by Casey Cep
Certain crimes, however, ran so deep in the veins of the South that those in power failed to register them as criminal. Many of the white residents of Coosa County and nearly all of the black ones were tenant farmers, victims of a brutal system that left those trapped within it barely able to eke out a living. Because they had to buy their seeds and fertilizers in the spring, sharecroppers were said to eat their crops before they planted them, and much of whatever they could later coax out of the ground went straight to the landowner. The terms of the loans a sharecropper could get were often unfavorable, the yields inadequate to feed and clothe a family, and the work itself backbreaking—sunrise to sundown, six days a week. Any child born into such circumstances was expected to help from the time he could walk.
In 1936, when Walker Evans and James Agee documented the gaunt faces and careworn lives of white tenant farmers in western Alabama, in what would later become Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Willie Maxwell was eleven, living on the other side of the state and the other side of the color line. Although his later years would leave documentation in courthouses around Alabama and make headlines around the nation, little is known of his early life, a silence characteristic of the historical record for African Americans in that time and place. Maxwell attended school, but around the harvest seasons, since life in Coosa County was organized chiefly by the rhythm of what went into the ground and what came out of it. Sharecroppers there grew corn, cotton, wheat, and oats in rotation, and, if they could, peanuts, peaches, or watermelons. There were baptisms and cemetery cleanings in the spring, quilting and corn shucking in the fall. Boys like Willie planted, hoed, picked fruits and vegetables, scared crows off the corn and rabbits out of the lettuce while learning to shoot, and fished for whatever they could catch in the Beau, the Hatchet, the Socapatoy, and Jacks Creek, the streams that bounded Crewsville.
Around the edges of all that, Willie got seven years of formal education. After school, in the summer of 1943, he joined two million other African American men in registering for the draft. At eighteen, he reported for basic training at Fort Benning, a base, named for a Confederate general, that straddles the state line with Georgia. He was issued a uniform, and his hair was shaved to the tight trim he would maintain for the rest of his life. Although he went through combat training, the army assigned Maxwell to an engineer aviation battalion at Keesler Field in Mississippi, and then to Camp Kearns in Utah.
Before the war, Camp Kearns was five thousand acres of wheat fields. Stripped of its crops, the wartime version was a gritty, filthy place. Military vehicles ran their headlights during the day to see through the clouds of dust, and soldiers woke most mornings under a layer of dirt that had blown in through the plywood and tar-paper windows. The men were packed into barracks so tightly that they called their quarters chicken coops; respiratory infections spread like rumors of deployment. Maxwell lived there for two years, until November 1945, when he was discharged with $413.80 and, in common with millions of other servicemen, a Victory Medal to mark the end of World War II. Instead of returning to Alabama, however, he chose to reenlist and was sent to California to join the 811th Engineer Aviation Battalion, one of forty-eight black units that constructed and maintained airfields around the world. From there, he went to the Pacific theater and drove trucks for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
At the time, the military was almost as divided as the Deep South that Willie Maxwell had left behind, an injustice that became even more glaring after the United States joined the fight against the Nazis. “Our local Nordics have a mass psychosis, too,” wrote Langston Hughes: “As the Hitlerites treat the Jews, so they treat the Negroes, in varying degrees of viciousness.” The same prejudice that kept civilians separated by race in schools and churches and soda shops kept soldiers segregated in camp bunks, mess halls, and on the front lines. The army would finally begin to integrate in 1948, but that was too late for Sergeant Maxwell. In January 1947, after returning to America with a Good Conduct Medal, he was voluntarily discharged. By early May, he was headed home.
Back in Coosa County, Maxwell settled in Kellyton, the town where he was born. Now twenty-one years old, he was six feet two and 180 pounds—tall enough to see over almost any man and slim enough to pass between any two. His brown eyes were always watchful, his face handsome and lean; a narrow mustache sat like an officer’s chevron above his lips. His speech was elegant, almost formal, and the charm most young men could spare only for their steadies he offered to everyone he met, leaving “sirs” and “ma’ams” like fingerprints wherever he went. “There wouldn’t be anybody nicer to you, conversation-wise,” people said of him. “You’d think that man came from heaven he was so smooth.”
