The Ghosts of Mississippi

by Maryanne Vollers

  L. P. Yerger set up a law practice and married well, to Susan Fisher Southworth, a Delta socialite from a family of planters. The Yerger family had cotton land as well, a 10,000-acre plantation called Glen Oak on the Tallahatchie River.

  The Colonel and his wife had four children, the youngest of whom was a high-strung, attractive girl named Susie Southworth Yerger, Beckwith’s mother. There are more stories than facts available about “Miss Susie,” as she was called all her life. Some say she was among the most popular debutantes in the Delta. Others say she had mental problems. Certainly Miss Susie was overshadowed by her flamboyant first cousin Mary Craig Kimbrough, who married the socialist author Upton Sinclair. Mary Craig later wrote a book about her life in Greenwood, appropriately titled Southern Belle. It captures perfectly the idealized life of the Southworths and Kimbroughs.

  “I was born in the midst of vast cotton plantations,” she wrote. The South of her childhood was, she said, “an enchanted land.” She described her family as “these proud white people [who] thought they were the lords of creation, and no ‘damyankees’ could make them change their minds or their ways. Pleasure was their chief concern, and they sought it and had it, just as their parents had done in the old days.”

  In fact this enchanted land was a child’s fantasy; the Delta was nobody’s paradise. It was a dull, flat, utilitarian landscape that flooded or parched, sweltered or froze depending on the time of year. It was a place of pestilence and isolation — so bad that few stately homes were actually built in the alluvial flatlands, but instead were set in the hills of Carrollton or Vicksburg, or somewhere high up in the breezes and out of the typhoid.

  The Yergers and Kimbroughs were exceptional. Delta folk to their bones, they built their big houses in Greenwood. They saw no reason to look any farther than Memphis, the shopping capital of the Delta. They lived chasing the myth of the Old South, and they passed the fantasy down through generations.

  No one knows precisely why Miss Susie ventured to Colusa, California, to visit her great-aunt Sallie Green. She may have simply needed a change of scenery. Certainly she needed a husband, since she was still a spinster at twenty-five.

  Aunt Sallie found a match for Susie in Colusa: Byron De La Beckwith, the town’s twenty-nine-year-old bachelor postmaster. The couple were married back in Greenwood in 1912. Her father, the Colonel, wore his Confederate uniform, and people remarked at the time at the sea of gray coats at the wedding reception, as the aging veterans paraded their colors.

  A picture of Miss Susie taken that year shows a handsome but wan woman with long, thick chestnut hair twisted up in the fashion of the day. Her chin is strong, her nose straight, but there is an air of melancholy about her that could have been the photographer’s sad music or something of her own.

  A picture of Beckwith shows a compact, square-jawed, black-haired man. His lips are thin and pursed, the eyes not friendly, as he poses in his stiff California National Guard uniform.

  The young couple settled in Colusa and soon moved into a brand- new Craftsman-style bungalow.

  For a native of Mississippi, Colusa would not have seemed terribly foreign. In fact it was like a little Delta town that had died and gone to heaven. It was a conservative community with broad, tree-lined streets, churches, neatly tended houses, and serious citizens of good pioneer stock. It was laid out in a rich, flat valley along the volatile Sacramento River, which was held back by a familiar barrier of earthen levees.

  After eight years of marriage, Susie and Byron De La Beckwith finally produced a child. He was born in the nearest hospital, in Sacramento, on November 9, 1920. The baby was named Byron De La Beckwith, Jr., although years later he would refer to himself as Beckwith the Sixth.

  By now Beckwith, Sr., had inherited a small fortune from his late father’s real estate ventures. He acquired a title and abstract company in Colusa and bought himself a 700-acre farm on the east bank of the Sacramento River, where he planted prune trees. Outwardly he seemed like a solid businessman. But Beckwith was a heavy drinker, and, apparently, a philanderer and a gambler. Before long all of his properties were heavily mortgaged.

