Turn Me Loose

by Frank X. Walker

  to own a car and not know how fast it’ll go.

  And whatever I am, I ain’t no fool.

  BIGHEARTED

  Thelma De La Beckwith speaks to Myrlie Evers

  You are wrong to think my man a monster

  or a lowly coward ’cause he grins at you

  from across the courtroom. Your shallow

  Faith won’t let you see his generosity

  or his compassion. Don’t you see the courtesy

  he extended to you by opening up a hole

  in that boy’s black back and not his face,

  allowing you and your children the dignity

  of an open casket, a vision of perfect sleep

  instead of a bloody stump, where his head rests now?

  ANATOMY OF HATE

  Byron De La Beckwith

  I have no problem with colored who know

  their place, but it’s easy to hate troublemakers

  an’ integrationists, uppity monkeys in suits’n ties,

  little more than pet dogs for northern scum

  pissing on our proud Heritage. Yeah, I shot that boy

  in the back. But not ’cause I hated his color.

  I hated how clean he kept his car. I hated

  his always-pressed clothes and shiny shoes. I hated

  that he parked in front of his own house. I hated

  the sound of the north and schools and books

  every time he opened his nigger lips.

  The prosecution said he was only speaking

  on equality and freedom, but what I heard

  when he flapped his black gums was

  “poor white trash, lick our union boots

  and watch us do to your wives and daughters

  what the slavers done to ours.”

  … everybody knows about

  Mississippi Goddam.

  —NINA SIMONE

  WHAT THEY CALL IRONY

  Byron De La Beckwith

  There was a time

  when being a white man

  on trial in Mississippi

  was like swapping lies

  in the barbershop or at a church picnic.

  Looking across at the Judases

  that helped find me guilty

  the third time

  was like looking at a souvenir postcard

  of a lynching

  only it’s me playing jump rope

  with the tree

  and the Christmas morning faces

  in the crowd

  is all carpetbaggers and Jews.

  ON MOVING TO CALIFORNIA

  Myrlie Evers

  Dying can’t compare with living

  with death and loss grief and anger.

  Standing up for truth and justice

  is much harder than marrying silence.

  Climbing out from under the heaviness

  of hate is the hardest thing I’ve ever done.

  Surviving a husband is something I prepared for.

  I practiced and practiced being strong enough.

  Surviving Mississippi took Fannie Lou Hamer

  strength, something I didn’t ever think I had.

  PART V

  Bitter Fruit

  ONE MISSISSIPPI, TWO MISSISSIPPIS

  after Thomas Sayers Ellis

  You got old plantations

  We got shotgun houses

  You got sprawling verandas

  We got a piece a front porch

  You got beautiful gardens

  We got cotton fields

  You got Ole Miss Law School

  We got Parchman Prison

  You got Gulf Shore beaches

  We got river banks

  You got debutante balls

  We got juke joints

  You got bridge parties

  We got dominoes and spades

  You got mint juleps

  We got homemade hooch

  You got your grandmother’s china

  We got paper plates

  You see a proud history

  We see a racist past

  You don’t remember lynchings

  We can’t forget

  You got blacks

  We got the blues

  A FINAL ACCOUNTING

  You can own the land a woman calls home

  but not the warmth in it or the stars above it.

  You can own the food she feeds her family

  but not the love that prepares it.

  You can own the well from which she pulls

  her water but not the thirst it quenches

  You can fill all the libraries with your version

  of facts, call it history, and still not own the truth.

  NOW ONE WANTS TO BE PRESIDENT

  Thelma De La Beckwith

  After that first harvest,

  they took to the streets

  and chanted “after” him

  there’d be no more fear

  but it took them forty-five years

  to grow back their spines

  after their so-called civil rights lions

  were slaughtered like lambs

  I look at this new one standing here

  shameless and shiny, faking humility

  and confidence, an educated mongrel

  peddling false hope

  But even though he won, the victory is ours,

  because it took them forty-five years

  to rebuild their backbones

  all those years to unshackle their fear

  forty-five years to raise another boy

  man enough to send home in a box

  Plenty of rich folks wants to fight.

  Give them the guns.

  —WOODY GUTHRIE

  EPIPHANY

  Willie De La Beckwith

  I never understood colored folks.

  They ain’t got no more than we got.

  Hell, most of them got less than nothing

  but every time I see one, they are smiling

  I don’t hate them as much as I hate

  those big ass grins on their face.

