Katherine was growing sicker every day. Living as they did, in a single room behind the store, her illness had become a family burden. The girls, even in their childish ignorance, saw that their mother was tired, sleeping at odd hours, complaining of headaches.
Even if Jeu Gong knew of a cure, he could not give it to her. There was no money left. His store, which once overflowed with customers stocking their wagons with salt meat, molasses, flour, lard, beans, tobacco, coffee, snuff, and sugar, was now silent. His patrons were all gone. It was a deceptive stillness that settled into the moonlit cracks of the grocery that winter night. Jeu Gong, a businessman on the brink of bankruptcy, was bearing witness to an exodus.
January was “movin’” month for sharecroppers. The departures often took place on Sunday nights between eight and midnight. They never told anyone they planned on leaving. They just disappeared. They packed their lives into burlap sacks and suitcases and boarded northbound trains.
A report by the US Department of Labor estimated that as many as 350,000 black laborers left the South during one eighteen-month period between 1916 and 1917, nearly a third of them from Mississippi. An investigator visiting Washington County at the end of 1917 found two hundred abandoned houses in just one town. Under the cover of darkness, in the biting chill of a winter Sunday, Jeu Gong’s customers were leaving the Delta, each in their own way, headed for a place where the future looked brighter.
As immigration plunged by more than 90 percent during World War I—from 1.2 million in 1914 to 110,618 in 1918—Northern industries such as steel mills, railroads, and packinghouses sent recruiters throughout the South to find black laborers to replace a dwindling European workforce. In 1917 the United States instituted the universal draft, further depleting the North of white labor.
To fill the jobs left vacant in Northern cities, some 550,000 blacks left the South during the decade of World War I, more than all those who had left in the five decades following the Emancipation Proclamation. As the migrants settled into their new lives in the North, reports of higher wages, more schools, and better living conditions traveled south. As one woman wrote back to a friend in Mississippi, “Honey, I got a bathtub.”
Such accounts passed from one person to another, culminating in a vision of a promised land. This vision was then projected onto the pages of the black press, as newspapers like the Chicago Defender and the Pittsburgh Courier were borne southward, distributed by railroad porters. By 1919 the Defender was circulated in 1,542 towns and cities across the South, including rural Delta communities like Tunica, Mississippi. “Our problem today,” read an editorial in the Chicago Defender in August of 1916, “is to widen our economic opportunities, to find more openings and more kinds of openings in the industrial world. Our chance is right now.”
Local white leaders blamed the Chicago Defender for encouraging sharecroppers to demand better working conditions and political freedoms. One Delta paper argued that by instilling the notion of equality, the Defender was directly responsible for the violence directed against Southern blacks. “The negroes who are making money out of this newspaper,” the article read, “are paving the way for ignorant Southern negroes to go to their graves.”
Measures were quickly taken throughout Mississippi to outlaw the distribution of the Defender as well as the Crisis, the magazine of the newly formed National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. In 1920 the state passed a law making it a misdemeanor to “print or publish or circulate” literature favoring social equality. Shortly after the law was passed, E. R. Franklin of Holmes County, Mississippi, received six months in prison and a $400 fine for selling the Crisis at his store.
Despite the risk, hundreds of thousands of Southern blacks managed to circulate the literature throughout the South. “Subscribers passed the publications among their fellow lodge and church members,” wrote the historian Nan Elizabeth Woodruff, “while the literate read to the illiterate. Thus rural black people, like industrial workers of an earlier time, had ways of transmitting information they deemed relevant to their community’s survival.”
The most famous and arguably most successful transmission of such information was through song. Music journeyed south from recording studios in Northern industrial centers, including the earliest iterations of what would hold the ultimate appeal for migration, the blues.
Blues pioneer and Mississippi native Charley Patton recorded his classic “Pea Vine Blues” in 1929 for Paramount Records. The song, played with the driving pulse of a moving train, referred to the Delta’s main rail line, the Peavine, which carried sharecroppers away from plantations to Northern cities. The lyrics were a message, clear to all Delta residents who heard Patton’s call: “I think I heard the Peavine when it blowed. . . . I’m goin’ up country, Mama, in a few more days.”
