by Josh Levin
* * *
In California, far away from where she’d been expelled from an all-white elementary school, Connie Harbaugh had been seen as more than just a biological mistake. But back home in Arkansas, where old acquaintances still thought of her as Martha Louise White, her racial background demanded she be exiled. As an adult in the 1950s, she was subjected to the same slights she’d borne as a young girl. This time, her children would suffer those insults, too.
Hubert Mooney didn’t see his niece for seven years after bailing her out of jail in Oakland. They reconnected near the Arkansas-Missouri border in 1952, close to where Hubert’s brother-in-law Troy “Buddy” Elliott lived and worked. The Elliotts and Mooneys had known each other for more than a decade, having picked and hauled cotton side by side. As of the early 1950s, Buddy Elliott had recently gotten married to Hubert’s wife’s sister. Rumor had it that Buddy’s older brother was the father of Martha Louise White’s oldest son, Clifford.
After her divorce, and possibly before it had been finalized, Martha started seeing Buddy on the sly. The tall, handsome twenty-two-year-old, who, like her first husband, had blond hair and blue eyes, was known as something of a scoundrel. Hubert would testify in Chicago that Buddy was a no-good drifter, adding, “I think that has been verified everywhere in the world.”
Buddy’s wife, Bonnie Elliott, would leave him when she learned he was having an affair. Before she broke things off, she asked some relatives to drive her to the lovers’ hideout. When they reached their destination, Bonnie’s husband and his dark-complexioned paramour refused to show their faces. Bonnie’s young niece, who’d come along for the ride, wasn’t sure why her aunt was crying, or what had compelled her to toss rocks at her husband’s car. She was old enough, however, to understand the meaning of Bonnie’s slurs. “Come out, you black nigger!” her aunt screamed. She thought Bonnie was going to kill this other woman.
Buddy and Martha escaped that run-in without suffering any physical injury, and in August 1952—seven months after a Tennessee judge granted Paul Harbaugh an absolute divorce—the couple was issued a marriage license in Mississippi County, Arkansas. That document listed the new Mrs. Elliott’s maiden name as Martha Louise White. It also included a phony birth date, one indicating that she was twenty-two years old rather than twenty-six. When she had her fifth child in 1956, a son named Robin, the birth certificate labeled the boy’s parents as Troy and Connie Elliott. Her “color or race” was recorded as white.
Connie/Martha’s second marriage wasn’t any happier or more stable than her first. As an adult, Johnnie would recall having seen Buddy Elliott beat his mother and pull her hair. But no matter how terribly her new husband allegedly treated her, she didn’t receive much sympathy from Buddy’s family. The Elliotts worked with black people in the fields, and they ate lunch beside them while perched on tractor tires. But a marriage between the races wasn’t something they could tolerate.
Regardless of what words were typed on those state and county records, the Elliotts knew about Martha Louise White’s bloodline. By the time Johnnie was ten years old, Buddy’s relatives had told him his mother was really black. The Elliotts didn’t seem to hold that against Johnnie, who himself looked white. But his older brother Paul Phillip, who was darker than his mother, wasn’t welcome to spend time in the Elliotts’ homes.
Martha’s side of the family wasn’t any more accepting. In court in 1964, Lydia Mooney Blount would deny, unconvincingly, that she’d described one of the children her daughter had brought around as a “nigger kid.” She would acknowledge she’d helped raise her grandson Clifford, explaining that he was white and—unlike her daughter Martha—had been allowed to attend an all-white school. Lydia would profess ignorance regarding her other grandkids, saying she didn’t remember most of their names. When asked if they were “white children or Negro children,” she’d reply, “What am I to judge what kids are?”
* * *
Johnnie didn’t know who he was or where he’d come from. He’d heard that his father was a man named Paul Harbaugh, and that he was off somewhere working for the navy. Some of the Elliotts told him that wasn’t true—that his stepfather, Buddy, who Johnnie couldn’t stand, was his real biological father. His mother wasn’t interested in helping him solve this mystery, and she’d beat him up if he asked too many questions. She also avoided the subject of her own lineage, telling him she was “a little bit of everything,” and introducing different people as her own mother depending on where she was and who was asking.
