The town had a rifle range, an archery club, a hunting and fishing club, a horseback club, a square dancing club, a community concert association, a little theater, five tennis courts, a country club with an eighteen-hole golf course, a public golf course with eighteen holes, a municipal swimming pool, and a small football stadium. None of the above was open to blacks. The library had air-conditioning and 41,000 volumes and six branches throughout Leflore County. Blacks were not allowed in any library facility except for one small branch in a black school. The town had five banks, more than Jackson had, and that only testified to the great concentration of cotton wealth.
Then, if not nearly so much now, East Johnson Avenue, along the railroad tracks, was the heart of a black Greenwood Saturday night. As far back as the forties, East Johnson jumped, like Beale Street in Memphis. It was barber-shops and Kut-n-Kurl shops and fish stands and pool parlors and outdoor shoeshine stands. It was a juke joint called the Silver Moon where Sonny Boy Williamson or Big Bill Broonzy could show up unannounced and play the blues till dawn. It was a tailor shop called Tom Walker’s that made the best suits in the Delta. There were Jewish and Lebanese merchants along East Johnson. Greenwood blacks, who’d spent the past six days chopping cotton on a plantation, would come to town on the backs of flatbed trucks, wearing Saturday-night Tom Walker suits. The trucks had long benches in them, and canvas tops, and—momentarily—some lightened hearts. Aven Whittington’s plantation outside of town encompassed 10,000 acres, and as late as 1955, Squire Whittington could proudly say at Delta soirées that he had 1,000 Leflore blacks living on his place.
The Greenwood Dodgers played Class D ball for the Cotton States League, and the Commonwealth always ran small display ads on the day of the game: “Baseball Tonight. Helena vs. Greenwood. Adm. 11c, 30c, 44c. Game called 8 o’clock.” The ads didn’t need to say that blacks could come but would have to sit in the bleachers. There’d be five hundred whites and blacks at a good Dodgers game, rooting for figures with fat mitts in their big spikes and full-cut flannels who were sweating through the uniforms to the skin, probably carrying around an extra ten pounds.
The mayor of this place was an unprincipled racist—Charlie Sampson, a chic dresser, with sweet fedoras and flowery neckties, a tall man, about six-feet-two. Nearly everybody figured him for Klan. He owned Leflore Dry Cleaning and worshiped at First Baptist. He once went to New York to be on the Today show, and all the way there—according to the legend—his bigot-cronies were coaching him not to say “nigger” on the air. It isn’t known if he slipped. In any case, Mayor Sampson once blithely told the New York Times, “It’s outsiders that’s causing it. We give them everything. We’re building them a new swimming pool. We work very close with the nigger civic league. They’re very satisfied.” This was spring 1963. James Forman of SNCC was writing his letter from the Greenwood jail. The town was suddenly in the national spotlight—“Greenwood was a crossover news flash,” as Taylor Branch would put it years later in his majestic history, Parting the Waters. City police had just loosed a dog on marchers to the courthouse. The dog’s name was Tiger. “Sic ’em, sic ’em,” whites on the sidewalk screamed. “Greenwood had become a theater of war,” Newsweek wrote in the lead piece in its national affairs report. The mayor released a statement: “What are these agitators and the Justice Department trying to accomplish with their present massing of colored mobs?… The only purpose of these agitators is to follow the Communist line of fomenting racial violence.” For these several weeks, Greenwood existed at the epicenter of civil rights in America—and then the center abruptly moved, to Birmingham, to Bull Connor’s fire hoses and attack dogs in Kelly Ingram Park.
But the hate ran on here. The city attorney, Hardy Lott, president of the local Citizens’ Council, was a Greenwood firebrand, in partnership with the mayor, willing to do almost anything to keep down blacks. (He’d later defend Byron De La Beckwith, local fertilizer salesman and home-grown psychotic, against the charge of murdering Medgar Evers.) Lott and Sampson ran Greenwood and everybody knew it. Actually, Lott ran Sampson—he was the true power of Greenwood. Their police chief was Curtis Lary. In terms of law enforcement, he was the second-ranking uniformed officer behind the county sheriff. (In an oral history archive at Howard University in Washington, D.C., there’s this 1968 exchange between an interviewer and a black Greenwood minister named William Wallace, who was active in the later years of the movement: “Is Chief Lary still head of the police?” “Yes, he’s still head of the police.” “What’s his position?” “He has a job and he has to do what he is told.”) The attorney for the LeFlore County board of supervisors, Aubrey Bell, was another prominent citizen-bigot who held a prized seat on the State Sovereignty Commission and threw grand parties and wore French cuffs and quoted Shakespeare before rural juries. Greenwood was the state headquarters of the Citizens’ Council. From its offices at 115 Howard Street, the Council leafleted Mississippi with its racism, offering cash awards to high school students for essays on the moral necessity of segregation: “1,000 in Cash Given For Winning Essays.”