  When I see one of them grinning, it’s like

  they are laughing at us for being white

  and still poor, for believing we had something

  in common with the real bosses.

  We stood by while the rich used blacks

  like they were little more than dirt floors

  to walk on, but we were too dumb to know

  we were just their rugs.

  LAST MEAL HAIKU

  Myrlie Evers

  imagine byron

  sitting down to eat, using

  his cotton shirt sleeves

  as substitutes for

  napkins, clutching a steak knife

  —no unleavened bread

  enjoying blood that

  drips from every single bite

  of his final meal

  imagine before

  he lays down to sleep, ready

  to meet his maker

  he gets on his knees

  and confesses all his sins

  in time to be saved,

  but when he looks up

  at God’s burnt brass face he thinks

  he has gone to hell

  WHITE KNIGHTS

  Myrlie Evers

  For every ten Beckwiths

  defending the right to wave

  the Confederate flag

  there’s at least one Kennedy.

  For every racist governor

  and flaming cross

  there’s a white Catholic priest

  dodging bricks, wiping off spit,

  bleeding from the temple

  in the thick of a march.

  For every hundred southerners

  teeming with hatred

  there’s a set of kind blue eyes

  full of hope, there’s a young heart

  unafraid of change and a reason

  not to fear or pity them all.

  EVERS FAMILY SECRET RECIPE

 
Myrlie Evers

  prepare closed minds

  with patience. peel ripe

  distrust with smiles.

  stir in generous portions

  of kindness and willingness

  to do the work.

  add commitment and determination.

  massage out doubt and fear.

  blend in a drop of daddy’s blood

  and two of mamma’s tears.

  season with hope and change.

  let sit for a generation.

  distill as a salve. rub deeply into

  your children’s hands, feet and hearts.

  now vote.

  THE ASSURANCE MAN

  Charles Evers

  If you knew him after Alcorn and the war,

  before history books, before that bullet,

  before becoming the field secretary,

  back when he was just an insurance man,

  you would’ve known how bullheaded he could be.

  He knew Mississippi polished and perfected ugly

  but also that she had something beautiful to offer

  her sons our freedom.

  He didn’t sell us a waiting game like a preacher

  and only promise our rewards in the hereafter.

  We shall all be free. We shall all

  be free.

  We shall all be free some day.

  —GUY AND CANDY CARAWAN

  GIFT OF TIME

  Myrlie Evers

  When I was able to see beauty in a world

  littered with scars

  when I discovered stores of memories

  that a bullet couldn’t quit

  when I watched a son grow into his father’s face,

  his laugh, his walk

  I saw how faith could be restored.

  And was finally able to imagine

  that before he fell in love with guns

  before he lost his mother

  and his childhood

  before he needed a reason to hate

  to feel threatened

  to push back against imaginary walls

  collapsing in on him

  like August heat and no fan

  I imagine before all that, little Byron was good.

  He was clean. He was innocent.

  And I finally understood

  that trouble don’t last always.

  HEAVY WAIT

  If Mississippi is to love her elephant self

  she needs a memory as sharp as her ivory tusks

  with as many wrinkles as her thick thick past.

  If she forgets, she need only reach back,

  caress her keloid skin, and run her fingers across

  the Braille history raised on her spine

  or the bruised couplets around her supple neck.

  For Mississippi to love her elephant self,

  she need only open her blue/gray eyes and move.

  Move, as if she carries the entire weight of history

  and southern guilt on her massive head.

  Move, in any direction, as long as it is forward.

  For Mississippi to love her elephant self,

  she must ask for, extend, and receive

  forgiveness.

  But she must never ever ever forget.

  Time Line

  1954

  The Supreme Court rules on Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka Kansas, unanimously agreeing that segregation in public schools is unconstitutional, paving the way for large-scale desegregation.

  1955

  Fourteen-year-old Chicagoan Emmett Till, visiting family in Mississippi, is kidnapped, brutally beaten, shot, and dumped in the Tallahatchie River for allegedly whistling at a white woman. The two white men acquitted by an all-white jury later brag about committing the murder in Look magazine.

  1955

  NAACP member Rosa Parks refuses to give up her seat at the front of the “colored section” bus to a white passenger. In response to her arrest, the Montgomery, Alabama, black community launches a successful bus boycott, which will last for more than a year.

