Sons of Mississippi

by Paul Hendrickson

  The Man with His Back Turned

  There was no way to know, before that first encounter, that form was following function in an uncanny way, that the man with his back turned in a photograph was the man with his back turned in life: a seg all right, but never exactly or precisely a true hating seg. Rather, a seg who’d gone along. Rather, a seg who’d been unable, and apparently unwilling, to step outside his and his state’s history of inhumanity. Rather, a seg who’d sought to look the other way while others (some of whom worked for him) did the broadly vicious and violent stuff. Rather, a seg who was caught between his personal distaste for treating people like dogs, like chattel, and his personal need to keep a six-pointed sheriff’s star pinned to the pocket of his shirt and thereby have the esteem of his intolerant community. The man with his back turned on the far right in Charles Moore’s photograph at Oxford, it turned out, was the morally ambivalent man who’d been head lawman of one of the scariest and most hate-filled and race-contested sixties’ Mississippi towns there was: Greenwood. And for that paradoxical reason, and for some others, too (not least of which was that he was alive these four decades later), John Ed Cothran became the most compelling figure of them all—of the seven in the photograph, that is. It took a long time to figure him out, but at length an indelible impression of him emerged: inescapably tragic, unavoidably culpable, then as now.

  “I just got one thing to ask you, mister,” he said. “You got anything to do with the federal government?” He was unloading a white pickup in his driveway, and a younger man was assisting him. He didn’t really look up as he said it.

  “Not one thing, sir.”

  He grunted. “Come on, then,” he said. He motioned toward the door of the handsome brick house with bluish-gray wood trim. He started across his heat-scalded yard while the unannounced visitor followed behind and worked furiously at processing a thought: Amazing. From the front, exactly what you’d have said. Short-haired and blocky and thick-necked. Same kind of glasses. Not as tall as he seems in the picture, but him all right, unmistakably. Everything but a tourniquet on his sleeve.

  He had pinkish, freckled skin. His work pants were held up by a pair of crossed yellow-green suspenders. He was in white socks and ankle-high work shoes, the leather looking soft as lanolin, and he seemed to shuffle them along the ground slowly rather than to take actual steps in them. He had thin white wispy hair and there was a ridge of deep tan across his forehead, where the brim of his perforated ball cap stopped. He had huge, freckled, liver-spotted hands. He had an open, meaty face, more angular than broad, and it didn’t seem malevolent. It seemed benign, accepting of old age. He had on a watch with a silver expandable band. His wrist was so thick that the band appeared to have his skin in a death hold. But the most powerful first sensation was of an old man still physically strong, remarkably so. His arms hung down like fence posts.

  He was just home from a fishing trip with a middle-aged stepson at an oxbow lake over near the Mississippi River. They’d been away two days. They’d done pretty well. With an oozing curve of smile, he pointed at a plastic bucket full of white perch, fat as hogs, a few of them still flopping and gasping for air. This same slightly disconcerting smile was going to show up often on John Ed’s face in the conversations of the next weeks and months.

  He was eighty-three then—early summer 1998. His second wife, Sybil, to whom he’d been wed twenty-five years, had died two months previous. She’d fallen down beside him, going into Sunday church, and then seemed to recover, and then vomited in the pews, and then had lapsed into a coma, not to wake up. But there wasn’t any way of knowing any of that right then, nor that he would be married again, to Maudine McClellan, by summer’s end, nor that there was a small blue faded tattoo on his left forearm that said “JEC” and that had been put on crudely some sixty-five years earlier, when he was a Delta farmboy, nor that he’d helped drag Emmett Till’s body from the Tallahatchie in 1955, when he was a forty-year-old deputy, and that he’d been in on the arrest of the two killers.