Later, Martin Luther King, Jr., would come to the town without pity, prompting the authors of the local KKK Hate Sheets to write a special installment of their newsletter:
TO THOSE OF YOU NIGGERS WHO GAVE OR GIVE AID AND COMFORT TO THIS CIVIL RIGHTS SCUM, WE ADVISE YOU THAT YOUR IDENTITIES ARE IN THE PROPER HANDS AND YOU WILL BE REMEMBERED. WE KNOW THAT THE NIGGER OWNER OF COLLINS SHOE SHOP ON JOHNSON STREET “ENTERTAINED” MARTIN LUTHER KING WHEN THE “BIG NIGGER” CAME TO GREENWOOD. WE KNOW OF OTHERS AND WE SAY TO YOU—AFTER THE SHOWING AND THE PLATE-PASSING AND STUPID STREET DEMONSTRATIONS ARE OVER AND THE IMPORTED AGITATORS HAVE ALL GONE, ONE THING IS SURE AND CERTAIN—YOU ARE STILL GOING TO BE NIGGERS AND WE ARE STILL GOING TO BE WHITE MEN. YOU HAVE CHOSEN YOUR BEDS AND NOW YOU MUST LIE IN THEM.
Greenwoodians, on both sides of the river, awoke to find mimeographed copies of these all-cap Hate Sheets rolled up on their morning lawns or shoved into the crevices of their front doors.
Sally Belfrage’s Freedom Summer, published in 1965, poetically catches all that Greenwood and Leflore were—the strange allure mixed in with the astonishing hate of it. Belfrage, in her innocence and cheek and with her wonderful eye, had come south as a volunteer worker with hundreds of other idealistic collegians. “The early mornings were glassy and warm, with hardly a hint of the thick heat that would roll in later,” she wrote. “The country was foreign, resembling Spain or Syria or anywhere where heat and poverty combine to overwhelm attempts at the streamlined.” Arriving in Greenwood for the first time, “We studied the faces of pedestrians and police for homicidal tendencies. Then we crossed the tracks, and for a block or two the wiry, cheesy commercial atmosphere remained but as a cheap exaggeration of itself; then the pavement bellied out and sidewalks disappeared or fell away in broken pieces: Niggertown.”
The police were a law unto themselves. The worst ones were the ordinary officers—on both the city and county forces. Clarksdale, an hour or so away, was famous throughout Mississippi as a Delta town with a terrifying police chief, Ben Collins. But Greenwood had thugs in badges by the number. In 1964, a white civil rights worker named Paul Klein filed an affidavit against a city cop. This document has been published in several books: “Logan took a long knife out of his pocket and started to sharpen it, [directing] a running stream of threats at the three of us. He asked Johnson how he liked ‘screwing that nigger’ (indicating Miss Lane). Then he said, while sharpening the knife: ‘sounds like rubbing up against nigger pussy.’ He poked the knife up against my ribs a few times; then he held it out toward me, told me to put my hand on it and asked: ‘Think it’s sharp enough to cut your cock off?’ ”
In 1964, when “Delay” Beckwith came home to Greenwood following his two mistrials for the killing of Medgar Evers, the local cops embraced him as one of their own. They made him an auxiliary officer. They let him ride up front in the squad cars, with his own gun and club, as they cruised Niggertown.
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Of all of the sixties cops whose names live on—Ben Branch and Ward Simpson and Ed Weber and so many others—the most feared and famous of the county may have been Big Smitty. Wilbur Wardine Smith. Mr. Big Smitty, as he preferred Greenwood blacks to address him, even the one or ones he was sleeping with over in Niggertown. (As Belfrage wrote in Freedom Summer, the real integration of the races in Greenwood “was always after dark, under the sheets.”) A lot of the local cops kept girlfriends on the south side. Smitty, who loved beating up on blacks at the same time he was having them sexually, was known to keep his share, and, later, when one of these women tried to register at the courthouse in a group demonstration, he threatened to kill her, and so SNCC had to sneak her by darkness out of town, up north to Detroit.
