It was early afternoon, midweek. She was eighty-three. She and her husband were watching television. She didn’t know who I was, but she invited me in. I have experienced this all over the South: a stranger at the door, invited inside. She was in a yellow sweater blouse and pants. In the living room were fine old sideboard pieces, and china, and silver glassware. She said that she and Julius had lived in this house on Columbus Drive since 1940. Their children had been raised here. She sat in a wicker chair with her ankles and her arms crossed. There was a small lacy handkerchief tucked inside the band of her gold wristwatch.
“I guess I don’t understand what it was that enabled someone like you to be able to speak against the day,” I said.
“Well, it’s just how I felt,” she said.
“Were you scared?”
“A little. But I knew it was right.”
She didn’t put it this way, but I think Kathleen McIlwain was trying to say that in every dark there are particles of light.
Yes, in every dark there are particles of light. Mississippi of an early morning, before the heat is up, can lie proud on the mind, like linen on your arm. Driving through the deep summer green of the Natchez Trace, what you are struck by most of all is the beauty. Not all white Southerners are overweight bigots, and not all rural Mississippi blacks are ennobled by their poverty—that is ever the temptation in an outsider’s eye. The great beauty seems to slip up on you unawares. In parts of lower and eastern and northeastern Mississippi, the earth turns to a deep orange, almost red, in vivid contrast to the dark alluvial riches of the Delta. On the Trace, one of America’s oldest roads, which cuts a diagonal through the state, the cardinals and jays will be flitting out beyond your car hood, as if to guide you, enchant you. The light on this road today seems clear as gin. You’ve gone ten miles and have yet to see another car. Last night, outside your motel, the air felt so moist and heavy and mysterious. It was early dark, and you were speaking to your family. You stood at a pay phone bolted to a utility pole as the blackness netted down over you in a kind of softening cone. You looked down and saw the cover of your notebook starting to coat with wetness. The scent of something perfumed was coming up—jasmine? Down the street, porches glowed with lamps. Then this morning at dawn, cruising on a four-lane with the window open, the air so freshening on your face, you looked over and saw Holsteins in a pasture, stolid as boulders, mist curling around their ankles. In Mississippi, just the white-lettered names on blurring green road signs seem invested with something rich and musical and seductive: Bogue Chitto, Neshoba, Ofahoma. These are Choctaw names. There’s supposed to be a spot somewhere in this state called Hot Coffee, although it doesn’t seem to be on any maps. There’s another spot called Panther Burn—you’ve been there. There’s a place called Increase. (It never has.) It’s so puzzling that a land of such charm and physical beauty, a people of such natural grace and disposition to kindness, could have so appalling a history. Standing once in the Old Capitol Museum in downtown Jackson, not hating this state but taken with it, at least for now, you saw this printed on a small sign card: “I can love Mississippi because of the beauty of the countryside and the old traditions of family affection, and for such small things as flowers bursting in spring, and the way you can see for miles from a ridge in winter. Why should a Negro be forced to leave such things? Because of fear? No. Not anymore.” Know who said that? James Meredith.
