by Safran, John
White Mississippians are holding a reenactment of Jefferson Davis accepting the presidency on the steps of a courthouse in Vicksburg. Earnest wonders whether today Jefferson Davis will read out all of the Mississippi declaration of secession or dodge around the awkward bit that endorses slavery. If he does read it out, Earnest wants to challenge him. If he doesn’t read it out, Earnest wants to attack him for whitewashing history.
“They’re pretending history,” Earnest says, “and so we’re going to go over and I’m going to play the role of a faithful reporter in 1861. I’m going to assume the persona of someone who is on the scene, a freeborn black man. I just want to let him know that we have every right to fight and kill anybody who proposes to keep African people in slavery.”
“But who’s going to play Jefferson Davis today?”
“I don’t know. It’s reality,” Earnest says.
Earnest tucks too many Jackson Advocates under his arm and carries a whole cardboard box of them toward the door as I follow, bewildered.
“You know, John, we might just be dreaming that we are in the twenty-first century, but in reality, we’re in the nineteenth century, we’re facing this crisis. You know how people fantasize when they have a crisis? They want to get out of it. We’re caught up in a crisis!”
“We’re in the nineteenth century?” I ask, floundering, as Earnest’s white leather shoe pushes open the door.
“What did Kant say? Reality is perception.”
Soon, I’m wiggling the car through the historic district.
“Hi, Chokwe!” Earnest shouts into his phone. “I have John, who’s come all the way over from Australia looking into the Richard Barrett case. Would you call me back?”
I feel better that Earnest gets the answering machine, too. Chokwe and Precious teamed up to pinch the Vincent McGee case from the white public defender. They (and Earnest) think there is a race aspect to the case that will be ignored if left in white hands. They think the whites will explain the crime as a garden-variety fight over money rather than a white supremacist attacking a black man and the black man having to defend himself. “Hello, Tina!” Earnest shouts as I curl onto the highway to Vicksburg. “I’ll put you on. An investigative reporter from Melbourne, Australia!”
Earnest hands me the phone and tells me to speed up. I’m driving too slowly for a highway, he says. “It’s Tina McGee. You know, Vincent McGee’s mother.”
Jesus!
This is crazy: It’s too early to be talking with the killer’s mother! I don’t feel ready for this. Shut up, John, this is a gift, talk to the mother! But I don’t know what to say. I suction my ear to the phone.
“Hello?” I try.
“Hello,” Tina says quietly.
“To the left!” Earnest shouts, thrusting his finger to the left lane. “Over there!”
“Um . . . have you seen Vincent since he’s been arrested?” I ask Tina.
“They will not let me see him!” she yells. “They will not let me see him! Eddie Thompson will not let me in!”
“Over there!” Earnest says. “John, you need to pay attention to your driving.”
“Who’s Eddie Thompson?” I ask Tina.
“He the Rankin County jailer!” she says.
“Left!” shouts Earnest.
There’s quadriplegia in my future if I don’t get off the phone, so I’m grateful when Tina tells me I can pop by her house anytime. We hang up.
I indicate to change lanes but turn on the wipers instead.
“You said on the radio Richard had beaten up a woman,” I say.
Earnest tells me old Mississippi spy agency files were unsealed in the 1990s. He says the story is in there, but he can’t remember the exact details. I can’t write down spy agency, but it’s the sort of thing I won’t forget.
“Were you born in Mississippi?” I ask Earnest.
“Yes, Vicksburg,” he says. “You know about Vicksburg?”
Although it’s where I’m driving to, I don’t. Earnest tells me if I want to understand Mississippi, if I want to write a book about this place, I need to understand that town.
The Ballad of Earnest McBride
Vicksburg is forty miles from Jackson, right up against the Mississippi River. Earnest’s father ran the print shop there. He’d print the local newspaper and jazz club posters, with art deco Negroes and copy like so: Boots & His Buddies—At the Cotton Club Ballroom. From 9.30 p.m. until the milkman comes.
