Sons of Mississippi

by Paul Hendrickson

  Interracial marriage?

  “I don’t hold with that. I see it all the time in the store. They come in, white woman with a black husband.”

  On the n-word: “I used to use it all the time, but I’ve gotten away from it.”

  Why?

  “I guess, well, sort of realizing how offensive it is to that race.”

  Has he felt this way for a long time?

  “No. I’m talking probably in the last ten years—maybe even five, maybe even less than that. I catch myself at work all the time. I’ll say to one of my black workers at the Depot in my department, ‘Listen, there’s a black guy over there in the next aisle in a blue shirt. Go help him.’ And I catch myself—but it’s always after the fact. I say to myself, ‘Now, why’d you have to bring color into it? Why didn’t you just say, ‘Go help that customer in the blue shirt?’ Probably ten years ago, shit, maybe five, I’d have said, or wanted to say, or probably would’ve thought about saying, ‘Go over and help that nigger standing over there, nigger, hear?’ Course, you couldn’t say that and work at the Depot. They wouldn’t stand for it. We have these training sessions twice a month—eight hours on respect for customers and coworkers. And don’t get me wrong, what I’m trying to tell you here. I’d say we have blacks in Mississippi, and we have some niggers in Mississippi, in the same way that we have white people, and we have white trash here. But I don’t use the word nigger anymore. Or I try not to.”

  Does he slip?

  “Course I slip, what do you think?” Then: “But I guess where I’m at now, I wouldn’t want that said to me, either. I guess that’s the reason I don’t say ‘nigger’ any more.”

  Could the change in the way he looks at all this have something to do with the pain of his own failures? “Maybe.”

  Then: “Maybe it’s been happening for a long time, and I never noticed. I remember being around blacks all the time on the farm who worked for grandpa. It was easy to say ‘nigger.’ I ran around in school with guys who did it for sport. But even then I guess it was starting to bother me. Not that I stopped using it. It was just bothering me a little. I remember out there in Greenwood where Highway 82 and the Humphreys Highway come together. You go down Bowie Lane and it takes you right into the heart of what they call Niggertown. We were out there one night, bunch of us. There was this black guy on a bike, older guy. One of my buddies worked for the city and he had a can of mace to repel dogs with. We got the car up alongside the old man on the bike and my buddy sprayed mace at him and the guy crashed his bike and started yelling and everybody in the car’s just roaring. I said, ‘Y’all take me home. I don’t want any part of this.’ They said, ‘Hey, John, it ain’t nothing but a nigger.’ I said, ‘I don’t care, take me home.’ See, if I have to act like that to get in trouble, I don’t need it. Because they’re going to bring me down with them. I mean, even when Daddy wants to tell me a dirty joke now, even if it’s got nothing to do with blacks, it makes me feel uncomfortable.”

  He gets up from the bed of the truck. “Guess she’s not coming,” he says. “Let’s go inside. I want to get something.”

  He’s in the back room, where he sleeps. You can hear him rooting for something. In a minute he’s back and standing in the middle of the living room. In his hand are some sheets of paper. They look like they’ve been torn from a notebook. He hands over several of the sheets. They’re poems. “Like you said, you thought I had this sensitive side,” he says. “I think the first one of these I wrote her, I called it ‘You,’ ” he says. “For my fourth. I wrote these for her.”

  “You” is in three stanzas. It begins: “When I’m with you I can not see / I get all nervous when I’m with thee / I get all jittery I don’t know what to do / I can’t explain how I feel when I’m with you.”

  “She read it and she said, ‘Where’d you copy this from?’ I said, ‘Right outta here. My heart.’ She said, ‘You’re lying.’ ”

  Almost choking, standing in the middle of the room, he says: “You’re the only person I’ve showed this to.” Then: “I snuck them out of the house on Bowden Street that we were living in when I left. I’m not sure she knows they’re gone.”

  There’s another poem called “Friends Forever.” It opens: “To have a friend like you / Is as special as they come / I would not know what to do / If this was undone.” The verse is four stanzas long and is initialed at the bottom, “J.T.C.”