  The previous evening, the director of a funeral home in Greenwood had provided the first and best surprise: The figure on the far right in the photograph was alive. “Sorry, can’t give you death information on him,” he said. “He’s over in Moorhead. It’s in the next county. John Ed’s a little hard of hearing, but otherwise he’s fine. He goes to a lot of funerals and wakes. People around here do that. Be sure to talk loud if you call him up.” John Ed didn’t answer his phone that evening, nor again the next morning. Moorhead, the funeral home director had related, was only half an hour away. He said it was the little Delta town in Sunflower County, directly west of Greenwood, famous for being the place where “the Southern crosses the Yellow Dog.” Those were train lines.

  Now, in the spic-and-span house, an old lawman and retired farmer took off his cap to reveal a scalp that looked pink and fair and tender as a baby’s. He smoked Camels and sat pitched back in his blue La-Z-Boy in the living room with his hands clasped on his stomach, his legs nearly on a level with his torso. His house felt almost unnaturally unlived in—as if the late Sybil Cothran had cleaned it just before she died on April 17 and he hadn’t touched things since. He slapped a bug and pinched it and studied it and then flicked it off with a surprising quickness. He jerked down the lever on his La-Z-Boy with the same quickness. He said he’d been having trouble with his ankles swelling. “Old doctor man give me some fluid pills, don’t believe it’s done any good,” he said, pulling on his pant legs to exhibit a pair of swollen and hairless and pale legs.

  He said, with edge, “I haven’t got any use for FBI people even today.” He cupped his ear and peered at me and said, “What? What’s that?” He said, “I liked it, I just liked all of it, ’cept toward the last, when there was all that civil rights crap.” Those were the same words Billy Ferrell had used in the first encounter: “civil rights crap.” What John Ed Cothran meant was that he’d liked being a Mississippi lawman, a career he’d never really aimed toward, especially the single term he’d served as sheriff of Greenwood and Leflore County, except for how fractious things had gotten toward the end because of outside agitation, and the bleeding ulcer that was tearing his stomach. He’d served as a Delta lawman from 1949 to 1964—the first eleven as a sheriff’s deputy, the last four as the head man. He said he came into office “on January 4, 1960.” He meant the office of sheriff. The date was sealed inside him.

  He talked of how he’d been subpoenaed to testify for the state at the Emmett Till trial in Sumner, and how he didn’t like a bit of it. “Four goddamn hours,” he said, holding up four knobbed fingers and folding his thumb behind. He talked in and around the Emmett Till murder. It didn’t come up until late in the conversation, and then some random details just dropped out.

  He said he was lonely. He said he was spending a lot of time with his Bible. Several times he said “nigger,” putting it into sentences as a seeming simple declarative and descriptive statement, without any self-consciousness or particular seeming meanness or fear of contradiction or recrimination from some man with a notebook who might have lily-livered sensibilities. It was as if there weren’t another authentic word. Of Till, for instance, he said, “What happened, see, was little Emmett went in that store. And the little nigger, he said to her, ‘Hey, baby, come on with me, I got all kinds of white women back home.’ ”

  He didn’t talk much about James Meredith and Oxford, nor was a photograph from a magazine produced in which a lawman, in the foreground, with an armband knotted to his left sleeve, has his back turned to the camera. You can’t precisely tell whether this figure’s eyes are trained on a swinging bat. You hold it one way, and he seems to be doing so, and you hold the picture another, and he seems to be looking slightly off from the bat, downward. Since you can’t see his face, you have to try to imagine where he’s looking, what he might be thinking.

  The Delta of Mississippi isn’t really shaped like a delta. It’s closer to a diamond, or an oval. It’s that legendary garde
n in the northwest corner of the state that stretches from just below Memphis at the Tennessee border southward to Vicksburg, and which encompasses all or parts of twelve counties, and which is framed roughly by the rolling loops of the Mississippi and Yazoo Rivers. It’s two hundred miles in length and about seventy across at its greatest width. It’s the richest soil west of the Nile. The total area within its alluvial boundaries is about 7,100 square miles. It’s been called “the most Southern place on earth,” and there is a good book with that title by a Southern historian named James C. Cobb, who points out that although it seems tabletop flat to the naked eye, the Delta’s surface is actually rather uneven, due to centuries of flooding and sedimentation by the Mississippi River and its tributaries. That may be so, but it’s the utter-seeming flatness people remember. East of Greenwood, in Carroll County, the earth is pastured, timbered, rolling, and you can see it out the window and feel it all beginning to change beneath you as you drive. Inside the Delta, beginning immediately west of Greenwood and extending west toward the Mississippi, the earth is so level as to make you almost imagine you’re traveling on the ocean floor.

