Carrollton Avenue was a quiet street. It, too, looked deserted until we got closer to Lusco’s and saw a doorman standing out in front. He opened the door and motioned for us to head into the foyer. While David spoke with the hostess, I took in our surroundings. The restaurant I’d read so much about was illuminated by a dull, once gold light that lingered forlornly like a trapped fog between avocado-colored walls. From those walls came the vacant, defeated stares of mounted, stuffed animals. Random knickknacks were crowded together on countertops and shelves next to priceless, precariously placed Coca-Cola memorabilia. Hanging high above the entrance to the hallway that still held the curtained booths, above the spot where passwords were required to pass, was a stuffed deer covered with so much dust it looked as though it had soot for hair.
The three of us were led to one of the curtained booths. We ordered a smorgasbord of dishes including the Broiled Shrimp in Lusco’s Shrimp Sauce, Lusco’s Special Salad, Filet Mignon, Pompano topped with Crabmeat, and a chocolate dish smothered in ice cream for dessert.
Raymond and I were stuffing our faces when David went to see if Andy, the great-grandson of Charles and Marie and the current owner of Lusco’s, would stop by our booth to say hello.
When Andy peeked his head in, I understood immediately why his wife, Karen, was the media face for the restaurant. He was intensely shy. Andy usually worked in the kitchen, so he was dressed comfortably in well-worn clothes, probably not expecting to be meeting with us or anyone else. He took a step into the booth with half his body on the other side of the curtain as if he was hoping to spend as little time with us as possible. He spoke so softly that it was hard to hear him.
After a round of introductions, Andy said, in all seriousness, that when he was a boy, Booker Wright was his best friend. A declaration of sorts. He included no anecdotes, just stated that simple fact before asking us about how we were enjoying the food. Raymond and I tried to pull him deeper into conversation, but Andy was clearly eager to get back to the kitchen.
Seeing Andy’s discomfort made me appreciate all the more the gift he was giving to us. He expressed how much he loved Booker, said they played together, and that the two talked about being best friends. Andy would’ve still been quite young when Booker left Lusco’s.
When he finally backed out of our booth and returned to the kitchen, Raymond and I immediately caught each other’s gaze. We both got the clear sense that the grown man who’d just left us was still missing the waiter who’d been his first best friend. Instead of feeling like this detail added to my understanding of my grandfather, it just made things more muddled. Booker had strong feelings toward Greenwood Whites, specifically about how they treated him when he was waiting tables at Lusco’s. Those feelings were intense enough to make him risk his life by appearing on the national news. Nevertheless, my grandfather was tender enough to be considered the best friend of a small child, and not just any child. Andy Pinkston was a member of the Lusco family.
When we got back to the Flats, I grabbed a notebook to jot down my thoughts, but every idea that came to mind was contradicted by the one that followed. I lay down on the bed, and as I drifted off to sleep, the only thing I felt certain about was how little progress I was making in understanding my grandfather.
* * *
IN THE FOLLOWING DAYS, the research and the interviews were almost nonstop. I continued to learn more about Booker, but still felt as though every new piece of information was something I didn’t quite know how to categorize, either emotionally or in terms of how it related to Booker’s life story. Almost every interview we’d done since leaving the screening at the Bridge had included at least one detail presented with such nonchalance that it could easily have been overlooked. But like dark matter—elusive enough to escape detection yet heavy enough to weigh down the universe—the details were revealing a different narrative about who my grandfather really was.
One of the people we interviewed was a Black man who was a little younger than Booker. He remembered going to his restaurant and having Booker drive him back home late at night, even though it was way out in the country. In his estimation, Booker had two separate lives—one on the Black side of town and another on the White side.
But even I knew his assessment was too simple. Booker had half a life on the Black side of town and half a life on the White side of town. To Blacks, his success as a restaurateur, coupled with the time he spent with Whites at Lusco’s, made him an oddity. He wasn’t one of them. To Whites, he was partially invisible, like the thousands of Black residents who didn’t make it into the storied beginnings of the town of Greenwood, who lived just beyond the camera’s frame.
Later, we met Gray Evans, a retired judge who told us about Booker being severely beaten by a White cop named Curtis. Judge Evans said, “Everyone knew who did it, who had gave him the beating.” In subsequent interviews we began asking people if they knew anything about a local cop from the sixties named Curtis, and many of them did. They spoke of a man who had a fierce hatred of Blacks and whose cheeks almost always looked flushed, as though he was in a constant state of either embarrassment or rage.
Judge Gray Evans was certain that everyone in town knew all about the incident, but when I called my mom to ask her if she knew anything about her father being beaten, she didn’t. It occurred to me then that Booker must have been an incredibly lonely man.
I also learned that he cheated on Honey more than once, and had children right under her nose. One of his longtime girlfriends was a waitress Honey had to work with several days of the week.
I met Blacks who hated him and people who were more than happy to talk about how mean he was. I met a lot of Blacks who said great things about my grandfather, but some of them would begin disparaging him to the filmmakers the minute I turned my back. Their complaints were the same: He dated a light-skinned girl; didn’t let people into his place; seemed uppity.