Early and late in his career, Mr. Big Smitty was a town cop. But in the first half of the sixties, when the days were ugliest, he served as a sheriff’s deputy. He fancied himself as the number-one criminal deputy of the sheriff’s department. And Mr. Big Smitty, Deputy Sheriff Mr. Big Smitty, with that menacing coal-black mustache, with that 280-pound wide-body frame, with that shiny nightstick that seemed as long as a broom handle, with that big-barreled flashlight that came in handy for clubbing, worked for a quiet and spectacled man who had a blue tattoo on his muscular left forearm. The tattoo said “JEC.” The blurry blue of the letters sat on a little patch of welted white skin.
I can’t remember the first time I noticed the tattoo, but I recall clearly the day John Ed Cothran told me how he got it, and how he’d once tried to take it off. We were eating dinner. “You want to bless it?” his new wife asked, holding out a hand to him and a hand to me. The three of us held hands from our seats around the table, and John Ed bowed his head and said, “Heavenly Father, we thank you …” After we’d passed the corn on the cob and the pink-eyed peas and the fried green tomatoes and the mashed potatoes with garlic, the head of the house got to talking about something else and the tattoo just came up. He said he got it put on when he was seventeen or eighteen. He and two other Delta farm boys, Jim Venable and Herman Price, decided to get themselves a blue tattoo, and the tattooist, who was an amateur and didn’t have the proper tools or know-how, hooked up a sewing-machine needle to a motor coil that got its juice from the battery of a Model T Ford. The thing ran at about the speed of a slow dental drill.
He extended his arm across the table to show it off, rubbing his knobby fingers over the raised surface. The smile was beginning to come up. The surface of his skin seemed like white scar tissue, healed over. He said, “I took me a knife once, or some other kind of sharp object, can’t remember, and tried to dig the ink out. Didn’t want it on my arm anymore. I dug at it, but I couldn’t get the durn ink out so I just left it. I like to rotted my arm off doing that. My daddy had given me hell for gettin’ that tattoo, by the way.” What seemed to bring the curving smile was the recollection of trying to remove the blue initials with some forgotten sharp object and then suffering an infection. The smile came atop the words “dig the ink out” and “like to rotted my arm off.” What did he use for the job—a dinner fork? A camp knife with a serrated edge?
Maudine, who’d been married to John Ed not quite a year by then, was in a yellow polo blouse. A small and perky woman, she’d recently turned eighty. Like her husband, she’s religious, but she can’t see the print of a Bible any longer. I’d called John Ed that morning—I always tried to keep things loose when I wanted to approach him for another talk—and Maudine had answered. “Come for dinner today,” she said, meaning “Come for lunch.” I’d been there for her meals before and remembered how wonderful the food was. I felt awkward about eating with people whom I was trying to plumb for secrets, but in the South it’s so difficult to say no to those invitations. I’d been in John Ed’s house five times by then, our talks lasting into long afternoons. Maudine had become a part of them. I’d learned by then to work in and around his poor hearing. “What? What’s that?” he’d say, cupping his ear, and I’d look up from my notebook and repeat the question loudly.
In his third wife’s presence, he’d continued to use “nigger,” as if there were no other useful or accurate word. Maudine always said “colored.” She didn’t attempt to correct her husband. Sometimes, I’d try to look over to get her reaction when the word was being said several times in a story. This one, for instance: “Only time I got rough, really rough, I guess, when I was sheriff was with a drunk nigger from Schlater, Mississippi. I had him cuffed and he tried to jump out of my car coming back to Greenwood in the middle of the night. I’d gone up there to Schlater to get him out of some durn bar. And the durn nigger tries to jump out of the car as I’m bringin’ him back and we ended up wrestlin’ in a bar pit alongside of the road. Guy came down with his cuffs on the inside of my wrist and tore the artery and I was bleedin’ all over the place. I caught him with the heel of my hand and broke his durn jaw. I put him in jail in the courthouse, and next day I’m taking the nigger to the county farm, and I took him without cuffs, ’cause I was just darin’ him to try somethin’. When I get stirred up, I don’t book no junk. I told that feller, ‘I’d have blowed your brains out if you’d a tried somethin’.’ ” There seemed no particular reaction in Maudine, except admiration for his manliness.