  The summer air is sweet, vegetal, smoky. The gray-black fields, snowy with their cotton, stretch out on either side of the roadbeds, which are often just two-laners. The tree lines, if there are any trees, form a green filmy blur at the horizon. At night, coming across U.S. 82, from Greenville to Greenwood, a distance of about fifty miles, it’s so black. “The Mississippi Delta is a glamorous, sweating land of long twilights and hot dawns,” wrote James Street in his book Look Away! But the most lapidary line about the Delta was written by David Cohn in a book called Where I Was Born and Raised. The Delta of Mississippi, Cohn said, “begins in the lobby of the Peabody Hotel in Memphis and ends on Catfish Row in Vicksburg.”

  Historian Cobb points out that Mississippians from other parts of the state tend to speak of traveling “into the Delta”—not of going to Clarksdale or Ruleville or Indianola. It’s almost as if they were talking of entering some heart of darkness and enchantment, the heart of the heart of what Mississippi has stood for in their own and in the country’s imagination. The reason this region bleeds the blues is because of the kind of dawn-to-dark stoop work that has gone on in its fields over generations. Much of that is over now—both the music and the stoop work. Agribusiness and corporate catfish farming have come in, even as there’s come a great emptying out of the place and the erection of casinos up in Tunica County, near Memphis. They, too, seem surreal.

  During slavery, blacks were the basic “machinery” of Delta cotton production. The area was sparsely settled before 1880 because of flooding from the Mississippi and its tributaries. Development of this boggy place was speeded by the railroads and by levee construction, and by 1910 the great flat garden had been cleared, drained, and planted everywhere the eye could gaze. As late as 1960, every county in the Delta still had more blacks than whites—the proportions ranging from 52 percent to 79 percent. But if so much has changed in the generation after civil rights, so much seems to remain, not least the fertility of the earth. The Delta topsoil is still twenty-four feet deep in places (as compared to, say, seven feet deep in southern Minnesota), and even now you can see plantation manors and plantation fields and plantation cabins sticking up from some of those fields, as if the Civil War hasn’t been fought yet. In the middle of the twentieth century the Delta was still producing a million bales of cotton a year—in some years that was a tenth of the American crop; bale after bale of pure Delta cotton, five hundred pounds apiece, wrapped in burlap and tied with jute cloth, with all that human sweat, before being shipped to market. James Meredith once said that you could almost hear the backs breaking and the vegetation growing as you drove down Delta back roads. Amzie Moore, who belonged to an earlier generation of twentieth-century Mississippi civil rights heroes, once said of Delta heat: “Some days in the summertime in Mississippi, the weather is so hot you can almost see it.” He was from Cleveland, another Delta town of civil rights legend.

  But nothing like Greenwood’s legend. For some in the movement, saying “Greenwood” is almost like saying “Selma.” For a time, in early 1963, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) transferred its headquarters to Greenwood from Atlanta and made the town the focus of its drive for civil rights in Mississippi. Bob Dylan and Sidney Poitier and Harry Belafonte and Dick Gregory and Pete Seeger turned up in Greenwood in the early sixties. (Dylan sang “Blowin’ in the Wind,” which was a hit record just then, not his own version, but Peter, Paul, and Mary’s.) James Forman, head of SNCC, wrote an eloquent piece of protest and journal literature in Greenwood on scrap paper called “Some Random Notes from the Leflore County Jail.” (It was John Ed’s jail.) Forman and eight others were being held in that jail, and one of them was Bob Moses, the Jesus figure of the movement in Mississippi. SNCC workers tried to tally some of the violence against blacks that went on in Greenwood within a few weeks in that late winter and early spring of ’63, which would have been the fourth year of John Ed’s tenure as sheriff of Leflore County. This was the year in Mississippi, after James Meredith’s forced integration of Ole Miss, when whites seemed to be frothing in their collective fury and humiliation. The sheet compiled by SNCC workers in Greenwood reads like a war diary.