The railroads, which first fueled and then solidified the South’s place in the global economy, had now become the mode of exodus for hundreds of thousands of Southern blacks. The tracks that coursed through the Delta, giving life to towns like Benoit, were now ferrying its labor force—and its economic foundation—northward. The planters feared that their fields, which they had seen parched by drought, drowned by rain, swept by fire, beaten by hail, and eaten bare as bones by boll weevils, would not survive without the Negro to tend to them.
They vowed to stem the tide of out-migrants by whatever means necessary. In the Delta city of Greenwood, white law enforcement officials dragged black passengers off of outbound trains, often taking the train’s porters as well. In order to avoid confrontations with whites at a train station farther south of Greenwood, in Greenville, a number of local blacks walked twelve miles east to Leland to board the train north to Chicago.
After the United States entered World War I, Southern landowners had a new means of ensuring their laborers remained on plantations—the threat of the draft. In the summer of 1918 the army’s provost marshal, General Enoch Crowder, issued a “Work or Fight” order to all local exemption boards, allowing them to draft men who were not engaged in employment.
Crowder’s order essentially federalized the local vagrancy laws that were already pervasive throughout the South. It was now up to the small-town sheriff, mayor, constable, and justice of the peace to identify “vagrants” and turn them in to the local exemption board to be shipped off to war. In the Delta, local defense councils adopted an identification system that required all blacks to carry a card listing their place of employment. The defense council requested national support in forcing “our negro labor to stay on the job six days in the week or they will be inducted into service.”
When the black men drafted into war eventually returned home, they were met with rabid hostility from local whites. “What did they do to the niggers after this first world war?” recalled a black sharecropper named Nate Shaw. “Meet em at these stations where they was gettin off, comin back to the United States, and cut the buttons and armaments off of their clothes, make em get out of them clothes, make em pull them uniforms off and if they didn’t have another suit of clothes—quite naturally, if they was colored men they was poor and they might not a had a thread of clothes in the world but them uniforms—make em walk in their underwear.”
In the spring of 1919, a band of white men in Blakely, Georgia, confronted a black soldier named Wilbur Little as he returned home from his tour of duty in World War I. When they ordered him to take off his uniform, he refused. A few days later, a mob attacked Little at a celebration for his achievements during the war. He was found beaten to death on the outskirts of town, still wearing his uniform.
In the Mississippi Delta, a black coast guardsman returning on leave to visit his mother in Greenwood was stopped in Tchula and arrested for “trespassing without money.” When it was discovered that he did, in fact, have money, the charge was changed to vagrancy. He was sentenced to thirty days of hard labor at a cotton plantation. Thirty-six days later, he was released, having been beaten on several occasions with a “seven poun
d strap,” once for writing a letter to his commanding officer.
The social and economic forces pushing blacks out of the Delta were also acting upon the Lum family, but in an entirely different way. At the outset of World War I, inflated wartime cotton prices gave sharecroppers unprecedented earning power. For the first time in history, thousands of Southern blacks were purchasing luxury items such as automobiles, radios, Victrolas, and pianos.
The Lums and other merchant families found themselves the beneficiaries of a rising black middle class. The Lums purchased a car and traveled to other towns. Katherine bought furs. The children wore new shoes. But the family’s newfound wealth did not last long. Soon, landowners began refusing laborers their share of the crop yields, often employing intimidation and violence. Within a few short years, tens of thousands of blacks escaped Mississippi and moved north.
As their customer base dwindled, the Lums were forced to supplement their income by taking in boarders. Katherine, in ill health and preparing for the birth of her third child, made room for two more residents in their home behind the grocery. Fifty-year-old Bartlett Dabney, along with his younger sister Cammie, boarded with the Lum family. Bartlett owned a general store in town, but his business, too, was failing, and with it his ability to afford his farmhouse outside Benoit.