  Beckwith, Jr., would later say that his childhood in Colusa was pleasant enough “to a point.” Beckwith’s mother, increasingly unable to cope with her life, had a startling habit of locking her son in the hall closet. He claims it never scared him. All he had to do was calm down and smile, and the door would open. Others say the hyperactive child was sometimes locked in his nursery for hours.

  The father was an avid hunter who collected hundreds of rifles, knives, pistols, and swords of all descriptions. He sometimes took the family to a rustic, shotgun-style cabin high in the mountains at Berry Camp, where he fished and hunted deer. One early photograph of “Little Delay,” as he was called, taken when he was a toddler, shows him with curly, golden baby locks down to his shoulders, wearing a little playsuit and holding a small revolver in his pudgy fist. Another picture reveals a slightly older boy, his hair trimmed in what might be his first haircut, looking serious and leaning possessively against a bolt-action rifle that is taller than he. In the foreground is the body of a buck his father had shot.

  Beckwith has another enduring memory from his California childhood. He remembers the white robes and tall caps of the Ku Klux Klansmen when they walked through town. The twenties were the heyday of Klandom in America. There were two million known members. In 1925 forty thousand hooded marchers converged on Washington, D.C. The Klan vote elected at least two U.S. senators and a raft of governors, including the governor of California.

  The main enemies then were Jews and Catholics, not to mention the “Yellow Plague” in the West — the Chinese, Filipinos, and Japanese, and every other sort of enterprising immigrant.

  Beckwith recalls seeing the Klansmen and describes the sensual impact that moment had on him. He wrote in one letter, “In the drugstore soda fountains — cafes, etc. in California in the 20’s, robed Klansmen with tall dunce caps (seemingly made of a good grade of white poster board), neat and clean — snow white — would take turns in walking through the towns just to be seen and were then as prominent as the bell-ringers, volunteers who used to drum up money for the Salvation Army! And now that too is fading.”

  In August 1926 Beckwith’s father died of pneumonia. His death certificate mentioned “contributory alcoholism.” He was forty-two years old. His son was not quite six.

  Unfortunately for all concerned, Susie Yerger Beckwith was now alone with her young son and practically destitute. The estate, including the prune orchard, was sold for fifty-seven thousand dollars, all of which went to pay debts. Her family dispatched a sober, responsible nephew, Yerger Moorehead — who was also a lawyer — to bring Susie and the boy back to Mississippi.

  The Yergers lived in a big, gabled, wood-frame house on George Street in Greenwood. It was a fine, tree-lined street with large, stately homes and lots of children running on the sidewalks.

  In 1926 both the Colonel and his wife were alive. Miss Susie’s forty-two-year-old bachelor brother, Will, still lived at home. There were plenty of people to occupy “Little Delay” and places to explore. Beckwith especially liked the attic, where guns and books were stored. An old muzzleloader interested him more than the books.

  Beckwith was a rambunctious boy, and he remembers his childhood as happy and indulged. “I am an only child and a spoiled child,” he would later write, explaining why he demanded to have things exactly his way.

  There was a lot to learn about southern manners, and Delay learned it the hard way. Once an uncle whipped his behind for responding to a request with “Okay,” instead of the required “Yes, sir.”

  Delay was astonished by how many black faces he saw in Mississippi. He had known only one Negro before in his life, and that was Aunt Sallie’s housemaid. The boy was constantly talking and asking questions, and one night at dinner he asked his cousin Yerger Moorehead what they were and where they all came from.

  Yerger smirked and to
ld him that that’s what happens to smart-aleck white boys from out west who ask too many questions: they get rolled in gumbo mud and hung on the fence to dry. When they come down, they’ve turned into black pickaninnies. The six-year-old sat wide-eyed and believing, as six-year-olds will, and stopped asking questions for a while.

  Beckwith had disliked Yerger Moorehead from the outset. He thought he was strict and dull and sarcastic, but he was more or less safe from the man as long as his mother was around or he was out of sight.

  His eccentric uncle. Will, took day-to-day responsibility for the boy. Little Delay spent summer days out at the Glen Oak plantation, the large family-owned cotton farm that Will managed.