Sometime after his return home, Maxwell traded his uniform for a job with the company that had made it: Russell Manufacturing, Alexander City’s largest textile mill. The handsome young army vet also met a quiet local girl named Mary Lou Edwards. Born and raised in Cottage Grove, another one of Coosa County’s tiny towns, Mary Lou was two years younger than Willie and still living with her parents when he gave her an engagement ring. They got their medical certificate the last week of March and were married at the probate court in the county seat of Rockford on April 2, 1949. It was the first but not the last marriage of the future Reverend Willie Maxwell, and whatever else can be said about it, this much is true: it lasted, as he promised that day that it would, until death did them part.
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Minister of the Gospel
Mary Lou Maxwell was shelling peas. It was the first week of August, after the summer storms had battered the bird nests and wildflowers, when the cicadas were loud in the trees and the ticks were wild in the grass. Once the corn grew heavy on the stalk and other vegetables sat fat and sedate on the vine, the pea pods were ready and could be plucked by their bonnets off the plants and shelled one at a time by the hundreds. Women and children pressed their thumbs against the pods, popping the creases and sending peas pinging into a colander. Over the course of slow summer hours, bushel baskets full of tangled greens were reduced to bowls of peas, ready for washing and blanching and packing away in the freezer.
Mary Lou had been shelling since she got home from her shift at Russell Mills—her second job, on top of working from home as a laundress and seamstress, taking in clothes and linens from her neighbors. Shelling was a peaceful, mindless task, good for gossip if you had company and contemplation if you did not. But when one of her sisters came by the house that evening, she found Mary Lou sweating and anxious. Earlier that day, Willie Maxwell had been dismissed from his own job at the mill. It was not the first time he had been fired, and it was unwelcome news for the couple financially, but Mary Lou hadn’t been able to discuss it with her husband yet, because he had a second job, too, and he had to go straight to it that night: the Reverend Maxwell, as he was universally known by then, was scheduled to preach at a revival near Auburn.
Back then, as today, southern revivals were all fire and brimstone, and they could go on for hours inside tents raised especially for the occasion. Even in the evening, the heat was so tremendous under the pavilions that attendees could be forgiven for thinking the setting had been designed to remind them of what awaited if they didn’t repent. But people flocked to them anyway, sometimes by the thousands, and churches kept hosting them, for the simple reason that they worked: it was partly thanks to the state’s vibrant revival culture that by 1970 one in four Alabamians was Baptist. Sometimes churches came together to host a collective revival, but generally they staggered them, so that summer was one long season of spiritual improvement where salvation was always within driving distance.
Maxwell had been invited to this particular revival by the Reverend and Mrs. Reese of Macedonia Baptist Church, but Mrs. Maxwell did not want to come along. In a small town, a preacher’s wife faces more scrutiny than almost anyone. Where she goes and what she wears, how she talks and whom she talks to and what she says: everyt
hing she does is noticed, noted, weighed, and judged. Charity begins at home, but so does humility, modesty, patience, piety, and respectability, and a preacher’s wife is under pressure to embody them all—even more pressure, sometimes, than the preacher himself. It is easy to see why a woman in such a position might keep to herself when she could, and that night, August 3, 1970, Maxwell agreed to go preach without his wife, but asked her to leave the phone line clear so that he could stop somewhere to call her on his way back home.
The Reverend headed out for the revival a little before six o’clock. Mary Lou’s sister left soon afterward, and later that evening Mary Lou got in her car and went to visit a different sister, Lena Martin. When she got back home, she stopped to talk with her next-door neighbor, Dorcas Anderson. Her husband, Mary Lou mentioned, was out at a revival and had asked her to stay off the telephone so he could reach her. They talked for a few minutes, and then Mary Lou went back to her house to wait out the rest of what she assumed would be a long, lonely night; she’d had enough experience of revivals by then to know that the one over in Auburn would likely carry on until well after dark, and enough experience of her husband to be used to passing evenings alone.
