The Ghosts of Mississippi

by Maryanne Vollers

  Henry sat back on the bed and wondered what to do. He felt like the life had been punched out of him. His old friend, his buddy, Medgar.

  Henry made that speech in Houston, then flew to Washington. Since he had a copy of Medgar’s testimony with him, he testified before Congress for his friend. He let them know he was speaking for Medgar Evers, who could not be there. Then he flew back to Jackson to prepare to bury him.

  It was about three o’clock Wednesday morning when Charles Evers rode in from collecting cash from his tavern operations. He saw all the cars around his property, and he knew it was something bad. First he thought something had happened to his daughter, Pat. As always he had his gun in his hand as he got out of his car. You never want to let them get you first. That’s how he had lived so long.

  He stepped up on his porch and peered in the window. His living room was packed with people. They all stared as he walked in the door. Nobody could look him in the eye.

  “C’mon in Charles,” someone said.

  “What’s goin’ on?”

  “Your wife’s back there; go back there.”

  He saw Nan in the bedroom, and she said, “Come in, Charlie. Sit down.”

  “Is there something wrong with Pat?”

  “No. Medgar.”

  “What?”

  “They shot him.”

  Charles tried to make a picture of it in his mind, but he couldn’t.

  “Oh, well,” he said. “They can’t kill ’im. They just winged him.”

  “No, Charlie. He’s dead.”

  That was all he could remember. Somebody must have made reservations for him, must have gotten him out to the airport, because he came to his senses as his plane was landing in Jackson the next day. He looked out at the haze, and he knew where he was. A plan was forming in his head.

  Somebody picked him up and drove him to Guynes Street. He saw Myrlie walking around like a zombie. There were reporters and so many other people milling around the house.

  His anger was burning through now, like a hot sun. Charles Evers was preparing to kill every peckerwood in Mississippi. Just like the Mau Mau he and Medgar had talked about years ago. He could do it; he had money now. He’d hire people to help him, pay cooks to poison the food in white folks’ homes, grind up glass in their hamburgers. He was half crazy, plotting his revenge. They were going to pay for this.

  There was one thing he had to do first. He had to get over to the funeral home and take care of his brother’s body. He had been in the funeral business, after all. He knew what they did to bodies. So he went down to the basement at Collins Funeral Home on Farish Street, and he fixed Medgar up in his suit, got his hair looking good in that low English style they both always favored.

  Then Charles Evers walked across the street to Medgar’s office in the Masonic Temple and started throwing things into the hall. The secretaries and NAACP brass from New York watched him trash the place, just crazy with grief. One of them said, “Who’s going to take Medgar’s place?”

  Charles said, “Don’t look no further. I’m here. I’m taking his place.”

  They looked scared. He figured they knew he was thinking about killing white folks, and they knew what his business was in Chicago, but there was nothing they could do to stop him. How would it look in the press if Roy Wilkins was feuding with Medgar’s only living brother?

  Medgar and Charles had made a pact. If something happened to one, the other would take over. It was that simple. The best part of Charles had been torn away and lost. He would have to live for both of them now and search for Medgar inside himself.

  Roy Wilkins quickly agreed to appoint Charles Evers Mississippi’s new field secretary. Charles left the jukeboxes and the numbers and the businesses in Chicago behind him. He never went back.

  The death of Medgar Evers revived the Jackson Movement, if only temporarily. The morning after the murder thirteen ministers marched downtown. They were immediately arrested and released later that afternoon. Medgar, in his death, had accomplished what he couldn’t do in his life: he got those ministers on their feet.

  That morning the NAACP staffers, Salter, Dave Dennis, and hundreds of Tougaloo students drifted into the Masonic Temple, pulled in like filings to a magnet, looking for a purpose in their grief, looking for something to do with their anger. When they heard that the ministers had marched, they also took to the streets. Two hundred student demonstrators marched from the Masonic Temple. One hundred police met them head-on. With some skull cracking and shoving, 145 marchers, half of them under age seventeen, were arrested and hauled off to the fairgrounds stockade.

