Roots of Murder

by R. Jean Reid

  When she got there, Jacko suggested he begin work on Marcus’s archives/stack of dusty old boxes. Nell gave the okay, but told him to start the next morning. Knowing Jacko, he had the energy and interest to be up all night, and Marcus had a debate this evening. Carrie left a message with Pam that she was going to the debate, so she was taking time off now. That sounded reasonable to Nell; she was content to have gotten the story she needed out of the young woman.

  Jacko went back to the property records; he was too wired to sit around and rest on putting the paper to press. Nell waved him off with an admonition not to stay all night. She let everyone else out early. They would have enough to do tomorrow.

  After supper, she commandeered the TV remote to watch the mayoral debate. Lizzie made noises about something she really, really wanted to watch, even pushing by pointing out they wouldn’t have this problem if she had a TV in her room.

  Nell suggested she save her allowance and buy one. “It’ll only take about six months” ended the discussion. Lizzie grabbed the racy novel and flounced off to her room.

  In the greater scheme of things, the issue of who was going to be mayor of Pelican Bay wasn’t a major newsmaker. That the debate was being held on a local access cable station was evidence of this.

  All four official candidates were there, with Aaron Dupree and Hubert Pickings in the center. Sensibly, Everett Evens was to the far side of Pickings, and Marcus Fletcher was on the other side, so they were as separated as they could be. Nell considered them arranged from sensible to nutcake.

  The debate started off with the usual drone of what each would do if elected. Nell knew she was somewhat biased, but she thought both Marcus and Aaron made a lot of sense, having reasonable yet progressive goals. They both emphasized education, Aaron in the direction of better schools all around and Marcus focusing on bringing the children of poverty more into the mainstream. Hubert, for his part, had to claim that everything was perfect and he would keep it that way. Everett nattered away on the need to bring back the old days. The moderator managed to cut him off just as he was getting wound up on the importance of heritage; in his case, decoded to mean the Confederate flag and all it stood for.

  There were three reporters, all from local TV stations, Nell noted, feeling the slight for all her print colleagues, with a professor from the local college moderating. All, save for Marcus, were white and male.

  The first question was directed to all the candidates and was about their backgrounds. The men dutifully listed their educations, experience, and whatever else they thought might be impressive. Nell learned that Everett was a cousin, several times removed on his mother’s side, to P.G.T. Beauregard, a Confederate general, whose name still inspired reverence among the hardcore “heritage” folks.

  Hubert Pickings, jumping into the spirit of things, managed to segue from how important heritage was to wondering why “black folks just can’t get beyond slavery.” Nell cursed the TV questioners for not asking the obvious follow-up: why did one group of people have to totally divest themselves of that heritage—slavery, lynchings, and Jim Crow—but it was important for another group to hold on to the whitewashed side of that heritage?

  Marcus managed to get in that slavery had nothing to do with the roads not being fixed in the black part of town.

  Everett took advantage of a pause to get back on his heritage bandwagon. The moderator either was far too polite for his job or didn’t have the skills to shut up a motor-mouth like Everett.

  Nell took a bathroom break and came back in time to hear one of the TV reporters—the cutest one, she noted—ask, “Mr. Mayor, what explanation do you have for the sudden change in the value of the land you donated for a state park in 1985 from $22,000 to $120,000 in just over a year, and just in time to be the value at the time of the donation?”

  Hubert Pickings looked like a man who needed twenty-four hours and five advisers to have a prayer of answering. His first try was, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  The camera cut back to the reporter and Nell was gratified to notice Carrie standing behind him. From his looks, she didn’t think flirting had been a terrible hardship. “Your family somehow acquired the property in the early sixties for $3,000 even though it was appraised at over $30,000. For almost the next twenty years it was appraised at around $20,000, then suddenly jumped significantly just before you donated it to the state park.” Hubert, foolishly, still didn’t answer, so the reporter continued. “You know, the place where the skeletons of those civil rights workers were found.”