The way Johnnie saw it, his family was either absent or might as well have been. His mother alternated between ignoring him and knocking him around; he barely knew his brother Clifford, who left home for good when Johnnie was less than five years old; and his younger siblings, Sandra and Robin, weren’t old enough to serve as co-conspirators. Growing up, he felt that Paul Phillip was the only person he could count on. The brothers, who were born just a year apart, clung to each other as best they could, but the day-to-day reality of life in the Jim Crow South meant their relationship was constantly under threat. At a restaurant in Louisiana, Paul Phillip had to go to the back door to pick up his food, then eat his meal outside. When Johnnie joined his brother underneath a tree, the proprietors forced the children to split up. If they were ever seen there again, the two boys were told, they’d get themselves into a world of trouble.
Johnnie called his brother Paul, although some white people in Arkansas referred to him as Tojo—an allusion to Japanese prime minister Hideki Tojo, who’d ordered the attack on Pearl Harbor. During World War II, Tojo’s name had gained currency as an anti-Japanese slur. In this case, the nickname may have been inspired by black Americans’ purported kinship with the United States’ “colored” foe. This had been a matter of some concern in Arkansas: In the 1930s, a Filipino union organizer had been arrested in Mississippi County after allegedly preaching to black sharecroppers that “the world belongs to the colored races. Join us and hell will soon pop around the corner for the white man.”
Paul called his brother Rusty, on account of Johnnie’s reddish hair. It was Paul’s hair, though, that attracted interest from white passersby, who wanted to know how a kid with dark, kinky locks had found a place in such a pale-faced crowd. Paul’s appearance marked him as an outsider, and different from the person he felt closest to. When he asked why he and his brother looked nothing alike, his mother was no more forthcoming than she’d been with Johnnie. No matter how much he pleaded, she wouldn’t give him an answer.
Martha Louise White had been able, in certain places and at certain times, to conceal her origins from those who might be inclined to use them against her. Three of her children—Clifford, Johnnie, and Robin—had light enough skin not to invite a second glance from suspicious white folks, while Sandra had the same olive coloring as her mother. But there was no hiding the way Paul looked.
Paul’s blackness was a problem, and her solution was to fob him off on other people, just as her own mother had done with her. In the mid-1950s, she left him with a family in Missouri, a black couple who sent him to school under his middle name, Phillip. She’d later reclaim him, then give her son away again. Johnnie found these repeated separations confusing and crushing. He missed his brother desperately, and he didn’t understand why their mother was unwilling to keep her family together.
Johnnie, too, felt the sting of her abandonment. His mother’s marriage to Buddy Elliott had only made her connections with her children more tenuous. The eventual dissolution of that relationship later in the 1950s didn’t do anything to strengthen those bonds. She’d leave Johnnie with Buddy’s parents and sister for a couple of weeks or months, and she’d bring him to a chicken farm in Albany, Louisiana, where he was fed and cared for by a woman he called Grandma Goldie. Although Johnnie thought Goldie was his biological relative, the truth was that his mother had briefly dated the Louisiana woman’s son—a fling during which Martha Louise White had passed herself off as a Filipina. The two wom
en may have seen each other as kindred spirits. Golda Forrest Stevens was married at least eight times. In 1950, she was convicted of manslaughter after shooting and killing one of her husbands during a domestic dispute.
By the time Johnnie met Goldie, she’d done her hitch in prison. In Albany, he chased chickens and stomped on snakes, and he got lavished with the sort of affection he rarely received from his own flesh and blood. But inevitably his mother would retrieve him, and they’d set out for some new place. Johnnie had no idea how she decided where to point that white Oldsmobile or green Nash—to him, it seemed as though she moved around at random. She brought the family to El Paso, Texas, where she got together with a man who supposedly worked in the oil business. They also alighted on the southeast coast of Florida, where she met a dentist who had a big house, a big boat, and a son with two gold teeth. That liaison stalled out when she started bringing people to the dentist’s house for voodoo sessions.
