The Black Russian

by Alexandrov, Vladimir

  Initially at least, Dickerson’s multilayered trap worked. Lewis and India thought they knew him well. So, they must have reasoned, if Dickerson was good enough to warn them of the dangers they faced from the whites around them, and if he said that they had to sign their farm over to him to make things right between them, he must be telling the truth, and they had to do what he said. Accordingly, on February 10, 1886, they signed the deed, although for a reduced and recalculated debt of $9,600.

  Lewis and India had lost everything that they, and Hannah, had worked for during the past seventeen years. But at least they could get away from Coahoma County with their lives and children. Or so they thought. They waited one week, then another. The promised wagon and two mules never arrived, and neither did the $2,000. When Lewis sought out Dickerson and confronted him about the delay, the white man flatly denied ever having made the promise.

  Given Dickerson’s wealth and prominence, it is hard to understand what would have motivated him to try to take the Thomases’ land in the first place. He owned around eight thousand acres between Clarksdale and Friars Point, of which four thousand were under cultivation, as well as a store with goods worth $8,000 and various buildings and land in Friars Point worth more than $50,000; and he had interests in several Friars Point factories. The Thomases’ 625 acres and other possessions were minuscule in comparison. Could Dickerson have been seeking to take what he believed was legally his? Or could it be that the rich white man thought he could simply brush the black couple aside because their success was “obnoxious” to his racist sensibilities? Subsequent events would suggest that the Thomases had become victims of an ignominious episode in the Dickerson family’s past.

  For the Thomases, Dickerson’s reneging on his promise meant they were now destitute. But rather than meekly accept this new blow, Lewis and India found the strength to rally. They began to doubt what Dickerson had told them. Although they did not keep many paper records on their farm, they did have good memories, especially when it came to cotton harvests. Furthermore, Lewis and India had tenants or sharecroppers who had worked their land and who also remembered what years had been good, middling, or bad. When they all put their recollections together and tallied the bales of cotton they produced each year and what the bales were worth, and when they recalculated all the other business transactions that they had naively entrusted to Dickerson’s reckoning, Lewis and India could not understand how they could owe him the enormous sum he claimed. Had Dickerson in fact credited them for all the cotton that they had delivered to him? Was not the interest he had charged them “excessive and usurious”? Had he not “wrongly charged them” for “illegal and unwarranted items”?

  Also very troubling was Lewis and India’s discovery that none of their white neighbors had actually written the threatening letters to Dickerson that he had pretended to read to them. They concluded that Dickerson had invented these in order to frighten them, to make them anxious to get out of the county, and to accept his low offer of a buyout. Fighting him would be difficult because of his and his family’s wealth and prominence. But the Thomases felt so wronged by what he had done that, in an extraordinary display of courage, they resolved to seek justice anyway.

  Swindles such as this were not rare in the South and often had a crippling effect not only on the victims but also on their children. A young black man in a different state whose father had been cheated out of his property by whites concluded: “it weren’t no use in climbin too fast … weren’t no use in climbin slow, neither, if they was goin to take everything you worked for when you got too high.”

  However, Frederick learned a very different lesson, judging by his behavior in subsequent years. He was thirteen in the spring of 1886 and old enough to understand the kind of elaborate deception that his parents were facing. Growing up in Coahoma, he would have known from earliest childhood the belittlement, hostility, and violence to which blacks were routinely subjected. But his parents’ reaction was hardly the usual response to such treatment, and it showed him the possibility of fighting for what was his no matter who the opponent or how slim the chance of victory. Even though the circumstances would differ markedly in Moscow and Constantinople, Frederick would show the same kind of tenacity there when he faced attempts by merchants, moneylenders, and lawyers to cheat him.

  The Thomases must have been greatly encouraged by the willingness of a small team of prominent lawyers (all white, of course) to take on their case—George F. Maynard and the brothers Will D. and John W. Cutrer. John, or “Jack,” Cutrer was also a politician with good connections who would marry well and become a rich, notorious, and flamboyant figure in Coahoma County. (In 1890, in the midst of the protracted Thomas lawsuit, he would shoot dead in broad daylight a white newspaperman who had questioned the purity of his white ancestry; and he would get away with it.) By contrast, Dickerson had only one lawyer, Daniel Scott. This imbalance suggests that there may have been some degree of antipathy among leading whites toward Dickerson—and the suggestion is borne out by later events.

  On May 6, 1886, Lewis filed a lawsuit in the Coahoma County Courthouse in Friars Point against Dickerson. He sought to cancel the deed transferring the farm to Dickerson; to have the accounts between them reexamined, recalculated, and purged of usurious interest and illegal charges; and to receive credit for all the sums to which he was entitled and which Dickerson had denied him. Dickerson must have been taken aback by the audacity of Lewis’s lawsuit. Not only was this black man trying to wrest a fine piece of property from his hands just when he had seized it; he was also impugning a white man’s honor in full public view and with the assistance of other leading whites.