  “Damn you, Nell McGraw,” Hubert sputtered before thinking better of it. “You’re repeating rumors and lies. I won’t dignify that with an answer.”

  “It’s public record,” Marcus said quietly, his voice filling the silence.

  “There are public records and there are public records,” Hubert Pickings fumed nonsensically. Luckily for the audience and the spectacle, Hubert didn’t have enough sense to realize that silence, as inadequate as it was, was still his best defense. He turned to Aaron. “This is your doing. Think you can win this election by repeating all these ugly things about me and my family, when your dad was out there doing worse than we ever did. At least my family never joined the Klan.”

  “Don’t think you can tell lies about me to cover up the truth about your background,” Aaron shot back.

  “Damn you, Aaron Dupree! We weren’t doing anything everyone else wasn’t doing back then!” Hubert Pickings’ face, despite the makeup he’d put on, was turning red and sweaty.

  Nell would bet money that only powerful white people were doing it, but that might have qualified for “everyone” in the world of men like Hubert Pickings.

  “Yeah, we got the land cheap,” Hubert blustered out. “But so did a lot of people. Back then—”

  Suddenly a voice out of camera range shouted, “Shut up, Hubert!” Nell thought she recognized the cold authority of Festus Higgins, but the second camera, whipping around the room, couldn’t catch him.

  From there the debate devolved into pandemonium. Hubert shouted, “I don’t have to take this shit!”—the curse word, live on camera, no less—and stalked off.

  Everett grabbed both his microphone and Hubert’s abandoned one and launched into his “retribution for the sins of the world is gonna get you” speech, and he was hurling fire and brimstone at everyone from Eleanor Roosevelt to Liberace to Hillary Clinton.

  The moderator, with just one microphone, was ineffectual at out-shouting Everett. Half of the room left to follow Pickings and see what else they might capture on camera. Someone finally had the bright idea to turn off the sound system to shut up Everett, but that took away the power from all the microphones. Aaron Dupree shrugged his shoulders and left the stage. As he left, the lights from the camera that illuminated the stage were turned off and Nell glimpsed Marcus’s shadow making its way offstage before the program abruptly changed to a bad video of a high school track meet.

  Nell clicked the TV off. She wished she’d recorded the debate. It was such a spectacular blow-up. She had to content herself with the part she’d played in the drama: her place in history—at least, the history of this small town—documented when Mayor Hubert Pickings cursed her on camera.

  eighteen

  When she got to the office, still school-morning early, Nell didn’t take the phones off the answering machine. The blinking light told her they were already being called. They could wait until nine a.m., office hours, and more importantly when reinforcements would arrive.

  As was her custom, Nell spread the newly released paper across her desk. On the top of the front page, in one of the boldest types they had ever used, was the headline “Lost Bodies of Civil Rights Workers Found.” Below the headline were their pictures. Below that was the story, bylined by Marcus Fletcher.

  Fifty years ago, Sheriff Bo Tremble of Tchula County told those who asked that civil rights
workers Ella Carr, Dora Ellischwartz, and Michael Walker had boarded a bus and gone home. In a newspaper report from the time, Sheriff Tremble was quoted as saying, “Witnesses saw them at the bus station hightailing it out of here, on their way back home. There is no cause for trouble or alarm. They’re healthy enough to get on a bus; if anything happens to them, it happened back in Yankee land.” Bones found in the woods of Iberville State Park tell a different story: that the former Sheriff Tremble was at best mistaken on his claim the three safely left the area. At the time, members of the black community were suspicious, as the three had packed nothing and left everything, save for the clothes they were wearing, in the spare rooms of Rufus Jackson’s and Hattie Jacob’s farms where they were staying.

  In a lucky break for investigators, Dora Ellischwartz’s sister married a dentist, and he kept her dental records for all these years. The records proved a match for the skull believed to be hers, establishing that she, at least, never got on a bus leaving Tchula County. The other two skeletons correspond to the known physical characteristics of her two compatriots, making it likely they are the remains of Ella Carr and Michael Walker.

