The Song and the Silence

by Yvette Johnson

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  I dedicate this book to the two sweetest, most wonderful boys ever to be brought into this world: You tether me.

  You know, they straightened out the Mississippi River in places, to make room for houses and livable acreage. Occasionally the river floods these places. “Floods” is the word they use, but in fact it is not flooding; it is remembering. Remembering where it used to be. All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.

  Toni Morrison

  “The Site of Memory”

  in Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir Ed. William Zinsser

  The meaner the man be, the more you smile. Always learn to smile, although you’re crying on the inside or you’re wondering, “What else can I do?” . . . I got three children. I want them to get an education. I wasn’t fortunate enough to get an education. . . . Night after night I lay down and I dream about what I had to go through with. I don’t want my children to have to go through with that. I want them to be able to get the job that they feel qualified for. That’s what I’m struggling for . . . I just don’t want my children to have to go through what I go through with. . . . “Tell that nigga to hurry up!” . . . But remember, you have to keep that smile.

  Booker Wright

  Mississippi: A Self-Portrait

  Preface

  When she returns, her approach is not without sound. She screams, whispers, howls, and roars while they listen. Most don’t wait to see her, choosing instead to make a hasty escape. With faces painted in grief and fear, they gather into their arms what they can—children, heirlooms, papers—and flee.

  When she returns, some stay behind because they have no place else to go.

  Others stay behind for different reasons. They might be clutching desperately to the hope that she’ll change her course before reaching them or that by some miracle she’ll simply stop. But at least a few refuse to flee out of arrogance. They refuse to submit to her the way she did to them—passively, obediently, like a defeated queen.

  When she returns, some watch in awe as she hovers above rooftops, eclipses the sun, and delivers a new sky.

  And then she bears down on them.

  When she arrives, her waters snatch up weeping cows, screaming pigs, and people as she moves along the ground, suckling her gems, reclaiming the treasure she began collecting long before it ever occurred to them to record time. She pushes against doors and presses into grooves, penetrating the sliver of space where nails meet wood. She swallows houses and farms. The people report hearing what can only be described as the exhaling of breath and the belch of a monster. The sounds the river makes are almost human, as if she has a soul.

  When she arrives, most of the people are seeing her this way for the first time, but almost all of them have heard the stories. For centuries, the Mississippi River had been running freely through the continent, swelling with the waters she received from multiple tributaries, all the while gathering chunks and heaps of nutrient-dense earth. Her journey always ended with a sweet homecoming as she plunged into the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico, becoming one with the sea. But just before giving herself away, she would stretch out, widening, spreading her waters over a shallow expanse to the east of her course. That was where she left her treasure—bits and mounds of glorious, abundant earth. Over time, her collection of exquisite gems grew higher and denser until the soil itself was a vast landscape. The people called it the Mississippi Delta.

  In journals and letters to loved ones, they recorded their impressions of the land that lay to the east of the Great River. Most described a place that, in spite of its plentiful soil, was almost completely uninhabitable. The Delta quickly developed a reputation as being a deadly place where recently wed brides and young children were often delivered to early deaths by way of harsh conditions and horrific illnesses.

  Rumors aside, the Delta truly was a dark place—both figuratively and literally. “Only the trees, some one hundred feet high, burst above the choking vines and cane into the sunshine.” One person went so far as to call the Delta a “seething, lush hell.”

  In the early 1800s, the Mississippi Delta was moist, flat, intensely humid, and nothing if not wild. Filled with bears, alligators, panthers, serpents, stinging gnats, mosquitoes, malaria, cholera, typhoid and yellow fever, dysentery, squirrels, ducks, geese, deer, feral cows, and—in times of flooding—fish of varying sizes and species, the Mississippi Delta was a beautiful, treacherous, untamed expanse of earth. A kingdom belonging only to the water, it was the river’s Eden.

  It takes a certain type of individual to hear such wretched descriptions of a wild, unwelcoming land and respond by gathering up all they possess—including their spouse and young children—and moving there. Given what they knew, the people who gambled their very lives on the Mississippi Delta must have been recalcitrant, filled with hubris, naïve enough to still believe in wild dreams, yet infused with the strength and discipline necessary to chase them down. If the United States was founded on a spirit of rebellion intertwined with relentless hope, by men and women determined to make a fresh start in an unknown place where they would have autonomy—people who came to define the very word “pioneer”—then surely the first American inhabitants of the Mississippi Delta were among the most pioneering of us all.

  Stories about the Delta were quick to spread. However, what people were most interested in were not the dangers, but the opportunities.

  “The cotton is about as high as my head,” said one. “Nature knows not how to compound a richer soil,” said another. Neither was exaggerating. Delta cotton could grow higher than the average man and topsoil there was so deep it had to be measured not in feet but in tens of feet. What so amazed them was a land made of thick, chocolate-colored, near-magical sludge, teeming with life and quick to regenerate. Delta soil had no earthly comparison.

