The Song and the Silence

by Yvette Johnson

  Finally, Rosie stepped off the train, already crying. She went to Booker and the two clutched each other and stood there, in the middle of the platform, crying together. There were people around them, some who were waiting for friends to arrive and others who’d just disembarked and needed to find their luggage. Many of those people slowed down and then stopped to watch Booker and Rosie. The two held each other as if they feared someone would come along to tear them apart again, as if by holding each other they could communicate all the love they hadn’t been able to share before.

  The minutes ticked away. At first Honey was impatient, wondering how long Booker and Rosie would keep this up. Then she noticed that the friend who’d come along with them had started to cry as well. She stopped thinking about how much time was passing by and started thinking about family. She figured she might’ve felt the same way if she hadn’t seen her own mother for so many years. She realized then that some people just don’t know how important it is to have a family. Even if all you have is a cousin here or there, that’s still a blessing. People might argue, but you can’t take it to heart, not if it’s family. To her surprise, Honey found herself crying as well.

  Thirty minutes would pass before Booker and Rosie finally let go of each other. They climbed into the car and headed for Booker’s Place. When they arrived, the food had been laid out nicely. Booker took a plate and served Rosie. He wanted her to get the first bite of every dish. And even though all the guests invited already knew what the occasion was, Booker kept introducing Rosie to people and saying, “This my mama,” as though finally being able to say those words felt so good that he wanted to do it again and again.

  After lunch, Booker, Rosie, Honey, and the friend who’d gone to the station with them all climbed back into Booker’s car and headed to Clarksdale so that Rosie could introduce Booker to some family she had there. They stayed in Clarksdale talking, laughing, and telling stories until seven o’clock the next morning.

  Instead of heading back to Greenwood, Booker wanted to take Rosie to Grenada to see Julia, the woman who was responsible for bringing the two of them back together. On the way there, Honey sat in the front passenger seat, while their friend drove the car. Booker and Rosie were on the backseat where they sat together silently crying and kissing each other.

  * * *

  IT WAS DIFFICULT FOR me to tell the entire story to Raymond without tearing up. I knew what it was like to feel rootless, like you don’t belong to anything or anyone. Booker spent his entire life feeling unwanted by his mother and unworthy of her love. The moment that I always tried to picture in my mind was the one of him sitting on a stool and crying into the phone. He was at Booker’s Place, the place where he was king, but in spite of all of his success there was something broken inside him that could be healed only by what he learned on that phone call. He was wanted. In that one call, in that one moment, he found redemption. He opened up the envelope of his boyhood heart, and his mother filled it with a story of never wanting to let him go. She had not chosen to abandon him. She had not left him on a doorstep. I felt that Booker and I had similar longings, a song sung in two-part harmony, our voices so close that a listener could never discern where his stopped and mine started. I understood what it was like to feel a loneliness that can only be cured by having family, by having someone who makes you feel tethered to the world.

  When I finished sharing the story, Raymond was silent for several beats as if pulling his thoughts together. David looked from me to Raymond and back to me, and then said he didn’t think the story was relevant to the documentary. I didn’t agree with him, but I also knew that my emotional attachment to my grandfather’s story made it difficult for me to have an objective perspective. I figured I’d have time to think more about it later. I took a sip of my cold coffee, and the three of us went on to discuss when we would be able to travel to Greenwood together.

  Then, as if something finally crystalized in his mind, and as though we’d never stopped talking about Rosie and Booker, Raymond looked at me with searching eyes and said, “You know, that kind of hurt stays with you. I’ve met people who are extremely successful and talented, but they never find peace or feel like they have any value at all because their parents didn’t love them. That’s a very specific kind of pain. It can be crippling. No matter how old they get, or no matter how smart they are, most people never get over feeling rejected by the people who’re supposed to love them the most.”

  A History Lesson

  Raymond and I were equally in awe of Booker’s story, but we both needed to understand so much more about life in the Delta before we began conducting interviews for the documentary. So, for the next six weeks, I committed myself to research. A professor at a local university suggested I read a book called I’ve Got the Light of Freedom, by Charles Payne. In his book, Payne lays out the conditions, both social and economic, of Black lives in the years before the civil rights movement and then goes on to describe how it was local people who had the courage and the drive to keep the movement alive. Payne’s book centers almost entirely on Greenwood. It was an amazing read and I pored over it. I read other books as well, books about the flood of 1927 and narratives of Blacks who’d lived in the Delta before, during, and after the civil rights movement.

  I saw a photograph in which a Black woman’s body hangs lifeless, suspended from a bridge over the still and tranquil waters of a river. Her son’s body hangs next to hers. Mother and child lynched together. Standing on the bridge is a crowd of White men, women, and even some children looking toward the camera, posing for the photograph.

  I read an excerpt from a speech Abraham Lincoln gave in January of 1838 after a visit to Mississippi in which he said, “Dead men were seen literally dangling from the boughs of trees upon every road side.” He was most likely exaggerating to illustrate an important point: The state of Mississippi was a place of violence.

