At a subsequent inquiry, reported nationally as the “Clinton Riot,” it was determined that “Chilton met his death while endeavoring to protect the colored women and children, and had handed his gun to a colored man in his employ at the time he received his death wound. Chilton was well liked, well thought of by his neighbors and friends. A young man of fine family.” (After the killings, a vigilante group of whites took revenge, murdering a dozen black residents of the county.)
Charles’s mother, Sarah Norton Chilton, described the tragedy in a September 17, 1875, letter to her sister in New Orleans:
He died in the arms of his brother John. I was three miles distant from him and had to go all the way through an infuriated mob—with no one but a negro—in order to bid him farewell. It seems to me like a thousand years since then. I never have looked upon any human face so beautifully peaceful as was his dear dear face. He said in every look, “All is well.” The country is in a sad state of excitement—men never take off their weapons except when they go to bed and there they sleep on their pistols.
In her bereavement, Charles’s mother sought the help of spiritualists and then became one herself to contact her son, father, husband, and others and communicate their words from the afterlife.
• • •
Alex’s great-grandfather Harrison Randolph Chilton was Charles’s younger brother, born in December 1853. He was the first of the Chiltons to settle in the Mississippi Delta, the birthplace of the blues—music Alex would later embrace. Sometime in the late 1870s Harrison became the owner of a plantation in Issaquena County, across the Mississippi River from Louisiana. Just before the Civil War, Issaquena County had the highest concentration of slaves of any county in the state, with the enslaved constituting 92.5 percent of the population; records show that 115 owners held 7,244 slaves. Harrison Chilton lost everything to heavy flooding in the late 1880s, according to Alex, so he sold what was left and became the county’s sheriff. Alex once visited the area and called it “the end of the world . . . way, way out there, the poorest place I’ve ever been in my life. I’ve read a statistic that around the turn of the twentieth century when [Harrison] was still sheriff . . . the ratio of black to white was 19 blacks to 1 white, in the height of the Jim Crow Era.”
The Chiltons moved to the county seat, Mayersville, which was once the heart of a plantation; approximately 11 percent of its residents were white and the rest black. (The great McKinley Morganfield, who later took the name Muddy Waters, was born in Issaquena County in 1915.) Only one square mile in size, the poverty-stricken Mayersville is where Howard Sidney Chilton was born in 1882. Things have not changed much in the twenty-first century since Alex’s grandfather’s birth: In 2000, around the time Alex visited there, the median annual income for a household in the town was $10,962; about 49.9 percent of the population was living below the poverty line. Today Issaquena County, with its median income even less, has the lowest per capita income in Mississippi and the thirty-sixth lowest in the United States.
The Delta intrigued Alex. “We talked a lot about books and history,” Mississippi native Dan Tyler, a songwriter and Alex’s longtime friend, remembers. “Alex loved history. I gave him a book called Rising Tide, and he said, ‘You’ll never know what this book meant to me.’ It was about the big Mississippi River flood of 1927, which kind of rearranged the South, and about race and class. Alex had almost a Marxist slant on history, so he was interested in those types of books. Toward the end of his life, he was starting to investigate his family history [in the light of such issues].”
“My grandfather grew up in the town of Mayersville with his brother and sister and married a woman from the town of Starkville where the state college [Mississippi State] was,” Alex told writer Bruce Eaton in 2007. “Her father, [William] Magruder, was kind of a big wheel around the college, the chairman of the English department.” According to Alex’s uncle Harrison Randolph “Jack” Chilton, “[Magruder] was an interesting guy who once caused a strike by the whole student body. In those days, . . . boys were not supposed to be found with girls in the stacks of the library. Well, a young man and woman were found there together, and grandpap expelled the boy. . . . The whole college went on strike. He finally had to readmit the boy.” Professor Magruder was also vice president of the university; today an annual scholarship is given to a deserving English major at the university in his memory.
Howard Chilton must have been an impressive young man to have passed muster with Professor Magruder and marry his daughter. Jack Chilton, her son, said that his mother was one of the few female students admitted to what was then an agricultural college. “They made a special case for her to attend because of her father. But she wasn’t allowed to take animal husbandry!” Her name was Kate, but no one ever called her that. “Her daddy called her ‘Daughter,’ so her sister called her ‘Daughter,’ and even her children called her ‘Daughter,’” according to Alex’s sister, Cecelia Chilton.
