The Prince of Frogtown

by Rick Bragg

  His killing by a village storekeeper makes no more sense now to Whiteside’s son Bill than when he was a seven-year-old boy on the front porch of their house on June 19 of ’55. He heard the phone ring, then saw his mother tear screaming through the screen door. “It was foolish how it happened,” he said. “That man killed Daddy on Monday, and they were going fishing Wednesday.”

  In the police report, it says Whiteside died because of a dispute over a water line, but if you believe in the tumbling nature of things, he died from changing times.

  By the end of the Korean War, the parochial society of the mill village had come undone. The mill no longer generated the village’s electricity, no longer gave workers a house. In ’55, the mill cut off its water supply to the houses. City work crews dug up the village, tapping old lines and laying new ones as people grumbled, damned if they’d buy water God made for free.

  The mood was black already, and many workers blamed the changes in their lives on the latest mill boss. Mill workers joked that, when the boss died, he raised up in his coffin as six poor men carried him to the grave. “You put wheels on this thing,” he told the head pall-bearer, “you can lay off five of these fellers.” Backed by a new ownership group of New York investors, the bosses put in place slow-downs and stretch-outs. Bosses just laid people off when things were lean, then, when contracts were fat, worked people half to death in an attempt to see how fast the machines could run.

  Then, the unthinkable happened.

  The mill shut down.

  It would only be idle a few months as another owner prepared a takeover, but for a few tense months there was a panic here. For store owners in the village, it was a death knell. One of them was Robert E. Lee Dentmon, a gaunt, sunburned, surly, besotted man who ran a little shack of a store, a Pepsi sign in the shape of a giant bottle cap tacked to the side. His friends knew he had a burning temper, carried a .22 in the bib pocket of his overalls, and drank whiskey like water when he was mad and sometimes when he wasn’t. He told customers he would shoot anyone who tried to take his water line.

  He and Whiteside had known each other for decades. It was an odd friendship—one was strident, quick-tempered, the other quiet, peaceful—but they both loved to fish, and when the weather was good on Wednesday mornings they would meet before dawn and fish the ponds and rivers they fished when they were boys.

  In June, the taps in Dentmon’s store went dry. J. T. Marible, a councilman and master mechanic at the mill, told the Anniston Star that Dentmon called him, incensed. “I told him he was talking to the wrong man. We [the mill] didn’t have anything to do with the water in the village anymore. He said, ‘I’ll give you till six o’clock in the morning to get my water on.’” Dentmon seemed determined to turn back time.

  Marible told Mayor J. B. Ryan about the call the next morning, on June 19. Ryan sent a crew of city workers to the village, to plug water lines in the vicinity of the store. Dentmon was drinking his breakfast when the city workers—Roy Wilkerson, William Barnwell and Roy “Tot” Turner—showed up. When the workers said they only wanted to locate the old line, Dentmon replied: “It don’t make no difference. They ain’t gonna move it.” The three men went back to city hall, and told their supervisor Dentmon would not let them do their job.

  Back at the store, Dentmon fumed about the water with Louis Snider, a produce salesman who sold the store owner watermelons and cantaloupes. As Dentmon griped, he reached under the counter and took out a box of shells, and began loading his .22, a poor man’s gun. It cost a dime to fire a .38, but just a penny for a .22.

  Mayor Ryan called Whiteside. Ryan told him to go speak to Dentmon, but Chief Whiteside said it would be smart to wait. “Daddy knew the man,” said Sandy. “He knew his temper. He said, ‘Let him cool off.’” But Ryan insisted and Whiteside drove to the store, followed by Wilkerson, Barnwell and Tot Turner in their city truck. Dentmon, wearing a pair of overalls faded almost white, his close-cropped hair shining with oil, stood outside. As Whiteside stepped from his car, followed by the three city workers, Dentmon greeted him:

  “Whaddaya say, cop,” he said, drunk.