* * *
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To hear him tell it, hours later and for the rest of his life, that was the night the Reverend Willie Maxwell became Job. On his way back from the revival, he pulled in to a service station in the town of Camp Hill to buy a Coca-Cola and call his wife. Forever after, he would insist that she didn’t answer and that when he got home to Nixburg, just before eleven, she wasn’t there. He would swear that, worn out by a long and difficult day, he’d fallen right to sleep. It was not until he woke up around two in the morning and realized his wife still had not come home that he called his mother-in-law, who said she hadn’t seen her daughter that day; his neighbor, who had seen her but much earlier; and then one of Mary Lou’s sisters, who said she had come by the house to visit but left hours before. It was only then that Maxwell called the police.
After the officers who were dispatched to Nixburg spoke to Maxwell, they went next door to talk with Dorcas Anderson. She had been woken earlier that night by the Reverend’s telephone call and had gone over to talk with him about his missing wife, but when the police came knocking, she told them something she hadn’t told the Reverend himself: Mrs. Maxwell had come to her house not once but twice that evening. The first time was after visiting her sister Lena, when Mary Lou mentioned something peculiar about how her husband wanted her to leave the phone on the hook; the second time was after ten, when she was excited and agitated. “The Reverend has been in a bad accident and I’m going to get him,” she had told Dorcas, explaining that Maxwell had called to say he’d wrecked his car up near New Site.
That was the last thing that Mary Lou had ever said to Mrs. Anderson. As for Maxwell’s claim to have gotten home around eleven, Anderson told the authorities that to the best of her knowledge he had been out all night. If he had come home earlier and fallen asleep, she had neither seen nor heard him. The earliest she could be sure that the Reverend was home was when he called her, at well past two o’clock in the morning, to ask if she knew where Mary Lou was. Right after that, Mrs. Anderson said, she walked to her back door and looked across at the Reverend’s garage, where she could see his car. “I went back to the bedroom,” she said, “and told my husband there was something wrong because his car wasn’t torn up.”
The Reverend insisted that there must have been some kind of misunderstanding. He had not been in any kind of accident, and when he called home from Camp Hill, Mary Lou hadn’t answered the telephone. He felt certain that it must have been his wife who had been in a wreck, and he urged the police to look for her car on Highway 22, the route that would have taken her home from her sister Lena’s house and had also taken the Reverend home from New Site.
A highway in name only, 22 is a sleepy, two-lane road that crosses Hillabee Creek. At night, when the air grows colder than the water, fog rises up off the creek and hangs over the pavement like breath in winter. When the police finally found Mary Lou’s 1968 Ford Fairlane along Highway 22, it was on the shoulder, twelve feet from the asphalt beside a stand of trees, but it had not actually hit any of them. There was a little damage, none of it serious; all told, it would cost only a few hundred dollars to repair. Far from looking wrecked, the car looked as if it had been parked. Its engine was running, and its headlights stared blankly out into the darkness. Mrs. Maxwell was inside, already dead.
* * *
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For the first five years of their marriage, the Maxwells worked as sharecroppers for a man named Mac Allen Thomas, then a county commissioner and later a probate judge, who owned a plantation just outside of Rockford. As commissioner, Mac was the kind of glad-handing, strong-arming good old boy who knew how to get bridges built and roads improved and didn’t mind when people joked that he’d paved every pig trail in the county. As judge, he wasn’t a stickler for details, and happily obliged law enforcement officers by pre-signing warrants for them to keep in their cars in case they came across any bootleggers. Mac took a shine to the soft-spoken, sweet-talking newlywed tilling his fields and remained friendly with the Reverend long after pretty much every other lawman in three counties had developed a different opinion.