  “Not bad for a dumb-ass dropout,” says the head of the kitchen and bath department at Home Depot, who makes about $11 an hour and hopes to gross about $30,000 for the year and who goes now to the screened door of his $300-a-month rental and arcs a stream of gloppy liquid out into the yellow-bulbed semidarkness. Arcs it nifty as you please. Slickers couldn’t do that on a bet.

  In Notes of a Native Son, James Baldwin wrote, “I imagine that one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, that they will be forced to deal with pain.”

  Back up a generation, to John’s mother and father. Billy and Alice Cothran, deep believers, Christian fundamentalists, live in a small community called Gore Springs out toward Carver Point, on Grace Road, far back in the country, about an hour and a quarter away from their only son. (Billy and Alice, in turn, live about seventy miles and about an hour and a quarter away from Billy’s dad and stepmom, John Ed and Maudine, who are in the middle of the Delta. These upper Mississippi distances tend to get bridged in Cothran pickups.) John’s folks are great-grandparents, but not at all what you’d think of as elderly. Billy’s in his mid-sixties; Alice is in her late fifties. Billy looks like a younger, fitter version of the old lawman: bald and reddish cueball head, gold-rimmed glasses, stocky frame, thick ankles, shiny shins, meaty fingers, muscular forearms with curls of the trademark Cothran blondish hair. Alice has a sweet, round, grandmomish face on her small, round figure. They seem to have a comfortable life and appear content with each other, but when you spend time with them, it becomes increasingly clear that their hearts ache over the fact that their two children don’t attend church or profess much belief in a savior and have somehow been married seven times in the aggregate.

  John’s parents worship at the Church of Christ. The Church of Christ goes strictly by what the Bible says. Literal interpretation, as Billy says: “You don’t add to it, you don’t take from it. If it ain’t in the Bible, you don’t do it.” Divorce is not in the Bible. Having children out of wedlock is not something sanctioned by the Bible. There’s no instrumental music in Billy and Alice’s church, and that’s because nowhere in the Bible is there a reference to instrumental music.

  One way to find their place, which is east of the town of Grenada, is to look for a sign nailed to a tree: JESUS IS LORD OF THIS COMMUNITY. You take a left there and a quick right and another quick right and then stop at the handsome brown house that has bulged itself outward over the years from a double-wide trailer. Thanks to Billy’s carpentry skills and to Alice’s homemaking skills, the place looks like anything but a mobile home now. It’s a little Shangri-la in the woods, with a trickling stream running through. Billy has done the additions himself, wiring walls, making corners mortared and tight. Inside, there are many knickknacks and homey touches: Alice’s extensive collection of Aunt Jemima dolls, Billy’s wood carvings of toy boats, other objects.

  He’s always been handy as a box of tacks. Back in the fifties, after he’d dropped out of school and gone into the Air Force, he trained to be a radio operator and picked it up in no time. This gave him a trade when he got home to Mississippi at the dawn of the civil rights era: TV and radio repair. He had his own Greenwood shop, Cothran Electronic Service, until he went to work for his dad in the sheriff’s department as a deputy and a jailer. He sold the business “to the boy who was working for me,” although he still did repair work on the side. He liked being a lawman and making extra cash by fixing up people’s TVs. He didn’t like working on the TVs of people on the south side of the river, because they had a way of not
paying, he says. Anyway, he got called up to service again, and that put sheriffing and TV repair on hold. This was during the Berlin Crisis, and when he got back to Mississippi, everything about his country seemed different.

  He’d gone to Uncle Sam the first time in the fall of 1955, a seventeen-year-old who’d always struggled with the books and had been left back a time or two. A month and a half before, in late August, Emmett Till had been murdered in the Delta and dumped in the Tallahatchie: another kind of pattern. That same summer, John Ed Cothran, who’d helped recover the body and who was chief deputy of the county to Sheriff George Smith, had run for sheriff—unsuccessfully. He’d come in third in the August primary. Then Till was kidnapped and killed. To reprise: The corpse was found on August 31, and that afternoon’s front page of the Greenwood Commonwealth described how “Deputy Sheriff John Edd Cothran and Deputy Sheriff Ed Weber went to the scene and carried Mose Wright, uncle of the youth, along in order to make identification of the body. It was brought back to Greenwood and turned over to the Century Burial Association.” Two days later, on Friday, September 2, John Ed’s picture was published on page 35 of the Memphis Commercial Appeal, squatting next to a gin fan in his snap-brim fedora and white summer shirt with the sleeves rolled up his muscular upper arms, with his Leflore County deputy’s badge visible on his left breast. “USED IN SLAYING,” the caption said. Who could have known the import of the moment?