The Dabneys of Benoit were a strange breed. For one thing, none of them ever married. Bartlett’s younger brother, William, owned a drugstore in town and devoted his life to his business. Bartlett, by contrast, moved often and changed professions regularly. He worked in cotton sales at the Speakes Plantation just outside Benoit. He then became a postmaster and then a farmer before trying his hand at operating a general store.
At the time he made the move into town, Cammie was living with him, so she accompanied him into the Lum household. As Bartlett struggled to save his store, Cammie helped Katherine around the house. Berda was now of age to attend school and Martha was both mobile and curious. The girls required a tender hand and watchful eye that their ailing mother struggled to give to them. Cammie became the nurse the family so desperately needed. She cooked meals and washed laundry. She entertained the children and recalled memories of her own youth, now distant after forty-eight years.
Likely inspired by her father, who ran his own medical practice, Cammie devoted her life to caring for others. As a young woman, Cammie had moved alone to Memphis to work at a sanitarium geared toward curing addiction. Working as the clinic’s stenographer, she transcribed hundreds of patients’ stories, typing the details of their troubles with alcohol, opioids, and pills.
The Dabneys did not live with the Lums for long, but Cammie’s nurturing presence was a welcome one for the family, helping them through a difficult time. Eventually, she became the proprietor of Benoit’s hotel and her bachelor brothers moved in with her.
In the winter before her son was born, Katherine told her husband she could no longer live in Benoit. The cramped, dirty quarters had taken a toll on her health. Jeu Gong agreed to sell the store and purchase property a few miles north, in Rosedale. Even as he made this promise, Jeu Gong understood that owning a grocery in Rosedale was a dream his family could not afford. Still its blaze of electric lights stood on the horizon, a world of potential. It was in Rosedale where Jeu Gong and Katherine were determined to build their future.
On January 21, 1919, Jeu Gong purchased a plot of land next to the railway depot on the east side of Rosedale. The barren lot, scraggled with brush, belonged to the Radjeskys, a family of Jewish immigrants from Germany. Katherine had known the family for most of her life. The patriarch, Jake Radjesky, was something of a real estate mogul in Gunnison, where Katherine had been raised. He was one of the town’s first settlers, buying up property while land was cheap. He owned the town’s livery stable, hotel, and mercantile business.
Jake’s relationship with Katherine’s family went all the way back to China. He testified on behalf of Katherine’s adoptive father, Don Chuck Tai Wong, when Don first decided to immigrate to the United States with his wife and children. The Radjeskys had since moved to Memphis, but Jake’s wife, Annie, still owned a parcel of land in Rosedale. She was eager to sell the property to Katherine, whom she called Katie.
When all of the details were finalized and contracts drawn, Jeu Gong was able to purchase the quarter-acre plot for a thousand dollars, paying one dollar as a down payment. One of Mississippi’s most powerful men, a lawyer, cotton planter, and state representative named Walter Sillers Jr., loaned Jeu Gong the rest of the money, at a rate of 6 percent interest.
Sillers had been a member of the state legislature since 1916. He also served on the town’s board of supervisors, the levee board, and as chief attorney for the city. His father, Walter Sillers Sr., also practiced law and served in the state legislature during Reconstruction. Minus a brief stint working in the state capitol, the elder Sillers had lived within the boundaries of Rosedale all his life. Even when federal troops invaded during the Civil War, Walter Sillers Sr. did not leave the city.
As a ten-year-old boy, Walter had sat in the schoolyard and watched Confederate cavalrymen, including his father, prepare for battle. “When troopers began to drill,” he later wrote, “every school boy was equipped with a uniform and a little sword, and a juvenile cavalry organized. . . . After months of drilling, the Bolivar Troop was ordered to war, and our little company accompanied them to the river landing, where they embarked.”