  But there was even more reason for Dickerson to be outraged. The lawsuit would also resurrect memories of a series of scandals in his family’s past involving an especially sordid intersection of race and money.

  The Dickerson family’s roots in the area went back to the early days of white settlement in Coahoma County. Around 1847, three brothers from Maryland—Peter, Levin, and George Dickerson—bought land and established what became several of the largest and richest plantations in the county’s northwest quadrant. Peter was William Dickerson’s father.

  The first scandal in the family involved Levin, William’s uncle. He never married but chose instead to live more or less openly with a black woman named Ann from 1855 until his death in 1871. Although before and during the Civil War many white men in the South kept slave women as concubines and sexually assaulted slaves at will, interracial marriage had been illegal under slavery. An open liaison was still a rare occurrence even after the Civil War and was seen as deeply shocking by white planters. Moreover, Ann and Levin had two children, Susan and Oliver, and Levin acknowledged them despite their “illegitimacy.” These two embarrassing offspring were William’s first cousins. When Levin died, leaving “a large real and personal estate” worth $115,000, his two children assumed they would inherit it all. However, Peter Dickerson and his family had other plans. Peter himself, his daughter Mary, and her husband, W. N. Brown, sued in the Coahoma County Chancery Court to get possession of Levin’s land and property by claiming that they alone were his legal heirs. They won, and Mary and her husband took over the plantation from Susan and Oliver to work as their own.

  Despite the racial barriers they faced, Susan and Oliver decided to fight back and appealed the lower court’s decision to the Mississippi supreme court. It is testimony to this body’s honesty and diligence, and to the unusually liberal moment in Mississippi during Reconstruction in October 1873, that the state supreme court overturned the lower court’s decision. It ruled that Ann and Levin Dickerson had lived in a state of de facto marriage after the Civil War, and therefore their mixed-race children were Levin’s legal heirs. As a result, Susan and Oliver received their inheritance, and Peter Dickerson, his daughter, and his son-in-law had to give up the plantation.

  There is thus a resemblance between William Dickerson’s attempt to take Lewis and India�
�s property and the attempt that his father, Peter, and members of his family made to take Susan and Oliver’s. Moreover, because William was eighteen years old in 1873, he must have known every last detail of the shameful story, even if there is no evidence that he had been directly involved himself.

  Everyone else in Coahoma County would have known about it as well, because the state supreme court’s decision legitimizing a white-black marriage and recognizing mixed-race children as legal heirs was so shocking that it reverberated throughout Mississippi. One newspaper in Jackson, the state capital, angrily condemned the decision because it equated “the sanctity of the marriage tie” to “the beastly degradation of concubinage” and because it let “copulation thrive.”

  There can be no doubt that everyone in the large Dickerson clan who was still alive in 1886, when William made his move against the Thomases, remembered the 1873 decision. Indeed, it is possible that when William first rode out with the threatening “letters” intending to scare off the successful black man, he had the earlier reversal in mind and was hoping for a form of revenge. What he could not have anticipated, however, is the way his plan would backfire and how this would lead to uncanny reminders of the family fiasco in 1873.

  The case Lewis brought against William Dickerson was complex and dragged on in the Coahoma County Chancery Court for nearly three years (before undergoing a spectacular twist that would give it new life for another five). It is unclear how the Thomases lived in the interim, without the farm that had been their livelihood. Perhaps this is the time when they ran a boardinghouse in Clarksdale, as Frederick recalled later. Both sides in the suit asked for and received extensions to gather additional evidence and testimony; there were additional delays.

  When the court finally handed down the decision on April 19, 1889, it could not have been a bigger shock, especially for William Dickerson. Lewis and India Thomas won on all counts. Not only did the court order Dickerson to return the property to them, but a recalculation of the accounts between them showed that he owed the Thomases a sum nearly identical to what he had claimed they owed him in 1886. The court also summarized Dickerson’s behavior in a way that was even more insulting than the verdict itself. He had made “misrepresentations” to the Thomases, had betrayed their naive trust in him, and had cheated them when he did not deliver the promised wagon, mules, and money. Incensed, Dickerson swore that he would appeal to the Mississippi supreme court.

  Although the Coahoma court’s decision was a resounding confirmation of the Thomases’ claims, other powerful forces were at play around their case as well. One would not necessarily have expected truth and justice alone to triumph in a case in the Delta that pitted a black couple against a rich and well-established white planter. It is possible that personal relations between Lewis and influential whites in Coahoma County could have played a role in how the court viewed him and even in the trial’s outcome, especially if William Dickerson had enemies. And he did.

