Sons of Mississippi

by Paul Hendrickson

  “Don’t you need a cat?” he said.

  “I used to get on a tractor at daylight and go in the house and eat dinner and crawl back on that thing and go to dark,” he said.

  “My middle name used to have two d’s on the end of it. Knocked one of ’em off. Got tired of having two on there. Now it’s just Ed,” he said.

  “I’m lonely here,” he said.

  The next time I drove up to his home, the summer’s heat had passed, and an old and seemingly nonmalevolent man opened the front door of 518 West Washington, and sitting in a middle distance behind him, her legs tucked beneath her, was a small white-haired woman. “I want you to meet my wife,” he said.

  Remember the parable of the wheel inside the wheel, and how one thing turns on another.

  There was once a youthful SNCC voter registration worker assigned to Greenwood named Douglas MacArthur Cotton. Everybody who knows him from movement days calls him Mac Cotton. He’s a native Mississippian and is past sixty now and lives far back in the woods, about an hour south of Greenwood, in a different county, closer to Jackson. He makes his living as a carpenter and odd-jobber. He wasn’t the first SNCC worker in Leflore County in the early sixties, nor the last, nor is his story unique. But it’s a story to remember nonetheless. On June 25, 1963, Mac Cotton brought two hundred people to the courthouse steps in an attempt to get some of them registered to vote. He got arrested. The Commonwealth ran a headline: “Ten Arrested at Noon Today for Loitering at Courthouse.” The story said, “When they started sitting and gathering in a large group on the steps of the courthouse they were told by sheriff John Ed Cothran and his deputies, they would have to move.” On another part of page 1 was an AP wire story about JFK telling millions in Berlin, “Ich bin ein Berliner.”

  The week before, on June 18, fifty-eight people had been arrested in Itta Bena. They, too, had been booked on charges of disturbance and breach of the peace, and they, too, had gotten their headline in the Commonwealth (“Sheriff Arrests 58 in Itta Bena”), and they, too, had suffered a rapid sentencing to the county farm. They’d been tried in groups of eleven or twelve, with no representation, and it had taken the sheriff’s deputies (one of whom was the sheriff’s son, Billy Cothran, home from a second tour in the Air Force and working again for his dad as a sheriff’s deputy) a whole hour to herd all of them into and out of the courtroom. So, a week afterward, when Mac Cotton and nine others got carted off to Leflore County justice, it was one more headline in the local paper but nothing to call news. His trial took place about ninety minutes after the arrest. According to a later affidavit filed by Mac Cotton, the courtroom proceeding lasted five minutes and the sheriff refused to answer any of the defendant’s relevant questions. By five o’clock, the prisoner had been moved to the county farm in a school bus with black grating on the window. He’d gotten four months and a $200 fine.

  At the county work farm, the prisoners were put in striped uniforms and made to cut roadside grass with kaiser blades. If you wanted to go to the bathroom, you told the sarge, “Taking a leak here, Shot.” One day out in the fields, the Shot cocked and pointed a pistol at Mac Cotton. He did this because the prisoner had asked the guard to call him by his name, and not by the word “nigger.” Everybody stopped working. The moment defused, but afterward the prisoner and some of his fellow prisoners went on a hunger strike, and for this they were sent to the Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman. Things had notched themselves up now, for Parchman—it was all you ever had to say during the civil rights era, “Parchman”—was the prison hellhole of the South. Parchman Farms has been grieved into song and poetry by generations of Mississippi blues men. It sits on Highway 49W, in the middle of the Delta, about an hour’s drive northwest of Greenwood. For most of the twentieth century, inmates at Parchman chiefly did one thing in daylight: work the farm’s thousands of acres of crops, notably cotton, under the gun and bullwhip. The whip was known by some as Black Annie. The farm, as historians have written, provided a remembrance of slave times to blacks who’d thought they were free in a free world—although whites were incarcerated there, too. There’s a book about Parchman called Worse than Slavery. Historically, both the penitentiary board and the parole board were controlled by Delta planters.

