American Dream

by Jason DeParle

  What a strange sight the homestead must have made on the eve of Civil War—this old man, lord of 100-plus acres, thirteen kids, and nine slaves. At seventy-five, Samuel Caples had pushed his way across a succession of frontiers to an estate worth something like $200,000 in contemporary terms—nearly all in human property—and he lived just long enough to see a terrible war sweep it away. Surrendering to no one in martial fervor, he named his next son Jefferson Davis and joined a local militia formed, its founder proclaimed, “to aid in driving the enemy from our country.” But no less an enemy than William T. Sherman entered the county a mile from Caples’s farm, burning and looting in a practice run for his more infamous march to the sea. Chasing freedoms they had never known, thousands of slaves ran off to trail the conquering force—“ten miles of negros,” “a grotesque crowd,” a “remarkable hegira,” Sherman and his entourage called them. Nothing if not prolific, Samuel Caples survived long enough to give his wife their sixteenth child, then died by the end of the decade. She lost the homestead in a tax sale, and much of the family left for Arkansas. Frank Caples, now a freedman, stayed.

  Given the tragic history that followed, it’s easy to forget the brief flowering of freedom that black Mississippians of his era enjoyed. Mississippi sent two black men to the United States Senate; black policemen patrolled the capital; and black letter carriers toted mail. Economically, progress halted with sharecropping, an impossibly rigged system close to slavery itself. Politically, blacks were driven from the polls first by violence and then by the law. As the future governor James Vardaman put it, the 1890 Mississippi constitution, with its poll taxes and literacy tests, was designed “for no other purpose than to eliminate the nigger from politics.” With that, the Mississippi of modern legend emerged, in a tumult of lynchings, Jim Crow laws, and race-baiting politicians. No state entered the twentieth century with a larger ratio of black citizens—nearly six in ten Mississippians were black, and one in ten black Americans lived there—and no state went to greater lengths to insure black subjugation. Into this world of lost opportunity, the next three Caples generations were born, down to Hattie Mae. In 1876, Frank had a son, whom everyone called “Pie Eddie.”

  The red clay hills that Pie Eddie farmed would never yield an easy living. But one of the world’s most fertile plains was a few hours away, running beside the Mississippi River for two hundred miles below Memphis. The Mississippi Delta was still mostly wilderness in antebellum days, but with the arrival of railroads and flood control it erupted in a speculative boom. Among those who began buying Delta land was a hill country pharmacist named Oliver Eastland, who in 1888 launched a giant cotton plantation that remains in the family today. He died a decade later and left it to his young sons, Woods and James.

  The history of the Delta has only one theme: the need for cheap and abundant (in this case, black) labor. Without it the rich land was worthless, since cotton was an extremely labor-intensive crop. A plantation the size of the Eastlands’ would need several hundred field hands, and planters went to extraordinary lengths to recruit and retain them. While dependency was a word typically tied to the region’s poor blacks, dependency ran both ways; perhaps nowhere was the prosperity of the white elite as dependent on perpetuating a large black underclass. The corollary to the white need for black labor was the fear of black numbers in counties where blacks formed as much as a nine-to-one majority. Socially, an elaborate caste system evolved to underscore who was in charge. Of all the degradations of Hattie Mae’s youth, none stung more than the prohibition on drinking from a white person’s glass. Where caste failed, violence prevailed. In the first three decades of the twentieth century, the Delta was a national leader in lynchings, dispatching a black man, woman, or child to a mob death - every 5.5 months. Whites knew they were guarding an island of privilege in a sea of potential black trouble.

  Trouble came to the Eastland brothers early in their tenure as planters, after they recruited a field hand named Luther Holbert, who had worked for them back in the hills. What prompted the dispute with Holbert is unclear, but the outcome is not: on February 3, 1904, Holbert shot James Eastland dead. The murder of a planter by a black worker was no mere crime but a threat to the social and economic order. (The Memphis paper referred to James Eastland as Holbert’s “young master.”) Woods Eastland joined a rampaging posse that claimed at least three innocent blacks’ lives before returning to the plantation with Holbert and his wife. By midday a crowd of a thousand assembled, and the accounts of what happened next, especially that of the Vicksburg Evening Post, made the case a touchstone in the literature of lynching:

  The blacks were forced to hold out their hands while one finger at a time was chopped off. The fingers were distributed as souvenirs. . . . one of his eyes, knocked out with a stick, hung by a shred from the socket. . . . The most excruciating form of punishment consisted in the use of a large corkscrew. . . . bored into the flesh of the man and the woman . . . and then pulled out, the spirals tearing out big pieces of raw, quivering flesh.