A Black member of law enforcement even told one of the production assistants that Booker probably deserved to die because he was a jerk.
One of the most uncomfortable moments I had that summer occurred when I sat down with the mother of the man who murdered Booker. I was nervous before the interview. I decided to look at it as a conversation between mothers. As much as I anticipated that meeting, nothing could have prepared me for what I saw when she walked through the door.
The mother of the man who murdered my grandfather had a face like a ruptured womb. It was a collection of twisted lines, broken symmetry, and colors ranging from bloodred to black. The incongruity of her skin tone gave the impression that some parts of her face were in shadow, while lending a strange prominence to others. The left side was lower than the right, and her lips were turned at an odd angle as if she’d had a stroke. Her cheeks were caved in because she didn’t have enough teeth to prop them up. Her left eye, having lost a battle with cataracts or some other ailment, was the color of milky silver, like a dense, priceless pearl.
She, too, talked about how mean Booker was, because he often wouldn’t allow poor Blacks into his place. She felt that her son wasn’t responsible for Booker’s death because he died in the hospital. With a shrug of her shoulders, she glanced around the room and said, “God come and got him.”
At the end of every single interview, I was exhausted. The interactions were painful. I knew they would play well on film, but they left me feeling emptied out. More and more I just wanted to go home.
One afternoon, I was standing alone in the long driveway leading up to the Flats, looking out at the fields. I was taking a break, trying to clear my head, when a White couple made the drive out to see me. They didn’t even climb out of their car. The wife was sitting in the passenger seat. She rolled her window down and took my hand while her husband leaned over to look up at me. They had no idea if I would be there then, if it even made sense to make the drive. They stayed only for a short while, but they wanted me to know that Booker was a great man. They wanted me to know how much they missed him, ho
w vivid their memories of him were, and that he’d brought them immense joy.
Then they drove away.
Deconstructing a Racist
Of all the things that happened when I visited Greenwood in the summer of 2011, few would stay with me as much as my meeting with Noll Davis.
The scene in Frank’s film that precedes Booker’s statements was one I’d watched over and over again. The faces of the five men who sat around a table talking about their own generosity and all they were doing to keep their Blacks happy had become quite familiar to me. Three of them were either former or future presidents of the Citizens’ Council, wholehearted believers in their mission.
One of them, Noll Davis, wanted to make it clear that many Greenwood Blacks were, in fact, beneficiaries of Southern hospitality. While looking intently into the camera he’d said, “The colored people are still living on plantations, charged no rent, they do no fieldwork, or any other kind of work. They’re still looked after, carried to the hospital . . .”
Every time I thought about his statement, I felt irritated. He didn’t acknowledge that the reason retired sharecroppers often couldn’t care for themselves was because White plantation owners had cheated them out of profits for decades. He didn’t acknowledge that because of racist practices, most Blacks couldn’t get jobs doing anything else besides sharecropping. He believed that Whites were actually performing some sort of charity for Blacks. It incensed me.
I’d gone to the Bridge meeting and felt disturbed by just how much hurt there still was, then went to Booker’s Place and traveled through Greenwood to see the decay and hopelessness juxtaposed against the immense wealth of the remaining members of the planter class and their descendants. That morning, I was determined not to lose my focus. The men and women whose lives I’d been reading about were imprinted upon me as I dressed and focused on what I wanted to achieve when I finally got my chance to talk to Noll Davis.
On the way to his house, I found myself relishing the idea of sitting down and confronting someone who’d opposed the civil rights movement, but in my mind, this man very well could’ve been one of the ones who’d humiliated my grandfather at Lusco’s. I had a whole host of questions I wanted to ask him that were fueled by curiosity and not a small amount of resentment.
I saw my meeting with Davis as an opportunity to perform an autopsy of sorts. I developed a series of questions that I hoped would allow me to pry inside his mind and uncover the genesis of his racism. I wanted to know what type of language his parents used about Blacks when he was growing up. Did he play with Black boys and girls? How did he see people of color represented in the stories he was told?
My ultimate goal was to one day be able to write about him, and in doing so, create a portrait of a life that could serve as a cautionary tale. I wanted to reach down into Noll Davis’s memory and wrap a hand around the moment the seed of racism was planted. I wanted to explore how it was watered, and then look into his eyes to see that seed fully grown.
I was going to deconstruct a racist.
Finally, our entire crew, traveling in four separate cars, arrived at the home of Noll Davis. It was one story, surrounded by trees and bushes, with a wide, winding driveway in front that was littered with fallen leaves so wide they made me think of the wasted, dried-out hands of giants. David and Raymond went in first, then the camera and light people, and then me. Davis was standing in his foyer greeting everyone and telling them where the bathrooms were.
The first thing I noticed about him was his height. He was well over six feet tall, with broad shoulders, a sizable head, and a straight, strong stance despite his age. His gray eyes were wet. His voice was deep, shaky at times, and lusciously Southern. He had a classic, beautiful drawl that made “y’all,” “reckon,” and the delicate dropping of d’s and t’s seem right, as though that was how English was always meant to be spoken. His cheeks, which were wide and thick, still held a blush. When he was listening to someone, he would tilt his head to the side and lift a hand to smooth his hair down. When it was his turn to talk and he was searching for the right words, he’d rock back and forth on his heels with his large hands in his pockets. Noll Davis was in his eighties, but somehow I had a sense of the boy he was before he learned to hate people who look like me.
