Police and soldiers arrive on the scene. They smell it before they see it, a grotesque, barely human form, bleached white in spots and warped by the sun and rain, skin losing to gravity in big folds, those big basketball shoes just a foot off the ground. Bugs swarm, and body fluids stain the trunk of the tree black. The corpse, no longer Tony Harris, hangs from a sturdy branch by a black shoelace. They notice that both of the shoelaces are in place. So he brought an extra shoelace with him from Brasília, managed to keep it despite losing his computer, pants, wallet, and ring? Could have happened.
The location of the pepper tree leads everyone who sees it to think suicide. This place seems too remote for anyone to have carried a body so far, and forensic evidence suggests Tony’s life ended in this clearing, hanging from a monkey pepper tree, four miles from Bezerra, 6,000 miles from Seattle, totally and utterly alone.
It’s the perfect tree. A short step up onto a low branch, an easy reach to tie the shoelace around a higher branch, then a quick step off. Death would have begun quickly, air cut off, the pressure on the spinal column beginning a domino effect, motor ability lessened or lost. Did his life flash before his eyes? Did he see a lost job and rejected applications? Did he see people chasing him and shadows and whispers? Or did he see other, happier things? Maybe a boy in Seattle pointing so many years ago and telling his mom: That’s Tony Harris. He plays for Garfield. Maybe a bear hug with Kelvin Sampson after making it to the NCAA Tournament. Or did he see his 14-year-old son, who looks just like him, or his wife, or his mother, or his friends? Did he see his future?
No one knows. But the police do believe this: The very last act of Tony Harris was to fight for his life. As he hung from that shoelace, his time now down to seconds, unable to use his arms and legs, he bit down on the tree, sinking his teeth into the trunk, as if to buy one inch of life-saving air. He failed, and he died there, hanging from the monkey pepper tree.
The day after cutting his body down, police found a hole burrowed deep into the bark of the tree. Laying on the ground below was a tooth, the last will and testament of a man struggling for light in a place consumed by darkness.
EPILOGUE
The two letters addressed to Tony Harris made it real. The first was from the state of Washington, absolving him of any further child support. There was a space for “reason” and one box had been checked: deceased. The next letter hurt even more. It was from a grocery store. Sorry, it began, we cannot extend you an offer. His application had been denied. Lori wept, for the man Tony wanted to be and for the man she’d lost. “He was always well intentioned,” she says. “He really had a heart of gold. It just broke my heart, because I could see the potential and the goodness in him, and nobody would give him a break.”
She replays the last months. She’s a mental health worker, and yet she never saw signs of a serious problem. Sure, he was really down, refusing to talk about his pain, finding solace alone on a lake, fishing. But the contract in Brazil seemed to make him whole again. Why kill himself now, with a child on the way, with so much to live for? She doesn’t believe it. It doesn’t make sense. “Tony was a pretty boy,” she says. “It’s very hard to even imagine how awful his last days must have been in order for him to end up like that. All I have is the image of how he was found and his body was decomposed and that last phone conversation. It just makes it almost impossible to feel like you can move on. It’s so hard.”
On the day of the funeral, a butterfly lands at the foot of the monkey pepper tree, flapping its wings slowly, refusing to fly away. Soon, another joins it. A continent away, his family spreads Tony’s ashes on the Green River in Washington, where he had so often found peace, the water slowly taking him away forever. At the service, they mourn the end of Tony Harris’s life and begin the rest of their own lives without him. His son, D’Nique, goes to a gymnasium. He’s on the JV team, and his first high school game is that night.
In the locker room, D’Nique quietly asks if he can switch jerseys with a teammate for the game. He wants to take that court with No. 4 on his back, the number Tony wore during happier times, when he was a star in Brazil. D’Nique doesn’t talk about that, though he also writes a “4” on his own sneakers. He will offer tribute to his father in the only way he knows how: with a game. He walks onto the court, already 6-foot-3 and growing, looking so much like his father, wearing his father’s number. He can’t miss that night from 3-point range, and in the stands, next to his mom, sits a man who’d seen Tony play. The hairs on the back of the man’s neck stand up. It is as if he has seen a ghost.