  Holbert and his wife were then thrown on a pyre and burned to death.

  Woods Eastland was indicted for murder—burning Holbert at the stake “was the intention of W. C. Eastland from the start,” the Memphis paper noted with approval—but the case was thrown out before it reached a jury, and he was swept from the courthouse by a cheering crowd. He moved back to the hills, became the district attorney, and managed the plantation from afar. Nine months after the gruesome execution, his only child was born, and he named him for his slain brother: James Eastland. For much of the country, the younger Eastland would become the very symbol of southern defiance, the cigarchomping Dixiecrat senator who boasted that he had a special suit pocket where civil rights bills went to die. For Hattie Mae, he was the man who owned all the land and made all the rules.

  The two decades after the Holbert affair brought Delta planters their glory days. Rising cotton prices made Woods Eastland wealthy and kept him in need of more workers. One of the men he employed in the hills was Pie Eddie Caples, who was about fifty years old with a young wife and a passel of kids when “Mr. Woods” persuaded him to give the Delta a try. Climbing in the back of Woods Eastland’s truck, the Caples clan rode out of the hills and onto the plantation in search of a better life, and when I found him three-quarters of a century later, Pie Eddie Caples’s son Mack was still there. A strapping man of eighty-five, he had gnarled hands, bright eyes, and vivid memories of a twelve-year-old’s first glimpse of the fertile land. “So much cotton in the field, look like it snowed!” he said. While the next generation, Hattie Mae’s, despised plantation life, Mack spoke of it with the kind of vicarious pride a midcentury worker might have shown in GM or GE. The store shimmered with more stuff than he had seen, all offered on easy credit. While some planters plowed every acre, the Eastlands let tenants garden. And as patrons with influence, they could keep favored workers from jail. “Just as much money as Papa wanna borrow, Mr. Woods let him have it,” Mack said. “I ain’t never heard him cuss none of his hands. Mr. Woods was a mighty fine man!”

  One cruelty of sharecropping was that the promise of prosperity almost always proved false. Another, as Nicholas Lemann has noted, was that the failure was subtly marked as the tenant’s fault; he was, after all, ostensibly a partner in a profitable enterprise. If the system was meant to breed self-doubt, it also encouraged an ethos of “getting over,” exacting your revenge on an unfair system by cheating it in return (an ethos that would reappear in dealings with the welfare system). Hortense Powdermaker found more than eight in ten sharecroppers worked all year, only to break even or sink further into debt. She was startled at how openly planters talked of cheating; they justified it by arguing that “the Negro is congenitally lazy and must be kept in debt in order to be made to work.” Whatever disappointments Pie Eddie Caples suffered in the Delta, he didn’t suffer them long. Three years after moving, he fell from a roof and injured his head. “Mr. Woods” sent him to a hospital in Jackson, and h
e died in surgery. Pie Eddie’s widow and children stayed on the plantation, where seven years later, Hattie Mae was born to an unmarried teenage mother she would never know.

  “I was a gorgeous little black child!” Hattie Mae told me one day. Though she started her life poor and orphaned, she didn’t start it unhappily. Her saving grace was Pie Eddie’s widow, the thirty-seven-year-old grandmother from whom she drew her home, her resilience, and her name. “I thought the sun rose and set in that old lady,” she said. As a cheerful woman who could cook and sew, Mama Hattie had escaped the fields to make her living in white folks’ homes, where the benefits to a cute granddaughter included a stream of hand-me-downs and “goo-gobs” of white girls’ dolls. Early life had other comforts. With several acres to farm, there were fresh corn and peaches in season, jarred greens in winter, and smoked hogs year-round. The Gilfield Missionary Baptist Church was about a mile’s hike across the fields, and the two Hatties regularly made the trek. Rounding out the household were Mama Hattie’s kids—Will, Lula Bell, Vidalia, and Pop—who, a half generation ahead of Hattie Mae, were more like older siblings than aunts and uncles. Hattie Mae spent her days making mud pies and waiting for her grandmother to walk up the road. “Those were the happiest days of my life,” she said.