After their marriage, in 1906, Howard and “Daughter” Chilton became boarders at the home of a widow who lived next door to Professor Magruder and his wife. The newlyweds had bought their own home by the time Alex’s father, Howard Sidney Chilton Jr. (always called Sidney), was born in Starkville on December 17, 1911, followed by Harrison Randolph “Jack” Chilton three years later. Both boys were musical and began learning to play instruments at a young age. The Chiltons then moved farther south, to Meridian, Mississippi. There, in the hometown of Jimmie Rodgers, later known as the Father of Country Music, Sidney and Jack became enthralled by music, and in particular the sound that emerged from New Orleans: jazz. Of his father and uncle’s musical training, Alex told Eaton in 2007:
My father was . . . a musician and played in the University of Mississippi jazz band. He . . . was in college around the early 1930s—he and his brother both. My dad was a sax player in those days although in my lifetime he was mostly a piano player. His brother plays guitar and still does—still going strong at age 93. I’m sure he studied in school a bit—he actually went to the state school [Mississippi State] for three years but as I’m told by Uncle Jack, for his last year he went over to Ole Miss [the University of Mississippi in Oxford]. I’m always confused by how that happened, but Uncle Jack says they wanted him in the jazz band there and that’s how he ended up at the more posh school for his last year of college.
Sidney graduated from Ole Miss in 1933. Later that year he married Mary Evelyn Reid, a striking and artistic brunette who hailed from another small Mississippi town, McComb (the birthplace of Bo Diddley). Though the Reids’ ancestry lacks the aristocratic lineage of the Chiltons, their American heritage dates back to Hugh Reid, who emigrated from Ireland in the mid-1700s. The Reids resided for two generations in South Carolina until Hugh’s grandson William S. Reid moved to Louisiana. His son, William Alexander Reid (b. 1843), a farmer for whom Alex was named, married Emma Gertrude Knott (b. 1848), who was living in Natchez, Mississippi, with her widowed, Virginia-born mother. William Alexander and Emma Reid settled in McComb, about 180 miles from New Orleans. One of eight children, their son Philip (b. 1885) married Nellie (b. 1890)—Alex’s maternal grandparents. The young couple moved in with Philip’s widowed mother, Emma, sharing living quarters with his sisters, Mary, a widow with two children, and Sally, an unmarried stenographer (who would later live with Alex’s family). Philip’s uncle operated a successful Main Street store, Reid & Nance, which sold “pure drugs, toilet items, soda waters, sheet music, cigars and tobacco,” according to a 1914 advertisement. Philip worked for a time as a pharmacist at the store, then became a traveling salesman for the New-Brite Company, which made furniture polish. Philip and Nell still resided with Emma when Alex’s mother, Mary Evelyn, was born on July 8, 1911, followed by a sister, Annelle, in 1916. When Emma Reid died, Philip, Nellie, and their daughters moved out and rented a house for $50 a month, eventually buying a home in a beautiful neighborhood with large shade trees.
Around
1930 Mary Evelyn left McComb to attend Mississippi State College for Women, which held the distinction of being the country’s first public college for women. Located in Columbus (the home of Tennessee Williams), near Starkville, the school is probably where Mary Evelyn met her future husband. Surely she was enticed by the young jazz musician, who played tenor sax at parties and concerts in a band with his brother. When Sidney transferred to Ole Miss, he made certain his engagements continued near Columbus so he could spend time with the raven-haired young woman, who also had a musical bent.
“I learned later that she actually had studied a lot of piano and played a lot, but I never saw her touch it,” Alex once said of his mother. “She could probably read music but not play by ear. I don’t know how she got so arty. . . . She and her sister were striving, elegant types.”
Sidney continued to play saxophone in jazz bands with Jack, who graduated from Mississippi State with a degree in electrical engineering. A few years after their marriage, Sidney and Mary Evelyn were living in the Delta town of Greenville, Mississippi. Their first child, Reid Magruder Chilton (named for his maternal and paternal grandparents), was born there on October 25, 1939. With a family to support, Sidney took a job at Mississippi Power & Light in Jackson, where he became personnel director.
