Sons of Mississippi

by Paul Hendrickson

  On Sunday, day of rest, the Lord’s day, following morning worship, Billy might fiddle with something around the house, or drive to Moorhead to visit his father, or sit back and listen to country music (he loves ol’ George Jones, considers Willie Nelson too uptown), or go jig fishing on Grenada Lake. He’s a crappie man, doesn’t fool with bass. “Them things stink,” he says in his best Mississippi redneck accent. Occasionally, he’ll stick a minnow on the jig, though mostly he just uses the jig rig itself and sinks it deep. He’ll sit there, waiting on them. Occasionally, his son will get time off to go with him, and then Billy might tell a couple of dirty jokes, which may or may not have the n-word in them, and, even if they don’t will still make his son uncomfortable, just because of the dirtiness. Not that John would say so to his father.

  Today is a Sunday, an afternoon in April several years ago, the first meeting with Billy. This initial visit to the Shangri-la in the woods, on Grace Road, is taking place before the first meeting with Billy and Alice’s son. Indeed, one of the things urgently and secretly hoped for from this visit with John’s parents is John’s home phone number. (One of the things to be discovered today is that John doesn’t have a home phone.) So far, in terms of the chronology of events, the infiltrator has spent many hours in Moorhead with John Ed and Maudine, although increasingly over these past months he has felt the need to move down the family ladder, most especially to the third generation.

  The talk has been going pleasantly enough for about two hours. Billy’s on a green metal two-seat glider on his porch. He’s in an open-collared shirt with a green ballpoint hooked in his shirt pocket. His wife, wearing tinted yellow glasses, is in a chair beside him. She’s brought iced lemonade to the porch. It has mostly been family stories. Everyone on the porch, however, is aware of the subtext, which has just come forward in an unshellacked way.

  Billy: “I don’t care whether you write it or don’t write it or whether you forget it or what, I’m just gonna say it. I think the morals of this country disintegrated with forced integration. And the reason I think this is because black people as a whole don’t have the same morals as white people—or maybe I’ll say it this way: the morals that white people used to have.” Here’s an example, he says: Just last Friday Alice was in the deli line at Piggly Wiggly and here comes these two blacks, maybe in their twenties, maybe some kind of construction workers, they’re coming up behind her and they’re using all this f-word profanity—the effing way the line is so long, and the mother-effing way they’re going to have to use up their whole lunch hour getting a sandwich. Everybody else was just waiting their turn. The whole store could hear it. Shameful conduct. “Poor Alice had to listen to that disrespect,” Billy says, and there is something hard in his voice. Alice is nodding at the truth of it, and even behind the tinted glasses it’s easy to see the narrowing glint in her eyes. Her voice has grown that way, too.

  Billy: “It’s what I mean when I say black people don’t have the morals white people have—or anyway, used to have. You see, if Greenwood, Mississippi, in the nineteen-sixties would have been let alone to solve its own problems, we wouldn’t have had all those problems with the federal government.”

  “Let alone to solve its own problems,” Alice repeats.

  The visitor says he’d like to read these words back to Billy. “Exactly. Exactly right,” he says, after he’s heard them.

  The visitor asks if it isn’t somehow wrong to make such generalizations about a whole group? Individuals, okay. But a race? A small, strained silence. Alice’s hands are folded in her lap. The swing is making creaking noises. Billy: “I don’t want you to leave here with the idea that I’m a racist or against all black people. That’s not the kind of people we are at all. That wouldn’t represent what we think. I wouldn’t want to see that representation go in your book. Here’s something you wouldn’t know. Alice and I defended the right of black folks from Winona, Mississippi, to come to our church at Red Heel. They were Church of Christ over there, and they wanted to come to worship at ours. We have just a very small church, and this caused a split. But I thought it was right, and Alice did, too. We stood up for it. If we were racists or against black people in general, we wouldn’t have done that.”

  Alice is nodding.

  “At post office banquets, I’d sit right across from black folks, no problem,” Billy says.