  At Parchman, the sassy prisoner from Greenwood with a general’s name began to suffer a drip from his penis, to get sores on his tongue, on his gums, and in his throat. Mac Cotton told a guard about this, and in answer to a question he made the mistake of saying “Yes” instead of “Yes, sir.” For this, he got the hot box. “You goddamn niggers shut up that goddamn racket. I’ll throw your ass in the sweat box,” the guard said to the others, according to an affidavit later filed. Sometimes at Parchman, the guards would take you to the box naked, jerking you by your penis. In the box, the only air came from a crack under the door. Several days later, back in his cell, the prisoner, who’d supposedly gotten his mind right, ate with his fingers from a face bowl. At one point, there were fourteen men in one cell—one was trying to sleep against the commode. Mac Cotton had the unreasonableness to ask for someone else’s food when that inmate said he had no appetite. The guards heard about this, and the next day they served Cotton three butter beans and a piece of crust about the size of a pair of dice. He told them to take these crumbs away, he didn’t need them, and for this insolence he got put on the bars. Getting put on the bars meant that the guards made you stand on your toes while they roped you by your wrists to the top bar of your cell.

  “I peed and shitted out all over myself,” Cotton is saying. We are in his living room. We have not met before. I have brought with me a sheaf of declassified papers and affidavits and other things that I’ve obtained from civil rights archives and government files and from the declassified Sovereignty Commission files. I’ve come to his home to ask him about John Ed Cothran, who’d once arrested him on a courthouse step on a charge of loitering, with or without true malice in his heart, but in any case an action and an event that had put in motion a long string of dehumanizing moments and actions: You could think of it philosophically as the chain of moral consequence.

  Cotton seems uninterested in looking at any of these papers, at least for now. He has placed them facedown on a coffee table, aligned their edges in a neat stack. “I think about this a lot,” he says. He means Parchman penitentiary in 1963 and of his hanging on the bars and of the peeing and shitting out all over himself in front of his fellow freedom workers. “I think what God did for me. I was just kind of floating through the air after a time. After a while all of it was taken away. I imagine about after eight hours, I was removed from the pain of it.”

  His wife, Mamie, is typing on a computer and listening in. Grandchildren are playing in another room.

  “Why aren’t you riled up?”

  “Why should I be riled up?” he answers.

  “But they were invading your rights.” (It feels ludicrous, phrasing it so weakly.)

  “My whole existence was illegal in their eyes,” he answers.

  He has just come from Sunday church, which is a short walking distance from his home. At Pleasant Hill Missionary Baptist Church, the preacher had taken his text from Ezekiel, Chapter 1, Verse 16. The pastor had cried out, “The big wheel turns, but the little wheel inside makes it turn.” Mac Cotton and I had sat in the first pew. He held his Bible on his right knee. He was in a suit and tie. “Keep on rollin’, keep on turnin’,” the pastor had told the congregation. “You go all these miles in life and what you find is there’s still a wheel in the middle of a wheel. The big wheel turns, but it’s the little wheel inside the wheel that makes it turn.” After the service, Mac Cotton had gone to the churchyard cemetery to look at his parents’ grave site. His father, Emmitt Hezechia Cotton, was born in 1884. He died on December 3, 1960. He had gotten registered to vote in Mississippi somewhere around 1905—the rarest of accomplishments. His son said, “See, it’s a continuity, it’s a chain, that goes all the way back, it’s all hooked together, just like t
he pastor said, is what I’m trying to tell you.”

  Back from church, back from the cemetery, in his living room, his tie pulled down, Mac Cotton is sipping clear moonshine from a fruit jar. And he is not riled.

  He looks at the picture in Life. The name “John Ed Cothran” hasn’t registered in him. He is shown a picture from the Commonwealth, in which you can clearly see the face of the sheriff of Greenwood.

  “This is the man who arrested you on the steps—and then all that stuff happened.”