  The doctor gave Myrlie Evers a sedative, but she couldn’t sleep. When the sun came up, the police and the gawkers were still at her house. Then Charles flew in from Chicago, there were NAACP people around, somehow newsmen were in the house taking pictures, and she couldn’t figure out how to make them all leave.

  Myrlie tried to go out with a bucket to clean the blood off the carport. Someone hustled her back inside. She tried to be alone in her room, but friends would come in and sit with her to keep her from brooding.

  When Myrlie heard there was a meeting at the Pearl Street Baptist Church that night, an idea formed in her mind: she had to speak. It was the most important thing right then, and nobody could stop her.

  Myrlie Evers was wearing a green summer dress and white gloves when she walked into the church where the Reverend R. L. T. Smith was speaking, and he introduced her from the podium.

  It was the first speech she had made since her school days. She was surprised to hear her own voice so calm, like it was coming from somewhere else, disembodied — and she felt Medgar was there with her. She spoke softly at first.

  “I come to you tonight with a broken heart,” she said to the immensely quiet crowd. “I am left without my husband, and my children without a father, but I am left with the strong determination to try to take up where he left off. And I come to make a plea that all of you here and those who are not here will, by his death, be able to draw some of his strength, some of his courage, and some of his determination to finish this fight.

  “Nothing can bring Medgar back, but the cause can live on. . . . We cannot let his death be in vain.”

  Then Myrlie Evers walked past the hushed, weeping people in the church and into the waiting car and back to her lonely, empty room to begin the grieving that would never truly end. She had made the first step in a journey that would take her thirty years to finish.

  14

  Funeral

  News of Medgar Evers’s assassination was covered on television, in weekly magazines, on every wire service, and in every major newspaper. Evers became, in death, more famous than he had been in life.

  On its editorial page the day after the murder, the New York Times noted the grim irony of Evers’s assassination following Kennedy’s compelling nationwide address on America’s moral awakening, noting that “Mr. Evers’s martyrdom [has] advanced the prospect for strong Civil Rights legislation.”

  The Thursday morning Clarion-Ledger reported that “the most intensive manhunt in recent Jackson history” was under way to find the killer or killers of Medgar Evers.

  President John F. Kennedy issued a statement from the White House saying that he was “appalled by the barbarity of the act.” He and Mrs. Kennedy sent a personal note of condolence to the widow.

  The white leaders of Mississippi expressed suitably shocked sentiments: Governor Ross Barnett called the murder “a dastardly act.” Mayor Allen Thompson, who for some reason was taking time off from the municipal crisis at his vacation home in Destin, Florida, immediately returned to the city. “I am dreadfully shocked, humiliated and sick at heart that such a terrible tragedy should happen in our city,” he said.

  A total of $22,350 was by now being offered for information leading to the conviction of Evers’s killer, including a $10,000 reward from the NAACP and smaller ones such as $50 from District Attorney Bill Waller, $100 from Sheriff J. R. Gilfoy
, and, most ironically, $1,000 from the Hederman newspapers — the Clarion-Ledger and Jackson Daily News, which had done so much to deride Evers while he was alive. The reward offer in the Clarion-Ledger was accompanied by its own tepid, back-handed editorial. “The death of Medgar Evers is most regrettable,” it began, going on to denounce the “outside agitators” who had supposedly started all the trouble. “Continued demonstrations can lead only to more bloodshed,” the paper warned.

  As soon as he learned that Medgar Evers had been shot, Roy Wilkins summoned his NAACP troops to Jackson. Gloster Current canceled his plans and stayed in Mississippi. Ruby Hurley flew in from Atlanta. The Washington and New York staffs piled in to manage the crisis.

  One of the men Wilkins called to Jackson to help with the funeral was Vernon Jordan, who had quit the association only two months earlier. Jordan was heartsick, but he was not surprised that his friend was dead. When he got the call that Medgar had been shot down he couldn’t cry. He was just angry deep down inside himself, and it was not the emotion that brings tears. Evers knew he was going to die, the way a soldier knows.