That voodoo stuff was just one more thing Johnnie didn’t understand. What he was certain of was that none of his mother’s entanglements ever lasted. She hadn’t succeeded in starting a new life in California, and both of her marriages had been busts. But in the latter part of the 1950s, she’d hatch a new escape plan, one that would allow her to leave her childhood home for good.
* * *
Connie Elliott drove up to Avalon and Annie Mae Moore’s plank-walled house sometime in 1956 or 1957, approaching the front door with an offer of transportation and friendship. The Moores’ five daughters and two sons didn’t know who Connie was—they didn’t recognize her from their worship services, and the ones who were old enough to work had never seen her in the cotton fields. Connie sounded more worldly than anyone else the black family had ever run across on their Arkansas plantation, and she had at least a little bit of money, seeing as she drove around in a big Oldsmobile station wagon. The Moore kids didn’t think Connie looked black, but they were pretty sure she wasn’t white either. After talking it over among themselves, they decided she was probably Mexican.
Annie Mae found Connie easy to get along with and fun to be around. The women would drive into Blytheville to go shopping, and Connie would stop by just to visit, strolling in and helping herself to a glass of water from the bucket in the Moores’ kitchen. Connie also brought around her children, no two of which looked the same. Sandra was the Moore girls’ favorite—they’d faithfully brush her long hair as if she were their personal doll. Johnnie and Paul mostly kept to themselves. Connie wasn’t all that strict with her offspring, but she didn’t need to be—they seemed wary of straying too far from their mother, or even opening their mouths.
Connie had an ease around all these children, but she didn’t appear attached to any of them. In addition to her own kids, she’d occasionally come around with a child or two the Moores hadn’t seen before, then never bring those youngsters around again.
The Moores’ oldest daughter, MaLoyce, who was born in 1945, sensed something was off with her mother’s new friend. She found it odd that this strange woman had just come out of nowhere, and that she referred to herself by different last names. Connie also hung around with an older boy named Joe, a gangly white teenager who tried to touch MaLoyce’s sisters while they were sleeping. All the girls were afraid of him; MaLoyce came to believe he was Connie’s henchman.
Although Annie Mae admonished her children to stay away from Joe, she didn’t banish the woman who’d brought him into their home. MaLoyce thought Connie was a bad influence on her good Christian mother. The mystery woman was always concocting one scheme or another, and blurting out swear-laden exclamations like “I don’t give a damn!” and “Hell no!” She also brought Annie Mae into the grubby company of fortune-tellers. One time, a clairvoyant in Memphis told MaLoyce’s mother that someone important in her life would turn on her, but not before doing some wonderful things. The psychic said there was nothing for her to do but wait for it to happen.
* * *
Avalon Moore had come to Arkansas in the fall of 1953 to make a few dollars harvesting cotton. He’d planned to stick around for just a couple of months but scrapped his plans to go back home to Mississippi when a plantation overseer asked him to stay on to sharecrop. Avalon, Annie Mae, and their children moved into a small wooden house on the outskirts of Blytheville. They had two bedrooms to split between two adults and six children—they’d have a seventh after arriving in Arkansas—and a woodstove for a heater. The cotton fields were just a few paces away.
Given their duties on the farm, the Moore children didn’t make it to school often enough to be in a specific grade. The four oldest kids picked and chopped cotton with their father while their mother tended to the household chores, and they all huddled together in the evening to listen to the radio and laugh at Annie Mae and Avalon’s made-up stories. When he couldn’t hitch a ride in the back of the boss man’s truck, Avalon would walk four or five miles to the plantation store to pick up flour, sugar, baking powder, and lard that he’d buy on credit.
Sharecropping sustained the Moores—barely. It also trapped them in a never-ending cycle of debt. By the late 1950s, they’d managed to move to a slightly bigger house, one with five rooms and a small garden in the back. They’d also replaced their woodstove with a gas-burning one and bought an electric Kelvinator refrigerator. But no matter how hard they worked, and no matter the price of cotton, they never came out ahead. Avalon and Annie Mae taught their children the importance of self-respect—that they should never kowtow to anyone. At the same time, the kids watched their father scrape and bow before the overseer, saying “Yessir” when the boss told him to “get your kids to put a handle on my name.”