  There Will was known to the servants and farmhands as “Master.” They called Delay “Little Cap’n.” Beckwith would later recall these plantation days as an ideal arrangement. He felt the races were happy in their separation, kind after kind, as it says in the Bible. The “nigras” expected the white man to care for them and to be courteous and soft-spoken. The white man expected loyalty and subservience. The white man, he came to believe, was put on earth “to rule over the dusky races,” and this was how it was done.

  Delay joined the Boy Scouts and spent his idle days with his friends in the swamps killing birds and garfish and turtles and frogs with their .22 rifles. A boy in the Delta had to know how to shoot.

  The Colonel died in 1928, and his wife followed him four years later. Neighbors on George Street remember the peculiar, old-fashioned mourning Miss Susie put herself through. For months she would wear only black, then only white, and then only lavender.

  The Depression cut hard into the Delta way of life. A lot of big farms went broke, and the banks in Greenwood closed one after the next. Fortunes were halved and halved again, and the great tracts of cotton land that the Yergers and the Southworths controlled dwindled.

  Still, depending on the price of cotton and the yield of Glen Oak, Beckwith’s family would sometimes have enough money to journey en masse to the health spas at Battle Creek, Michigan, or nearby Allison Wells. Going to spas was a fashion of the time, but there must have been more of an attraction for Miss Susie. She was occasionally hospitalized — some say for mental disorders — while a cancer slowly spread through her body.

  Delay noticed his mother was spending more and more time in her room, skipping family meals. She assured him she was getting better, just resting. He would often sit with her in the evenings, watching as she brushed her long brown hair, and she would tell him stories about his father and their life in California.

  Through those hours with his mother, and through the letters his father had written to Will, which Delay was later given, he learned that his father had some strong ideas on race and culture. The Chinese, he wrote, were diligent people, but unwelcome in America “because their pagan practices and racial characteristics can not fit into Caucasian culture nor civilization.”

  Beckwith has said that after his father, Uncle Will was the main male influence in his life. He would spend endless hours in the creaking old house, listening to stories about the War Between the States, also known in these parts as the War of Northern Aggression.

  The Greenwood relatives, the Yergers and the Southworths and Morgans and Kimbroughs, were all Confederate patriots of the first order. Their exploits were drummed into young Beckwith, as they were drummed into so many white boys of the South, boys born in defeat but still talking about the glory of the lost cause.

  The stories gained new luster with each passing year. The women devoted themselves to keeping the faith alive. Beckwith’s grandmother, Susie Fisher Southworth Yerger, helped create a monument to the fallen Confederate heroes in front of the Greenwood courthouse. She was the model for one of the stone figures: a brave rebel woman cradling a fallen soldier.

  Beckwith’s aunt, Mrs. Allan McCaskill Kimbrough (born Mary Hunter Southworth, and Mary Craig’s mother), was, along with his maternal grandmother, a friend of Varina Davis, wife of the Confederate president. Mrs. Kimbrough’s crowning achievement was to restore Beauvoir, the Jefferson Davis house on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, and turn it into a monument and a home for Confederate veterans. To this end she gave a rousing speech before the state legislature in 1917, echoing the sentiments that were heard, would be heard, at the house on George Street in Greenwood for many years. She said to them: “The old South has not forgotten, and the young South will ever remember the great lessons of heroic faithfulness which is its final inheritance. . . . None in the history of the world shows greater courage nor fidelity to a principle than does the conduct of the Confederate men and women who are our ancestors. Theirs was called the defeated cause. It has never been defeated and stands triumphant today before the world.”

  Considering the ruins of the post-war South, it is hard to imagine a greater self-delusion, but there it was.

  Delay Beckwith was at a Boy Scout meeting when his mother died in her bed upstairs in the big house on George Street. Uncle Will broke the news, and told Delay to change into some good clothes to greet the mourners. Within hours of his mother’s death, the twelve-year-old was mingling with a houseful of visitors, in the old southern way.

  To Beckwith’s horror and dismay, Yerger Moorehead was made his legal guardian. Not only was he an orphan, but his boring, disciplinarian cousin now controlled his money. Their mutual animosity grew to the point where, as Beckwith later wrote, “his face generally revealed gloom at my approaches and satisfaction at my departures.”

