Sons of Mississippi

by Paul Hendrickson

  “So in a sense a guy like this is more dangerous?”

  “Oh, my, yes.”

  He was told what his former SNCC colleague George Greene had said—that “you never knew what they were thinking.” Peacock said: “That’s it.”

  Leroy Potts, the black who was sent to Parchman for raping a white woman—or at least convicted of same—could he still be alive? Leroy Potts, at whose fleeing back Deputy Sheriff John Ed Cothran once fired.

  Parchman had the record. The convicted man entered the penitentiary on May 20, 1955, and was paroled fourteen years later, on August 29, 1969. Three months later, he was back in. Got paroled a second time in 1972 and was out for good, until he died, three years afterward.

  Ella Jean Lucas, his sister, is standing on her doorstep in the middle of black Greenwood. Her brother’s been dead since 1975, she says. It was his heart, she says. He had obtained a factory job in Jackson after the second parole. He was going straight, she says. But his health declined and then he was gone by forty-six. Did his early death have anything to do with mistreatment at the prison? “I couldn’t say about that,” she says. She’s got on a straw hat and it’s pulled down over her head in folds. She stands on the top step of her asbestos-shingled and tidily kept house, holding open the screen door. Two green park benches are on either side of the steps. Roses climb a trellis behind her. Lucky to catch her at home this morning, she says, because she spends most of her time now sitting up with the sick and the dying. She goes to hospitals and nursing homes and hospices. “I have been told it is my gift.” She’s sixty-nine and her life has been hard. One night in the sixties, while she slept, her husband and another man were killed right out front of the house. Some kind of argument in the street and then the shots waking her up. None of this has ever wavered her in her faith in God. God has His reasons.

  “I don’t know whether he was falsely accused or what, Leroy,” she says. “He told me he wasn’t guilty. That’s what he said. They convicted him. I was five years younger. I was always the one in the family to do the taking care. We lost our mother early, and the kids got farmed out. Something happened to my brother. I say it that way. I used to blame myself. He’s sleeping out there in the clay.” She says this, pointing toward a cemetery plot in another county, maybe thirty miles from here, where her brother and other family members are interred.

  “He was at Camp Ten up there at Parchman. I’d all the time be taking cakes up there. They’d slice my cakes up, make sure no razor blades and knives were in them. The warden used to come by and get a piece. He said he loved my cakes. I got to know all them folks pretty good.”

  John Ed Cothran—does she remember that name? “I remember Mr. Cothran from the trial. He didn’t seem like a vindictive man. I never knew Leroy wrote him a letter to try to get out.”

  How about the name Big Smitty? “I will tell you this about Mr. Wardine Smith,” she says, nodding slowly. “When he was dying, they had him in a bed, and he had to be tied down, his arms and his legs, he was thrashing and fighting it so. He was just carrying on. I was a few doors down, visiting other sick folks. You could hear it all over the floor. He made a hard time of his outgoing.”

  A symbol is not an explanation. The naked eye is often faulty. The truth tends to live at the middle. It wasn’t Leroy Potts’s story or Sam Block’s or Mac Cotton’s or even Big Smitty’s that permitted me to see John Ed Cothran whole in a grainy way. Rather, it was Emmett Till’s. Rather, it was two things John Ed remembered all these years later that allowed me to begin to grasp an old man’s interior. It was the Till kidnapping and murder and trial, taking place seven years before the photograph in Life, that helped unlock the once and ever morally ambivalent law enforcer.

  To study the available record of John Ed’s role in the Till case is to get the wrong picture—or at least not the whole picture. The man in the published record appears to be putting his conscience ahead of his predilections. That man comes across as nearly heroic in a bad time, willing to do his duty, to stand up. When you read the record, when you obsess on it, that is the conclusion. But it’s a wrong conclusion. Parts of it are correct. But the “truth,” if there can be any truth, is somewhere in the middle. It’s ambivalent, a little blurry, perhaps unknowable in the end, something like a photograph itself that had once seemed so limpid in its messages.

