Sons of Mississippi

by Paul Hendrickson

  —Joyce Carol Oates, “They All Just Went Away”

  I intentionally avoided children of famous perpetrators, like the sons of Rudolf Hess or Josef Mengele, who had already been the subject of media attention, because I suspected that they had developed an “external self” in talking about their fathers and the Third Reich. I looked for people who had been left alone, for whom the past might have become part of an internal dialogue.

  —Dan Bar-On, Legacy of Silence: Encounters with Children of the Third Reich

  Wars have their endings inside of families.

  —Cynthia Enloe, “Women After Wars: Puzzles and Warnings”

  History says, Don’t hope

  On this side of the grave.

  But then, once in a lifetime

  The longed-for tidal wave

  Of justice can rise up,

  And hope and history rhyme.

  —Seamus Heaney, The Cure at Troy

  Part Three

  Hopes of the Sons

  Five years before James Meredith at Oxford, and two years after Emmett Till at Money, Dwight Eisenhower ordered 1,200 paratroopers of the 101st Airborne into Arkansas during the desegregation battle at Little Rock’s Central High School. Despite a court order, Governor Orval E. Faubus had dispatched the state national guard to the steps of the school to bar nine black students, thus forcing the president to deploy federal troops. There’s an image from that civil rights standoff in the early fall of 1957 that turned into an icon photograph; the Associated Press later named it one of the top hundred pictures of the century. A white student named Hazel Bryan, her face contorted, spews venom at the back of a fifteen-year-old black student named Elizabeth Eckford. Eyes hidden by dark glasses, clutching her books, looking slightly downward, Eckford proceeds toward the entryway. Behind her is a column of bigots, and in the center of it the white girl, who looks about seventeen and has on a pretty dress and who holds out in front of her a rolled newspaper, as if she might swing it at Eckford’s neck. But what the world didn’t find out is that six years after the photograph, in 1963—which was the year of Bull Connor’s attack dogs and fire hoses in Birmingham, the year of America’s complicit role in the overthrow of a puppet president of South Vietnam named Ngo Dinh Diem—the female hater, by then married and a mother, contacted her victim by phone to offer an apology. The apology was cautiously accepted. The years passed. The white woman told friends and family that she continued to feel like a national “poster child for the hate generation, trapped in the image captured in the photograph, and I knew that my life was more than that moment.” She longed for a face-to-face reconciliation. In 1997, the opportunity came. The private meeting—arranged by the man who’d made the photograph, Will Counts—was in anticipation of the fortieth anniversary of what had happened in Arkansas. (Native son Bill Clinton attended the ceremony.) Ahead of the official events, Elizabeth Eckford and Hazel Bryan Massery met at Eckford’s home. “Elizabeth, thank you so much for agreeing to meet with me,” Hazel said. Elizabeth replied, “You are a very brave person to face the cameras again.” They drove to Central High and stood together out front of the entryway. Their thickened bodies touched. They laughed—two middle-aged women of opposite color from the same city who’d suffered separate shares of life’s setbacks—while Counts took pictures. The following year, they appeared on programs at several universities and participated in a workshop on racial healing.

  This is a redemptive story in the arc of sorrow that defines us as Americans more than any other sorrow, and some of it has now been told in a small, beautiful book entitled A Life Is More than a Moment. But there is no similar redemptive story to tell about any of the faces in Charles Moore’s photograph. These seven lived on, each for his allotted span. They didn’t approach or outwardly regret. Anything in the direction of atonement or expiation—even if never named that or understood as such—was left to sons, or to sons of sons, or to sons of sons of sons.

  Sometimes Trashy, Sometimes Luminous

  And when the morning light comes streaming in

  I’ll get up and do it again

  —Jackson Browne, “The Pretender”