  People got drunk on dreams of the extreme riches all but guaranteed to those with the capital and perseverance to endure the land and tame the river.

  But they had their work cut out for them because “the complexity of the Mississippi River exceeds that of nearly all other rivers . . . engineering theories and techniques that apply to other rivers, even major rivers . . . simply do not work on the lower Mississippi.” But the people were patient, inventive, and stubborn. They built levees to hold back the river’s waters and plantations to exploit her treasure. In the end, the intricate system of levees they built was hailed as a true feat of engineering.

  Finally, their dreams were coming true, but not without a cost.

  Nowhere else did slaves work as hard as in the Mississippi Delta, for not only did Delta slaves tend the fields, they also created them, conquering the land, facing the wild. One planter said, “Everything has to bend . . . Land has to be cultivated wet or dry, negroes to work, hot or cold.”

  Working in season and out, Delta slaves made cotton king, but because of the intensity of their labor, Delta slaves also had higher-than-average mortality rates.

  The solution was simple, one that was being instituted all over the land. Black women became breeders, repeatedly raped so future workers could grow inside their wombs. Of her master, one female slave recalled that he “would have children by a nigger woman
and then have them with her daughter.”

  For Whites, the Delta was a place of immense profits. For Blacks, it was a place of unspeakable horrors.

  Today, the people nod their heads in solemn agreement, but then quickly add that all of these things—the slaves, the rapes, separating the water from the land—happened a long, long time ago.

  They’re right of course. Those atrocities are in the past.

  Yet the river still returns, and when she does, her rampage is indiscriminate and her approach is not without sound.

  2013

  Booker Wright was a difficult man to know.

  I’d completed six years of research, including four trips to the Delta, conducted more than fifty interviews—spending hours with people who’d known him for years, shared laughter and tears with him—but in the end, all I’d learned was that none of those people really knew him.

  Even though my work kept pointing to that uncomplicated version of Booker, I was certain it was wrong, if only because of the event that sent me to the Delta in the first place.

  It all started six years ago when I learned that my grandfather, Booker Wright, appeared in a controversial NBC News program that aired in 1966. In the film, he discussed some of the humiliating encounters he regularly faced while serving White people at the restaurant where he waited tables.

  But what he did was so much more than that.

  My grandfather managed to eloquently convey the pain and degradation he experienced every day living as a Black man in the South. He revealed a kind of pain that transcended racial lines, a picture of longing and suffering that made viewers pay attention. Booker reminded complete strangers of the one thing they all shared with him: a basic sense of humanity. And he did it all in under three minutes.

  Four and a half decades later, his story was having a resurgence. People who saw the footage for the first time would tell me how it moved them, broke their hearts, and made them think of what has and hasn’t changed, not just for Blacks but for anyone who could be defined as “the other.” One university professor burst into tears when he watched the two-and-a-half-minute piece, because Booker reminded him of his lifelong struggle for acceptance as a homosexual male living in the American South. My grandfather had been dead for over thirty years, but once again people all over the country were becoming interested in the Black waiter from an all-but-forgotten Mississippi town.

  Amid my joy over the rebirth of his story, a few things kept bugging me: Why would my grandfather reveal fears and humiliating experiences on the national news, ones he hadn’t even shared with his own children? What was going through his mind? Were a few minutes on television worth risking his life?

  When I traveled to the Delta in the summer of 2011, almost everyone I met agreed that Booker was eloquent and that what he managed to communicate was remarkable. But in addition to being well-spoken, Booker was also either bold or reckless because of where he was living when he spoke out: Greenwood, Mississippi, a place where the local Whites had a reputation for being anything but ashamed of their stance against the civil rights movement. When their US senator, James Eastland, traveled to Alabama to protest the Montgomery bus boycotts, he attended a rally for the White Citizens’ Council, where he had thousands of flyers distributed with the following content:

  When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary to abolish the Negro race, proper methods should be used. Among these are guns, bows and arrows, slingshots and knives.

  We hold these truths to be self-evident that all Whites are created equal with certain rights; among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of dead niggers.

  Apparently, White Mississippians didn’t have a problem with his views. James Eastland held his post for another twenty-two years, making him one of the longest-serving senators in US history. Ole Miss even named a law library after him.

  By the time Booker conducted his interview ten years later in 1965, so much had already been accomplished. The United States Supreme Court ruled school segregation illegal in 1954 and the Civil Rights Act, which barred discrimination in public places, was passed in 1964. The nation was shifting and laws were already changing, so why did Booker go on television and disturb the waters? Why did he risk angering people when the battle was all but won?