John Henry, Jimmy, Bob
Of these three, a briefer look: First, John Henry Spencer, from Pittsboro, Mississippi, Calhoun County, on the far left, with his ash-heavy cigar guttering down to its last acidic inch, with his sleeveless undershirt showing gauzily through his short-sleeved and thin-fabric outer shirt, like pentimento. Second, the hanging-back Jimmy Middleton, three over from the right, framed in the wedge of space between Billy Ferrell’s head and Jim Garrison’s head. Sheriff Middleton of Port Gibson, Mississippi, could almost be a mortician, or a mafioso, or a Baptist preacher, or maybe even a haberdasher from the Midwest, with that grim black hat and poker face that may be having some faint second thought—or darker thought. And third, the snap-brimmed, press-lipped, and forward-tilted-just-a-slight Bob Waller, immediately behind Billy, whose chin appears to be resting on Billy’s right shoulder, and who, if you look again, is the only one in this frame looking directly outside the frame, beyond the frame, past the moment—to the photographer, it would appear, and to the photographer’s box. And why would Sheriff Waller of Hattiesburg be peering without a lot of happiness at a man who’s peering through the lens of a camera, getting set to depress its shutter? Because the sheriff’s a photographer himself. Not an amateur, but a professional, with his own studio and successful commercial business, which is in the hands of someone else presently. Waller isn’t an artist, but on some level he has to understand the art of the shot. He took portraits for a living for years before becoming a law enforcement officer, and he’ll take them for years again afterward. So he must see, if only in his subconscious, the inherent storytelling power, the visual tension, the perfect composition of Mississippi bigotry, all of it being sealed, even as Waller registers it, inside a mechanical box on a strip of cellulose acetate. His squinty regard of the unseen Charles Moore seems to have about it a small wishful lethality, and a tincture of mirth, and maybe even some photographic envy. We’ll get you for this, you sucker, whoever you are. Dammit, son, I’d almost trade places with you for a picture like this.
John Henry. Fifty-four years old, eldest of these seven. His wife’s name is Annie Lois, his daughter is an Annie, too. He once had a son, but John Emmett Spencer died tragically, gothically, in childhood. Thirty-five years hence, Pryor Funeral Home will put into a file, along with John Henry’s vital statistics, a list of survivors, and the cost of his coffin: “He was a Mason, and he loved to sing.” It’s true enough. The old lawman will have made eighty-nine, passing from this world on May 29, 1997. Cancer and congestive heart failure will take him off, and afterward they’ll rest him in a hidden cemetery, with a path parted in the woods, in a community called Spring Hill outside of a village called Slate Springs. He and his spouse will have been wed for sixty-two years. In the Spencer plot at Spring Hill Cemetery at the time of the burial, they’ll cut into the stone Annie Lois’s name and date of birth, beside her husband’s dates, with a space for her own final date. In the June 4, 1997, issue of the Monitor-Herald, a weekly serving all of Calhoun County, John Henry Spencer, lifelong native, once photographed in Life with a stogie in his mouth, will get a twenty-one-line obituary, his extremely long life reduced to three paragraphs, and several of those lines of type being taken up with the names of his pallbearers and the reverend who performed the obsequies, Jim Vance—he’s related, as are some of the pallbearers, as is half the county, or so it seems.
John Henry—everybody calls him this—is head lawman of an iddy-biddy little place. The county seat of Calhoun County, Pittsboro, is something like a wide spot in the road. It’s just down Highway 9W from Oxford, where this Meredith trouble is taking place. There aren’t even 15,000 people in Calhoun County. The sheriff’s a farmer by trade. Lots of folks say he ran for sheriff in the first place and was able to get elected because of all the people he knows from church singings. He has a fabulous voice and loves raising it to the Lord at his own Ellard Baptist Church or any other gospel church that he gets invited to on a Sunday. What he particularly loves is an all-day gospel picnic-sing, in the middle of summer, with dinner served family-style on the grounds, with the sweat condensing on the aluminum water pitchers, with the long rows of tables stapled down with butcher-wrap paper, with the Good Book shouted aloud by the preacher as the evening sun is disappearing, like an orange wafer on the flat horizon. You wouldn’t arrive at these wholesome mental pictures from studying a stumpy lawman with jug ears and thinning hair and a guttering-down ’gar, with a sleeveless undershirt showing gauzily through an outer shirt, standing manfully ready in this grove of trees at Ole Miss for what shall come. It might be more reas
onable, from the way the lawman is presenting himself pictorially, to wonder where his blackjack is.
Decades hence, when a visitor to the county shows up, Sheriff Spencer’s undertaker, minister, pallbearer, and widow will look at the picture, nod, say it’s him, then instantly start to talk about what a “friend of man” he was. Each has his own expression of the same sentiment, each his own memory. Sonny Clanton, his great-nephew, a local attorney and one of his pallbearers who, at the time of Meredith, was just a kid in high school with an important football game that week, will say, “Uncle John had this benevolent way about him.”