  Whiteside did not say a word. He just walked up to Dentmon, planning to pat him down for a weapon. As he came within arm’s reach, Dentmon pulled his .22 pistol and fired point-blank into Whiteside’s chest. The bullet, the size of an orange seed, went in below his badge, hit a bone and ricocheted into his heart.

  “Kill him, Tot,” Whiteside said, and died.

  Turner and the other men did not move. A dog came up and started to lick at the blood, and one of the witnesses kicked at it. “Kick that dog again,” Dentmon said, “an’ I’ll do the same to you.”

  Even as the bullet came to rest in Whiteside’s big heart, its effect, its impact, was unchecked. “They gave Dentmon life in the penitentiary. But I didn’t know life meant seven years,” Bill Whiteside said. The bullet destroyed his family. Mary Whiteside, shattered, could not make enough money at the movie theater to feed, clothe and care for five children, and the county sent the children to live in a foster home. “That man,” Bill Whiteside said, “took all I had.”

  City workers laid new water lines through the village, but for a long time, when people looked at scars of red dirt snaking through the streets, they thought of cemeteries. In ’56, Union Underwear bought the mill and renamed it Union Yarn, and it was like the scare never happened, like a bad dream. The city hired Bill Harris to be chief. He, too, understood the village and had even worked in the mill, and in the village people said there would never be anyone as straight with them as Whitey, but that Bill Harris would do. But bad luck just kept tumbling, and Harris died of a heart attack that year. In October of ’56 the job tumbled to Ross. He raised his right hand and swore to execute the duties of his office with professionalism, fairness and integrity. “So help me God,” he said.

  To look at him you would have thought the city had hired a knee-breaker and head-buster, just a redneck police chief with a turnip’s IQ. But that wasn’t Ross.

  He was a conflicted man.

  Born in Anniston in 1912, Ross was a respected welterweight boxer in his teens. He pumped iron and battered his sparring partners every day at Rubenstein’s gym at Thirteenth and Moore. He was trim then, and his feet were light and his hands were quick. He went pro at eighteen in 1930, and outfought Jack Taylor for the Southern Middleweight title just a few years later. His toughest bout came when he turned heavyweight and fought the feared brawler Ching Johnson. Ross won the fight, but broke both his hands on Johnson’s head.

  When World War II erupted, he enlisted in the navy, as a healer. He entered the medical corps and served five years in the bloodiest theater of the Pacific, at Guadalcanal, Boganville, New Georgia, attached to the First Marine Division, Third Division, the Fourth Raiders and the Seabees. He slogged through the jungle muck and blood-soaked sand, carrying bleeding and shattered men across his big shoulders, watching them die, helping them live.

  “There was always two sides to Ross,” said Jack Andrews. “There was the evil side, and that other’un.”

  After the war he was a foreman in an Anniston foundry, then a deputy for county sheriff Socko Pate. He worked his way up to chief deputy by chasing down men who ran whiskey in the dry county, and was a logical choice for chief in Jacksonville. He took over a department with three officers and one car, unless you count the one they shared with Water and Sewer. He worked six days a week, twelve hours a day, for $150 a month. Ross took those humble seeds and grew an orchard.

  He ran a loan business from his desk, lending ten dollars and asking back fifteen, and levied fines off the books. That was common knowledge among the working people, who paid the fines Ross levied with the money Ross loaned. The mayors and councilmen haggled over annexations and parade routes and judges ate lunch at the Ladiga Grill, but Ross ran the streets. He arbitrarily raised and lowered fines with his feet propped on his desk, settled cases based on his moods, and let you go early or kept you in his jai
l for as long as he felt necessary. He was just an old-time police chief, say older people in town, allowed to run his business any way he wanted as long as he kept the peace.

  But Ross had beliefs. He believed in the dynamic of family, in the pureness of it. When his father, L.P., and mother, Elsie, died, he kept their house in Anniston just like they left it, and lived in a spare, concrete-block building off the square in Jacksonville. He had no family, no wife, no children, but preached his ideas on family values to civic clubs and schools. “Crime prevention can start the first day of a child’s life, at home, at church, and school…[T]otal environment influences him, especially during these early years,” Ross wrote in his speeches, which were covered by the Anniston Star and Jacksonville News. “The parent should be with the child long enough to make him understand right and wrong. This is best accomplished by an understanding between parent and child which is brought about only through close association.”