  Jordan’s eyes were still dry when he and Roy Wilkins walked into the room at Collins Funeral Home on North Farish Street where Medgar’s body was laid out for viewing. Both men noticed that the funeral home had put a phony handkerchief in Evers’s blue suit pocket. It was a cardboard square with a cloth triangle glued to the top. Without a word they exchanged looks and agreed that this was not good enough for Medgar. Vernon Jordan watched as Roy Wilkins removed the cardboard square and placed his own handkerchief carefully in Medgar’s pocket.

  The NAACP staff took over the funeral arrangements. Medgar had told Myrlie that he wanted his funeral to be short, “no long eulogies,” and, typically, he didn’t want anything expensive. “When I’m gone, I’m gone, and I won’t know anything about it.”

  The NAACP had other plans. Myrlie fretted about the expense of a big funeral, but Ruby Hurley told her not to worry about it. Ruby was taking charge, managing the event. Clarie Harvey noticed with some resentment the way Ruby was pushing people out of the way, making it an NAACP show.

  Hurley even chose the clothes Myrlie and Reena were to wear to the funeral.

  When she walked into the Masonic Temple on Saturday morning, Myrlie Evers was wearing a simple black dress, a double strand of pearls, elbow-length gloves, and a beaded black toque, a style popular in New York that season. Four thousand people crammed into and around the simple, sand-colored temple. For three days temperatures had gone past one hundred degrees, and the hot, damp-flannel air settled around the mourners. It was an effort to breathe.

  The only sound was the stirring of a thousand paper fans and the murmuring of voices. There were flowers on the stage around the glossy casket draped with an American flag. Medgar Evers was dressed in the suit Myrlie had chosen for him. He wore a blue NAACP tie imprinted with the scales of justice, a white Masonic apron trimmed in blue, and an Elks emblem around his neck.

  Photographers flashed pictures. Reporters scribbled on notepads. Myrlie knew this was not what Medgar had wanted. But by now the funeral was a runaway train; she could not apply the brakes if she wanted to. Her life, her future, and her children’s future were attached, maybe forever, to these people, this organization that had stolen her husband while he had lived and claimed him now, more than ever, in death. She took her seat in the front row of folding chairs, with Charles on one side and Darrell on the other, and stared at the open coffin.

  The temple was packed with prominent blacks and a few white officials: Bayard Rustin, Ralph Bunche, Dick Gregory, James Meredith, and John Doar.

  Doar and the usual crew from the Justice Department had been standing by in Tuscaloosa when Governor George Wallace had stood in front of the Alabama campus gate to protest the entry of two black students. Doar had rushed back to Jackson when he heard that Evers had been shot. Then he had been immediately diverted to another crisis just north of Greenwood, in the town of Winona. Fannie Lou Hamer, Lawrence Guyot, and two other SNCC workers had been unlawfully arrested and brutally beaten in the Winona jail in the days before Evers was killed. Doar had spent much of that week preparing lawsuits against the Winona police.

  Now he was here to pay his respects to his friend. John Doar did not “fraternize” with the government’s clients, and he would not let his lawyers get too close to people in the movement. It wasn’t proper. But Doar had worked so hard and so long with Medgar Evers that he couldn’t call him anything but his friend. Doar sat quietly and pondered what might have been done.

  Martin Luther King, Jr., sat up front in the sweltering room. He had not been invited to speak, and he made no statements to the press.

  An organist played Fox’s “Requiem.” A black-robed choir sang gospel songs. And the speeches began.

  Dr. T. R. M. Howard, who had come down from Chicago, spoke about Medgar’s days in Mound Bayou, how he had organized the state’s “first non-violent protest,” the 1952 bumper sticker campaign to boycott gas stations that had no rest rooms for Negroes. Medgar’s old mentor was always ahead of his time, and even as the movement’s leading Gandhian pacifist sat in the audience, Howard’s words foreshadowed the era of militancy this first of many assassinations would bring down on the nation: “For over a hundred years, now, we have been turning first one cheek, then the other cheek,” Howard bellowed in anger. “Our neck has gotten tired of turning now!” The crowd roared its approval.