  I was familiar with the Jim Crow laws of the South, but the more I read, the more I was convinced that Mississippians played by their own rules. These rules, though largely unspoken and unwritten, were taught and reinforced by violence, causing Blacks to lead lives of constant vigilance. After hours of research I distilled the rules down to six major themes:

  Never tell a White man he’s wrong. One night, a Black man named James Gooden was resting on his front porch after having worked all night at trying to restore the levee after the flood of 1927. A police officer pulled up and called to Gooden, ordering him to get into the truck so that he could go work at the camps. Gooden said he’d just returned from work, but the officer didn’t care. After a fruitless discussion, Gooden got up and walked into his house. Though uninvited, the officer followed him inside and shot him. Gooden died a few days later.

  Never appear to be disrespectful. In 1934, a seventy-year-old tenant farmer named Henry Bedford got into a verbal disagreement with a White man about land. The man felt that Bedford had spoken to him disrespectfully, so he, along with three others, beat him until he died.

  Never be accused of committing a crime. In 1936, when Roosevelt Townes was in his mid-twenties, he was accused of murdering a White man. A mob of three hundred or more that included women and children tortured Townes with a blowtorch for over an hour, during which time each of his fingers and both of his ears were burned off, one by one. Later, Townes was set aflame while still alive.

  Never be too prosperous. In 1944, a sixty-six-year-old minister named Isaac Simmons farmed 278 acres of land that he owned outright, some of which had been in his family since 1887. White men began making claims to some of his land. Fearful that what he owned might be taken out from under him, Simmons sought advice from an attorney.

  Word of the visit got out, and Simmons was assaulted on his own property by six armed White men. He was shot to death in front of one of his sons, who was beaten and told to evacuate the property. When the son returned to claim the body, he found that his father’s teeth had been knocked out, his arm broken, and his tongue cut out. I
found this story so disturbing that I wrote about it on my blog. A woman who read the post contacted me and said she was a descendent of Isaac Simmons. She told me that even though her family didn’t live on the land stolen from Simmons, they did still have the deed that he’d tried so hard to protect for them.

  Never be in the wrong place at the wrong time. In 1949, a man named Malcolm Wright, his wife, and five of his seven children were traveling down a road in a mule-pulled buggy. Three White men, traveling down the same road in a car, had trouble maneuvering past Wright’s buggy. They became angry, got out of their vehicle, and dragged Wright, who was unarmed, down to the road. With a bumper jack, one of the men beat Wright in the head repeatedly in front of his family, who watched in horror as Wright’s skull caved in and his brains oozed out onto the side of the road.

  Never touch a White woman. In 1951, a Black man named Denzill Turner had an epileptic seizure at a bus stop. The White men who witnessed it didn’t understand what was happening, so they assumed Turner was drunk and that he was allowing his body to flop around so that he could touch White women. The police were called, and when they arrived, they accosted Turner. After a brief struggle, the officers shot him in the head.

  These incidents weren’t the only ones I read about, nor were they the worst. Charley Shepherd’s lynching lasted for seven hours and ended with him being set on fire. “The mob saw to it that his mouth and nose were partially filled with mud so that the inhalation of the gas fumes would not bring his agony to a premature end.” He burned alive for forty-five minutes before finally his “agonized fighting at the ropes and flames” subsided.

  According to Charles Payne:

  Such mutilations—parading dead bodies around the town, shooting or burning bodies already dead, severing body parts and using them for souvenirs, using corkscrews to pull spirals of flesh from living victims or roasting people over slow fires—were as much a part of the ritual of lynching as the actual killing. They sent a more powerful message than straightforward killing would have sent, graphically reinforcing the idea that Negroes were so far outside the human family that the most inhuman actions could be visited upon them.

  During those six weeks, there were times when I felt as if I was drowning. I didn’t want to read anymore, I didn’t want to see even one more photo of a Black person being beaten, but I couldn’t stop. I needed to learn as much as I could before going down to Greenwood. I needed to understand the world Booker knew so that I could understand him, and then present his story in the film.

  Part of what struck me about Black life in the Delta was that the horrors seemed to occur exponentially. After decades of being mistreated, humiliated, sexualized, spoken down to, and forced to do menial jobs, so many Blacks then had to stand by and watch loved ones get beaten to death. Their lives were compounded by one trauma after another: the daily trauma of racial abuse, and the physical trauma of being beaten without cause. I stumbled upon an article about the long-term effects of trauma and how repeated emotionally traumatic events can influence an individual’s biochemistry, causing not only psychological scars but also chemical changes that influence how someone interacts with their environment. These chemical changes can imprint themselves on genetic code, allowing the remnants of trauma to be passed down from generation to generation.

  My mind was spinning.

  I didn’t know what to do with all this information I’d learned. It made my soul rage. The stories of loss gave birth to a fire inside me, one that I feared I’d lose the ability to control.

  More and more, I thought about the cliché of the angry Black man or woman. I decided that while emotions like anger, bitterness, and even shame aren’t altogether uncommon in the human experience, something different—a darker cousin of those emotions—takes over when the hurt is inflicted by someone with power. When those with power abuse it, the ones hurt have no means for retaliation. They can’t hurt the powerful the way they’ve been hurt. When the powerful inflict wounds, it often takes place in the open, within the confines of socially accepted—though morally depraved—behavior.