JANUARY 2008
Ghosts of Mississippi
In 1962, the Ole Miss campus erupted in violence over integration and swelled with pride over a powerful football team. Mississippi native Wright Thompson explores how that tumultuous fall still grips the state.
When I was 5 or 6, because of my dad’s political activism in the Mississippi Delta, local white supremacists burned a cross in our front yard. My parents had a decision to make: Wake me up, or let me sleep. They chose sleep. On that night, hate and fear would not be passed to another generation.
In the years that followed, my parents raised my brother and me to leave old prejudices behind. They enforced strict rules that made our home something of an oasis. Respect all people. Understand other points of view. And, of course, no N-word, ever, under any circumstance. That certainly made our house different from many in town. My dad ran the local Democratic Party, so I grew up around whites and blacks, which also made me different from many of my friends. Still, there were things never discussed. We never really talked much about the civil rights era, about things my parents had seen. The South during the ’60s was like that cross in our front yard: something they experienced but wanted to shield their children from.
Once I grew up and moved away, I began to study the history of the South. The 1962 Ole Miss football team fascinated me. That year, perhaps because of the school’s near self-destruction over integration, or perhaps in spite of it, the team managed the most remarkable season seen in Oxford before or since. The star quarterback, Glynn Griffing, was born near my family’s farm, which his uncle managed, and my dad idolized him growing up, wearing No. 15 as a high school quarterback to be just like Glynn. It was the team that made my dad love football. It was also a team not discussed much, just a quick story here and there. They seemed forgotten, their legend small despite big accomplishments, and I wanted to find out why.
A few months back, I dove into the Ole Miss library’s special collection, containing records and artifacts from the 1962 riots. Each page changed the way I looked at the place around me, the way I looked at the places inside myself where I love my state and its traditions. Why hadn’t I been taught any of this in school? I’d had an entire Mississippi history class in junior high. We talked mostly about Indians. More recently, my aggravation had been stoked by ignorant election emails from my great-uncle in Jackson, ones that seemed to be from a time long past.
I came upon a box containing two small notebooks used by the soldier tasked with guarding James Meredith, the first AfricanAmerican student at Ole Miss. They were Nifty brand, cost a dime, and were filled with descriptions of suspicious characters, of license plate numbers and names. I flipped through the pages . . . until a familiar name stopped me cold.
My great-uncle, the emailer’s brother. Last name: Wright.
Two questions went through my mind:
What is the cost of knowing our past? . . .
And what is the cost of not?
I. THE BATTLE
1. SEPTEMBER 25, 1962
Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy places a phone call to Ross Barnett, the segregationist governor of Mississippi. They’ve been talking for weeks now. Every day, it’s a different story. Mississippi politicos joke that whoever gets to Barnett last wins the argument. Kennedy is finding this out firsthand. Federal courts have ordered Ole Miss to admit Meredith. Barnett
is resisting. A bumbling and unpopular politician—he’d been booed at Ole Miss games—he is now soaking in some newfound adulation for standing down the Kennedy brothers. It is a drug, and Barnett’s hooked.
“We have been part of the United States,” he tells Kennedy, “but I don’t know whether we are or not.”
There is silence on the phone. Kennedy doesn’t know what to say, really. It’s 1962. And Mississippi is threatening to secede?
“Are you getting out of the union?” he finally asks.
2. SEPTEMBER 29, 1962
The players can hear the noise. They cannot see anything but the locker room walls inside Mississippi Memorial Stadium in Jackson, but they can hear the noise.