  Carr, Ellischwartz, and Walker had all come to Mississippi to help with voter registration at a time when only five percent of blacks in the state could vote. Carr, nineteen, was a sophomore at Jackson State and had taken the semester off to contribute to the effort. Ellischwartz, twenty-three, had completed two years at Boston College and was taking time off to travel. Walker, twenty-two, was a recent graduate of Columbia University in New York City and had delayed beginning law school for a year.

  As Nell again read the article, she thought Marcus had done a good job of hunting down the added details. She had gotten most of the information on Dora Ellischwartz, but it was his work that had unearthed the additional information on their short lives. And he had uncovered the pictures; young faces haunted with promises never kept. With Gwen Kennedy the only relative contacted, they had debated about revealing the names, but as Ina Claire pointed out, “After fifty years, no one can expect them to come walking through the door only to find out they won’t via the newspaper.” Nell was hoping that by revealing the names, others who knew them would come forward. Perhaps another sister or brother who cared enough to bury the bones.

  Her story ran next to his. To keep things equal, she had also given herself a byline.

  Ellen Cohen, professor of forensic anthropology at Louisiana State University, oversaw the removal of the remains of three skeletons from Iberville State Park. As Cohen said, “They didn’t die an easy death.” One of the victims’ skulls had a bullet hole in it, with a twenty-two slug still in the brain case; another had a fractured hyoid bone, considered a classic sign of strangulation. One skeleton had both legs broken, another had a crushed pelvis; both injuries were made close to the time of death. According to Cohen, forensic anthropologists can determine whether injuries were pre-mortem or post-mortem by the condition of the bone. Rusted chains were found on one of the bodies, making it likely he was in chains when he was transported into the woods.

  District Attorney Buddy Guy, in a press conference held yesterday morning, used dental records to identify one of the sets of remains as Dora Ellischwartz, a twenty-three-year-old woman from Boston. He stated that his office, as well as Sheriff Clureman Hickson, would be investigating the deaths as suspicious.

  The bones were found a little over a week ago by a hiker. Lightning had struck a tree that had grown over the graves, felling the tree and, in the process, unearthing the long-hidden bodies. From the condition of the remains and the age of the tree, as well as from coins found at the grave site, experts were able to guess that the victims had died around fifty years ago. Sheriff Clureman Hickson brought in forensic specialists from LSU, in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, to aid his office with investigating the site.

  Inquiries into possible missing persons from that period turned up little until one longtime civil rights activist remembered three young workers who had supposedly left on a bus, only to never be heard from again. The unusual name of one of the victims, Ellischwartz, led investigators to her sister and the dental records. DA Buddy Guy refused to speculate on the identity of the two other sets of remains, but anonymous sources admit that in all likelihood they are those of Ella Carr and Michael Walker.

  Jacko and Carrie both got below the fold, but bylined. “Mayoral Election Heats Up” was Carrie’s headline.

  Polls from the campaign of current Mayor Hubert Pickings show him with a slim lead over his main challenger, Aaron Dupree. Mr. Dupree’s pollsters find a similar result, but with the slight lead in his favor. With both candidates around one percentage point of each other, the results of the upcoming election are impossible to call.

  Mayor Pickings is running on his signature slogan of “You’ve got a friend in City Hall.” In a recent campaign speech, he said, “The last four years have been good to Pelican Bay, and they’ve been the four years I’ve been mayor. Four more years of me is four more years of good for Pelican Bay.”

  When asked about specific policy initiative, Mayor Pickings replied, “Why change what ain’t broke? It’s been four good years.”