  A picture of a working man: He was in his third bad marriage, still in his mid-twenties, that winter night in 1989 when John Ed Cothran’s grandson and namesake got off work at the produce company and went out to the parking lot to find his car dead again. It was a cold January midnight, snow on the ground, something like seventeen degrees out. In Mississippi, that’s the Arctic. The car was a ’78 Mustang that looked good but didn’t run worth a damn. John Cothran got out and kicked at the door and trudged home, where probably there was a fight with his wife. In daylight, he went back to the parking lot and tried to get it to fire, and when the car wouldn’t, he opened the trunk, retrieved a tire iron. “I just worked my way around,” he says. “I busted the windshield, the back glass, the hood, the front door on the driver’s side, the door on the passenger side, just every place where there was metal or glass and I could hit it with a tire tool.” Two of his coworkers came out and stood a safe distance away to watch the demolition derby. They were laughing. The teller of this story is cracking up as well. “The thing had four hundred dollars worth of tires on it. If I had a blade, I’d have cut them, too. So what have we got here? A tore-up car that still won’t crank. Stupid. I put the tool back in the trunk and went on in there to my job. See, what I’m telling you is I had a temper like that back then that was just out of control.”

  Ever bubble up now?

  Quickly: “I won’t let it.”

  Here’s a second picture of a nearly forty-year-old inheritor, descended from the figure in the photograph who’s got his back turned:

  Several summers ago, John and the woman he was living with—her name was Kay—decided to try to take a real vacation, “like regular people.” It was a long weekend motor trip, “a sorta unplanned thing.” They almost didn’t go—he was going to cancel so that he could help his fourth ex, from whom he’d been divorced less than a year, move out of her house and into a new place. He’d earned eleven days off from his supervisor’s job at the Home Depot, and he’d used up almost all of it by helping out his parents or his most recent ex with one thing or another. He did get in one good day of jig fishing for crappie with his daddy on Grenada Lake. That relaxed him some. John was living then in Arkansas, across the Mississippi River from Memphis. Kay had small children, and he was trying halfheartedly to connect with them. John’s own two older children, Ashley and John Jr., whom he’d been with once in the previous three years, and who are by his third wife, were visiting from Tupelo, Mississippi, on the weekend that he and Kay decided to take off. Their destination was Six Flags amusement park in St. Louis.

  They headed out in Kay’s van, much later in the day than they’d intended. They drove hard, but it got dark too quickly, and then the kids were turning cranky, and everybody was hungry, and so he and Kay started looking for a place to stay, hopefully one that would be close to a McDonald’s or a Wendy’s. They were somewhere in Illinois. All the motels were either full or way beyond their means. John kept driving. Everyone else in the car fell asleep. On the outskirts of St. Louis, he saw the Arch, that huge silver curve gleaming on the other bank of the Mississippi River. Right there, crossing over from Illinois into Missouri, the whole trip almost felt worth it. John’s fourteen-year-old woke up to see the Arch in the headlights and said, “We’re here, Daddy, we’re here,” and then Ashley went back to sleep.

  He drove across the river and into downtown St. Louis. He got out and asked about lodging. The rooms were unbelievably expensive. He drove on, got out, kept asking, kept coming back to the car without a motel key. At this point, he was actually driving back south, toward where they’d come from. He told Kay, “I’m only going to stop at one more place, and then I’m going to drive straight back to Arkansas without stopping.” He went into the next motel he saw and the guy said $200. “Are you crazy?” Kay said when he reported the price at the car win
dow. He went back in and took the room anyway, paid cash, and the six of them got a beautiful room with two king-sized beds. It was now about 6 A.M. A couple of hours later, the kids were all over the grown-ups. They wanted to go to the park. At the park, John bought the admissions. The tickets were over twenty bucks apiece, even for the kids. John said to Kay, “Nah, I don’t want to go on any rides in here, I’ll just sit on one of these picnic tables with your baby.” Kay said, “But we’ve come all this way.” John said, “Nah, I like this fine, I ain’t sweating it, you go on and have a good time.” And that’s what he did—sat for most of the day in the July sun at a picnic table just inside the gate of Six Flags, tending Kay’s nineteenth-month-old. A month or so later, when they broke up after a nasty fight (they’d been together about four months), John took out of Kay’s apartment in Marion, Arkansas, everything he could stuff into an overnight bag: rolls of toilet paper, soap, salt and pepper shakers, paper towels, shampoo, toothpaste, pillowcases. He probably would have taken the front door off the hinges if he’d needed a front door, and if there’d been a screwdriver handy, he says. Kay had already left for work, and soon, so had he: gone, in a rage again, in flight again, back home to Mississippi.