In 1930 a distant cousin, Ann Chilton McDonnell, wrote a letter to the William and Mary Quarterly about her family’s traits: “I have traced each branch of the Chilton family which settled in these Southern and Western states and have corresponded with many of them. Am proud to state I found them all, without exception, educated, intelligent, and invariably proud of their name.”
CHAPTER 2
Memphis
Some folks considered Sidney Chilton one of the best musicians in Jackson, Mississippi. Armistad “Army” Brown, a guitarist and arranger with the touring big band Herbie Holmes and the Mississippians, became close friends with Sidney and Jack Chilton in Jackson. Army and Sidney had met earlier in the ’30s and played together in various combos before Army left town to tour for several years with Holmes’s band. When Army married his wife, Iris, in 1935, Sidney was their best man. “I remember my dad talking about Sidney,” says Army’s daughter Adele Brown Tyler, “and of all the musicians my dad knew and worked with, he would say Sidney was the most talented.” When Army left Holmes’s employ in 1940, he returned to Jackson and opened a music store, eventually becoming the Steinway piano dealer for the region. Iris Brown worked at H.C. Speir, a store where such blues greats as Sonny Boy Williamson recorded for Paramount Records. The Browns grew ever closer to the Chiltons, who asked them to be their son Reid’s godparents.
The following year, on April 17, 1941, Mary Evelyn gave birth to Cecelia, the Chiltons’ only daughter. After the attack on Pearl Harbor in December, Sidney, a Naval Reservist, joined the war effort. As a lieutenant in the U.S. Navy, he served on a supply ship in the Mediterranean.
“If we asked, ‘What did you do in the war, Daddy?’” Cecelia Chilton recalls, “he said, ‘I delivered toilet paper and toothpaste to the guys who were fighting.’” Refusing to stay behind in Jackson, Mary Evelyn, with her two kids and Aunt Sally in tow, rented an apartment in upper Manhattan near Columbia University, where Sidney would visit while on leave. Mary Evelyn enjoyed exploring Manhattan. “My mother always loved New York City,” says Cecelia. “Maybe she thought this was her only opportunity to live [there]. . . . She had Aunt Sally to take care of us, so she could go out and party. Her sister, Annelle, who later moved permanently to New York with her husband, came to visit.”
While in New York, Mary Evelyn also looked up a friend’s brother from Columbus, Mississippi, Peter Lindamood, a bon vivant and art critic who wrote for publications like Harper’s Bazaar and View, an avant-garde journal founded by his friend and fellow Mississippian Charles Henri Ford. The gifted Lindamood served as an Italian-language interpreter during the war, earning the rank of corporal, but until his induction, his East Fifty-eighth Street apartment hosted the gay literati. Fellow Columbus native Tennessee Williams once described Lindamood as an “elegant Auntie type,” while others compared his looks and manner to those of Truman Capote. Sidney and Mary Evelyn greatly admired modern art, and Lindamood educated them as he made his own artistic discoveries. The Chilton-Lindamood friendship lasted for decades, with Peter relocating to Memphis in the early 1960s.
After Sidney’s discharge from the Navy, the Chiltons returned home to Jackson, where he got a job as a manufacturer’s representative for Day-Brite Lighting, selling “architectural lighting equipment,” according to Cecelia. “He traveled a lot.” Cecelia would be the only family member to follow in her father’s footsteps in the lighting business.
The Chiltons’ second son, Howard Sidney Chilton III, was born in Jackson on November 27, 1945. Two years earlier, while Sidney was in the service, his father had died, and in 1946, the widowed “Daughter” Chilton, who’d been living in Jackson, moved to Colorado Springs to live with relatives. Sidney and Mary Evelyn also decided to leave Mississippi for Memphis—a hub of the postwar building boom, where Sidney could bid on the many new industrial-lighting contracts. In addition, Memphis made a good, central home base from which to travel between Arkansas, Tennessee, and Mississippi. For half a century Mississippians had been migrating to the Bluff City, which Alex once referred to as “the town home for a lot of plantation-owner people.”
In 1947 the Chiltons settled into a brand-new subdivision in East Memphis called Sherwood Forest, filled with modest two- and three-bedroom redbrick houses built specifically for returning GIs. “There were lots of veterans with families all about the same age,” according to Cecelia. “It was kind of the beginning of suburbia.” Right down the street a new elementary school had just been constructed.