  I’ve already told how I drove to a library in Memphis on the night I first met John Ed. I sat at a newspaper microfilm reader and looked at a picture of the forty-year-old earlier self of the elderly figure I’d been with in Moorhead a few hours earlier. The man on the roll of microfilm was squatting next to a cleaned-up but still-silted gin fan.

  In the days afterward, I read everything I could set my hands on about the case and his role. He’d been quoted in Newsweek: “The white people around here feel pretty mad about the way that poor little boy was treated. Northerners always think that we don’t care what white folks do to the colored folks down here, but that’s not true. The people around here are decent, and they won’t stand for this.” He’d been quoted in Jet magazine as “disagreeing” with those who were claiming that the decomposed thing pulled from the river wasn’t Till. One of the chief proponents of the theory that it was a body planted by the NAACP was the massive sheriff of Tallahatchie County, Clarence Strider, who, in most newspaper photographs, is wearing sunglasses and a malicious grin. I would later find out that, besides being sheriff of the county that is north of Leflore, Strider was a big-time cotton farmer, with 6,000 Tallahatchie acres under cultivation. Going down the lane to his manor house was a string of cement-block plantation shacks, and on the roof of each, painted in white, were huge letters spelling out STRIDER.

  From United Press International, September 4, 1955: “A deputy sheriff who witnessed the identification of the body said it was Till’s. Deputy Ed Cothran said he ‘completely disagreed’ with Sheriff Strider. ‘Emmett’s uncle, Moses Wright, definitely identified the body as the boy,’ Cothran said. ‘I was with him when he did it.’ ” The deputy sheriff of Leflore had in his possession a ring taken off the body right after the fishing out. It bore the initials L.T. It had a date inscribed on it: May 25, 1943. The ring had belonged to Till’s father, Louis Till. It had a flat crown. The boy had been wearing it when he left Chicago. The boy’s uncle had identified it. These facts were told to the press in the hours and days after the body was located, and one of the principal tellers was the deputy sheriff of Leflore County. In some of the photographs of him, examining the ring, he looks almost sad. From the Memphis Commercial Appeal, September 5, 1955: “Deputy Sheriff John Ed Cothran of Greenwood showed a ring taken from the victim’s finger to newsmen Sunday. It had the initials, ‘L.T.’ ” From the Jackson Clarion-Ledger, September 4, 1955: “Cothran also said he had a small silver-looking ring pulled from the body by a Negro undertaker after it was fished from the river.… Cothran said relatives of the Negro boy told him the initials stood for Louis Till. Emmett’s full name was Emmett Louis Till.” From the Commercial Appeal, September 6, 1955: “Deputy Cothran said he didn’t think ‘there was any doubt about the identification at the river.’ ”

  Again, to read accounts of what he said on the stand at the trial itself is to get a picture in your head of a lawman trying to uphold his duty. The trial transcripts themselves are lost, so the newspaper record takes on even more weight in forming that picture. Snippets of published trial testimony have shown up in at least one graduate school thesis, but they are inconclusive as regards John Ed. Sheriff George Smith of Leflore and his chief deputy both had testified under subpoena, for the prosecution’s side. Both were in the witness chair on the opening day of trial, September 21. The deputy told the jury how he’d wheeled his car onto a dirt road near Pecan Point and had gone down the steep bank to stare at something that was “badly torn about the head.”

  He gets his neck hugged by so many women,” Maudine said.

  “Maudine, your buddy’s back,” he said. He meant a hornet. He shuffl
ed out to the kitchen and got a fly swatter and came back and then stalked it slowly around the living room. He was determined to get it. And he did, wedging and smashing it between the venetian blinds. Dinner had been fine again: macaroni and beef tips, boiled cabbage, turnip greens. As was his way, he talked of many things. And one of them this day was Emmett Till.

  “I’ve read the record,” I said, “everything I could find, and it makes you look pretty good.”

  “What? What’s that?” he said, cupping his ear.

  Loudly: “It must have come at some cost for you. Saying the things you said.”