  As much as I wanted to sit down with my grandfather and ask him all of those questions, I couldn’t, because he was murdered the year before I was born, which was also seven years after his appearance in the NBC News documentary. For a time, I tried as hard as I could to prove causality between those two events—his moment of truth and his brutal murder—but I couldn’t. The pieces to that theory just didn’t hold together. When I left the Delta in the summer of 2011, I’d discovered something much more rare and hard to swallow than another story of a Black man losing his life in the segregated South. It took a long time for me to finally digest what I’d found and to accept what it meant for me and for my grandfather, but when I did, it brought me immense peace.

  In spite of all I’ve learned, a few questions still remain.

  I spent years collecting memories of my grandfather’s life, gathering them from the ones who shared his world—customers, friends, and family. I’ve cherished and carefully catalogued each and every one of their stories as if they were so many pieces of the man himself.

  Maybe because I’ve spent so much time letting his world seep into mine, there are still moments when I catch myself having a somewhat childish desire. Whenever I learn something new about him—usually some small detail—a sense of longing creeps up on me, a primal craving for the relationship the two of us might have had. I start to wonder what it would have been like to have really known him, not just the image of him I’ve peered at through the faded and bent fibers of other people’s memories, but to have heard his laughter for myself, to have seen him cry with my own eyes, and to have felt the warmth of his hand wrapping around mine.

  To curtail this sorrow before it blooms, I spend a little time with the few things I have of my grandfather—four film clips, three of which have no sound, and photographs.

  In almost all the photos he’s smiling. Early on in my research, people told me over and over again that my grandfather had an amazing smile. It would be years before I got to see what he looked like and when I did, I understood what they meant. In those photos lives a smile that embodies pure, unsullied charisma—warm and generous, shining from the past with bright, enduring vitality.

  There’s one photograph from my research that I usually have a hard time pulling myself away from. Actually, my grandfather isn’t even in it, but for me the photo captures the disquiet spirit that still lingers in Greenwood—a place of infinite beauty, forever maimed by its past. The image is the front of Booker’s Place, the restaurant he owned. It was taken the morning after he was shot, so a piece of cardboard is covering the front window, the one that was shattered by the shotgun pellets. On the door handle is a large, puffy, light blue ribbon, tied into a bow.

  Sometimes when I look at that bow, I have a feeling that it’s being pushed upon. This movement, or pressure, is barely perceptible, as if it’s coming from something as subtle as a breath.

  Whenever I see it, I’m suddenly back where I was in the beginning, standing in a river of questions. Only this time, one of them rises to the top where it shimmers, as lovely and ruinous as an iridescent, oily film.

  Part One

  Places in Time

  The river is within us.

  T. S. Eliot

  Four Quartets: “The Dry Salvages”

  Where He Was King

  On any given Saturday night in the ’50s and ’60s, the place to be for Blacks in Greenwood, Mississippi, was a little spot called Booker’s Place down on McLaurin Street. In those days, McLaurin was lined with darkly lit, poorly maintained one-room bars and juke joints where shootings, stabbings, and robberies were regular weekend occurrences, but Booker’s Place was different.

  While the owners of the other joints on McLaurin
were happy with whatever business stumbled through the door, Booker had expectations of his customers. He knew that no matter how tangy his barbecue sauce was or how juicy his hamburgers were, the type of customers he really wanted to entertain weren’t going to tolerate the violence so common on McLaurin. At the first sign of quarreling, Booker would put a stop to it with one of his characteristic lines such as: “Maybe the club you just came from was like the O.K. Corral, but if you gonna come in here, you betta sit down and act right.”

  Sometimes before a customer with a bad reputation even made it through the entrance Booker would appear at the door and say without apology, “You can’t come in here, I don’t want you in here.” That was usually all it took. That and the butt of the gun protruding from his waistband.

  Booker might have considered the gun to be a necessary prop because, without it, he didn’t look very intimidating. In the early years, he was tall and thin, but even as he got older and put on weight, he didn’t become any more imposing. On the contrary, he had a plump, baby face with copper-colored skin that was smooth and taut. When he smiled his cheeks stretched across the bone and lightened, giving the impression he was backlit by an internal glow. This, combined with his polished smile and manicured mustache, created in Booker not the appearance of a tough nightclub owner but one of a happy-go-lucky kid.

  His restaurant developed a reputation throughout the state as a place not to be missed. Its owner was almost as well known, in part because he was so difficult to actually know. Booker had a singular characteristic to him, one that was both elusive and potent. In certain instances, this trait was like a Midas touch, ensuring success and allowing him to evade the financial hardships haunting others like him—Black men living in the Delta. At other times, the quality was alienating, rendering Booker so indecipherable that even those who worked by his side for years could only describe him from a relative distance, as if he weren’t a real person but rather a well-crafted representation of one. What most Greenwood Blacks did know about Booker was that they either loved or hated him; few were indifferent.