  In the village and poorer neighborhoods adjoining it, where mothers nursed babies on their ten-minute break and worked predawn to after dark, he saw his idyllic society come undone.

  One family, in particular, seemed to live the way it damn well pleased.

  They broke the law like it was written on the back of a beer bottle.

  It was inevitable that they would collide. But he had barely gotten going good in Jacksonville when he lost, temporarily, the one thing a chief has to have in a small town, in a mill town, especially. He lost his invincibility, lost his swagger, and even lost his hat. Everett Slaght, my father’s first cousin, took them from him. “Ross already thought we was trash,” said Carlos, Everett’s little brother. “But he hated us when Everett was done with him. Ain’t no tellin’ how bad Everett might have whupped him, if his leg hadn’t come off.”

  ROSS SHOULD HAVE KNOWN there was too much magic in that boy’s life, light magic, and dark, to mess with. Here you have a boy who gets blown into the Pacific yet doesn’t get a scratch, then gets blown apart in his kitchen on the way to get a bowl of milk and cornbread. By the time Ross challenged Everett, he had already swam through a miracle, and danced on sticks. He was the most beautiful, most happy crippled man anyone had ever seen, and the only thing that could knock the smile off his face was a woman, and should that really come as much of a surprise?

  Everett never told people his miracle. He never explained what happened to him after the shell exploded in his gun turret on the Iowa, sending him cartwheeling into the deep. His mother, Eldora, got a letter from the War Department after it happened, giving sympathies. But a few months later he came walking up Pelham Road, and she saw him there, at the corner of Mountain Avenue. “Hey, Momma,” he said, “it’s just me.”

  He didn’t have a mark on him, not a burn or a cut, as if angels had snatched him in midair and carried him home, and that was what a good many people came to believe.

  He was Michelangelo’s David, with freckles. He was six feet one and 235, with slabs of muscle rippling across his body, hard as the marble he seemed to be. He had blondish-red hair and laughed all the time, like he knew he was living on bonus time.

  He married when he came home but there was no happiness in it. One night, after another argument with his wife, he came home late and asked her to fix him a bowl of milk and bread. He pushed open the door to the hall and there sat his father-in-law with a single-barrel 16-gauge shotgun. The old man pulled the trigger but he shook a bit as he did, and blew Everett’s left leg off at the knee.

  “But they stayed together, him and her, a few more years,” Carlos said. “It didn’t get no happier.”

  Tennessee Williams wrote that a one-armed, beautiful boy was even more like a statue, with that missing part, and I think it was that way with Everett. He was still fit and trim and raced two-legged men on his crutches, until the VA fitted him with a wooden leg. Not long after that, Everett and his wife got into another fight just off Alexandria Road. Carlos and his brother Red happened to be there when Ross’s cruiser pulled into the yard. Ross liked being the champion when women were involved.

  Carlos and Red tried to calm Everett down.

  “I got it, boys,” Ross said.

  He walked carefully up to Everett.

  “Let’s go, son,” he said.

  “I ain’t done nothing, Ross,” Everett said.

  “Just till you cool off, boy,” Ross said.

  “I ain’t going with you,” he said.

  Ross grabbed his shoulder, and Everett hit the big man so hard on the side of the head it staggered him. “But as he swung he broke the straps on his wooden leg, and his leg come off, inside his pants leg,” Carlos said.

  Everett had been a boxer, too, on the Iowa, but he couldn’t fight Ross in a stand-up fight teetering around on just one leg. So he lunged forward, wrapped his arms around Ross and dragged him down.

  It was a fair fight in the dirt. With Ross on top of him, Everett locked one ironlike arm around the chief’s neck and started jabbing him in the face with his free hand. Ross fought back, punching, and you could hear the fists landing like drumbeats on rib cages and heads, but Everett was choking Ross blue as he pounded his face.