  They wore suits when they lynched you. They drank illegal whiskey from a clean glass. They delicately wiped their mouths on monogramed handkerchiefs after they spat on you. What is left for you to do? You have no resources or purchase of power to tip the scales. As a matter of course, your very essence is socially unacceptable. You have no suit, and you drink moonshine from a dirty mason jar. Your handkerchiefs are handed down, withered, and stained in blood.

  Occupying this space in the world is damning. It’s a place where the soul is under pressure that builds and builds with each infraction, but there is no room to explode. The explosions happen on the inside, within the soul, making it burn itself up from deep within.

  That type of pain, from the flippant and the powerful, withers away all that was good inside of you. After being humiliated day in and day out, what do you have left? Does the fiery pain burning in your soul steal oxygen from your ability to hope, to dream, maybe even to love? How do you accept degradation with a smile and still tell yourself that you’re better than that, than the way they’re treating you all day, every day? How do you believe that you’re different from the way everyone sees you?

  Men were treated like boys and women like whores, and then they returned home to their children. Mothers knew they could not protect their sons from being overworked and exploited. Fathers knew they could not protect their daughters and wives from sexual harassment and even rape. What remained in their hearts that they could gift to their children?

  Even my mother’s explosive rage over my striptease took on new meaning as I learned about the world she’d grown up in, where a woman with a brown body was often a commodity. One Southern governor claimed it was impossible to actually rape Black women, who were viewed by some like dogs in constant heat. In 1944, when Recy Taylor was gang-raped by six White men who all acknowledged what they’d done, two grand juries declined to indict.

  I thought of my father and wondered how his life might have been different if he’d been taught to read. Booker was such a charismatic person and an astute businessman, and I wondered who he would have been if he’d been born in a time and place where race really didn’t matter.

  I wanted to face the guilty, the perpetrators of injustice. Were all White Southerners responsible for what they’d allowed to happen in their world? What does it take to be complicit in a crime? Malice or intent? What about foreknowledge?

  When I was a little girl and my teachers or the talking heads on TV discussed racism, inevitably someone would comment that racism was about ignorance. Everyone would nod, and that seemed to be the end of the conversation. But what kind of ignorance? People who lacked book knowledge, who never went to college, who couldn’t balance a checkbook? Or were they ignorant of something else? Was it an emotional ignorance, a deficit? Maybe something in them had been severed, some ability for human compassion, empathy, kindness had either been cut off or simply failed to properly form.

  That’s what I wanted to understand. That’s what I wanted to get from Greenwood. I wanted to see Booker, to feel his presence, yes. And then, with the sense of him locked inside me, I wanted to expose the underbelly of darkness I was certain was alive in the Delta. I wanted to shed the brightest of lights on the evil that would enable a person to take their own children to watch while a mother and son were thrown from a bridge, to watch their bodies twisting as they struggled to breathe—and then to capture it in a photograph with pride. What the hell was wrong with these people?

  Not long before I was scheduled to fly out, I learned that Raymond and his production team had managed to set up an interview with Noll Davis, who, they informed me, had been a president of the White Citizens’ Council. Davis was one of the five men seated at the round table in the scene that preceded Booker’s in Frank’s original film.

  For the life of me, I couldn’t figure out why he’d agreed to meet with us. Regardless of whether or not his politic
s had changed, he certainly had to know the world around him was different and that, all those years ago, he’d stood on the wrong side of history. Davis had to expect that we’d hold him accountable for who he’d been and for at least some of the damage and fear that was spread by the Council. Maybe he wanted to apologize or even clear the record by minimizing his involvement. I decided that whatever he wanted to get from our meeting was incidental.

  As I prepared to go to Greenwood, I was filled with so many emotions—excitement, anxiety, sorrow, and rage. I wanted to face Noll Davis and others like him because, in my mind, those who’d taken part in the terrorizing and degrading of Blacks or watched it take place in their small towns were soldiers with an inhumane, ungodly mission. Every single one of them represented the people who’d robbed my grandfather of his dignity.

  Weeks later, when the trip was over and I’d returned to my life, I would look back with amazement at the determination that surged inside me as I packed my bags, said farewell to my children, and boarded the plane that would take me down into the Delta. In retrospect, it’s almost incomprehensible to me that I’d had such confidence and such clarity before I went to Greenwood, because I had neither when I returned home.

  On June 15, 2011, when I stepped off the plane in Memphis, Tennessee, and began looking for the car that would take me down into the Delta, I thought I understood the South and the nuanced relationships between Blacks and Whites because of what I’d read in a few books. I believed that redemption could be found through vengeance, and that an absolute truth was just waiting for me to uncover it. Greenwood would prove me wrong on every count.

  Part Seven

  The River’s Eden

  For me, forgiveness and compassion are always linked: how do we hold people accountable for wrongdoing and yet at the same time remain in touch with their humanity enough to believe in their capacity to be transformed?