The interview was to take place deep inside Davis’s home in a space that appeared to function as a family room. It was dark and had several seating options. As I contemplated where to sit, I wondered whether or not Raymond was going to invite me to interview Davis with him. The family room was full of people carrying large pieces of equipment, moving them back and forth. Finally, I was able to see that, across from a high-backed chair that would certainly be used by Davis, there stood a single stool. I knew then that Raymond was planning to conduct the interview without me.
When everything seemed to be in place and Raymond was just about to sit on his stool, I pulled him aside and in a rushed whisper I asked, “Will you ask him about what he was told about Blacks when he was a boy? Did he see or interact with Blacks? What did his parents say to him about Black people?” Raymond shrugged and nodded at the same time.
“Yeah, if I can, sure, yeah, we’ll see.” Then he turned around.
My disappointment quickly slid away when I realized that, even if these questions weren’t asked during the official interview, I could ask them afterward.
The camera was turned on, and a hush fell over the room. Even though there were three lighting technicians, two cameramen, a producer, and several researchers all huddled together between just a few couches, it was suddenly as if Raymond and Davis were in the room by themselves.
To warm him up, Raymond made small talk. Davis had been good friends with John Faulkner, the brother of famed Southern writer William Faulkner. He spoke about that relationship, about growing up in Mississippi and living during a time when people walked everywhere and used notes as promises to pay debts. Eventually, Raymond asked him if he thought Greenwood had changed since Davis had first moved to the town back in September 1949.
“I think the cultures in Greenwood are getting along somewhat better than they once did,” Davis said. “I had one that worked for me thirty-five years. I had known him before I even hired him. We got along just fine. We went through the civil rights era in good shape. We had no problem.” From where I sat, my view of Davis was blocked by lighting equipment, so I couldn’t check his face to see if he knew how ridiculous he sounded when he claimed that he’d been friends with “one.”
He went on to talk about the current economic situation in Greenwood. “I don’t see the work ethic I used to see. That’s what brought the Mexicans in. See, they’ll work. Most of our gins are working Hispanics now, rather than . . .” He seemed to be looking for a word, one that didn’t start with the letter “n.” He finished by saying, “The people that already lived here.”
I stopped listening. I was afraid I would stand up and either scream at Raymond for not calling out Davis’s blatant racism or that I’d just tear into Davis myself. I wanted to repeat his statements to him, break them down, and explain how dehumanizing they were. I wanted to ask him what the fuck was wrong with him. What had gone so wrong in his development as a human being that he couldn’t even hear how backward he sounded? I clenched my fists, closed my eyes, and leaned back into the cushions of his couch. I took several deep breaths in an effort to take myself back to my plan. I would have to wait.
I could hear Raymond and Davis giggling, chatting like old pals, talking about Byron De La Beckwith, but I forced myself not to listen, to not allow their conversation to penetrate my consciousness. I just wanted it to be over. I was looking toward my moment with the racist.
When the interview finally ended, the members of our crew walked back and forth, into and out of Davis’s home, to remove the equipment they’d brought in. I stood in his foyer, waiting for everyone to leave so I could do what I had come to do.
The last person to leave was Nicki, the associate producer. She
’d stayed behind to take me to the next interview. She must have sensed something, because she quietly slipped outside, leaving Davis and me alone. We stood together in his foyer, engaging in small talk. I was only half there, because the rest of me was examining him, trying to figure out how to begin, how to delve into my provocative questions.
Suddenly his voice changed, and with a hint of authority he said, “Come sit in this chair.”
“What?” I asked.
“You should try this chair,” he repeated. I looked around. For the first time, I let myself take in his front room. The carpet was a light, pale color, possibly green, and free of evidence that anyone had ever walked on it. Furniture was smartly placed around the room in a delicate balance. On the far wall there was a built-in bookshelf, under which stood a beautiful, well-polished piano. There was a medium-size settee with plump, comfortable-looking cushions that had a simple painting of pastel images hanging over it. The dark wood coffee table that stood in the center of the room seemed faint and feminine; on top of it were several picture books about historic Mississippi homes. I smiled to myself. This was a room for sipping sweet tea in petticoats and starched trousers.
In one corner, Noll Davis stood, pointing at a futuristic-looking beige leather chair. It was long and slender and had lots of buttons on it. “Come on. It belonged to my wife. No one’s sat in it since she died four years ago,” he said. I heard myself inhale through my teeth. I shifted my weight and found that my hand was in the path of a narrow sliver of Delta sunlight. It was reaching from the sky, across the land, past the leaves in the tree outside, and through a slender slit in the curtains that I could barely make out. I felt as though I was standing in a beam from a searchlight, a very hot searchlight. I moved away, but not before I started to sweat.
The Song and the Silence Page 21