  Alice, her voice softening: “You can approach it like this: Who’s going to go to heaven? Aren’t black people going to go to heaven? Doesn’t God want black folks in the kingdom? Sure, he does.”

  A little later, inside the house, Billy retrieves his son’s current phone number. He has it on his speed-dial on his cordless phone. It’s the place where John is shacking, over in Arkansas, with that woman with the kids. John’s parents and the visitor spend a little time leafing through old family photo albums. From one of these albums, a postcard drops out and paper-airplanes itself to the floor. It lands on its face. Alice reaches down to pick it up. On the front of the postcard is a picture of onetime presidential candidate and famed Alabama segregationist Governor George Wallace. On the back is a machine-generated thank-you note from the governor, with a machine-stamped signature. Billy squints at the card. “Oh, I remember what this is. I donated a little money to his campaign back then. I didn’t have much to give, but I gave some.”

  Alice says, “Well, I guess this is kind of interesting right here, isn’t it, this card and what we were talking about a little while ago.” She is smiling.

  When Billy and Alice’s son bolted from his fourth marriage, just about to turn thirty-five and a father of small twins, he was living in a modest but attractive one-story redbrick house on Bowden Street in Senatobia. There was a tire swing under a big tree in the front yard; there were three-wheelers and other toys in the carport; there was a blue Nissan pickup parked in the driveway at odd hours. A person could have driven by that house in the summer of 1998, looked at the swing and the piled toys, and formed a very wrong impression about the lives therein, some sort of fantasy that they were happy lives.

  Some months have passed, although it’s the same calendar year. The Cothrans have continued to allow the visitor in. The visitor has been with Billy and Alice’s son on half a dozen occasions. It’s the Christmas season, an important time of year at the Home Depot. On several occasions, the infiltrator has arranged to meet John Cothran at work, and thus has been able to observe an old sheriff’s namesake interacting with customers and employees, some of whom are black.

  A few months back, on another visit to the home of John’s parents, there had been some lengthy and unvarnished talk about Big Smitty. This was asked: Why would John Ed have kept such a hateful bigot on his payroll? Billy answered: “You’d have to understand something about my dad. He’s a trusting individual. He wasn’t necessarily going to ask what was going on behind his back.”

  But what about what other people would have told him?

  “Well, that’s the thing,” Billy said. “Some others weren’t going to talk about Big Smitty, what he was doing or not doing to the blacks.”

  Why not?

  “Well, afraid of it getting back.”

  Retaliation against them if Big Smitty found out?

  “Yes,” Billy said.

  Billy and Alice were asked about their son’s anger, and about the blur of marriages. “I don’t know,” Billy said quietly. “I’ve thought about it a lot.”

  Alice said: “It may have something to do with squabbling. Billy and I fussed at each other when we were early in our marriage, and maybe they were affected by it—our daughter, Carolyn, and Johnny. Now, as far as John’s anger, I don’t know. There just seems to be a kind of torment there in our son.”

  Billy said, “Anyway, we’re sorta beyond that now. The squabbling.”

  But could the squabbling really account for all the anger and divorces? Doesn’t every family have its share of parental squabbling? “It’s about the only thing I can think,” Alice answered. Her hu
sband began talking about how it says in the Bible that the only reason for a marriage to be set aside is infidelity, is adultery. “I can see sometimes where it might be better for two people to be apart,” Billy had said.

  Now it’s a Friday afternoon, two weeks before Christmas, and the supervisor of kitchens and baths at the Southaven Depot store should have been through the front door an hour ago, when he clocked out, but he keeps hanging around his department, shooting the shit, as he likes to say. John doesn’t have to work at Kroger today. He’s talking to Buddy Harris (this is not his real name), who has worked for the Depot for three years. Buddy recently graduated from a community college with an associate’s degree in design and drafting; he’s progressed from unloading carts in the parking lot to the paint department to John’s department. He seems eager and bright and a little bashful. He is a young black man who seems barely out of his teens.

  He tells John he made a $4,000 sale at the end of the night last night. John had clocked out in midafternoon.