  John Cothran, with his lifelong rage and impulses for goodness as well as flight, is a stubby, bouncy, balding, extroverted man with pale features and a scraggly reddish beard and a mustache that looks made of straw—auburn straw. You could imagine him as a muscular fireplug, and that would be a start. To see him in Bermuda shorts is nearly to stifle a laugh: squat, pasty legs covered with curls of blondish-red hair. He has sensitive skin, which is why he doesn’t like to shave and often looks shaggy. He’s got a recessed tooth on his front left side. Early in the day, the gregarious fireplug with the recessed tooth can look especially shaggy, not to say green-glassy-eyed, not to say ready to knock your own teeth out, and this will probably be due to a lack of sleep and maybe a little too much beer the night before. He doesn’t sleep well to begin with—he’s usually too popped up from his long hours at work. Some nights he doesn’t get home until midnight or one in the morning. He’ll toss and turn on his black rubber water bed and then he might get up as early as 4 or 4:30 because he’s got a 6 A.M. department heads’ meeting at the Home Depot. The store he’s assigned to is about forty-five minutes away, in Southaven, Mississippi, up in the Memphis metropolitan area, just below the Tennessee state line. He’ll rattle up the interstate in his old beater through the north Mississippi darkness: Good morning, America, how are you, don’t you know me, I’m Johnny Cothran, your native son and working stiff. He’ll make it to the store in time for the meeting, and then he’ll start his regular shift—say, from seven to three—and then he’ll maybe take an hour break before he goes across the parking lot of the same suburban shopping mall, to the Kroger supermarket, where he’ll tie on an apron and begin stocking shelves for another five or six hours. Then he’s off—until the next day. He doesn’t work like this week in and week out, but he’s been doing versions of it, on and off, for many years now. He has no choice. He’s a man ever strapped for money. He pays child support for four kids to two women.

  “I only count the last two,” he says, wishing to get off the subject of how many times he’s been married, of how confusing it all seems now, not least to himself. He’s been married to four women thus far. Why doesn’t he wish to count his first two marriages? “Too far back,” he says, shooting a brownish-yellow stream through the split in his front teeth. He’s grinning his easy, infectious grin. The stream of juice is from a glop of Skoal Long Cut tobacco bulged in his lower lip. He sends it out in an arc, and the juice hits the ground about four feet from his tennis shoes. His beat-up sneaks look to be about a size six or seven—this compact man with the Popeye forearms has small hands as well as feet. He wouldn’t spit the juice from his chew if he were indoors. One of the things you discover about him, no matter what’s on the outside, is his inclination for neatness. He desires order in his disordered life. If you go into his bare bathroom and open a closet, you’ll find towels and facecloths folded carefully on a shelf. They are thin, practically worn through, and there aren’t many. Same thing with his toothbrush and comb and toothpaste: lined up on the back of the toilet, on a paper towel, as if a cleaning lady had come through and straightened things.

  At the Depot, which is how he refers to his primary place of employment, they slice up his check three ways. “Two of my ex-wives get cut a paycheck just like I do,” he says, with something like mystification in his voice. John never sees the taken money—the Depot just records it on his pay stub. In its own way, this is relieving. “Courts say you gotta pay child support as long as they stay in school—you mess up and they’ll lock you up,” he says. “I’m gonna be on their butts to stay in school as long as they can.”

  Not like their dad, who left school behind at fifteen, hell with it, I’m through, middle of the day, fuck you, you can have it. “Yeah, I went eight weeks in tenth and called it quits,” he says. “I had failed ninth, and repeated it, and passed, and went into tenth, and just hated it. Bad teachers, no one who’d believe in me. An English teacher who didn’t take any interest at all. I fell further and further behind. Maybe a lot of it was me, my fault. But I felt stupid, I hated it, it was humiliating, I got up one day and said, ‘You can have it, I quit.’ She said, ‘What do you mean?’ I said, ‘I quit, I’ve had it.’ They were all sitting there and I just walked right out. Didn’t even bother to check books in. I called Daddy. He said, ‘I’ll come get you.’ He did, right away. He also said, ‘If you don’t have a full-time job by this time tomorrow, don’t come home.’ ”

  By the next day, Johnny Cothran was sacking groceries and helping the old ladies load them into their cars at the Big Star supermarket in Greenwood. The teen started at a buck-ninety an hour and three and a half years later he was up to three seventy-five an hour, and he’d progressed by then to one of the best and fastest shelf stockers in the place, and by then, too, he was in and out of a first marriage—which had lasted roughly six weeks. The old Greenwood ladies, whose bags he used to load, liked him a good deal—there’s always been a natural kindness, even softness, in this rough man’s rough character. That could be said to be the leitmotif of his life, of his story: a remarkable and complex humanity that’s obscured, masked, by the chaos of his history, so much of which he’s brought on himself. The chaos, that is.

