by Paul Theroux
“As you well know, this is the fiftieth anniversary of the civil rights movement,” Cynthia said. “I think about how far we’ve come. I want to talk about how people have benefited. I want to celebrate the families that didn’t get notoriety. So many people contributed to that struggle—it was a war, they were soldiers in that war. No one knows their names. They were ordinary people, taking big risks.”
I mentioned the 1965 confrontation provoked by the Klan and the “Fight Race Mixing” whites in Greensboro that Reverend Lyles had described, elaborated in the book he’d shown me, Susan Ashmore’s Carry It On: the street fights, the many injuries, the arrests of the black protesters, the connivance of the police, the indifference or hostility of the white politicians.
“It surely was a war,” Cynthia said. She sighed and reflected for a moment. “I try to imagine the pain of Beulah Mae Donald when she saw her son hanging from a tree.” Saying so, Cynthia became tearful. “That poor woman.”
The death of Michael Donald had been recent in Alabama terms, and was an outrage, the last recorded lynching in the state. A local horror that had not resonated much beyond the state line, it had happened in Mobile in 1981. It had begun with a murder trial and a hung jury and the consequent acquittal of a black man accused of murdering a white policeman. Infuriated by this turn of events, the Exalted Cyclops (presiding officer) of the local Klavern, Bennie Jack Hays, summoned a meeting of his Klansmen and demanded a revenge killing. His son Henry and James Knowles, two young Klansmen—the youngsters known as Ghouls or Knights—obeyed him. They drove through the back streets of the city looking for a black man, any black man, to punish as an example.
Late on the night of March 21, 1981, Michael Donald, nineteen years old, was walking alone, on his way to buy cigarettes at a convenience store. Slowing down near him, the two Klansmen called him over to their car, claimed they were lost, and asked him for directions. When Donald obliged, answering them, they seized him, dragged him into the back seat, and drove to the next county where they clubbed him to death. For good measure, they slit his throat. They then brought Donald’s corpse back to Mobile, tied a rope around his neck, and hanged him conspicuously from a tree on a city street.
“I can hardly imagine the sorrow of a mother,” Cynthia Burton said, “and what this poor woman went through.”
What she went through was the horror of seeing her son lynched, and then falsely accused by the police of being a drug dealer (this being the supposed pretext for his murder), and enduring two and a half years of justice denied, of agony and appeals and interventions (by, among others, Jesse Jackson), before the FBI became involved and the murderers were at last caught, sent to trial, and found guilty. When the younger of the two defendants, James Knowles, from his place in the dock after his conviction, in June 1983, told Beulah Mae Donald that he was sorry, he asked for her forgiveness.
“I do forgive you,” the bereaved Mrs. Donald said. “From the day I found out who you all was, I asked God to take care of y’all, and He has.”
Because Knowles had agreed to a plea deal and testified against his accomplice, he got life in prison. Henry Hays was sentenced to death. He spent fourteen years on death row in Holman Prison (called “the Slaughterhouse” by prisoners), about fifty miles northeast of Mobile. He was executed in June 1997, in Holman, in the electric chair, painted yellow and known to Alabamians as “Yellow Mama.”
Cynthia and I talked about this tragedy and its implications. She said, “Nothing like that happens now. But people don’t have an appreciation of the sacrifices that have been made. And we have a distance to go.”
After a while I said, “About those appointments.”
“Oh, yes, there’s some people I want you to meet when you come back here and I’m feeling better.”
“Black Day”
Instead of making another roundabout tour via Philadelphia and Choctaw, I drove south and west out of Alabama, through Mississippi, on the back roads of beat-up bungalows and small, white-painted wood-frame churches. I had crossed from Lincoln County to Jefferson County. Jefferson had the distinction of being home to the most obese Americans, and paradoxically it was also one of the poorest counties in the nation. I headed to Fayette, Jefferson’s county seat, and went from there to Union Church, a small town of 830 people (and five good-sized churches), where I planned to turn north into the Delta and return to Highway 61. Eventually I got to the lovely town of Vicksburg.