  Sharecropper society was not monolithic, and the Capleses had a reputation for inhabiting its tougher tiers. If you buy the notion that the social problems of northern ghettos had roots in the Jim Crow South, the family history is one to explore. Among the children that Pie Eddie left behind, one (Frank) was shot and killed by his girlfriend. Another (Lula Bell) shot and killed her man. A third (Pop) did time in penitentiaries from Parchman to Joliet; among other things, he killed a man dating his ex-wife. Another, Vidalia, got involved with a man whose wife retaliated by torching Vidalia’s house. A picture of Opal’s grandfather, ’Lij, survives from the day the carnival came to town. Clenching a cigar between his teeth, he stares down the camera and thrusts open a wallet overflowing with bills, a portrait of the bravura that would fill his granddaughter’s veins; the quickest way to get a laugh in the family is to ask how many times ’Lij married. Even Wiley, the stable homesteader of the group, kept a still. “They were known as a rough-riding group that stuck together,” Hattie Mae said of her uncles and aunts. “If you mess with them you might as well kill them.” Hattie Mae’s father, Robert Logan, who was fifteen when she was born, came from a more prosperous and lighter-skinned plantation family that didn’t approve of the Capleses; he left town for a long army career, and Hattie Mae’s visits with him were confined to the occasional furlough.

  As a stable, pious, hardworking woman with a bunch of hell-raising kids, Mama Hattie would scarcely be an unfamiliar figure in the contemporary ghetto. Nor would the crime that put an end to Hattie Mae’s carefree years, sexual molestation. She was about seven when her grandmother’s boyfriend, Clyde, started catching her alone and doing things she didn’t want him to do. Afraid of retribution if she told, she kept the secret inside, as a source of confusion and pain. “Men back then didn’t allow girls to have much a childhood,” she said. Another calamity befell the family at about the same time, when her uncle Will got into a dispute with another plantation hand over a woman. Out playing one day, Hattie Mae ran home to say she had seen some men stuffing Will into a car. But no one listened to an excitable child until his body was found the next day. Bereft over her son’s death, Mama Hattie briefly moved the family back to the hills, but Clyde came along, and in an argument he stabbed her. The boys gave him the kind of beating that insured he wouldn’t return, and Mama Hattie moved back to the Doddsville plantation. Soon the household was going separate ways. With no one but young Hattie Mae at home, her grandmother landed a job as the Eastlands’ cook, a privileged perch but one that required her to live in the cook’s quarters near their house with no room for a child. Nine years old, Hattie Mae was effectively orphaned again, left to spend what remained of her childhood with whichever relative might take her in.

  The life that followed would have extinguished a spirit less keen. At nine, she was old enough to pick cotton; at twelve, she could “chop,” or weed, it. Both tasks took precedence over school, which let out when the cotton needed tending, and Hattie Mae made it no further than the eighth grade. As an abandoned girl whose beauty showed, she attracted more sexual predation. This time she told, but Aunt Vi accused her of lying about Uncle George and administered one of her infamous beatings. If black men were one source of Hattie Mae’s grief, white folks were another. Unlike her grandmother, she had a hard time striking the pose of grateful deference that plantation life required. “I was the troublemaker,” she said. Tired of snapping stalks in the cold, she led a group of younger cousins, including Opal’s mother, Ruthie Mae, out of the field one day. When the overseer rode up on a horse and ordered them back to work, Hattie Mae snapped, “I’m not your child,” which brought Uncle ’Lij racing to make peace before things got out of hand. Years later, as Congress debated the welfare bill, its proponents talked about work in transcendent terms, as a source of dignity, order, and hope. But the first thing Hattie Mae noticed about work was the unfairness of it all: “All the black people was out working for nothing.” In picking season, she dragged a heavy sack across the field, bent or sometimes crawling, and pulled the fluffy fibers from the lacerating bolls. The bending made her back ache. The bolls made her fingers bleed. It felt like snatching thousands of eggs from nests of angry thorns.