Earnest found an old New York Times when he was young. It told him the very word jazz came from his town. Some drummer called Chas, some mishearing when the crowd would click and say, “Chas, Chas.”
In 1955 Earnest read something else in the paper. A black guy visiting from Chicago, Emmett Till, had whistled at a white woman in a Mississippi Delta grocery store. He was found three days later in the Tallahatchie River, tied to an industrial fan by barbed wire, with a bullet in his head. Emmett Till was fourteen.
Earnest McBride was fourteen.
“That was a major teaching point in our lives,” Earnest tells me. “Those of us who were getting out of puberty at the time.”
Earnest was supposed to scoop poop from the chicken coops behind the print shop, but he preferred to read. In Jet magazine he read about the Klansmen just outside Vicksburg. Jet told him the Klan were not just lynching but castrating black men.
“The notion that someone’s going to castrate you, or even take your life, if you had sex with a white woman, that really got home to us.”
Teenage Earnest was a caddie at the Vicksburg golf club. There had been a break-in at the club, and all the caddies were taken down to the police station. In a mildewing room, a white policeman took Earnest’s hand. He rolled his black fingers on a black inkpad, then onto a fingerprints card.
The policeman and Earnest were chatting, all cheery. Then Earnest spotted a bottle on the shelf behind the man. The policeman took the bottle down so Earnest could take a closer look. It was a black finger floating in formaldehyde.
“The way he expressed it,” Earnest says, “was it was the finger of a Negro.”
“A finger of a what?” I say, instinctively looking at my own fingers on the wheel. “A Negro? So he was sort of, like, threatening?”
“He was just sounding friendly. ‘Hey, look at this finger of this dead Negro that I have. What do you think about that? Ha-ha!’”
“But he would have gotten it off someone already dead. It’s not like he would have gotten it off a live person?”
Earnest seems annoyed I’m not keeping up.
“What I’m saying is that the finger had come from some black man who had been lynched. The policeman was probably from the group that lynched the man and made sure that he got his souvenir.”
“Christ,” I gasp.
Back then Earnest also worked at a convenience store. The owner was a man named Tom. He had an arm he couldn’t use. It had been crushed and was just hanging there. Tom was high up in the White Citizens’ Council, a white supremacist group.
“I remember seeing the white woman there, the wife of Tom. She’s sitting on the backseat of the car. I was just looking at her and she was looking at me. I’m walking toward her, toward her car.”
In a dark homage to Emmett Till’s whistle at the white woman at the grocery store, Earnest stopped at her window, spat on the ground, and walked off.
“I quit working for white people in the tenth grade. No more! I’d been exploited and insulted too much.”
Young Earnest began reading about the Civil War. And a certain battle began changing the way he thought about being black and being a Mississippian.
The Battle of Milliken’s Bend
Milliken’s Bend is in Louisiana, opposite Vicksburg, Mississippi. The Mississippi River cuts between the two. In the middle of the Civil War, over a thousand black men guarded supply dep
ots along Milliken’s Bend. They were ex-slaves who had pulled on the Union uniform to fight the Confederates who had owned them.
Meanwhile, in Vicksburg, white Union soldiers were shooting and starving the Confederates. So the Confederates in Louisiana planned to capture Milliken’s Bend. They could then send supplies and men across the river to break the siege.
One night, thousands of Confederates crept toward Milliken’s Bend. There were twice as many Confederates creeping as there were ex-slaves waiting. The ex-slaves were ill equipped and untrained, but those Confederates had them manacled not long before, so there was a certain frisson added to the air.
When the Confederates charged the Union line, the ex-slaves shot their muskets and held them back. The Confederates regrouped and charged again, this time more successfully.
But the ex-slaves didn’t surrender.
In 1863, guns took a long time to reload. Even if you were losing, your opponents could only kill so many of you as they closed in. Most battles were won when one side lost its nerve and surrendered or ran away. Something unusual happened at Milliken’s Bend.
When the Confederates came close enough, the ex-slaves launched into hand-to-hand combat, slicing with bayonets and bashing with musket butts. The Confederates bludgeoned and bayoneted back. A wreck of men, black and white, piled up on the terrain.