In Vicksburg again, I returned to the Round Table at the Walnut Hills Restaurant, because eating with the eight white people had been such an unexpected immersion (“You made us eat rats”) on my previous trip. This time three women, just finishing their meal, welcomed me; the two questioners—mother and daughter—were having dessert, and a more exotic woman, their friend, was sipping coffee.
“We like the Round Table,” the mother said in a good-humored way, pressing her fork tines slantwise into a wedge of pie. “We like to eat, as you can see.”
They were, each of them, heavy and pale, resembling one another in their bulk and their friendliness, but chewing hard, a bit breathless in their eating.
“I’m part Cherokee,” the exotic woman said. She was dusky, her black hair in a long braid. “I do some writing too. Poetry mainly.”
They asked me, off the bat, whether I was married, and where was my wife, and what did I do for a living. These were the sort of questions I was used to when traveling in Africa or India or on a Pacific island, a concern for family, the fascination and distrust of someone traveling alone.
“Mama, look at the time.”
“Oh, golly, we gotta run,” the mother said. “We from across the river, north of Tallulah, near Lake Providence, Louisiana.” She added with a slight boastfulness, “That there’s the poorest town in the whole United States.”
It was not true, but it was close: fifty percent of Lake Providence’s population lived below the poverty line.
With that, they upped and left, and wished me safe travels. I sat and ate alone for a while, spinning the lazy Susan, and then three more women entered the room and took their places at the table. They were Deborah McDonald and Carmen Brooks, two black middle-aged women, both of them attorneys in Natchez, and Carmen’s aunt Lola. They’d come up to Vicksburg for the day, for the pleasant drive, to look around, to shop. It was a Saturday, a free day for them, and they were fond of the freedom of the Round Table, choosing dishes at will.
“I went to Alcorn,” Deborah said, “and then law school at Ole Miss. John Grisham was one of my classmates.”
Alcorn State University, near Lorman, which I’d passed through, was a traditionally black institution, founded in 1871, as its brochure explained, “to educate the descendants of formerly enslaved Africans.” There were now two other campuses, but the enrollment was still predominantly black.
At the University of Mississippi, Deborah was one of thirteen black students in the law school class (1979–1982) of three hundred. When she laughed at the memory of her years there, I suspected her laughter to be pure exasperation, so I asked for details.
“It was always very hostile, which is really strange, because James Meredith had been there years before,” she said. “For example, the other students would hide books from us. We’d have required reading and the books would be nowhere in sight—not on the shelves. That’s just mean. And the teachers would ignore us. But they’d call on us now and then, and some days they’d call on three black students. We’d laugh about that. We’d call that Black Day.”
Randall Curb, a reasonable man, had said to me, “The tables are turned. In a lot of places in the South, the whites are out of power. The blacks have taken their place. There are hard feelings on both sides.”
I mentioned that to Carmen.
“That’s true,” she said. “But the whites want to come back—and they might. They field their own candidates, like Jonathan Lee in Jackson, a right-wing black candidate—that’s their man. Jackson is now seventy-five percent black.
”
But in the event, Lee lost in the Democratic primary to an activist attorney, Chokwe Lumumba, a sixty-five-year-old civil rights lawyer who had gained fame in a 1993 successful defense of the rapper Tupac Shakur, who’d been charged with assault. Born in Detroit and educated in Michigan, Edwin Taliaferro had renounced what he called his “slave name” and renamed himself Chokwe Lumumba. It seemed to me an eccentric choice: the Chokwe—properly, Lunda Chokwe—are an Angolan tribe (and it is not a first name among those people, though Edwin is), and Lumumba was the martyred patriot of the Congo. Chokwe Lumumba became Jackson’s mayor in July 2013, promising renewal and fairness, and at his inauguration he gave a black power salute and shouted, “Free the land!” A local paper described his program as an “all new, progressive Black agenda committed to self-determination, self-governance, self-economic development.” If whites had felt somewhat distant before, Mayor Lumumba had arrived to offer them no encouragement, and to tell them that their place was at the back of the line. (Mayor Lumumba died suddenly, six months into his term, on February 25, 2014.)