  Aaron Dupree, when asked his reasons for running for mayor, replied, “This town is home to me. I grew up here, my family is all here. Like my father, I don’t want ‘good’ when we can have better, or even better when we can have best. If elected, one of my main focuses will be education. I know it’s a cliché, but it’s true; our young people are our future. I’ll lobby the school board pretty hard to get community service as one of the requirements for graduating from high school. It’s important that our young people develop a sense of ownership and pride in our community. Another thing I’ll do is bring city hall into the computer age. Why don’t we have a good website? Why not let people apply for permits and do business with the city online? Why do we waste people’s time by making them come to us for every little thing? I’ve developed six-week, six-month, one-year, and four-year goals for what I’d like to accomplish. Education and the Internet are just a few of the things I’d like to work on. To prove I practice what I preach, my plans are available online, or at my campaign headquarters.”

  When asked about the recent discovery of bones in Iberville State Park, Mr. Dupree’s comment was, “While it is a sad thing for any human to have died young, we may never know who they are or what happened to them.”

  In answer to the same question, Mayor Pickings said, “I haven’t seen the bones yet and I can’t help but wonder if it’s not some stupid plot to mess with this election.”

  Mayor Pickings was also asked about the circumstances surrounding his family’s acquisition of the property that they later donated for the state park. According to property records, the mayor’s father bought the land for $3,000 even though it had been appraised for over $30,000 the year before. Subsequently the value of the property was pegged at around $20,000 until just before it was donated, at which time the value shot up to $120,000. When these figures were brought to the attention of the mayor, his response was, “I don’t know nothing about that. There’s always lies around election time. You might ask Aaron Dupree why he’s telling all these lies about me.”

  Asked to comment on Mayor Pickings’ allegations of spreading lies, Mr. Dupree commented, “I have done no research into Mayor Pickings’ background and I don’t care to run that kind of campaign. I assume that my opponent is a fair and honest man.”

  Two other candidates are also running in this election. E. Everett Evens is campaigning on a promise to “bring things back the way they used to be, when we were a God-fearing nation, the Constitution was based on the Bible, and the homosexual agenda was stoning those sinners.”

  Also on the ballot is Marcus Fletcher, a longtime civil rights activist and retired teacher. When asked for his reasons for running, Mr. Fletcher replied, “Elections are a time of public discourse and my purpose here is to bring
out the issues still facing the less fortunate members of Pelican Bay. It is easy to forget that children go hungry even here, and not just hungry for food, but also hungry for a good education, for a voice and a feeling of belonging to the American Dream. The words were written over two hundred years ago, but they still say it best: we are all created equal, and we all have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. We just need to get there.”

  Voting takes place on Tuesday, November 5th. All candidates agree on the importance of voting.

  “Land Dealings Raise Questions” headlined Jacko’s article.

  Allegations have recently surfaced about irregular land deals dating from the late 1950s into the mid 1960s. According to sources still alive who remember the era, approximately 20 percent of the property owned by black citizens of Tchula County was transferred into white hands using tactics ranging from high-interest loans to property tax manipulations. A farm owned by Mr. Elbert Woodling was reappraised, raising its value from of $21,200 to $32,000 in one year. He was unable to meet the higher property tax in a timely enough manner and was forced to sell his property to Hubert Horatio Pickings, the father of the current mayor, for $3,000. Part of this property is still owned by the Pickings family, and part of it was donated in 1985 to become Iberville State Park. Appraisal records indicate that between the original transfer of property in 1961 and the donation for the park, the value of the property went from $15,000 to $22,000, until 1984 when its value shot up to $75,000 and again, in 1985, to $120,000, at which time it was donated to the park system.

  Other irregularities with property transfers also surfaced, including records with “Paid” crossed out, dates changed, entries in pencil made over clearly erased blurs. Most of the properties so marked were subsequently sold for the cost of back taxes or significantly below appraised value. One entry claimed that the taxes were paid a day late, but in that year, the date claimed for Payment Received was a Saturday, not a day the office would have been open. Had the payment been made the day before, a Friday, it would have been on time.