When Maxwell wanted to, he could be both charming and persuasive, but he did not always want to, and his self-control, such as it was, had limits. At Russell Mills, for instance, his reputation for hard work was marred by a record of absenteeism, and in 1954, two years after Hank Williams got arrested for public drunkenness and disorderly conduct and was famously photographed stumbling shirtless out of a cell in the Alexander City Jail, Maxwell was fired from the mill for failing to show up for work. Around the same time, the Maxwells stopped sharecropping for Mac Thomas, leaving them short on money. But as would later become abundantly clear, Maxwell was an entrepreneurial man, and he soon began working the series of jobs he would have in rotation for the rest of his life: powdering, pulpwooding, and preaching.
The powdering took place at a rock quarry in Fishpond, a smidge of a town near the county line. It was a difficult, dangerous job, and Maxwell excelled at it. “He was one of the most outstanding, dependable employees I had in every way,” recalled his supervisor, Jack Bush, who would later be elected Alexander City’s first full-time mayor. The work entailed drilling holes several feet down into the rock so that blasting caps or fertilizer blasts could bust the rock into smaller bits and a crusher could break them down. Each explosion covered the quarry and everyone in it with powdered rock, so that by the end of the day the laborers looked like they had been dusted with flour from head to toe.
Unlike his co-workers, however, Maxwell never stayed dusty for long. At the quarry as elsewhere, he excelled at erasing the evidence of what he had done. “When we cleaned up,” Bush said, “he was immaculate.” Maxwell didn’t just brush off the powder and mop off the sweat, and he did not truck any more than necessary in work clothes; instead, he fashioned himself into one of the most dapper men in eastern Alabama. His shoes were always polished, his suits were always black, and a tie almost always accentuated his crisp white shirts. Later, people took to saying that his clothing must’ve been handmade for him by the Devil, and the men who watched him deliver pulpwood to wood yards in three-piece suits still talk about it today.
Pulpwooding was cleaner work than powdering, but not by much, and only because the Reverend Maxwell ran a crew instead of working on one. America’s pulp and paper industry had moved south in the early decades of the twentieth century, after New England’s forests were depleted and a Georgia chemist figured out how to make newsprint from southern pine despite its high resin levels. In short order, the gristmills and sawmills that had dotted rural counties around the South were overtaken by pulp mills, and many of the crews that had cut and hewed ties for the railroad industry and planed lumber for construction turn
ed their energies to pulping wood. A war waged briefly over supply, as lumbermen fought pulpwooders over millions of acres of forests—the South’s version of the farmer-versus-rancher battles in the West. In Alabama, International Paper established its headquarters in Mobile, while the Gulf States Paper Corporation landed in Tuscaloosa; those giants and many other smaller companies depended on leases with private landowners and arrangements with private crews to supply their mills.
As head of one of those crews, Maxwell worked the way most pulpwooders did: with a single-axle truck, chain saws, axes, and a team of anywhere from two to six men. When he had a full crew, one or two of the men ran the saws, a limber followed along behind removing branches, a bucker cut the delimbed logs into sections, a loader moved them onto the truck, and a driver delivered them. A crew like that could expect to harvest eight cords of short wood per day. At the mills, that wood was fed into chippers, the chips were cooked into pulp, and the pulp was pressed and dried into paper. The mills reeked of ammonia and sulfides and discharged those chemicals whenever they ran, but they gave Alabama one of its few flourishing industries and gave the country countless essential and inessential goods: newspapers, notebooks, towels, lunch bags, liquor store bags, birthday cards, tissues, milk cartons, novels.
For Maxwell, pulpwooding was a way into the lucrative logging business. It did not require a lot of overhead—just a few hundred dollars to cover saws, chains, tires for the trucks, and gas for everything with an engine. The companies that contracted men like him to bring them wood would often handle the leases and send a timber specialist in ahead of a crew to mark trees, but Maxwell did not need much help. As reliable in the woods as in the quarry, he never missed a marked tree and never cut one a client wanted standing. “I’d see after it all,” said one mill manager for the Montgomery-based company Bama Wood. “Only thing was, with Maxwell, I’d just mark a small place. He’d cut it just like I told him to. I would go out there and mark about an acre of it and I’d tell him, ‘Okay, Preacher, this is the way I want it to look, I want it all this way,’ and he would just do it.”