  “Yes!” he says. “Okay. Now I remember him. Now I remember this guy. Come to think of it, I think he was a kind of Southern gentleman. Law-and-order person. His kind or brand of Southern gentleman. Come to think, I can remember now that he was almost troubled. I remember him talking to me … before we were sent to the county farm. It was as if it was bothering him. He was saying, ‘Well, what do you all want?’ We said, ‘Well, all the rights guaranteed to us under the Constitution.’ He seemed at a kind of loss. It was almost as if he couldn’t quite make himself come out and say to us, ‘You’re wrong.’ At the same time, he sure wasn’t going to say to us, ‘You’re right.’ But you could see it was almost bothering him, that’s the idea I had in my mind, as if he was sort of struggling with it himself.”

  Mac Cotton pauses. “I don’t know what he did other times, of course. I’m telling you how it was right then between him and me.… This is what I think I remember.” Mac Cotton pauses again. “Maybe he would have turned his back and let somebody else hang me, there’s that, too.”

  David Jordan easily remembered John Ed Cothran—and even more so he remembered Wilbur Wardine Smith. Jordan is black. He is a lifelong Greenwoodian. He lives on the south side of the river and has had a long career in state and local politics. One morning in his home, he was looking at old government documents relating to incidents of police brutality by Greenwood cops during civil rights activities, with the names of the brutalizers blocked out, and before any questions could be asked, he flicked at the papers with his middle finger and said, “I’ll bet this was Big Smitty.” He had half a dozen Big Smitty stories to tell, including this one, which he said he personally witnessed one Saturday night in the Silver Moon: Big Smitty—who must have been a town cop at that point—walked in and saw a drunken man in a corner. The guy was sort of slobbering on the table and talking to himself. Big Smitty strolled over and the place came to a halt. The lawman put his billy under the drunk’s throat, horizontally, clenching the stick at either end. Slowly he began sliding the man up the wall. “He had him wedged there by the throat, a couple feet off the ground, and his eyes started to pop and get glassy. The man was strangling to death, and then Big Smitty let him fall. The reason I remember this so well is because I was just a kid. I was a kid in the Silver Moon, and I saw this, against a defenseless man, and I’ll never forget it,” said Senator David Jordan, who represented the 24th District, which includes the three Delta counties of Holmes, Tallahatchie, and Leflore.

  The legislator said he could remember when John Ed Cothran was campaigning for sheriff again, in the summer of 1967, after he’d been out a term. (He lost to the man who ran the county prison farm, John Arterbury, and after that he didn’t run again.) Jordan and a committee from the Greenwood Voters League went out to the Cothran farm, south of town, on the Humphreys Highway. They were treated with much respect, Jordan said. There was something like apology in Cothran’s voice. “You’ve got to think about this: for four black men to come up in the privacy of his living room, and for him to offer us refreshments, and to have him explain to us about the system. This is almost unheard of, is what I’m telling you. He said he couldn’t do anything about it, the way the race thing was. He said it was the system. He said it had to be this way, and we told him we pretty much understood.” Could the candidate have just been trying to get their vote? “I don’t think so. I think a lot of these guys were caught in the system. These guys were afraid something was going to happen to them if they didn’t go along with it.”

  Jimmy Green remembered him. He had recently retired from a combined forty-five years’ public service on the school board, on the board of county supervisors, in the Mississippi statehouse. He is white and owns a big plantation farm west of town that he has lived on for seven decades. As a politician and Delta planter, he’d grown into a certain racial tolerance, earning the eventual respect of blacks, who’d turned him out of office for the board of supervisors. Early one morning, he stood under pecan trees in front of his farmhouse. For almost an hour, he’d been inside, drinking coffee, beating mainly around the bush of the key question: What was really in John Ed’s heart? Jimmy Green said quietly: “John Ed didn’t have malice. John Ed was afraid, and I’ve been knowing and liking him as long as I can remember. He didn’t want to be too hard on them and at the same time he didn’t want to lose the confidence of the people who ran the town.” Green didn’t quite look at me. “He was afraid of Big Smitty, really.”