The Chiltons’ compact, L-shaped brick house at 987 Robin Hood Lane had a small front yard, three bedrooms, living and dining rooms, and a kitchen complete with breakfast nook. The backyard was perfect for a spacious garden, where Mary Evelyn spent time tending flower beds, earning her stripes in the Garden Club. Eventually the Chiltons would add on to the house, putting in a den, a small office for Sidney, and an additional bathroom and bedroom.
When Cecelia was nine, the third Chilton son was born at Memphis’s Baptist Hospital: William Alexander Chilton came into the world at the end of the first year of a new decade, on December 28, 1950. Thirty-nine-year-old Mary Evelyn named him for her paternal grandfather. Cecelia’s earliest memory of Alex coincides with that of a health scare of their father’s. After having had a heart attack in his early forties, Sidney was recuperating at home. One day after a barber arrived to cut Sidney’s hair, Alex vanished. “Alex was about two, and he just rode off on his tricycle down the street,” Cecelia recalls. “He rode as far as the next corner, and the barber [who’d just left the Chiltons] recognized him and brought him back home.”
When Alex was three, something even more frightening occurred. Fourteen-year-old Reid climbed to the top of an oak tree in the backyard, slipped, and plummeted to the ground. Though he didn’t break any bones, he was knocked unconscious and remained in a coma for three days. “One of [our] neighborhood friends was a neurosurgeon and happened to be the doctor taking care of him,” Cecelia remembers, “which I’m sure was very comforting to my parents, because they could get whatever information they wanted. When [Reid] finally woke up, he was fine, and there was no obvious sign of anything being wrong with him. My recollection is that [the doctor] told my parents that anytime anyone is unconscious for that length of time, there’s some brain damage that might show up at some future point.” But for the time being, all seemed fine.
The Browns, who frequently visited the Chiltons, had three children: a son and daughter near Reid and Cecelia’s age and a much younger daughter, Adele, who was born the same day as Alex. As the youngest children of parents whose eldest child was eleven years older, Alex and Adele shared some traits. “Alex and I were both kind of
shy, introverted children,” says Adele. “The two of us were almost awkward around each other at times. I remember him not wanting to talk much, and I didn’t want to, either. My mother’s take on Alex was that he was a little bit of a Dennis the Menace—mischievous. He could be kind of quiet, but he definitely had that little-devil thing. He had such a gleam in his eye. He loved to stir things up.”
To look after active preschooler Alex while his siblings were in school, the Chiltons hired a tall, statuesque woman named Nellie, who favored turbans. “I remember Alex talking about her years later,” recalls Adele Brown Tyler, “because we had a black lady who worked for us during my early childhood, too. Alex and I both felt like these women pretty much raised us.” Nellie was employed as the Chiltons’ maid over the next three decades, and Alex and his brother Howard remained close to her.
While Nellie took care of Alex, Mary Evelyn stayed busy with the Garden Club and a neighborhood bridge club that convened regularly. Not a doting mother, she enjoyed that kind of activity much more than domestic life, according to Cecelia Chilton: “She didn’t join the PTA. She and the neighbors played bridge while we were at school. They’d get together at eleven in the morning and have lunch and play bridge until the kids would get home. They probably did that every day.” Copious cocktails accompanied the bridge parties.
Sidney frequently spent nights away on his many business trips. To ward off loneliness, Alex visited the next-door neighbors, a retired Army colonel and his wife. “His name was Colonel Cray, and he was home all day, and Alex was good friends with him,” Cecelia recalls. “I think he liked to drink and watch TV, and Alex spent a lot of time over there. They were good buddies.”
When Sidney and Mary Evelyn were home, they sipped drinks and played their abundant jazz records. Sidney tried teaching Cecelia piano on the family’s Chickering, though “I didn’t practice very much,” she admits. It was Reid who was the first family member to introduce music to Alex. “My oldest brother was a rock & roll fan,” Alex told musician and music writer Cub Koda in 1992. “He liked things like the Coasters, and I listened to little bits of that ’50s stuff and saw Elvis on TV [in 1956].”
A Man Called Destruction: The Life and Music of Alex Chilton, From Box Tops to Big Star to Backdoor Man Page 2