  “Way to go,” John says. They high-five.

  “Incidentally, we were first in the division last week,” John says.

  “Yeah? Wow,” Buddy says.

  “Yep. Cordova did eighty-six, we did ninety-five thousand. They usually blow everybody out of the water,” John says.

  The supervisor goes to another part of the department. Of his boss, out of earshot, the employee says, “John’s a real nice guy. Down to earth. We don’t have any issues at all.”

  Ariel Jeffords (not her real name) echoes that. She’s much older than Buddy. She’s white and is married and has worked in various retail jobs. “You might think a guy like John would be sexist,” she says. “He’s about the kindest guy you could ever find in a boss. I know about his marriages. I hear him talking on the phone to his kids. He loves those twins. In the store, he gets in there and just works with everybody. He’s great with pitching in and helping with freight. Only thing, I guess I worry some about whether he can handle the stress of all he’s gotta do as a supervisor.”

  Close to two hours after he has punched out, the supervisor exits the store. At a nearby restaurant, while waiting for a burger and fries to arrive, he makes a puddle of ketchup on his plate and pours salt into the middle of the puddle. “I went and bought Christmas for my kids,” he says. “Got them those electric four-wheelers—got Tyler the jeep, got Sara the Barbie car. Well, they’re both the same thing, just different color and design on them. One of them I’ve got covered up with a horse blanket in my bedroom next to the water bed. The other one’s still in layaway at Wal-Mart. My ex and I went shopping together. We’ll get that one out of layaway next week, on payday.” He shrugs. “My kids ain’t going to be this age but once.”

  Money’s real tight right now, he says. “I bought me a twenty-five-dollar electric heater for my bedroom. Bought two of them—one’s a twelve-hundred-watt, other’s a fifteen-hundred-watt. It’s all I need. The water bed heats the room up pretty good anyway. With those space heaters, I don’t have to turn my gas on at all.”

  Few days ago, he bought himself a four-foot tree and all the trimmings. “Thirty bucks for everything, including the blinkers. The tree folds down. It comes in a box. [My ex’s] got a six-foot artificial at her house. I took mine out of the box and fluffed it up and called my ex. ‘I need some help,’ I said. ‘I got an artificial tree that looks like dog shit.’ She told me to get some candy canes. I went to the dollar store and bought a box of candy canes and put them on.” Then his ex and the kids came over to take a look. His ex stood in the doorway of his apartment while the kids ran into the living room to look at the tree. “My ex said, ‘You gonna behave now?’ I said, ‘Of course. I’m not gonna run off with them, you know that.’ It was real nice between us. She said, ‘Okay now, I’m going home to take a nap.’ First time since the divorce she let me play with the twins without her being there.” This last part is said with a glow of pride.

  He’s asked if he has ever sent out Christmas cards. Shrug. Grin. “Never thought about doing anything like that.” How about getting them? “Oh, sure, I’ve had them. I’ll get a Christmas card in the mail this year. I’ll get one from my mama.”

  The talk returns to his anger. “It just follows me. I’ve tried to stop it. I’m getting better.” He tells of a 1978 Chevette he once owned, and how he broke the windshield. He’d been out drinking with his buddies. This was in his third marriage. He and his wife were on food stamps—and he was pissing away with friends whatever little money they had. He went to pick up his wife in the Chevette and she started yelling at him. “I’ve got my two hands like this, on top of the steering wheel.” He swung and broke the windshield, “shattered it, sitting there in the driver’s seat, cause she’s yelling at me and we’re broke and I’ve been drinking. I say, ‘Great. I smashed the windshield. Here’s another hundred fifty dollars we gotta find.’ ”

  He hesitates. “In the past, I’ve gotten mad enough to hit her—hit any of them—and turned away and went outside and hit something.” He says he has never hit any of his wives—and wonders how he managed not to.

  Where does such rage come from? He shrugs. “Basically, I think it was the drinking. Because back then I was drinking every day.”

  Were you an alcoholic? “Oh, yeah.”