“I live in Fayette,” Deborah said. “Charles Evers was the mayor of Fayette way back, from 1969 to ’74. He was a great friend of Robert Kennedy.”
They asked what I’d seen so far in the South. I mentioned that I had been unprepared for the sight of such extensive poverty, of the sort I’d seen in Third World countries.
“What we got now are the working poor, just keeping their heads above water,” Carmen said. And then she said something I thought of often afterward: “One medical problem can propel you down.”
She talked about Natchez, how the south of the city was mainly white and had its own school; north Natchez was black, its high school ninety percent black. Natchez’s recent history had been turbulent. The Klan had a large membership (six thousand Klansmen in this part of Mississippi, in fifty-two Klaverns) and had been active in and around Natchez into the late 1960s, in a particularly violent incarnation, as an offshoot called the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. For many, including the aunt, Lola, this was a recent memory.
Recalling this, Deborah became emphatic, like the lawyer she was, delivering a closing argument, a summation at the end of an important trial, enunciating each word.
“We have been living, black and white, forever,” she said. “No point saying we’re strangers! We have been friends. We have been neighbors—intermarrying, living together, talking all the time. We know each other better than we know anyone else.”
“So what needs to happen?” I asked.
“People have to change in their hearts,” she said, then dropped her voice. “It’s hard.”
Delta Winter
The cold mist and the gray sky seemed to flatten the Delta and made the road bleaker, the muddy fields beside the long straight road, raised like a levee, the chilly wind from the river that tore leaves from the trees. In its nakedness the Delta had a stark beauty and simplicity, the stripped trees, some of the dark fields evenly combed of their stubble by a harrow for planting—cotton, I guessed; the sprawl of it had not been obvious to me on my previous trip. Denuded in winter, the land had a desolate grandeur. But those were the fields and the woods and the sloping swamps of the bottomlands and the sodden grass, the bayous and the backwaters.
The human communities were another story, and a sad one. The decaying house trailers sat in clusters outside the decaying towns, all of them more shocking for being so visible. And because of the cold day, few people were outdoors, a Doomsday vision, a road through a depopulated landscape. No wonder the notion of Last Days was something I met often in the South, the famine, tribulation, and false prophets mentioned in the book of Revelation. Going up Highway 61 you could be persuaded (if your church helped you along by drumming the passages into your fearful mind) that you were seeing the dire disclosures of the Seven Seals—deception, devastation, hunger, civil unrest, persecution, tribulation, and—the Seventh Seal—the revealed mysteries.
Arcola was a cluster of poor houses and shacks and shuttered shops on a grid of streets. One house had six gravestones in the front yard. A small school, a police station, the post office—but no one outside. Dee Jones, whom I had met in Greenville on my last trip, had a sister here, Ruby Johnson, and Dee had suggested I look her up if I wanted to know a bit more of Arcola. Ruby was Arcola’s postmaster.
“Miss Johnson’s away this week,” the woman at the counter told me. This was Vivien Weston, who was filling in for her. “You come back and you’ll find her.”
“How’s things here?” I asked.
“It’s nice and quiet around here,” Miss Weston said. “I like it.”
That was a characteristic of the Delta: no matter how down-at-the-heels a place looked, the local people talked it up and found something to praise.
I bought some stamps.
“Course, when the fish farm closed in Hollandale,” Miss Weston said, handing me my change, “that was real hard.”
“What happened?”
“They was no more work,” she said, and in her Delta way gave the word a lilt and made it into woik.
At the Leland crossroads, I called to make an appointment to see Sue Evans again, to catch up, and perhaps to learn a bit more of B. B. King. But she was busy.
“Next time you come ’round this way, please stop by.”
The Ghostliest Structure in the South
So, instead of turning left at Leland, I went right, drove another forty miles or so to Greenwood, and up Money Road to the place called Money.
