because he was so young and from someplace else. And then the way they came for him, in the middle of the night.”
“Were you worried that someone might come for you that way?”
An old man, finishing a killer breakfast, chuckles. “We were calm enough not to give away our true purposes in Mississippi. Which was to picture them exactly as they were.”
The last time I saw him, he’d been reading Revelation that morning, one of his favorite books in the Good Book. As usual, he’d been up since five, sitting in the La-Z-Boy in the front room while Maudine slept in till seven. The arthritis in his legs was so debilitating now that he’d been able to put in only a shadow of a garden: three little durn rows of corn, greens, onions. “Been spending a lotta time with ol’ Arthur,” he said, rising slowly from the rocker. “I reckon I know all them Ritis boys. Yessir. Especially ol’ Arthur Ritis.” That oozy curve of smile, that red meaty hand poking out from the stolid body for a shake. He could still grasp surprisingly strong. It was clear, though, that John Ed Cothran was going down, in both body and spirit.
We went out and looked at the diminished garden. We stood over the new growth. “Used to grow bushels of this stuff for the widow women. Now there ain’t many widow women left.”
His hearing was worse. “Can’t even hear m’self poot anymore,” he said. A cancer had returned to the tip of his ear, and they were going to slice off some more of that ear before long, he said. He said that the doctor man he’d been seeing for his arthritis had given him a little black box to put in his pocket that was attached to a wire that was supposed to shoot electronic impulses into his spine—but he didn’t like its jolt and had said the hell with it. A couple of weeks before, he’d been in the hospital for three days for a fierce bellyache. “Diverticulitis,” he said, drawing out all six syllables.
It was clear that Maudine Cothran’s health was declining, too. Her eyesight was all but gone: macular degeneration. “I can’t see your face,” she said, standing three feet away, after we’d returned from the garden to the house. “I got great-grandbabies and I can’t see their faces.” She, too, had had emergency stays in the hospital. A gallbladder attack had come on Mother’s Day. “Now if you get sick on Sunday, it’s too wet to plow,” she said. “There’s nobody going to help you that day.”
We went out to the screened porch. John Ed sank into a metal porch chair. The sun hadn’t come to noon yet, so there was something of a breeze. He sat with his hands folded, staring. Sweat formed on his upper lip. Behind him was the little handsome pecan grove that he loved to keep tidy. He’d mowed it just the day before on his Murry riding mower. He’d also run over one of Maudine’s mock orange trees and felt awful about it. “Don’t know how I missed seeing the durn thing.”
He told a joke or two, an old story or two. Once he used the term “colored women.” Another time, in another story, he said “nigger,” as I’ve often heard him say the word, with no seeming malice, making me wince once again.
Mostly, Maudine and I talked that day. “I don’t think he’ll ever go to a nursing home,” she said in a loud whisper. “I’d like to sell out here and just go. The two of us could go into this retirement home they have in Greenwood. You don’t have much room in a place like that. John Ed says he’d blow his brains out first. He wouldn’t do that. I don’t think he would.”
Maybe her husband had heard some of this. “I reckon the thugs that shot little Emmett’s head off are sure enough dead now, ain’t they?” he said.
“Milam and Bryant,” I said loudly. “Milam died twenty years ago. Bryant died in 1994.” But it was as if these dates weren’t registering. Or maybe he just couldn’t hear. Or maybe he was wandering in a biblical dream.
The book of Revelation is the last book in the New Testament. It’s only a few pages. It’s apocalyptic and eschatological, meaning that it’s about final accountings and ultimate destinies and other worlds to come. It speaks of the alpha and omega. It talks of the seven seals and of the last plagues and of the wild tormenting beast that comes up from the abyss. Bible scholars have long remarked that the language of apocalyptic writing is deeply symbolic, and that the true significance of the visions described is not to be found in their literal meaning. I drove away from Moorhead, from an old man who once had his back turned in a photograph, with a vision: On judgment day, all the slain bodies from all the fevered and silted Mississippi waters will rise as one.
A Bibliographical Essay
Henry James once said that a good story is both a picture and an idea, and that the picture and the idea should try to be “interfused.” The idea for this book came on February 19, 1995, while I was standing in Black Oak Books in Berkeley, California, paging through an outsized text of black-and-white images entitled Powerful Days: The Civil Rights Photography of Charles Moore. I’d never heard of Charles Moore, although I love black-and-white photography and although I was familiar with some of the images in Powerful Days, especially those the photographer had taken in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963, of fire hoses and dogs baring their fangs on their choke chains. I kept turning the pages of the book, thinking anew about that parting line in late-twentieth-century history known as the sixties. Then I saw page 55, and the photograph there stopped me in my tracks. It was a good while before I understood that the book I set out to write, as I stood there, wasn’t about the photograph so much as it was about what came down from those seven Mississippi faces. I didn’t begin to get that part until after my editor of two decades, Jonathan Segal of Knopf, had studied the image and had then told me in a single word where the true direction of the story lay: “legacies.”
The material for Sons of Mississippi has been gathered in three ways: First, it has come from my own interviewing—breathing sources, whether intimately or tangentially related to Moore’s photograph and to the history o
f civil rights in Mississippi. The interviewing process has spread over nearly seven years, beginning with the initial exploratory reporting trip to Mississippi in June 1996. It concluded when the work was in galley form, when I was somewhere on the other side of thirty-five reporting trips to Mississippi—some lasting three or four days, but most lasting a week or more.
The most important interviews were with the principals themselves, and their family members; they were the chief source of my information, which I then verified, double-checked, and supplemented in every way I could. I am referring especially to the long chapter-portraits of sons and grandsons in Part Three, but also to portraits elsewhere in the book, notably of James Meredith and Charles Moore in Part Two, and, not least, to two chapter-portraits in Part One: Billy Ferrell and John Ed Cothran. In each instance, extended conversation with the principal himself made the difference. As is clear from the text, Ferrell and Cothran were the only lawmen from the picture who were alive when I started the project in earnest in 1997; I feel lucky to have had a chance to interview them both, to spend time with both. My time with Cothran—running over nearly five years, from mid-1998 to late 2002, as his health and memory slowly declined—was obviously far more extensive than the brief window of time I had with Ferrell, in 1997 and 1998, before the onset of heart disease and cancer and his fairly quick death the following year. And yet, in many ways, Billy Ferrell, in the center of the frame, resides in the center of my imagination, in the center of the story, in terms of what was passed down, good and bad: to his namesake known as Tommy, sheriff of Natchez and Adams County and president of the National Sheriffs’ Association (now finishing up his year-long reign in the latter); to his namesake known as Ty, the federal lawman out on the border with the large, conflicted heart and propensity to tears. If I had never been able to meet the flesh-and-blood Billy, the entire work might have aborted, no matter how intriguing the two men down the generational ladder from Billy turned out to be.
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