  An hour later, at his place in Senatobia, he opens the door and puts on the light. He bends down and puts a plug in a socket, and then his four-foot artificial tree is glittering in a corner, with two red stockings taped up beside it. He puts another plug in a socket and a little electric heater begins to glow orange. “That star cost me three dollars and those string lights a buck and a half apiece,” he says, sitting across from the tree on the yellow sofa. “Two sets of them.” He gets up and goes across the room and lights a red candle on top of his TV.

  For a while, there isn’t much talk. Then he says he’d love to get out of this dump and buy a trailer—“one of those Jim Walter mobile homes on a pond around here. Really, I don’t even know if there are any ponds around here.” Pause. “I haven’t asked. I don’t want to get my hopes up.” Pause again. “I’ve had a lot more downs than ups, but I think I’m a helluva lot better than the guy I’ve come from—this dumb-ass dropout who was getting married all over the place and didn’t have any money or any kind of job prospects.”

  With no prompting: “I don’t know if it’s a matter of growing up and realizing it’s not a right thing to do, calling somebody a nigger.” The other day, he was talking by phone to another supervisor. The supervisor was a couple of aisles over. John wanted to send a customer to see him. “I said, ‘You’ll recognize him. He’s about my build and he’s got a blue cap on.’ That’s all I said. I didn’t say the guy was black. Proud of myself.”

  He says he’d like to get in his truck and drive over toward his ex’s house—not to go in or anything; that wouldn’t be appropriate and she probably wouldn’t allow it anyway. “She’s on the other side of town, in a new housing development. She just bought a beautiful new home—well, her and the bank did. C’mon, I’ll show it to you.” On the way across town, his Nissan belches and rattles. He’s wearing an old coat and an orange Home Depot hat. He’s got country music on. He seems almost ready to start singing with the music. He doesn’t stop in front of his ex’s house, just slowly drives by, making a turn at the cul-de-sac. As he turns, he tries to get a glimpse of his children through the front window. He drives to the next block, parks the truck diagonally, cuts his headlights and engine, rolls down his window. Peering now in darkness through the side yard of a neighbor, he points out his ex’s six-foot artificial tree. It’s glowing in a window in the rear. “My babies are in there,” he says happily. “They gonna have Santy Claus two places this year.”

  Early the next morning, Sarah and Tyler’s dad is at the Depot. Most of his shift is spent working in the store parking lot with a man named Maurice, a supervisor in walls and floors. The two are managing a “fire sale,” trying to snare customers before they get i
nside the front door. Maurice is a muscled black man who looks about forty. In forty-degree cold, he’s walking around in a T-shirt. In terms of size, he makes almost two of John. They trade insults. They bring each other coffee, tell raunchy jokes, talk Depot politics. “You poor-ass honky, you don’t know shit about being a salesman,” Maurice says. “I can whup your black ass in sales,” John says.

  Later in the morning, he runs into one of his best and oldest Depot friends, Charles Hawkins. They pass each other in the lunchroom. Hawkins has a dollar bill in his fist that he’s going to insert in a vending machine. John, with surprising speed, a little cornerback running for daylight, snatches the bill, heads for the door. “I’ll just be relieving you of this,” he says over his shoulder to the black man. And the black man says, “Oh, I know you think you will, you miserable honky.” John hands it back. A moment later, out on the floor, John says: “Since I came here, me and Charles Hawkins have been just like that.” He crosses two fingers. “We were in lumber together.”

  In a better world, it could end there. Six months later, on a June evening, I pulled up to his place in Senatobia. The apartment looked vacant. No one answered the door. I went across the yard and spoke to a neighbor, who told me John had moved out some months before. He was in a mobile home in the country, the neighbor said. It was in a community called Strayhorn, about seven miles from Senatobia. Since there seemed no way to get hold of him (the neighbor was pretty sure he still didn’t have a phone), I drove out toward Strayhorn, hoping John wasn’t doing a shift at Kroger that evening. I wondered if he had received the several letters I had sent him since our last talk.