  “Afraid in a physical sense?”

  “Well, some of that, maybe. But afraid more of not getting elected again, afraid of Big Smitty’s following.” I said, “What would have made Big Smitty do all those nasty things in the first place?” Green shrugged. “To be a hero to that element. So he’d have that kind of following.”

  “Why would John Ed have Big Smitty working for him?”

  Green shrugged and formulated his reply as a question. “So he didn’t have to do it himself?”

  Gray Evans remembered him. He is another upper-aged and extremely hospitable white Greenwoodian who’s had a long public career, not without controversy and enemies on the south side of the river. He lives in a fine house on the north bank. He’d once had the bad form to work in Washington for the liberal Delta U.S. congressman Frank Smith. Smith, a friend of JFK, miraculously kept his House seat until 1962. Evans, who’d been a young aide to Smith, was a senior circuit judge in Mississippi when we spoke. In the early sixties, after working in Washington, he became Greenwood’s prosecuting attorney and thus got pitched into the middle of things. It was as if Gray Evans’s first name was a signal for where his mind was. He seemed to have regrets, although not by the cartful. “I knew things weren’t right,” he said. “We didn’t do right by a lot of those folks back then. And yet I know in my heart I tried to stop some things that might have turned out deadly.” Of John Ed Cothran, he said, “Putty. Just like putty in their hands.” He said it with no pleasure. He made a squeezing motion with his fingers and moved his head from side to side. He was asked who the they were of “their hands.” He said, “The Hardy Lotts, the Charlie Sampsons of the town.” He said, with softness in his voice: “Weak man, weak man, really—that he ever was sheriff. He was always cut out to be a number-two.” The senior circuit judge rubbed his fingers in his eyes and said he had the lingering but overriding impression that in a volatile situation John Ed would’ve slunk back and let another do it—not out of cowardice, no, but out of aversion to violence. “I suppose,” he said, “he could be frightened into doing things he didn’t want to do.”

  On the next trip to Mississippi, I asked George Greene about John Ed. The Greene family is one of the great families of the Greenwood movement. All the Greenes were heroic, not least the parents, who preceded the movement by decades. In the fifties, Dewey Greene, Sr., was president of the local NAACP. George Greene, one of the sons, hasn’t lived in Greenwood for many years. He was in Jackson, where he worked at the Veterans Administration hospital in food service. He told old war stories about SNCC and COFO, and at length he was shown the picture of the man with his back turned. “Yeah, I remember him,” he said. “Low-profile sorta guy. And I always thought those kind of guys were dangerous. Because you never knew what they were thinking.”

  Low profile. It’s difficult to find John Ed Cothran’s name in old civil rights suits brought by the federal government against Greenwood and Leflore County. He is seldom named as a defendant in these cases. When you search the record, it’s easy to find
the name Wardine Smith, along with other civic officials. Big Smitty, like his stomach, was right out there. But the head man, with guile or without it, was able to escape being named as a defendant. Most times.

  There is also the parable of Thatcher Walt, a local editor who deviated from the norm, who chose at a crucial juncture not to go along. But you wouldn’t have thought to call him liberal—not if you saw his signed editorials in the Commonwealth, which were often enough about the communist menace come to town. “In time these men will leave our midst. Behind them they will leave either the permanent wreckage of racial hostility (which they thrive on) or they will leave Greenwood much as it was before, a quiet town where Negroes and white people are living side by side in comparative harmony,” he wrote. He went on in that same piece: “This pattern will not change in the foreseeable future. It is a tactic in the grand strategy of forces which seek to warp the social patterns of the South.” When SNCC worker Jimmy Travis was shot in early 1963, Walt said (under a headline on the editorial page that proclaimed, “A Good Day to Get Shot”): “Travis is one of those self-styled saviors of the Negro race who is agitating for voters registration. What better way to mobilize on-the-fence opinion in Congress than to have a vote worker shot?”