Hardly a town or a village, Money (pop. 94) was no more than a road junction near the banks of the Tallahatchie River. There, without any trouble, I found what I was looking for, a one-hundred-year-old grocery store, the roof caved in, the brick walls broken, the façade boarded up, the wooden porch roughly patched, and the whole wreck of it overgrown with dying plants and tangled vines. For its haunted appearance and its bloody history it was the ghostliest structure I was to see in the whole of my travels in the South. This ruin, formerly Bryant’s Grocery and Meat Market, is at the top of the list of the Mississippi Heritage Trust’s “Ten Most Endangered Historic Places,” though many people would like to tear it down as an abomination.
What happened there in the store and, subsequently, in that tiny community of Money was one of the most powerful stories I’d heard as a youth, and it was unforgettable, which was why I was there today. As was so often the case, driving up a country road in the South was driving into the shadowy past. A “Mississippi Freedom Trail” sign in front of the store gave the details of its place in history. It was part of my history too.
I had just turned fourteen, in May 1955, when the murder of the boy occurred. He was exactly my age. But I have no memory of any news report in a Boston newspaper at the time of the outrage. Our daily paper was the Boston Globe, but we were subscribers to and diligent readers of family magazines: Life for its photographs, Collier’s and the Saturday Evening Post for profiles and short stories, Look for its racier features, the Reader’s Digest for its roundups from other magazines. This Victorian habit of magazines as family entertainment and enlightenment persisted until television overwhelmed it in the late 1960s.
In January 1956, our copy of Look carried a story by William Bradford Huie, “The Shocking Story of Approved Killing in Mississippi,” and it appeared in a shorter form in the Reader’s Digest that spring. I remember this distinctly, because my two older brothers had read the story first, and I was much influenced by their tastes and enthusiasms. After hearing them excitedly talking about the story, I read it and was appalled and fascinated.
Emmett Till, a black boy, visiting his great-uncle in Mississippi, stopped at a grocery store to buy some candy. He apparently whistled at the white woman behind the counter. A few nights later he was abducted, tortured, killed, and thrown into a river. Two men were caught and tried for the crime. They were acquitted, and afterward gloated, telling Huie that they had indeed committed the crime, and they brazenly
volunteered the gory particulars of the killing. They had gotten away with murder.
“Let’s write them a letter,” my brother Alexander said, and did so. His letter was two lines of threat: We’re coming to get you. You’ll be sorry. And signed it The Gang from Boston. We mailed it to the named killers, in care of their post office in Money, Mississippi.
No one was ever convicted of the murder, though the killers and accomplices were known. But as the commemorative sign in front of Bryant’s store said, “. . . Till’s death received international attention and is widely credited with sparking the American Civil Rights Movement.”
The depositions in the case and the transcripts of the 1955 trial of the accused were believed to have been lost. But in 2004 the FBI found water-damaged copies and transcribed them, releasing them in 2005, fifty years after the events, with a 110-page “FBI Summary Prosecutive Report of the Investigation of the Murder of Emmett Till.”4
The FBI investigation reported that Emmett Till, fourteen years old, and at 150 pounds big for his age, arrived in Money from Chicago, in August 1955, to visit his great-uncle, Mose Wright. Before he left home, his mother, Mamie Bradley, gave him his late father’s silver ring. The ring was inscribed “Mar. 25, 1943” and “LT,” for Louis Till.
Louis Till had a strange and violent history. To avoid being imprisoned on a charge of assaulting his wife, Till enlisted in the US Army in 1943 and served in the Italian campaign. While in Italy he was convicted of the murder of an Italian woman, and the rape of two others, by a military court. He was jailed in Pisa (the poet Ezra Pound was detained in the same military prison, on a charge of treason) and hanged there in 1945. None of this was known to Till’s ex-wife and young son, who believed he had died in combat. The ring was to prove significant in identifying Emmett Till, the only unviolated item on the naked mangled body.