  He turned the talk in another direction. He said the whole thing was a controversy made up by the press. They were trying to manufacture a split between the two sheriff’s departments. “It’s just the way they wrote it. Made me mad as hell. I wanted a retraction. I never said I knew the body was Emmett Till’s for sure. I never saw Emmett Till alive. How would I know? All’s I said was that I didn’t know myself but that the boy’s uncle was positive it was him. That’s all I said. When I read that other junk in the paper, I wanted to sue that reporter. I told my boss I wanted to get a retraction. I think it was a durn reporter in Memphis that started it.”

  Now he remembered something else. There was a man from Tallahatchie County, whose name he could no longer remember, but who was there at the trial every day. After the acquittal, this man was waiting for him downstairs in the lobby of the Sumner courthouse. He was leaning against a pillar. He walked up and said, “You testified for the nigger-loving prosecution, Cothran. Didn’t matter, though, did it? Up here in this county we never convict a white man for killing a nigger. That’s why Tallahatchie’s number one.”

  “Had to take his guff,” an old man said.

  He continued. Two months later, in Greenwood, a Leflore County grand jury was convened to consider whether a kidnapping charge should be brought against the two men who’d been let off from murder in the adjoining county. Once again, the head man of Leflore County and his chief deputy were called to testify. On November 9, 1955, the Leflore grand jury refused to indict Big Milam and Roy Bryant. They were free as air of all charges. As the deputy was leaving the courthouse, he saw the man who’d given him guff in Sumner.

  “I went over to that feller. I said, ‘Guess we don’t indict them down here, do we? Now you tell me who’s number one? Leflore’s number one.’ ” John Ed Cothran said this, remembered this, and poked up a big pale index finger with the curving ooze of smile.

  You never knew what they were thinking.

  Several Januarys ago, on Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday, a non-Mississippian trying to understand Mississippi was in Greenwood and felt like going to church. It was a Sunday morning, and just as on any Greenwood Sunday morning, the whole town seemed to be at worship. It was unusually balmy. At the Episcopal Church of the Nativity, the rector preached on prophets and how they call into question things about ourselves we don’t especially like. “They make us uncomfortable,” the priest said, “and we drive them out.” He told his flock they were self-evidently the brightest and best of their community—but it wasn’t enough. He said it wasn’t enough that they had done well professionally or financially. He said it wasn’t enough that they were comfortable in life. No, the gospel demands that a Christian live in such a way that God’s love will embrace everyone in a community. The priest spread his arms wide. There were no blacks in attendance and Martin Luther King, Jr., wasn’t mentioned by name.

  That afternoon, there was a memorial march through black Greenwood. It started at St. Francis of Assisi Catholic Church and ended a mile or so away at Friendship Missionary Baptist Church. Old ladies sat in metal lawn chairs out front of shotgun shacks and waved. Kids rode their bikes along the parade’s periphery. The size of the parade kept swelling as people hopped off their porches and fell in alongside the marchers. People sang “We Shall Overcome” and “If I Had a Hammer.” A man with a bullhorn kept the parade moving. “We are in the process, and we will make it,” he cried. At Friendship Missionary Baptist, a woman played an aching piano. Light came through the amber windows and fell on wood paneling. Hand fans bladed holy air. Babies squalled. A robed choir in front of a maroon velvet curtain sang hymns. Someone in a beautiful falsetto voice sang the song that wonders, “Anybody here seen my old friend Martin?” Except for a couple of Franciscan priests and nuns and myself, the congregation was black. It could almost have been the early sixties, when a movement was in cry, when a sheriff with his back turned was trying to navigate in a gray middle zone of moral complicity. Only it wasn’t the sixties. The hate here has gone mute, I thought. What remains, in Greenwood, in this arresting place called Mississippi, is a deep sense of separation. On the weekend commemorating Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday, Mississippi felt like a nation of strangers.

  A picture is an action that must fill up its available space.