John Ed and Maudine had gotten hitched on Labor Day weekend, 1998, right before his eighty-fourth birthday. He’d been widowed, second time, for not quite five months; she’d been a widow for twenty years. John Ed and Maudine and Maudine’s former husband, Clyde McClellan, had all been friends for decades. After Clyde died, Maudine and John Ed and John Ed’s wife, Sybil, kept visiting back and forth. They’d go to Delta reunions and auctions and church suppers. Maudine’s from Leland, Mississippi, over closer to the Mississippi River. This is how John Ed described the sudden hitching to a woman he’d long known, though not in a carnal way: “I didn’t want to be alone and I didn’t want her to be alone. She’s about two-thirds blind, I’m about two-thirds deaf, and so I said I’d see for her and she’ll hear for me, and that’s the way it’s been, I guess. We just did it.” They drove in his pickup to Eudora, Arkansas, because there weren’t a lot of justices of the peace open in Mississippi on a holiday weekend, and anyway, they thought of the trip to another state as a sort of honeymoon, even though they drove right back. None of his family went to the wedding, although some of hers did. “I told the JP we wanted to be married, whole thing didn’t take two minutes. We’re just as married as if we’d done it in a church, and I told the JP, ‘We’re going to be the happiest teenagers you ever saw.’ He said, ‘You take this woman holding your right hand to be your wife?’ And I said, ‘I shore do.’ He asked Maudine the same thing, and that was it.” Whenever John Ed gets into his pickup, his bride climbs in on the other side and then scoots all the way over: a two-headed driver, with the two heads adding up to about 170 years in age.
His oozing curve of smile: I’m not quite sure when I began to think of it as a passageway to help decipher the hidden inner man, but—like with the tattoo—I can recall vividly the first time it got my attention. We were on the porch, sitting in white rockers. It was overcast and extremely humid. Little tears of perspiration kept gathering on his upper lip. He’d lick them off and go on with a story. He wasn’t married to Maudine yet. This was my second time in his home. A cat named Sophie that had belonged to Sybil was meowing and curling at the base of our rockers. The cat kept him from rocking, which brought annoyance and more beads of perspiration. “Don’t you need a cat?” he said. He spoke gruffly to the cat, but there didn’t seem any teeth in the gruffness.
He started telling about a “little water head” grandchild, long dead. He’d been talking of his first wife, Maggie Myrt Cothran, who’d died young of stomach cancer. They’d had two children together, Billy and Betty. John Ed had outlived his first wife, Maggie, just as he’d recently outlived his second, Sybil. But anyway his mind was drifting back to this long-ago grandchild, Donna Kay, one of many Cothran offspring. Donna Kay had
been born a Mongoloid. Betty Ellis, the child’s mother, had been unable to care for her, so Donna Kay’s grandparents took her in. The child had a red wagon with a little bed in it and she loved pulling her wagon up close to the television set in the living room. She’d turn on the set and lie down in the wagon. “She’d lay in it real close to that television and she’d start to laugh whenever blacks came on and then maybe that little water head would get a convulsion,” John Ed said. This time there seemed something almost sheepish, something embarrassed, in the curving smile. He didn’t use the n-word. It was unnerving to imagine a little girl with water on the brain lying in a red wagon in her grandparents’ farmhouse, laughing at flickering images of blacks on TV—and her aged grandfather smiling so many years later at the memory of it. Donna Kay, John Ed said, had lived for six years.
He was wearing a diamond ring that day. It was set in the middle of a gold cluster, and eight starbursts were shooting from it like sunrays. The ring looked so incongruous on such large work-worn hands. He said he’d been given it by his first wife. He said he just decided to start wearing it again after his second had died.
In southern Mississippi, the former Imperial Wizard of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, Sam Bowers, was set to go on trial for a 1966 civil rights arson-murder, and this was much in the news in the state. John Ed spoke of Bowers and of the Klan’s attack on the family of Vernon Dahmer and of the prospect of justice at last. “Well, by damn, they ought to get him,” John Ed said. “No call to go around hurting folks like that.” He shook his head as he said it—sadly, genuinely.
He led a tour into the hall to look at some mounted pictures. There was a framed reproduction of a 1926 baptismal certificate. John Ed was twelve when he got doused in Christ. The certificate said he’d been “buried with the Lord in baptism for the remission of sins.” The baptism took place in the Quiver River near the town of Itta Bena, which is outside Greenwood and means “beautiful spot in the woods.” After a while, we went out into the backyard and sat in peeling metal chairs. We looked at his garden: peas, butter beans, tomatoes, cukes, okra. He said he didn’t even like to eat the stuff—he grew it to give it away to relatives and local widow women. The garden wasn’t doing well—the heat was too intense, not enough rain. He showed some gourds he’d grown and had hollowed out and had strung high on poles, so the purple martins could nest in them. “They eat their weight in mosquitoes twice a day,” he said. But the nesting martins weren’t eating enough mosquitoes—the air was so thick with their high hum that he wanted to go back inside. We sat in the almost depressingly clean and rugless front room. There were long silences. He was smoking filtered cigarettes—he’d switched from his Camels.
Sons of Mississippi Page 13