The Civil War street fight ran on for ten hours. Eventually, two Union gunboats cut up the Mississippi, paused behind the ex-slaves, and fired. The Confederates fled, and the ex-slaves chased after them. One captured his former master. It was over. Milliken’s Bend remained in Union hands. So, black soldiers won one of the most important battles in the Civil War, Earnest tells me. The Battle of Milliken’s Bend helped win the Siege of Vicksburg, and that battle won the entire war! But people just don’t know their history. Or they spread lies about it. According to Earnest, over at the museum in Vicksburg, a museum official denies black Union soldiers fought at all! In the Vicksburg National Military Park, another official denies black troops their glory. And Earnest has seen the new park historian dressed in a Confederate uniform, performing a monologue, real tears streaming from his eyes as he moans how the South has been treated.
But worse is that there are blacks who don’t think the Civil War is their history. Idiots, Earnest tells me, who refuse to see that their ancestors weren’t just the slaves but the soldiers who helped free black people and defeat the South.
White Southerners still trying to win the Civil War. Black people thinking of themselves as helpless figurines in someone’s (or God’s) bigger plan. This, he tells me, is Mississippi.
Vicksburg
Like historic Jackson, Vicksburg is decaying, ivy slithering over crumbling white walls. I roll the car down steep and lumpy roads. Up against the Mississippi River, the abandoned Yazoo and Mississippi Valley Railroad Station is fronted by six white columns mighty enough to front a plantation mansion, but it’s a beautiful corpse. One red wooden carriage goes nowhere on the track behind it.
Outside a gas station, a black man is sitting on a red box. He’s the only person I’ve seen since pulling off the highway. Twenty meters after we pass him he rasps phlegm and I can hear it. That’s how quiet Vicksburg is.
The casinos ended up winning the Siege of Vicksburg. There are five here, and they are the only things new and shiny. We’re one hour early for Jefferson Davis accepting the presidency of the Confederacy. Earnest points me to one of the casinos, a “stationary riverboat” floating in the Mississippi.
“I’m staying in Vicksburg a couple of days so I can catch up with my girlfriend,” Earnest says as we burrow into the casino. “You should have dinner with us.”
I ask him how long he’s been with her.
“Well, I’ve known her thirty years,” he answers, “but only lately been dating her. I’ve been waiting for her to mature. She’s fifty now, but she still thinks I’m too old for her.” Earnest is sixty-nine.
His girlfriend used to weld in a factory but lost that job, and now rips beaks and claws from chickens.
“So you’ve never been married?” I ask.
“No.”
“No kids?”
“No. Well, there’s only one that could be, but I don’t know.”
Like Jim Giles, Earnest is an old man who seems a bit lonely.
Electronic bleeps and blips and bings dance through the air. The poker machines try to outsparkle the belt buckles squeezing in the Mississippian bellies.
We stop in front of the Kitty Glitter poker machine. A white kitten is wearing posh earrings.
“Look at the people!” Earnest urges. “Take a census!”
This is the most integrated I’ve seen Mississippi. Unlike, well, everywhere, there’s a jolly mingle of black and white. Fat blacks in cowboy hats yabber with fat whites in cowboy hats.
Earnest isn’t impressed. Considering the demographics of Vicksburg, considering these whites are all from out of town, this room says something worthy of our attention.
I’m confused about what Earnest is getting at. Not least because I don’t know whether he thinks blacks at a casino is a good thing or a bad thing.
“I rallied against this casino for five years in the Jackson Advocate,” Earnest says. “Then I came in because I was writing a story. And I decided to put five dollars in a machine. And I won eighty. And I was hooked.”
Hooked?
“So you gamble a lot?” I ask.
“Oh, yeah.”
“How much have you lost?”
“A lot.”
“Ten thousand dollars?”
“Oh, more than that.”
“More than ten thousand dollars?!” I squeak. Jesus, I chose ten thousand because I thought it was so ridiculously high and he’d be able to chuckle, No, no, don’t be silly, John. “How much?” I try again. “Fifty thousand dollars?”