  Carlos and Red watched.

  “As a family,” Carlos said, “we don’t respond well to being run over.”

  But fearing that Everett would kill the chief, or that Ross would blow a hole in their brother, Carlos and Red wrenched the men apart and the chief wheeled away, holding his throat. Carlos and Red stuffed Everett and his dangling leg into the back of Ross’s car. Not even Ross could shoot a man in back of his own cruiser and claim self-defense. Ross had no choice but to drive Everett to jail. Carlos and Red followed in their car, just in case.

  Ross was too embarrassed to bring serious charges against a one-legged man who whipped him in the dirt. Word got out anyway, as it always does, and people snickered.

  Everett’s house burned down not long after that, under suspicious circumstances. He and his wife split up, and he just wandered, rootless, on that wooden leg. His magic, good and bad, leaked out of him, and he died of a massive heart attack as a young man.

  It would be easy to say that, after his whipping, Ross picked on my family for no reason, but that would be untrue. My people always gave him reason. Police turned their cars around in the yard, on the chance they might catch them doing something illegal. “He took Roy to jail for a gallon of cold water, ’cause it looked like moonshine,” Carlos said, but conceded that any other time, it probably would have been. If Bob tried to be Bob, if he tried to hitch up his wagon and take a spin around the village drunk, Ross sent his men with guns. You can shoot a man for a lot of things, but should never even think about shooting a man for driving horses under the influence.

  “When someone is arrested,” Ross told the Exchange Club, “you usually make at least five enemies: the individual himself, his relatives, and his close personal friends.” But an officer of the law, he said, must treat everyone the same. “You can’t treat your fellow man like you’re a bulldozer. Give him a fair shake, and then you’ve got nothing to be afraid of, and nothing to be ashamed of.”

  All you had to do to earn his benevolence was to say “sir.” But it is funny, how that little word sticks like a fishhook in some men’s throats. Bobby and his sons did not say “sir.”

  Long before my mother made her first walk to retrieve my father, Velma walked to fetch her men.

  It is hard to truly capture the dignity of that little woman, her homemade dresses half covered by an apron, her face and shame shielded by her bonnet, change purse in her hands with just enough money to get Bob out. She stood in front of Ross’s desk because she was never asked to sit. He lounged in his chair, treelike legs across his desk, to show Velma the bottoms of his shoes. He stood up when ladies from the East Side approached, but he never stood for Velma.

  He harangued her as if it was she, and not Bob, who had gotten drunk and acted a fool. One day he went too far, got too mean, and she told him, her voice a squeak, t
o go to hell.

  “DO YOU KNOW WHO I AM?” he roared.

  Nobody talked back to Ross.

  “I’M ROSS TIPTON.”

  He came to his feet then, so he could look down on her.

  “Do you know who I am?” she said, her little voice trembling.

  “WHO?” he said, in contempt.

  “I am Velma Bragg.”

  She stood there shaking till he dismissed her.

  He despised the drunkenness most of all, though he went home after locking them up and drank from gallons of whiskey left as tribute by whiskey runners outside his door. Even though they worked in the mill, the Bragg clan had everything he did not. Their women were beautiful and their lives, while certainly not rich, dripped with excesses. Their cars smoked but gleamed, and they lived in mill houses but wore neckties. Worse, they denied him things that were rightfully his. He could not make them afraid of him.

  My father saw it as a game, a chance to dance with the devil in his own backyard. In the mid-to late 1950s, he engaged in a period of self-destructiveness that could have, at any drunken moment, left him cold on a slab. The infractions blurred together, but my mother remembers how he banged through the house, lunging for the back door, gleeful, as Ross rolled up in the yard. It was like hide-and-seek to him. He would see Ross pull in behind him at night, and he would slam his foot on the gas and speed away, then turn off his lights and race blind down the streets. As soon as he was beyond the glow of Ross’s headlights he would zigzag through side streets, pound down a dirt alley or back his car into a stranger’s driveway, kill his engine and sit, heart pounding, the orange glow of a cigarette bobbing in time.