  The speeches, the gospel music, and the eulogies went on for an hour and a half. Roy Wilkins delivered the final words: If Medgar Evers “could live in Mississippi and not hate, so shall we,” he said. “Medgar Evers was a symbol of our victory and of their defeat. The bullet that tore away his life four days ago, tore away at the system and helped to signal its end.”

  Darrell, who was ten years old, sat quietly through the long ordeal, his face a mask of grief. By the end of the ceremony, the little boy who hid his tears at home tucked his chin and sobbed.

  As the crowd filed out and the pallbearers lifted Medgar’s casket, Myrlie slumped against Charles. “Don’t break down now,” he murmured, and held her up until she took her place, alone, behind the white hearse as it slowly rolled down Lynch Street.

  The rest of the mourners followed behind, three and four abreast, walking in silence. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Roy Wilkins, in a tense public display of unity, walked side by side as the line stretched along the mile-and-a-half route to Farish Street.

  Earlier that week the Jackson City Council had issued a permit allowing a silent march from the Masonic Temple to the Collins Funeral Home on North Farish Street after the funeral services. It was a classic Thompson push-and-pull gesture. Yes, you can walk, but you cannot run. Or talk or sing or carry placards.

  When the procession crossed the railroad tracks and skirted the white part of town, the police lining the route thickened. Row after row of blue-helmeted riot police stood at the corner of Farish and Capitol Streets, their backs to the granite dome of the statehouse, their batons at the ready across their chests.

  Myrlie was alone in her grief, her mind gone somewhere else, when Aaron Henry came up next to her and said, “Look behind you, Myrlie.” She saw them then, thousands of people, young people walking through Jackson, and she realized that Medgar had taken them past their fear. She wished Medgar could see them now.

  Aurelia Young opened her house on Pearl Street, a few blocks west of Farish, to the NAACP representatives and their guests. They were sitting on the floors, on the beds, on every available space in the great living room, eating a buffet lunch, when the phone rang. It was for John Doar, someone saying there was a riot breaking out on Farish Street. Jack Young and Doar jumped in a car and headed back to the funeral home.

  It had started with a song. The crowd stood outside the Collins Funeral Home, some finding shelter under sidewalk awnings, most just standing in the searing sunlight, grief-stricken and helpless and angry.

  Suddenly the th
in soprano voice of a young girl broke the quiet vigil. “Ohhhh, freedom . ..”

  A hole opened in the crowd, and the girl stepped into it, her voice gaining strength. “Ohhhh, freedom . . .”

  A few voices joined hers.

  “Before I’ll be a slave, I’ll be buried in my grave. . ..”

  Then they were all singing:

  No more killing,

  No more killing, over me, over me . . .

  The cops were starting to notice, and the dogs grew restless at the edge of Farish Street. After a pause someone picked up another song, more up-tempo, and everyone was singing and clapping.

  This little light of mine,

  I’m gonna let it shine . . .

  Someone started pointing at the tall buildings and the domed statehouse, and the lyrics changed. “All over Capitol Street, I’m gonna let it shine . .

  The crowd turned south and started moving. Hundreds more were pouring in from the side streets and porches along Farish, shouting “We want the killer,” moving fast now, running. Running in front of them were the Jackson police, retreating to Capitol Street and the riot squads. It was as far as the crowd would get. Hundreds of police, some with weapons drawn and dogs straining at the leash, advanced on them slowly, deliberately driving them back from the white business district.

  The news footage from that day shows the riot squad in a human chain from sidewalk to sidewalk. At the edge of the crowd cops rough people up, using their batons. The crowd pulls back, leaving a wide gap between them and the riot police, backed up by a fire department pumper truck with a hose at the ready and some itchy-fingered county deputies who are starting to look real nervous.

  John Salter and Ed King watched the rush to Capitol Street and thought one thing: we’ve got to get Martin Luther King back here to lead this. They ran into a building and up a flight of stairs, desperately searching for a telephone to call the airport and stop King from leaving. They found an open office but no phone. As they paused to look out the window at the crowd, some cops spotted them, and within minutes police had charged into the building, grabbed the two, and thrown them into a paddy wagon. A black man with a bleeding head wound and a black woman with a torn dress were thrown in after them. They were taken to the stockade.