  Not Billy Cothran, who had a wild hair in him and wanted only to escape from school and the Delta in 1955. Twenty-three years later, the same high school, another autumn, his fifteen-year-old son would have similar longings. Billy worked briefly for an uncle in construction (he’d gotten a job by the next day, because that was how John Ed had laid down the law), then told his father he didn’t want to be crawling around on roofs when the cold weather came. Since Billy was under age, John Ed had to give his written consent for the enlistment. Billy did basic training at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, then went to electronics school at Scott Air Force Base outside St. Louis. The following July, the recruit pulled out of the Brooklyn Naval Yard bound for Europe on a ship filled with servicemen. He spent much of his tour in Germany, which he loved. Sometimes fellow G.I.’s asked him about the South and race relations, and he’d say, “In Mississippi, we’ve got black people, and we’ve got niggers.” He was thirty-seven months overseas, and when he got back to the States, in August 1959, he was twenty-one and a man and figured he’d sown his wild oats and was ready to settle down. His dad had just won the county primary for sheriff, even as the noted and folksy damage-suit lawyer Ross Barnett in the capital city had triumphed in the gubernatorial primary.

  Billy lost no time courting his future wife. He and Alice were married six months later on February 12, 1960, which was also five weeks after his dad had taken the oath of office as sheriff of Greenwood and Leflore County. Eisenhower was president, and his handpicked successor was Richard Nixon, but Senator John Kennedy was running hard for the nomination of the other party. (In six months’ time, James Meredith would come out of the Air Force and back to Mississippi with one mission.) Billy and Alice were married by a JP in the kitchen of the county jail. They’d both been talking to their preachers about a ceremony—Alice was Baptist, Billy was Church of Christ—but Billy was impatient and said to Alice, “Honey, let’s just get it done.” In attendance were the groom’s parents, John Ed and Maggie, whom people called “Mack,” just as those who’ve known John Ed well have always referred to him as Jack. Besides Jack and Mack, the marriage of the twenty-one-year-old to the sixteen-year-old was witnessed by the jail cook and the new sheriff’s deputies: Noel McCool, Boll Weevil Stowers, Jack Poss, Ed Weber, and Wardine Smith. Big Smitty hulked in the small space with his massive stomach and hooded eyes, and even now, more than forty years onward, Alice can see him looming there. Her parents did not attend the Friday-morning nuptials. It snowed like hell in Greenwood that afternoon, but the newlyweds had already gone to bed and pulled the curtains. That evening, the new husband stepped outside in his bare feet—and crunched into snow: “What the hell is this?” he called in to his bride, roaring with laughter. It felt like a sign from above.

  On Monday, Billy went back to work at his TV repair shop. Soon, though, he became a full-time deputy to his dad and moved into the jail with his wife. A year later, in February 1961, Billy and Alice’s daughter, Carolyn, was born and the infant was brought home to the living quarters in the jail. Billy had lived there as a boy, when John Ed was a deputy to Sheriff George Smith, but his wife could never get used to the idea of being so close to prisoners, especially with a baby daughter. The jailer’s apartment had a living room, two and a half bedrooms, two baths. The white men’s cell was on the same floor. The black men’s cell was upstairs on the fourth floor, as were the white women’s cell and the black women’s cell. Alice knew the prisoners couldn’t get to her—there was a double-steel door going into her living room—but there they were, above her head, just across the hall. They’d bang on the bars with their tin plates and scream profanities and carry on to all hours. A decade before, when Jack and Mack had lived in the jail with their children, the screaming and the banging had seriously upset Maggie, and Billy wonders now if this didn’t have something to do with his mom’s early demise, from colon cancer, at age fifty-three, in 1972.