“But what about the picture?”
“I heard him say once that he had no real idea why he was even called up there.”
Speaking of blackjacks: The sheriff has a nephew one county over who’s also a sheriff and who looks a lot like him, and who’s pretty good in the blackjack department. His name is Spencer Leroy Davis, although everybody calls him Spec. Sometimes the two lawmen get confused, because of their blood relation and similar body mass. Spec Davis, sheriff of Grenada, controls a bigger town and more populous county. No telling how many insults to the brain he’s delivered to drunk soldiers who come into Grenada on Friday nights from nearby Camp McCain. All of the Spencers and the Davises were born in and reared around these several counties of north-central Mississippi. The uncle and the nephew—who are only five years apart and are serving concurrently—have driven up to Oxford together, summoned to this riot. The nephew must be close by, if out of the range of the photographer’s viewfinder.
Spencer is destined to be sheriff of Calhoun County for just one term before he goes back to a life of farming and singing in church. In a way, he’s an accidental sheriff, as opposed to a professional lawman. He may be the least violent and most racially tolerant of the seven in this picture. Tolerance of and violence toward blacks in Jim Crow Mississippi are relative ideas. It’s fair to say of him that he was intolerant, not murderous, happy to be part of the system, as they all were and are.
From a State Sovereignty Commission document dated March 4, 1960, in his third month in office: “I visited Sheriff John Henry Spencer, the new Sheriff of Calhoun County, at Pittsboro, Mississippi. I also talked with Deputy Sheriff Carter, Circuit Clerk H. L. Crew and the Supt. of Education, Mr. Billie B. Gray. I was informed by all of these individuals that there is no known NAACP operating in Calhoun County. They have no names of any potential negro agitators and they are not acquainted with any possible racial unrest or problem within the county. All have advised that they will inform the State Sovereignty Commission immediately should such a situation arise.”
From another document, July 11, 1960: “The Supt. of Education stated that so far as he knew there were no teachers in Calhoun County who were members of the NAACP or any other left wing organization advocating the mixing of the races. The Sheriff made a similar statement concerning conditions in Calhoun County.… Spencer did express his appreciation in that he now had an organization on which he could call in case of any trouble which might arise relating to integration.”
Black teachers in the segregated schools of Calhoun County must be closely watched, because teachers can harbor dangerous ideas. Investigators from the state capital make regular trips to the county to consult with civic officials on who is “agitative.” A Sov-Com report: “On March 13, 1961, I journeyed to Calhoun County. I talked to John Spencer, the Sheriff and his two Chief Deputies.… Supt. of Education Gray said he felt his Negro teachers of Calhoun County were well pleased with their new school buildings and their salaries. He said he did not think any of the Negro teachers were members of the NAACP. He also said it was the policy of the school to make inquiry into the teachers’ background before employing them, and if it is discovered they have a Negro teacher who is an agitator the board does not re-employ them.”
The sheriff spies on any local black, when he is asked to do so by his fellow racists in Jackson. This work is “in unison with our purpose,” as the Sov-Com investigators put it. In April 1961, the sheriff was asked to “check on car tag #167-055—owner Taylor Ford—address Slate Springs, Mississippi, 101 Booker Ave.” Not a lot came of it. From the report that was filed after the sheriff and others had turned in their info: “Taylor Ford is a no good Negro who makes his living by inveigling mostly Negroes out of their money by various methods.… All of the white people who have known Taylor Ford for years said … he is a dead beat, sham, and panderer.… ANALYSIS. Taylor Ford is just another dead beat Negro who earns his living by fleecing both white people and Negroes out of money by any method he can conspire to do so.” Unfortunately, Ford isn’t around to speak for himself.
Forty years onward, Annie Lois Spencer, almost ninety-one, is around, in a nursing home, in a wheelchair. Instantly, she remembers the stogie. Her eyes are bad, and so she rests her finger on the page at the approximate spot where her husband is half turning toward Billy Ferrell’s bat. Her nails are painted an elegant red. Her voice is wheezy. The collar of her red blouse is locked at her throat. “He didn’t smoke them very often,” she says. “I think somebody had just given him that cigar that day.”
