Sons of Mississippi

by Paul Hendrickson

  One morning during his second year at Ole Miss, Joe and I met at a McDonald’s near his apartment. Jasmine was living with him. He had just dropped off his daughter at day care. He came into the restaurant in a Hilfiger jacket and an Ole Miss baseball cap pulled low. He smiled and shook hands. He stood at the counter, shifting his weight, bobbing his head. He studied the menu posted over his head. The young black clerk on the other side of the counter cleared her throat. Did she have any idea who he was? Probably not. Three or four people in line behind Joe began to fidget. Joe sighed and said without making eye contact that he guessed he’d have the eggs and a stack of pancakes and potatoes. What did he want to drink? He didn’t seem to hear the question. She asked again. “Lemonade,” he finally said, sighing.

  In the booth, he said he was still having great difficulty communicating with his father. “We almost never talk. But maybe things are a little better. A couple of years ago, he was in a period of wanting to die. But he’s recovered from that. He wants to write his autobiography. He’s still in precarious health. Sleeps a lot. Basically, I’ve given up that we’ll ever really communicate.”

  When Joe and his brothers were young, their father would drive them to school in the morning. He’d pick them up in the afternoon. There was almost never any talking in the car.

  One of Joe’s classes started at 4 P.M. and was finished at 5:15, which meant he had to jog to his car before Jasmine’s day care closed at 5:30. They charged him a dollar for every minute he was late. The university was paying him a stipend of $800 a month, Joe said, and late fees didn’t figure into his budget.

  He said he had a little more respect for the math that was involved in getting a doctorate in finance. Had he changed his mind about the overall caliber of the university? He laughed. “Still a bunch of party numbskulls, you ask me.” He was worried that an Ole Miss doctorate wouldn’t count much in landing him a job. A lot of it was perception, he figured.

  In the Esquire story about his father, Joe was asked what goes through his mind when James Meredith refers to himself as a king. After a minute of silence, Joe uttered softly, “I haven’t interpreted it yet.”

  A Harvard story that has been interpreted in various ways over the years: Joe Meredith once refused to get off his stool during the final minute of a wrestle-off. His opponent was a teammate named David George, known to be a horse of an athlete. Peckham was officiating the match, which was tied. After the final time-out, the coach nodded to both of his men to come at each other again. Joe sat on his metal folding chair at the edge of the mat. His head was down and he was shaking it from side to side. Peckham: “He wouldn’t get off the stool. It was unheard of. I still don’t know what it means. Was he afraid? Was he disappointed in how he’d performed? Did he just want to shut it all out? You couldn’t know.” The following week, as the squad was getting set to board a bus for a road trip, the captain, Kelly Flynn, a big, likable kid from Iowa who liked to fool around, showed up with a gym bag under one arm and a metal folding chair under the other. In a telepathic instant, everybody knew, everybody laughed, everybody but Joe, who climbed on the bus and took a seat alone and stared out the window.

  Several months after I heard this story, Joe and I had dinner in a restaurant on the Oxford square. It was Christmastime and the town was trimmed in lights. Joe hadn’t been downtown since our last dinner. He kept turning his head to look at how pretty the square was. The day before, his father had been in town. A documentary crew from New Orleans had convinced James Meredith to come to Ole Miss. Joe went over to the university library, where some of the shooting was taking place. The meeting between father and son had the usual awkwardness about it. Joe was pretty sure his dad stayed only one night in town and was gone by the time we met.

  “So you found out about throwing it in,” Joe said, when the conversation drifted to Harvard and wrestling.

  Why didn’t he get off the stool?

  “Because that’s the one match I most felt they were rooting against me. I just said the hell with it. I wouldn’t even look at them.”