During the war, young Sillers Sr. and his mother hid in an abandoned plantation on the outskirts of town and foraged the woods for food. When the Federals took Vicksburg, Walter Sr.’s father was taken prisoner, executed, and buried in an unmarked grave. After the war, Walter’s brother tried to recover their father’s body but returned to Rosedale with nothing. These stories Walter shared with his son, who strove to honor his father’s memory. For Walter Sillers Jr., the town of Rosedale, and by extension the entire South, was as much a philosophy as it was a place. His contract with Jeu Gong was conditional, that the Lum family uphold the values of the Southern way of life.
In March 1919 Katherine gave birth to a son. She named him Hamilton Biscoe Lum, after Benoit’s mayor. It was a vow to herself and her only son that the future held greatness. There was now a boy to carry on the family name in America.
In keeping with tradition, Biscoe was baptized in the manner of all Chinese sons. The family celebrated his arrival with a great banquet known as the hone aun, or red egg ceremony. Katherine and her young daughters prepared a feast of eggs, hard-boiling and delicately wrapping them in thin, red calligraphy paper until the kitchen overflowed with bright pink chicken eggs. Then they prepared the tay doy, tea pastries, molding rich confections called moon cakes out of sweet bean curd.
The relatives arrived bringing lee shee, red envelopes filled with “lucky money.” Katherine’s adoptive brothers were in attendance. Her brother Ben lived behind a grocery in Rosedale, with his wife, Susie, and their son Alex, who was recently given a hone aun of his own. Biscoe’s grandparents, Don Chuck Tai Wong and Lung Jin Foon Wong, who first brought Katherine to America, had planned to move back to China in the winter but delayed their voyage just long enough to attend the banquet. Following the ceremony, the Wongs sold their store in Gunnison and moved back to their native country, never to see Katherine or her children again.
While many of Katherine’s relatives came to congratulate her, there was only one relative who arrived for Jeu Gong, his eldest brother, Gow. They had not seen each other in over a decade, not since Jeu Gong crossed the US border. They had each fashioned vastly different lives for themselves, Jeu Gong as a grocer in Mississippi and Gow as a laundryman in Michigan. Yet both men had started American families.
Gow brought a son with him, whom Jeu Gong now met for the first time. Gow’s son, Lee, spoke fluent English, unlike his father, whose tongue snapped awkwardly across the foreign syllables. As relatives filtered out of the grocery, each leaving behind gifts and well wishes, Jeu Gong informed Kather
ine that Gow and his son would be staying in Benoit. They, too, would live at the grocery. Lee would work the register and Gow would learn about the grocery business from Jeu Gong.
Katherine could have told her husband that she was too weak to care for others, that there were no beds to spare with the Dabneys boarding in the home, but Gow and Lee were family, and family provide for one another. So the two men moved in behind the store, sleeping on mattresses alongside Cammie and Bartlett Dabney, Martha, Berda, Jeu Gong, Katherine, and baby Biscoe.
The girls called their uncle Ah Bok, the respectful term for a father’s older brother. Gow commanded this respect. He was much older than their father and did not have a wife’s touch to temper his rough disposition. He spoke with his brother in Cantonese about the things they used to have in the old country. His son, Lee, shared stories of life in the North, of snow and ice and towering buildings that almost touched the sky. There were cinemas and opera houses where a Chinese man could enter right through the front door. There were parts of the city where everyone spoke Cantonese, even the same Sze Yap dialect that Gow spoke with his brother.
For Berda, who was about to begin primary school, the stories were mesmerizing. In learning about cities, Berda developed a yearning for a world outside the Delta and a wanderlust that would stay with her all her life. Martha was far too young to make sense of the stories. She clambered about the store with childish buoyancy, leaving the duty of listening to her sister.
As much as Jeu Gong enjoyed the company of his brother, Gow’s stay was unsettling. Jeu Gong had traveled south to avoid the immigration officers of the North. In a big city, there are many eyes watching. Gow brought those eyes with him. And with them, he brought the threat of deportation into Jeu Gong’s home.
Water Tossing Boulders Page 6