  1957

  Federal troops are sent in to facilitate the integration of formerly all-white Little Rock, Arkansas, Central High School by “the Little Rock Nine.”

  1962

  James Meredith becomes the first black student to enroll at the University of Mississippi. Violence and riots surrounding his enrollment cause President John F. Kennedy to send five thousand federal troops to restore and maintain order.

  1963

  Byron De La Beckwith shoots Medgar Evers. He is tried twice in 1964 for murder. Both trials result in hung juries. Beckwith goes free.

  March on Washington draws over 200,000 people. Martin Luther King, Jr., delivers famous “I Have a Dream” speech.

  Four young girls (Denise McNair, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, and Addie Mae Collins) are killed when a bomb explodes at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama.

  President John F. Kennedy assassinated. Warren Commission concludes Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone, committed the crime.

  1964

  President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits discrimination of all kinds based on race, color, religion, or national origin.

  The bodies of three civil rights workers (James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, & Michael Schwerner)–two white, one black-are found in an earthen dam six weeks after being murdered by the Ku Klux Klan.

  1965

  Malcolm X is assassinated in the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem.

  Blacks begin a march to Montgomery from Selma, Alabama, but are stopped by police at the Pettus Bridge. Fifty marchers are hospitalized after police use tear gas, whips, and clubs against them, earning the incident the name “Bloody Sunday.”

  Voting Rights Act of 1965 makes it easier for southern blacks to register to vote by outlawing literacy tests, poll taxes, and other such requirements that were instituted to restrict blacks from voting.

  Routine traffic stop ignites six-day race riot in Los Angeles, California.

  1968

  Martin Luther King, Jr., is shot in Memphis, Tennessee, sparking riots in over sixty cities. James Earl Ray is convicted of his murder.

  Robert F. Kennedy is assassinated in Los Angeles, California, by Sirhan Sirhan.

  1969

  Black Panther Party deputy chairman, Fred Hampton, is assassinated as he lies in bed by Chicago Police, FBI, and a tactical unit of the Illinois state attorney’s office.

  1992

  Race riots erupt in south-central Los Angeles after a jury acquits four police officers for the videotaped beating of Rodney King.

  1994

  Thirty years after assassinating Medgar Evers, Byron De La Beckwith is convicted for murder at a third trial.

  1998

  James Byrd, Jr., is murdered by three white supremacists in Jasper, Texas, who drag him behind a pickup truck.

  2001

  Racial tensions ignited by fifteenth shooting death of a young black man by police in six years results in riots in Cincinnati, Ohio.

  2005

  Edgar Ray Killen is convicted of manslaughter forty-one years after the deaths of civil rights workers Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner.

  2007

  Six black students at Jena High School in Central Louisiana are arrested and charged with attempted murder after the beating of a white classmate.

  2008

  Barack Obama becomes first African American elected as president of the United States.

  2011

  White teenagers brutally beat, run over, and kill James Anderson in Jackson, Mississippi.

  2012

  Neighborhood watch volunteer shoots and kills unarmed teenager Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida.

  Bibliography

  The epigraph in “Humor Me” is taken from the poem “The Social Order,” by Andrew Hudgins, in The Glass Hammer.

  Carson, Clayborne. Civil Rights Chronicle: The African-American Struggle for Free
dom. Lincolnwood, Ill.: Legacy, 2003.

  Delaughter, Bobby. Never Too Late: A Prosecutor’s Story of Justice in the Medgar Evers Case. Scribner: New York, 2001.

  Evers, Myrlie. For Us, the Living. Jackson, Miss.: Banner Books, 1967.

  Gwin, Minrose. Remembering Medgar Evers: Writing the Long Civil Rights Movement. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2013.

  Hampton, Henry and Steve Fayer. Voices of Freedom: Oral History of the Civil Rights Movement from the 1950s through the 1980s. New York: Bantam Books, 1990.

  Hudgins, Andrew. The Glass Hammer. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1994.

  Massengill, Reed. Portrait of a Racist: The Real Life of Byron De La Beckwith. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1994.

  Mills, Kay. This Little Light of Mine: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2007.

  Nossiter, Adam. Of Long Memory: Mississippi and the Murder of Medgar Evers. Cambridge, Mass.: Da Capo Press, 1994.

  Sims, Patsy. The Klan, 2nd ed. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1996.