This was the plight of a poor black sharecropper in Arkansas: Work yourself nearly to death, yessir-ing all the while, just to earn the right to do it again the following year. That’s the deal Avalon Moore had made, and that’s the deal he’d be held to. At least that’s what the Moores had believed before the spring day in 1959 that they thought might mark the end of Avalon’s life.
* * *
Annie Mae was picking beans in her garden one Saturday afternoon when her daughter Bobbie ran to the back door, almost hyperventilating. A white man had marched up to the porch, the eleven-year-old shouted, and he’d pointed a gun at her father’s forehead. From the garden, Annie Mae could see Avalon getting into the back of a pickup truck. She watched the vehicle speed away down the field road, kicking up dust until it zoomed out of sight.
The matriarch of the Moore family tried to keep her children from panicking, but they could tell she was worried. Annie Mae told them to climb down into a roadside irrigation ditch, and to keep their voices down and their footfalls quiet. She led them to a bridge, then across a river to a friendly white family’s house, where she dropped off her youngest children. Annie Mae and MaLoyce then walked a couple of miles farther down the road to Connie’s place. Annie Mae’s friend had a car that could get them to the sheriff’s department.
When they made it to the station, it was already starting to get dark. Annie Mae told the man on duty that her husband had gone missing, and that he’d had a gun pointed in his face. When she finished telling her story, the man said it didn’t strike him as a matter for law enforcement. “If he ain’t dead,” he said, “there ain’t nothing we can do for you.”
MaLoyce started crying, and she couldn’t make herself stop. The thirteen-year-old didn’t know where her father was, and it didn’t seem as though anyone cared enough to help. Connie got the teenager even more agitated, taking it upon herself to run through a series of worst-case scenarios. By the time they’d retraced their steps and regathered the younger kids, Annie Mae, MaLoyce, and Connie had all begun to suspect that Avalon might be dead. Instead, they found him sitting on the Moores’ front porch, waiting for his family to get back home.
Avalon’s daughter Bobbie hadn’t seen what she thought she’d seen. One of the plantation bosses had stuck his finger, not a gun, in the middle of her father’s for
ehead. The boss man had reeked of alcohol, and he’d started yelling about all the money Avalon owed him. Avalon had no choice but to endure the abuse—he couldn’t risk upsetting a white man, particularly a drunk and angry one. He’d sucked it up and done as he was told, hoisting himself into the back of the boss’s truck and going for a ride. They’d ended up outside a backwoods shack on a plot of untended, mosquito-infested land: This is where the Moores would have to live, the overseer had said, if Avalon didn’t repay his debt.
Avalon explained all this to Annie Mae, telling her he hadn’t been in mortal danger, and that they wouldn’t have to move to that mosquito-infested land. But his wife had had enough.
“Avalon,” she said, getting out of Connie’s station wagon to face her husband. “We’re leaving.”
Avalon told his wife they should stay a little while longer—that they could break even if they worked for just one more season.
Annie Mae knew the overseer would never let that happen. She also knew her husband could’ve been seriously hurt, or even killed. Her family didn’t deserve to be treated this way, and they wouldn’t be treated any differently so long as they stayed in Arkansas. Her children weren’t getting out of the car. It was time to go.
“Avalon, come on,” Connie shouted from the driver’s seat. “Don’t be such a scared jackass.”
Avalon Moore stepped inside his house, grabbed his favorite cap off a nail on the wall, and squeezed into the station wagon with his wife and children.
The Moores would never see their home again. They’d leave behind that new Kelvinator refrigerator, all the clothes that weren’t on their backs, and drawers full of family photos. As she drove them away, Connie assured Avalon and Annie Mae that she’d take care of them. The Moores didn’t have any better options. They were going to put their lives in Connie’s hands.