  There’s an odd pattern of death among the Cothrans—the dying always seems to occur on birthdays of other family members. For instance, Maggie Cothran died on the birthday of her grandson, John Cothran. Maggie’s own mother, Willie Mae Granthan, had died on her daughter’s birthday. John Ed’s father had died on John Ed’s birthday. Billy and Alice’s explanation of this phenomenon is that the ways of God are unfathomable.

  In the fall of 1961, Billy got called back to the Air Force. He was gone a year, until October 1962, right after James Meredith had caused all that trouble at Ole Miss and right as the Cuban Missile Crisis was happening. By then, the local papers were full of headlines such as “Negro Marchers Found Guilty,” and by then, too (as Billy was wont to say after he got home), seems there were a helluva lot more niggers in Mississippi than black people. He put on the star again (Boll Weevil Stowers had become the jailer in his absence) and worked for his father until August 1963. By then, John Ed’s term of office was nearly over, and it was state law that he couldn’t succeed himself, and so the son decided to interview for a civil service job at the Greenwood post office. On August 7, 1963, three and a half months before John Kennedy died in Dallas, Billy and Alice’s redheaded son was born, and they named him after Billy’s father.

  This is the past, as it wraps in and around other pasts. These days, lawman no more, not for a long time now, not a postal worker either (that experience ended badly), Billy Cothran is in the car business. On his business card for Grenada Nissan, it says: “W. T. (Billy) Cothran, Sales Representative.” He’s nearly always number one when the monthly totals are added up. He figures he’s moved something like 1,500 units off the lot. Once, in a lapse of faith, he left Grenada Nissan and went over to Sunset Chrysler to try his hand. In the good weather, he’s at the dealership from early in the morning until seven in the evening. He sits there and waits on them to come in. He doesn’t go in for the hard sell. He likes to sidle up and be friendly, get them into the vehicle (VEE-hicle is how he pronounces it). If he can get them behind the steering wheel in the first ten or fifteen minutes, he figures he may have a deal. He’s been accused of losing a few deals because he wasn’t aggressive enough. But he can’t stand to pressure them, especially these young couples who come in with babies. They remind him of when he was a broke young buck starting out with Alice so many years ago.

  He’ll pass the time between nibbles sitting in a Naugahyde chair out in the rugless, open showroom, or he’ll stare at daytime TV, or he’ll do paperwork in his corner office, which has a good view of the lot, where he can watch them coming in. One wall of his office is covered with plaques. According to Billy, the bosses pre
tty much stopped handing out sales awards because he’d won almost all of them. It was demoralizing to his colleagues. “I do believe my daddy could sell a man the hat on the top of his head,” John Cothran says of his father. The Grenada dealership doesn’t have a quota system, not per se, says Billy. It does have a “demo” program, meaning that if you sell seven units in a month, you get to drive back and forth from home in a model of your choice. Billy always chooses a pickup.

  His office at work is full of what you might call Billyness: little shellacked wood carvings and some mounted corny jokes. He’s got a jar of “dehydrated water” on his desk. (It’s just a jar.) At Christmas, he likes to decorate the office with his wife’s arts and crafts: a string of colored bulbs, for instance, arranged in a wreathlike cluster of plastic cups. Billy also passes the time between customers by working on his newsletter, which he subsidizes from his own pocket. “Published Monthly By: W. T. ‘Billy’ Cothran, Sales Consultant, Grenada Nissan” it says on the front of the newsletter. On the inside, it might say, “GREAT THINGS ARE HAPPENING AT GRENADA NISSAN!!!!” Before telling what they are, he’ll spin out the latest news from the Mississippi Redneck Mother. He invented her for his newsletter. A sample of her wit and wisdom from an installment several years ago, following the presidential elections: “A Mississippi Redneck Mother writes another letter to her Son that went like this: Dear Son, MERRY CHRISTMAS. Do you know the difference between Al Gore and a new-born puppy? Well, let me tell you. After three weeks a new-born puppy opens it’s eyes and quits whining. I read in the paper where they ain’t having a Nativity scene at the White House this year. After searching far and wide, they couldn’t find no Wise Men in Washington. Have you noticed that late-night television has become very educational? It teaches the very important fact that we should go to bed earlier. Will write more next time, Love, Ma.”