It’s halftime, and Ole Miss is beating overmatched Kentucky, though just barely, 7–0. What’s worse, the Rebels have been uncharacteristically sloppy. Early in the game, bruising fullback Buck Randall, considered by many the baddest SOB on campus, has a touchdown called back because of a penalty. This is not like a team coached by John Vaught, who runs his squad like a corporation. All business, no rah-rah speeches. The critics love to pick on Vaught for his soft schedules, his inability to win a big game, the fact that his team couldn’t tackle LSU’s Billy Cannon three years earlier with a national title on the line, but nobody ever faults his discipline.
The scene in the stands above the locker room is alive with color, a circus of motion, most of the 41,000 spectators furiously waving Confederate battle flags. The band marches onto the field in Confederate battle flag uniforms, carrying the world’s largest Confederate battle flag. The band plays “Dixie.” The crowd sings along, waves those flags, cheers. There are no black fans in the stadium, and on nights like these, it’s easy to forget the South lost the war. In some ways, that’s precisely the point.
A young politician named William Winter looks around and feels like a stranger. How can this be happening? The crowd shakes with indignation, the air filling with Rebel yells, from the mouths of doctors and bankers and lawyers and priests, and Winter thinks: So this must be what a Nazi rally felt like.
The crowd screams for Barnett to speak. Unbeknownst to them, hours earlier, he’d made a secret deal with the Kennedys to have Meredith enrolled. But, once again, he’s on the verge of changing his mind. He has been so hated and now is so loved. He can’t help himself; the enthusiasm of the crowd is taking him out to sea.
A microphone appears at midfield. A single spotlight swings across the field until it illuminates the governor. Barnett walks to the microphone. The crowd falls silent. He raises his right fist. “I loooooove Mississippi!” he yells.
The crowd roars. Even the moderates in the crowd feel chills. The flag waving grows frantic. One hundred and one years earlier, all but four students at Ole Miss dropped out of school to form Company A of the 11th Mississippi Infantry. The University Greys. On July 3, 1863, at Gettysburg, the unit rose from safety and made a futile rush from Seminary Ridge. Everyone was killed or injured, and history named their suicide mission Pickett’s Charge. The school’s sports teams would be called Rebels to honor their sacrifice. The young men and women in the stands today are just three generations removed from those soldiers. One of them, senior Curtis Wilkie, received a letter from his mother before the game. She anticipated what the young man might be feeling: Son, Your great-grandfather Gilmer set out to fight the federals from Ole Miss with the University Greys, called the Lamar Rifles, nearly a hundred years ago. He didn’t accomplish a thing! See that you don’t get involved!!!
William Winter grew up listening to his grandfather tell about riding with the Confederate army. The male students especially, who’ve grown up with similar stories, feel something move deep inside themselves. Later, most will deny it. But tonight, the emotions are real, and in case anyone misses the connection, the next morning’s paper will devote two pages to Robert E. Lee’s march north.
Barnett looks out at them and feels the emotions too.
“I looooooove her people!”
The roar gets louder.
“I looooooove her customs!”
The yelling and screaming drowns him out, and Barnett doesn’t say another word. He doesn’t have to. He stands at midfield, soaking up the love and adulation, a wide grin spread across his face.
3. THE PRIDE BEFORE THE FALL
Mississippi in the fall of 1962 is a doomed civilization at its apogee. Enrollment at Ole Miss stands at an all-time high. The football team has been to five consecutive bowl games, won three SEC championships in the past decade, and gone 27-2-1 in the past three years. In 1959 and 1960, Ole Miss coeds won back-to-back Miss America crowns. Pageant moms around the country send their daughters to Oxford, an invasion of leggy blondes whose influence can still be seen in the state’s gene pool.