  Children were wary of the rambling house he lived in with his peculiar bachelor uncle and cousins. One neighbor remembers hearing Beckwith, as a small boy, tell her mother how lonely it was living in that house with all those men.

  One of them, an older cousin named Hunter Holmes Southworth. apparently did nothing for a living. He would often dress up in full hunting livery and, with a servant appropriately attired, take his old Ford out for country jaunts.

  Uncle Will grew increasingly odd. It seems he was a capable manager of the Glen Oak plantation while he was young. As he aged, that streak of eccentricity that ran through the family surfaced in him. He was always a cheerful man, a little scary to the neighborhood children on George Street, but he would win them over with little gifts he pulled from his pockets. As he got older, his behavior grew more bizarre, and he could be seen walking through town collecting scraps of wood and metal. Junk piled up in the yard of the house — people remember this as far back as the early fifties. To neighborhood children, it was always a spooky, haunted house.

  Eventually Will became forgetful. He would buy fish for supper, or maybe catch some, and then stuff them in a bureau drawer for safekeeping, and forget them for a few days or weeks. He was a generous, addled soul who contributed to Democratic causes and politicians, neighbors in need, whatever took his fancy. Years later some family members had him committed to an institution to stop his squandering of family funds. Delay, who never thought there was anything terribly wrong with Will, had to bail him out.

  In his freshman year of high school Beckwith was shipped off to the Webb School in Bell Buckle, Tennessee. Beckwith liked the male camaraderie of boarding school, but he chafed under the discipline and academic requirements: Latin, physics, four years of English and history. He lasted one year, then transferred to the infinitely more fun and less demanding Columbia Military Academy in southern Mississippi. There he got to wear a red-caped overcoat over his miniature Confederate uniform. In 1938 he dropped out of the military academy and returned to Greenwood to finish his education in public high school.

  As a teenager Beckwith wasn’t much of a lady’s man. He wasn’t exactly ugly — “just so-so,” one of his friends recalls. But he wasn’t a dater, more interested in men’s activities, like hunting and fishing. He was always attached to a gun of some kind. He boasted to his friends that his father had been a “military man” and that he had owned a big gun collection in California.

  One of his schoolmates remembers he was popular
among the girls who couldn’t get a date. If a girl’s date fell through, she could always call on Delay. He was the extra man, always a gentleman and very funny. A chum more than a boyfriend. There were dances every weekend at the country club, and Delay was often there with a girl who considered him a safe choice — better than going alone.

  Another classmate — and few want their names mentioned — remembers Delay as “a screwball,” blazingly eccentric even in a town where genteel eccentricity was borne with honor and not discussed in public, like a string of bad paper debts. He would do unusual things, like circulate a petition to demand that all the high school dances be formal balls and to mandate the wearing of tuxedos. This was in the depth of the Depression.

  He finally graduated when he was twenty years old. This is his prediction in the “Class Prophecy” pages of his high school annual: “De La Beckwith has turned reformer and missionary in the South Sea Islands.”

  It is unclear whether this was meant to be ironic. It turned out to be partly right. He ended up in the South Seas, although his mission was not yet religious.

  In the fall of 1940 Beckwith enrolled at Mississippi State College in Starkville. His grades were so bad that he dropped out after midterm and returned to Greenwood. He went to work in a steam laundry and later at the nearby Pepsi-Cola bottling plant, where he did well enough to be made a salesman. It was not an easy thing, but he managed to break this new beverage into the Delta marketplace, where Coca-Cola and RC were nearly sacred traditions. Apparently Beckwith found his calling as a salesman. By all accounts he was not interested in much except learning the trade, enjoying his Scotch and soda, and generally having a good time.

  But before he could decide whether to return to college or make his career in sales, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. There was never a question that Beckwith would sign up, like every able-bodied Mississippi boy was expected to do. In January 1942 Beckwith joined the Marines. He was twenty-one years old, five foot eight, and not quite 140 pounds.