  A few days earlier, Joe had taught his last class of the fall 2001 term in an undergraduate course in finance. (While working on his dissertation, he helped earn his keep at the graduate school by teaching low-level courses and by doing tutoring.) A student named Kimberly, to whom he had given private tutoring, was in the restaurant. She saw him and passed by the table with some of her sorority sisters. It was very warm between the black teaching assistant and the white coed from Atlanta. He gave Kimberly a small hug. He bopped his head and shoulders from side to side and smiled broadly. “I know you want that A,” he kidded. He didn’t seem antisocial in the least, not then.

  After his student was gone, we talked of his twin brother, an investment counselor in California. They’re not often in touch, Joe said. Pause. “You have to understand, he’s the happy one. He’s the one with friends.” Again, the loud laugh.

  Later that evening, I went out to the Ramada Inn on the west side of town and introduced myself to the night clerk, Vondaris Gordon, an undergraduate and past president of the Black Student Union. Gordon, affable, handsome, interested in politics and history, a native of the Delta, was studying for an American history final. He was reading a book about the admission of James Meredith to Ole Miss. I said that I had just been to dinner on the square with Meredith’s son. I asked if he knew that Joe Meredith had been living in town for more than three years and was close to finishing a doctorate. The past president of the BSU said he could hardly believe that. “Is he just like his dad?” he asked.

  In Vicksburg, at Shoney’s, late at night, in the last month of last century, an interracial couple came in and took a booth. He had tattoos, she had nose piercings. They both seemed about twenty. They sat beside each other and passed a smoke back and forth. When the food came, they ate from each other’s plates, from each other’s forks. They knew the taboos they were breaking—it seemed to be the point. In Pascagoula, a few days earlier, in the dining room of the city’s finest motel, a young and fit black man in a well-tailored suit sat across the table from an attractive blonde. Both looked to be in their early thirties. They talked quietly over breakfast, heads bent toward each other. Had they spent the night together, or was this an early-morning business meeting? Their presence didn’t seem to be causing any stir. In north Jackson, seven months later, in an upscale shopping center, an elderly white woman brought two little girls out of a restaurant and stood on the curb while an elderly man fetched the car. One of the little girls was white, the other black. The woman, who must have been the white child’s grandmother, held each by the hand: black child on her right side, white child on her left. While they waited, the three swung their arms and sang a nursery ditty. It was a July evening, still early, the air lambent, not stifling, and it was easy to imagine that these genteel and morally upstanding grandparents, native Mississippians, having taken two best friends of different color out to eat, were accompanying them back home now, where the black child would be invited to stay and watch a rental movie and to sleep over with her white chum in a big frilly poster bed. And yet the next morning, in the Clarion-Ledger, were all of the old reminders, travails, intractable ghosts. The lead editorial was about the recent suspicious hanging death of a black teenager from Kokomo named Raynard Johnson. He’d been found in his front yard, under a pecan tree, hanged with his own belt. Was it a suicide or a lynching? The editorial urged a full investigation, inasmuch as the word “lynching” had so resonant a history in the state. A column over, the letters to the editor were about the ongoing “flag flap”: whether to keep the old state flag, with its Confederate battle emblem, or to come up with some new design that would embrace all of the citizenry and not serve as a reminder of slavery to blacks. One or two of the letters were reasonable, although most were knee-jerk, warning of “the final demise of Mississippi” should the left-wingers and do-gooders and outsiders get their way. On page 1, the leader of a neo-Confederate hate group called Leag
ue of the South was quoted: “If you stand up and defend the Confederate flag, you’re a racist. It’s false. It makes me angry. It’s frustrating to have to put up with this.” John Thomas Cripps of Wiggins wasn’t interested in applying the salve of reconciliation. The head of the League of the South said he planned to run for governor in 2003, and he had votes.

  Confederate Shadows: Good Son

  The shadow of dark hangs over them, making whatever narratives we construct around them seem sentimental and beside the point.