  —Alfred Kazin, An American Procession

  Every story is over before it begins. The novel lies bound in my hands, the actors know all their lines before the curtain rises, and the finished film has been threaded onto the projector when the houselights dim.… All stories, including history and biography, are past and therefore precluded. When we watch a documentary film years after it was shot, we know the outcome that the figures on the screen are trying to bring about or prevent. They have all aged or died, and what was present or future to them has become past.

  —Michael Roemer, Telling Stories

  Part Two

  Filling Up the Frame

  The picture’s a double-reverse, the setup that wasn’t. These guys sandbagged themselves. It’s a posed-unposed shot that represents an uncanny documentary moment—far beyond what the photographer could have known or dreamed. In its magical, mechanical ways, the camera pinned truths of seven lives—not all the truths, no, yet some undeniable ones. Billy Ferrell, for instance, who always had to be the center of attention, being undone here by his ego. Or Grimsley, with his delicious and alcoholic malevolence. And of course John Ed, who didn’t ever want to look but couldn’t remove himself. The goal now is to document and contextualize the moment, the instant of the shot, the event that surrounds it, that day, that weekend.

  The goal is to put a slice of emulsion—one of billions of photographs in the universe—in its historical perspective. The place it needs to start is in James Meredith’s living room. He is the first and last victim of a whooshing bat. That twenty-nine-year-old Air Force vet in the wan smile and dark business suit integrated the University of Mississippi in 1962 with such stoicism and courage, and then, a couple of decades later, when he’d already done so many bizarre things, went to work in Washington for race-baiting Jesse Helms, and after that endorsed ex–Imperial Wizard David Duke for governor of Louisiana and the presidency as well. I’ve wondered, as I’ve gazed and gazed again at this image, trying to see in it all that isn’t here: Is the only real conclusion that Meredith’s mad? I’ve thought a lot about what must be intolerable pressures of mind. For a long time, I didn’t want to go back to try to talk to him. Besides, the story wasn’t about Meredith anyway, although I knew in a deeper part of me that it was precisely about him. Because it’s about what we’re inflicted with, about what others do to us, about what we cannot escape—and about what we send down to others, our loved ones, in direct and oblique ways, wittingly and unwittingly.

  American Haunting

  The address is 929 Meadowbrook Road, Jackson, Mississippi.

  In the midst of all that chaos—which came to its statewide frothing point in the last few days of September 1962—he kept a small white hanky folded into a square in his lapel pocket, and every now and then, pressed on all sides by federal marshals and reporters and Justice Department lawyers and faces contorted into hate, he’d take it out and dab with it at his beading upper lip. You can see this in the news film.

  The last time in his house, three years ago, he’d gone on and on about his royal Choctaw blood. He was from the n
ation of Choctaws. His father had been a chosen leader of the former citizens of the Choctaw nation, whose forebears had been reclassified as blacks by the nineteenth-century bigots of Mississippi. “You see,” he’d said, “the vast majority of blacks in this country who are successful have the same ancestry as mine—predominately Native American blood. Ruling-class families. Joe Louis was ninety percent Native American. At least. Same with Lena Horne. You understand what I mean?”

  But how would that be proven? “Well, DNA would prove it, DNA would prove it,” he’d said, his voice growing faint, as if already losing interest.

  “Race is no longer a significant factor in politics in America,” he’d said with perfect seriousness.

  Pictures from a picture: a modest-sized gray house with gray shutters and closed blinds in an upper-middle-class integrated neighborhood a couple miles north of downtown. The listing in the Jackson phone directory: James H. Meredith, as if it were any old name. The blinds were drawn here three years ago, too. Plenty of times in the interim I have driven down this street without looking over. I’ve come to know pretty well one of Meredith’s three sons, Joseph Meredith, who’s up at Oxford, working on his doctorate at the school his father integrated before he was born. I have passed strained as well as fascinating hours in the company of this highly intelligent and extremely well-educated (Phillips Academy at Andover, Harvard) and very likable and yet so painfully reticent and cautious son, who’s a twin, in his mid-thirties, and who’s a father himself, divorced, and who has struggled for more than a decade with a life-threatening illness (lupus), and who—most important here—seems locked into father-son inheritances he cannot begin to understand.