  As Hattie Mae took to the fields, James Eastland embarked on a long if accidental career in the United States Senate, one that like the plantation itself was bequeathed to him by his father. It began in 1941 when the incumbent senator died, leaving Mississippi governor Paul Johnson free to appoint a successor. For counsel, the governor turned to his old college roommate; the roommate was Woods Eastland. Declining his own chance to fill the seat, Woods persuaded his friend to send his son, who had served two terms in the state legislature but had been out of politics for nearly a decade. With that, at thirty-six Jim Eastland became the youngest senator in state history. War loomed and the Depression lingered when he arrived in Washington, but Eastland found fame with an issue of more limited interest: the price of cottonseed. The seed was an important byproduct of every farmer’s harvest, and a federal official’s talk of price controls had prices deeply depressed. With a fiery speech on the Senate floor, Eastland squelched the effort. Prices doubled, and Eastland, an unknown planter with a humorless style, became a statewide hero overnight. He left the Senate after eighty-eight days but went home and won the next year’s race for the first of his six full terms.

  If locally Eastland made his name with cotton, nationally it rested on race. One of the first battles of the civil rights age erupted midway through his first term, when President Truman sought permanent status for a wartime antidiscrimination agency, the Fair Employment Practices Commission. Segregationists rightly saw the move as a threat, and in the summer of 1945 Eastland helped kill it with a filibuster that marked him as no mean southern bigot but a truly distinctive one. The commission was a “Communist program” to “rape American justice,” he said. “I assert that the Negro race is an inferior race. I say quite frankly that I am proud of the white race. I am proud that the purest of white blood flows through my veins. I know that the white race is a superior race. It has ruled the world. . . . It is responsible for all the progress on earth.” Of would-be black voters, he later added: “The mental level of those people renders them incapable of suffrage.” Reelected with no opposition, Eastland was rewarded with the chairmanship of the subcommittee on civil rights.

  Eastland’s turn on center stage arrived a few years later, when the Supreme Court decided the most important civil rights case of the century, Brown vs. Board of Education. The white South was divided as it groped for a response, with some segregationists seeing no choice but to give in and desegregate the schools. Eastland helped lead the opposite charge, condemning Brown as a “pro-Communist” d
ecision and embracing the doctrine of massive resistance. As a prime supporter of the Citizens Council, he allied himself with a movement that all but explicitly endorsed the violence that terrorized the South. (J. W. Milam, one of the men who lynched Emmett Till not far from the Eastland plantation, explained he was acting in part to take a stand against school integration.) In 1956, Eastland’s fervor landed him on the cover of Time, which argued that his aura of wealth and respectability made him a “far more dismaying phenomenon” than the usual southern demogogue. Amid this assault on Constitutional governance, Eastland got another promotion—to chairman of the full Judiciary Committee, through which all civil rights bills and judicial nominations passed.

  To modern ears, he merely sounds cartoonish—a forgotten foil for a civil rights movement whose success in retrospect risks seeming preordained. But for the next twenty-two years, every legislative victory had to find a way around him, and by the 1970s, as Senate president pro tem, he stood third in line to the presidency. Long before that, he was for the Caples family a kind of feudal lord. To understand why there were holes in her roof or an ache in her back; why she - couldn’t vote or stay in school; why the field hand who shot her uncle Will was beyond the reach of the law, Hattie Mae had to look no farther than the other end of the cotton field. Even now, Ole Miss students study at the James O. Eastland Law Library, and justice is dispensed from the James O. Eastland Federal Courthouse. But one place visitors won’t find his name is on the road to the Doddsville plantation, now run by his son, “Little Woods.” Instead they find a sign celebrating the county’s civil rights pioneer: “Home of Fannie Lou Hamer.”