On her husband’s girth: “I think he was about a twenty-eight waist when we married. That was in ’thirty-five. He got big around the middle and proceeded to widen out, as we all do.”
On her little boy, John Emmett, who died in the late thirties at about age three: “He was out playing. He fell on a toy bugle. It was made of tin. He was running with it. It sliced open his jugular vein at the throat and the mouthpiece went up into his brain.”
Maybe “throat” has brought another memory. “My husband lost his voice box. He got cancer of the vocal chords. Malignant. They gave him a vibrator box to put up to his throat, but he didn’t like it much. It like to killed him, because he couldn’t sing in church the way he wanted to. I think it just did something to him when he lost his voice box. I don’t know how long he had that cancer in him. He used to say, ‘Oh, why did God give me this cancer, Annie, and take my singing away?’ ”
Jimmy Middleton, sheriff of Port Gibson and Claiborne County, which is a tiny and handsome wedge of the state over near the Mississippi River. This hanging-back man in the black hat and sidelong wan expression, who’s framed between Sheriff Ferrell and Deputy Sheriff Garrison, has never been known to identify himself—on the street, in a legal document, on the signature line of a check—as “James Middleton.” Jimmy, or at least Jim, is the name his parents gave him, and that’s what he goes by. Jim S. Middleton’s the law in a triangular-shaped agricultural county, just below the Delta, about halfway between Vicksburg and Natchez. (To further locate it, Vicksburg is about thirty miles north of Port Gibson, Natchez is about forty-five miles south.) His is a town and a county that prefer to think of themselves as “genteel.” Thus far in the years of civil rights, Port Gibson has been largely free of ugly racial incidents. The movement won’t come to the county until the mid-sixties. Historically, there have been lynchings in the county—but relatively few. Port Gibson, the only real town, is a community where the burghers and local farmers prefer to avoid the so-called unpleasant exchange—as long as blacks stay in their place. Claiborne County is undulant and fertile Mississippi hill country, half open, half wooded, rolling to the bluffs of the great river.
From a recent Sov-Com document drafted by an investigator named Virgil Downing: “I reached Port Gibson, Mississippi in Claiborne County by automobile at noon January 23, 1961 and immediately began to contact all City, County and State Officials as ordered by Director Albert Jones of the State Sovereignty Commission to obtain all information from them regarding any subversive or NAACP activity in Claiborne County. I contacted Sheriff J. S. Middleton and he stated that he knew of no NAACP activity in the county and was not having any trouble at this time and everything was alright. He informed me if any trouble developed from any subversive or NAACP organizations he would contact the Sovereignty Commission at once. Sheriff Middleton was very cooperative a
nd stated he appreciated very much what the Sovereignty Commission was doing to help keep Mississippi segregated.”
From another Sov-Com document, following another visit by the same investigator: “The sheriff stated that he keeps a close watch throughout the county for any violations and when he sees things developing that he thinks will cause trouble he stops it before it can develop further. He stated that the Negro Voter School was not active in the county at this time. Sheriff Middleton was very cooperative and assured me that should the NAACP ever cause him any trouble in the county he would cooperate with the State Sovereignty Commission in every way to keep all of Mississippi segregated.”
He’s fifty-one. He’ll live another thirty-one and a half years. His obit will appear on page 8 of the local weekly: back page, under a bar of type that says “Deaths.” It won’t be cancer that’ll kill the ex-sheriff, it’ll be his heart, and probably also his deeply embittered spirit. The banks will have closed on his notes and he’ll have been forced to sell his land. This is going to happen during the farm crisis that first hits America in the mid-1980s. He’ll depart this life not owing anybody, it’s true, but not having possession of his land, except for just a little bit that he will have been able to hold on to for the decade that he lives beyond the sell-off. On February 16, 1994, he’ll suffer a heart attack at home and die en route to Claiborne County Hospital.
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