Of course, that’s just half of the story. To be an African American in this world isn’t much different than it was in 1861, and the Mississippi of 1962 has been forming in earnest for 14 years, with segregation becoming more and more formalized. In 1948, President Harry Truman signed the first civil rights legislation. That year, something new popped up at Ole Miss football games: Confederate battle flags. The band started playing “Dixie.” Someone commissioned the largest Rebel flag ever for the band to carry onto the field. Vaught, in his second season as coach, gave fans something to cheer about. The football team might not have intended it, but to people in the state, the squad became the last Confederate soldiers. “You see them moving away from this larger national narrative,” says D. Gorton, an Ole Miss student who witnessed the Meredith riots and later became a photographer for The New York Times. “They’re no longer part of the United States. They really saw themselves as an archipelago. That led to their great football. What else would explain it?”
By 1962, the atmosphere is intoxicating for half the population, toxic for the other. A young African American boy named LeRoy Wadlington, who’d grow up to be an influential preacher, lives off the highway leading out of town and learns to dread home football games. Fans, many drunk on illegal booze, yell racial slurs at his family as they inch back home. The black community feels under siege.
On the day of the Kentucky game, radio stations around the state play “Dixie” over and over again. Myrlie Evers, whose husband, Medgar, is head of the Mississippi NAACP, is working in her kitchen, with two radios playing for surround sound, and as the hours go by, she catches herself singing along with the radio: I wish I was in the land of cotton; old times there are not forgotten . . . She is horrified. She despises “Dixie,” but even she is being sucked in.
By halftime, when Barnett has finished his speech, the state is in a frenzy. Leaflets circulate through the stadium with lyrics to a new song, which also had been printed in that morning’s paper. A few people leave in disgust, but many stay and sing:
Never, never, never, never
No, never, never, never
We will not yield an inch of any field.
Fix us another toddy, ain’t yielding to nobody.
Ross is standing like Gibraltar; he shall never falter.
Ask us what we say, it’s to hell with Bobby K.
Never shall our emblems go
From Colonel Reb to Old Black Joe.
That’s all Barnett needs to hear. The deal is off. James Meredith will not be enrolled.
Never.
4. SEPTEMBER 29, 1962
Vaught brings his team out for the second half. He knows the whole state is being pulled into something, and it’s his job to keep it from destroying his squad. This group has worked so hard the past few years, and these players seem capable of finally getting it right. Seven times in the past 14 years, he has come within one loss or one tie of a perfect record. It eats at him.
The Rebels go on to beat Kentucky, though they manage just one more touchdown. As the players are pulling on their street clothes, Barnett heads back to the governor’s m
ansion, where he will call Washington to reveal what he’d decided earlier, amid the halftime adulation: no deal.
In Washington, the wheels are turning. Staff members take papers to President John F. Kennedy that, when signed, will federalize the Mississippi National Guard and begin the process of sending U.S. Army regulars to the South, something he’d desperately hoped to avoid.
Kennedy sits down in the Treaty Room to sign and date the document. “Is it past midnight?” he asks.
“It’s 20 seconds past 12,” a staffer says.
Kennedy nods, signs the order, then writes the date: September 30, 1962. The genie is out of the bottle, and no force on earth, least of all Ross Barnett, will be able to push it back in.
5. SEPTEMBER 30, 1962
James Meredith waits. He has been waiting his entire life. When he was just a kid, his daddy told him stories about their family, about how his great-grandfather had been the last legitimate chief of the Choctaw Nation. The indignity of that fall from grace cast a shadow on Meredith’s early life, and it shaped him, convinced him to leave segregated Mississippi and join the Air Force, sent him to Asia, brought him back home a 29-year-old who wanted to destroy white supremacy. On the day of Kennedy’s inauguration, he applied to Ole Miss.
In other words, he has been preparing for this moment for decades, mostly getting his mind ready, reading, trying to find out the secret to ordinary men doing extraordinary things. One thing he read sticks with him. Back in the day, he says, the reigning pope and his army conquered Rome, and after the battle, the pope walked alone into the city, stone cold, to show people that he had no fear of troops or weapons or death. He knew his calm in the face of such danger would intimidate those who wished him harm. For years, Meredith has practiced making the face he imagines the pope’s face must have looked like on his lonely stroll into Rome.
The Cost of These Dreams Page 6