  —Mark Strand on Edward Hopper

  So many stories, mysteries, interconnected lives, curling outward from some faces under trees. This story, for instance, which can only be outlined at this point. It concerns Jim Scott Middleton, who lives in Clarksdale, Mississippi. Scott’s dad, Sheriff Jimmy Middleton of Claiborne County, three over from the right in the photo, was much loved by Scott.

  The inheritor is a churchgoer and a devoted family man in his middle fifties. The inheritor is a golfer, with a membership in the local country club. He’s a duck hunter, proud to own his own “duck hole,” whatever that is. He drives a big sedan with a phone in it. He’s an old self-described Pi Kappa Alpha boy out of the University of Southern Mississippi (he was on the six-year plan, he jokes), who doesn’t seem fretful about cholesterol or calorie intake. What he most seems, however, is a man comfortable in his upper-middle-class white skin. Scott Middleton is the only direct male heir of Jimmy Middleton. The father—who passed on his big-boned frame to his only son, and who got only as far as eighth grade—isn’t remembered as an outgoing or comfortable man. But neither does he seem to be remembered, by blacks in the county over which he presided, as a hateful seg. What his son’s life suggests, perhaps, is that it isn’t all just ineluctable; that sometimes the story line—the through-line in the script, as moviemakers say—seems to shift greatly just one generation down. The gene mutates for the better. The blades of hope are discernibly there.

  Jimmy Middleton was the head lawman of Port Gibson and Claiborne County, which are about two hours south of Clarksdale. (By Mississippi standards, Clarksdale, which is about an hour below metropolitan Memphis, is a city and is one of the larger industrial places in the Delta.) As noted earlier, Claiborne County and Port Gibson were never known—not even in the late nineteenth century, when lynchings were a commonplace—as the region of the cudgel and the rope, of the fagots burning in a pyre beneath the figure dangling on a noose. The county’s indecency to its fellow man was then and seems now a far more deceptive thing. Port Gibson’s bigotry has always sought to mask itself behind a kind of noblesse oblige. The head lawman of the county in the early sixties—and for some of the fifties, too—was pretty much an extension of his jurisdiction: a paternalistic supremacist working to keep a bitter system in place.

  Consider him in the photograph, and how once more form seems uncannily to follow function. He’s part of the group, and yet in another way not. He’s standing off. Is he leaking doubt? Does he think that this is something of a bad idea? Who can tell? But the shadow of that suggestion is there.

  Scott Middleton, Green Bay Packer fan, has a lovely Lebanese-American wife named Lynn and a slightly indulged but entirely charming young daughter named Marlene. (It’s his second marriage, second family.) Scott and Lynn worship at the Catholic church in Clarksdale. They’re not practicing Catholics, but Marlene is being educated at the parish school, and so her parents feel that they should worship there as a family on Sundays. Scott has enjoyed coaching in his daughter’s integrated T-ball league. On most weekends from March to November, the gregarious man loves going to his segregated country club. In the late fall, when the Delta is sodden and gray, he loves sitting before daylight in his duck hole. Afterward, he’ll get cleaned up and go to work.

  To get to work, he climbs into his Buick or SUV and drives north from Clarksdale on Highway 61 (which is the old famous blues highway that used to deliver gifted Delta black musicians to Memphis and points north) before turning off onto a side road. This two-lane takes him through the fields into a village called Jonestown, in the middle of which is a manufacturing and cotton-processing firm called Delta Oil Mill. Scott is its general manager. His office is behind a glass-enclosed door in a wooden cottage on the grounds of the plant. The warehouses and processing barns of Delta Oil Mill tower over tiny Jonestown in more ways than one. At noon the GM gets back into his car and goes home to eat with his spouse, because Clarksdale is only about a twenty-minute drive from his office and because you wouldn’t want to try to get a bite to eat in Jonestown. Before he can get out onto the highway, where he’ll gun the car, Scott first must drive through the heart of Jonestown.