“Oh, more than that.”
Lord, I said fifty thousand because I thought that was ridiculously high. We go higher and higher until we settle on a seventy-five-thousand-dollar loss over thirteen years.
Earnest pulls out his wallet and turns to Kitty Glitter.
The Old Court House
We were an hour early to Vicksburg, but because of Kitty Glitter, we’re late to the big event.
A hundred and fifty years ago, the real Jefferson Davis bellowed from the steps of the Old Court House. Fifteen minutes ago, reenactment Jefferson Davis did the same. Now he’s slipped off. The whole square is empty. Earnest has missed his chance to confront the president either reading out or failing to read out the awkward slave bit in the Mississippi declaration of secession.
“Why do white people always have to be on time?” Earnest laments.
Inside the courthouse, though, colors swirl. Pink heads are squeezed into top hats and bonnets. Buttons threaten to pop on the army jackets of tubby Confederates. Several hundred folk have turned up dressed for 1861.
Awkward eyes glimpse Earnest, the only black man here.
“John! The stairs!” snaps Earnest. We dart up the wooden staircase.
A hundred or so more folk have flocked to the second story. Behind the deep rows of bonnets and gray felt caps pokes Jefferson Davis’s head. Families are lining up to get snapped with the president of the Confederacy.
Earnest is dizzy with giggles.
“This is my friend John,” he tells a family. “He’s from Melbourne, Australia. He says he wants to see what Jefferson Davis was really like.”
This de-awkwards things. It makes more sense to the folks that there’s a white Australian in their midst than a black Mississippian.
Jefferson Davis is flanked by four plump Confederates, all lips quivering and eyes nervous as Earnest worms closer to the president. Jefferson sports a black wig and cloak, and a glued-on beard hangs for dear life to his chin.
“Something
I want to tell him!” Earnest says to me, smiling like hell.
“What are you going to tell him?”
Earnest spins from me to the president of the Confederacy.
“Mr. Jefferson Davis!” Earnest cries. “I represent the United States Colored Troops! First Mississippi Infantry! And we defeat you at Milliken’s Bend!”
The tubby Confederates protecting the president don’t know what to do, their sweaty hands fidgeting on their bayoneted rifles. Jefferson Davis, however, remains composed.
“Well, that’s okay,” says Jefferson Davis.
Earnest tries to blurt out more—Jefferson Davis owns a plantation! One of his slaves gets him back years later!—but Jefferson Davis pats Earnest along like Snow White at Disneyland and welcomes the next in line.
Still, that was pretty much a Race Relations stunt. I liked how Earnest snatched victory from the jaws of defeat after he’d missed the president’s address on the steps. I like to think I would have done the same in similar circumstances.
“John, let’s get out of here.” Earnest chuckles. “Now don’t put no shit out that says Earnest McBride sold out to Jefferson Davis and the Confederacy!”
“No, no, no. I won’t,” I reply as we escape down the staircase, the crowd closing behind us.
The Elastic Band Retracting
I’ve been thinking about this. I’m not 100 percent sure what it means. But it feels relevant.
I’m in grade five, so what’s that . . . I’m eleven? Mum, Dad, my sister, and I drift through a market or expo. (The Queen Victoria Market?) There are cheap books about pyramids and World War II. There are Michael Jackson cassettes with a white glove glued to each. Shirts have to be fished from up high with a hook on a stick.
And there it is. A sleeveless T-shirt, the entire front of which is a Confederate flag.
The leather-faced man at the stall fishes it down.
Was it just the colors? Did I see it on a toy racing car at a friend’s? If you were a Scientology auditor forcing me to suck deep into the innards of my mind, I’d say it was Billy Idol’s “Rebel Yell.” In fact, there’s a photo of me on my knees in the family living room with my hair gelled up, re-creating the Smash Hits cover propped up next to me. Billy Idol holds the Confederate flag taut; I’m holding my Confederate T-shirt in tandem.