  On February 28, 1963, SNCC worker James Travis was machine-gunned by three white men seven miles from Greenwood. On March 6, 1963, three SNCC workers were shot at while sitting in a car outside the SNCC office. No one was hurt. On March 24, 1963, the SNCC office was burned down. On March 26, 1963, two shotgun blasts were fired into the home of SNCC worker George Greene. No one was hurt. On March 27, 1963, ten SNCC workers—including SNCC Executive Secretary James Forman—were arrested for “inciting to riot” while they escorted 100 Negroes to the courthouse to register. On April 2, 1963, Greenwood police arrested a SNCC worker and forcibly ejected comedian Dick Gregory from the courthouse lawn.

  The brown Yazoo River still curls through the middle of it. Now as then, the town still proclaims itself “Long-Staple Cotton Capital of the World.” Now as then, the county jail occupies the top two floors of the neoclassical stone courthouse at 310 West Market, and prisoners still stand behind its barred windows, looking down on slow-moving pedestrians and cars. You can drive by the courthouse and jail at midnight, the town asnore, and the prisoners are there, against their bars, the light shining from behind their backs the color of weak tea. In the sixties, the Leflore County Courthouse was the first place in the Delta where great numbers of blacks turned up on the steps in an attempt to register to vote. The afternoon daily, the Commonwealth, used to publish the names of those who’d tried to register—so that they might likely lose their jobs as domestics or yardmen when they went to work the following Monday. In 1962, the nonwhite median annual family income of Leflore County was $595. In 1962, the sheriff of Leflore County had an ornate wooden rolltop desk in the sheriff’s department on the main floor of the courthouse, and next to the desk, hanging vertically from a cradle, was a phone with a receiver that weighed about four pounds. Until just a few years ago, there was a newsstand and a candy counter in the lobby of the courthouse, and on the greasy glass of the candy counter was a hand-lettered sign. It was adhered to the glass with gray electrical tape and said FULLER BRUSH PRODUCTS SOLD HERE.

  Now as then, the gray steel girderwork of the bridge at Front Street, right behind the courthouse, carries you over to the white residential side. “The other side,” Greenwood blacks still call it. There, on Grand Boulevard, are some of the finest homes and tended yards in Mississippi. You come the other way on the bridge, to the south bank, and in no more than half a dozen blocks you’re in the middle of hard Delta poverty. Two Americas, then as now, side by side, in a town of less than 20,000, split by a swollen stream. Greenwood is 100 miles north of Jackson, 134 south of Memphis, the largest town between the two.

  In 1963, Leflore County had 13,657 blacks of voting age; about 2 percent, or 268, were registered.
Of eligible white voters in the county, 95 percent were registered. The total population of the county was just under 50,000. Whites owned 90 percent of the land and had a median income three times that of blacks. This paragraph from a report on Greenwood in 1963 House hearings of the Eighty-eighth Congress roughly summed it up: “There is no Negro clerk, bailiff, or prosecutor in any court in Leflore County. No Negro judge sits on any bench and there is no local Negro attorney. There has never been a Negro juror in Leflore. No Negro holds a job in any portion of the law enforcement agency, and the quarters in the Negro parts of the jails are inferior. The post office has employed Negroes as letter carriers restricted to delivering in Negro neighborhoods.” And yet, within three years, by 1966, some kind of freedom would come: 7,000 of those nearly 14,000 eligible blacks of voting age would be registered.