  In a state full of towns of an almost mind-beggaring poverty, Jonestown, predominately black, is in a league by itself. It’s as if everything about it is idle and crumbling and full of despair. That isn’t literally true, because some black Jonestowners—hardly enough—are employed at the oil mill and are able to earn livable wages. (Others are fetched up to Tunica County by bus, where they hold better-paying jobs at the casinos, which are supported by metropolitan Memphis.) I have been in the big sedan with the windows rolled up as the GM passed down the main street, past Mississippians who seemed to possess nothing except the rags on their backs. One evening early in December, Scott drove me through Jonestown while a Christmas “parade” was in progress. Neither of us said anything, because it was the saddest Christmas parade imaginable. Scott maneuvered the car out onto the highway and we went on to dinner in his tastefully decorated home on Second Street in Clarksdale. Second Street is one of those avenues in the South that look like a photograph from Architectural Digest. Jim Middleton’s son spoke that evening about the welfare system in America, and of how in his view it is ruinous. It wasn’t said with anger.

  “I don’t think Daddy was,” he said. We were discussing the question of whether his father had belonged to the Klan.

  On another day, in his office, he said, just as evenly: “Daddy had a good reputation as a law enforcement officer, even with the blacks—I think you’ll find that. I’m not going to say he wasn’t tough with them, strict with them, and back then it would’ve been pretty easy to do almost whatever you wanted to do. But I think local blacks would say he treated them fair, in business and whatnot.” Scott was dressed casually for work: a polo shirt with an Illinois Central logo on it. He looked like about a sixteen handicap, a Republican, a bank board member (he keeps his connection to Port Gibson by sitting on the local bank board there), a cotton man, a Missisippian, a well-fed Deltan, who gets on airplanes and goes to trade shows and conventions now and then in big cities like Washington, D.C.

  A cotton man and Mississippian and Deltan who told me he didn’t know the name Emmett Till.

  One night, we dined at a place called Katherine’s, on Moon Lake. We were eating big steaks. There were other Delta cotton men at nearby tables and the GM went over and glad-handed them, laughed with them. He came back to his seat and asked what I had been discovering on my own about his father.

  “Pretty much what you’ve said,” I answered.

  On my most recent visit to Port Gibson, I had sat on a smooth cement slab outside a co-op grocery called Our Mart. The store had been started during the time of the troubles, when Claiborne County blacks launched an economic boycott against the white merchants. An elderly man named Nathan Jones, who’d helped found Our Mart in the mid-sixties, said: “Jimmy Middleton bought posts from me. We shared farming in common. We’d talk about cattle. You knew exactly who he was, but he wasn’t going to harm you, like some around here.” Next door to the grocery was the county administration building. Inside was a permanent exhibit entitled “No Easy Journey,” which described Claiborne County’s civil rights movement in photographs, text, and other materials. There was a wonderful sepia photograph of a handsome and strong and young Nate Jones, just home from World War II.

  The deceased sheriff’s son said that evening at Katherine’s on Moon Lake, “If it
proves to be otherwise as you go on, however, or even if you come on something big about Daddy, I think I can live with it.”

  Employees at Delta Oil Mill have told me that Jim Middleton’s son is a very fair boss. It could reasonably be asked what they would have to gain by talking badly about their employer to an out-of-stater carrying a notebook. Even though they seemed to appreciate their boss, I do not think they were trying to suggest that he was free of racial feelings.

  In the summer of 2001, the golf club to which Scott belongs gained statewide attention when two married black physicians were denied membership. Scott said he wasn’t present when the all-white membership of the Clarksdale Country Club voted down the applications. He said he wasn’t precisely clear on how he would have voted—he felt himself caught in a wedge between friends and business relationships and his own heart. He said he was still struggling with the morality of it. “A private club is a private club,” he said, “and the membership can rightfully set its own policies. That isn’t unique to Mississippi.” He said he had gotten to know one of the turned-down physicians through his daughter’s T-ball league. “Fine, decent, sophisticated people,” he said. He cleared his throat. “But the club belongs to its members.”