  A lot of Cothrans have gotten only as far as tenth—the grade seems to be a family demarcation line for formal learning. John’s mom, Alice Cothran, a housewife, quit in tenth. His father, Billy Cothran, who has spent much of the last decade selling cars and pickups in the town of Grenada, quit in tenth. His sister, Carolyn, a medical receptionist in Jackson, quit in tenth. His paternal granddad quit in tenth. That was back in the twenties, at a different Delta high school. The future sheriff of Leflore County left school and went straight to work on the land (and in a sense never got off of it, not even in all those years he was a lawman), while his namesake and spiritual heir, five decades later, left Greenwood High and went straight to work as a time-puncher. That was two and a half decades ago, and whatever else you could say about him in the time since, you couldn’t say the grandson is afraid of work.

  The year he left school, 1978, was also the year the progeny grew an Afro all the way up. It was bright and bushy. They called him Fro. His girlfriend’s mom called him Fro With Legs. “That head of hair I had then was so thick, when I’d wash it, it’d take thirty minutes to dry,” he says. In snapshots, the Afro looks almost like a fright wig or Ronald McDonald’s headgear. His face was narrower then, and the auburn hair literally surrounded the soft, boyish features. What made him decide to grow it? “I don’t have a clue,” he says. “I couldn’t tell you, other than the girls I ran around with liked it.” He knew he looked fairly ridiculous, this short white kid walking around nearly all-black Greenwood High with his ’fro. Did he get heckled? “I got it from every angle possible.” Did he get in figh
ts? “No, I try to avoid fights. Because I have such a temper. Put it this way. I’m afraid of fighting.”

  This is another paradox, or at least a surprise, the curious mixture in him of fear and fearlessness, of terrible temper and what could almost be called delicate sensibility. John played Little League baseball in Greenwood—but he wouldn’t go out for pony league, the next level up. He was afraid of getting hit by a pitch. On Grandpa’s farm, where he worked as a kid for extra money, he’d do almost any chore asked of him except to drive the cotton picker. He was scared it would flip. “It was a three-wheeled thing, and I was sure it was going to turn over and crush me.” Once, in sixth grade, the bantam with the bad temper walked away from a fight on the school playground with everybody watching. “I got popped three times before I knew. Black eyes. Pop, pop, pop. I put down my fists and walked away.” And yet, as an adult, he’s been willing more than once to defend an ex-wife against a bully boyfriend. Usually, it never came to an actual fight, he says—just tough-talking on the phone or in person. And he tells this story too: At one of the grocery companies where he worked for a few years in his twenties, there were many blacks earning minimum wage, or less. The teenage son of the white boss of that company loved going off on the black workers. The son was even fouler in his use of the n-word than the father, who owned the business. One day John, who’d risen to become a mid-level supervisor—with about fifty employees under him, all but five of whom were black—stepped in front of the son. The son was almost twice as big as John. “I told him to lay off. He was just abusing the shit out of one of my black workers. He was going off on one of the oldest men there. He was saying things like ‘You goddamn worthless nigger.’ The man couldn’t quit because he had to have the job. The owner’s son told me to mind my own business. He was seventeen. I said, ‘Now, there’s no question if we go at it here toe-to-toe you’d whip my butt. I’m not questioning that. But I don’t think you’d better fight with me, because there’s enough stuff laying around here on the floor, and if we get started, I’ll pick up a pipe or a board or the first thing I can get my hands on and I’ll crack your damn skull in two.’ ” The owner’s son cursed at him and walked off. John didn’t get fired. Good thing, because he was in his third shipwreck marriage and a father by then.