  Coahoma County was a contentious place in the 1880s and there were many causes that divided whites. One of the major issues for some was the location of the county courthouse. It had been in Friars Point since the 1860s, but in the 1880s a faction formed that wanted it moved to the growing town of Clarksdale. A leader of this group, and a son-in-law of Clarksdale’s founder, was none other than Jack Cutrer, one of the Thomases’ lawyers. By contrast, Daniel Scott, William Dickerson’s lawyer, was a well-known proponent of keeping the courthouse in Friars Point. The two factions went so far as to disrupt each other’s meetings, to arm themselves with clubs and guns, and to threaten each other with bodily harm. Their conflict became so notorious that news of it was reported as far away as Boston in 1887. At stake were not only the seat of local power and the trickle-down effect this would have on local business and development. Even more important was where railroads would be built through the Delta to link Memphis and points north with Vicksburg and ultimately New Orleans. Peter Dickerson owned a plantation ten miles north of Clarksdale but only three from Friars Point. He succeeded in having a train station built on his property in 1889 and named it after his son William. Perhaps this kind of bold and lucrative initiative put the Dickersons at odds with Cutrer and his Clarksdale allies and influenced the Cutrer brothers’ decision to take on the Thomases’ case. Local political and electoral rivalries may have played a similar role as well.

  A year after the Coahoma court had delivered its verdict, the supreme court of Mississippi considered William Dickerson’s appeal during its April 1890 term. In their official “Opinion,” the justices complained that they found the hundreds of pages of testimony and documents they had to review overwhelming and unclear. As a result, the ruling they handed down was mixed and confusing.

  On the one hand, the justices affirmed the lower court’s decision to cancel Lewis’s transfer of his land to Dickerson in 1886. This would seem to have been a confirmation of Lewis’s victory. But on the other hand, the justices undermined the entire evidentiary basis of the lower court’s decision and thus of Lewis’s victory by ordering that his accounts with Dickerson be recalculated. They also ridiculed the Thomases’ other claims against Dickerson, the lower court’s procedures, and the portrait that his lawyers had painted of Lewis as a simple and uneducated black man. The only real criticism of Dickerson was that on occasion he charged the Thomases too much interest. Nevertheless, it is clear that the justices did not find the Thomases’ case against Dickerson to be entirely without merit (or, perhaps, the influence of local Coahoma politics a matter of complete indifference).

  The two sides in the lawsuit must have found the supreme court’s decision confusing as well. Lewis and his lawyers naturally focused on the part that appeared to favor them. Thus, on June 7, 1890, Lewis asked the local court to issue him a “writ of assistance” so he could get his property back, a request to which the court agreed. At the same time, the court ordered that all accounts between him and Dickerson be reexamined to determine once and for all who owed what to whom.

  Dickerson’s plans had been thwarted for the second time by the unlikely coalition of a black couple and the local white judicial system. He immediately decided to reappeal to the Mississippi supreme court. The stakes had now risen for the Thomases, and fighting Dickerson had become more difficult, but they were not about to give up. During most of this time, they did not have possession of their farm or receive income from it, and they could not have had much cash on hand. Consequently, two days after Dickerson announced his intention to reappeal, the Thomases deeded one-half of their farm to their lead lawyer, Jack Cutrer, as a retainer and gave him a lien on the remainder in case he incurred any other expenses. Because they badly needed some money just to get by, the deed also stipulated that Cutrer would give them ten dollars in cash when they signed.

  William Dickerson and his family were unlikely to have been the only whites in the county who saw the Thomases as troublemakers needing to be taught a lesson. By the late 1880s, Mississippi was becoming the “lynchingest” state in the entire country. This would have been a prudent time for the Thomases to leave. In fact, they appear to have abandoned Coahoma County and moved to Memphis during the summer of 1890, after they deeded their farm to Cutrer. This was the nearest city to Friars Point and was located only some seventy miles away, which meant that it was far enough to establish a safe distance from possible threats but close enough to allow them to keep an eye on the lawsuit’s progress.

  By 1890, Memphis had a population of some sixty thousand, with 56 percent white and 44 percent black, and was a major business hub. It was the largest inland cotton market in the United States and shipped 770,000 bales a year to fabric mills at home and abroad, especially to England. River transport on the Mississippi and railroads linking the rest of the country with the South further enhanced the city’s economic importance and made it an attractive place to seek work.

  Although Memphis became a temporary haven for the Thomases, it was hardly a model of racial tolerance. In 186
6, the city had seen one of the worst race riots in the South following the Civil War; and in the 1880s lynchings began to increase. But Memphis was also big enough to allow a new black family to blend in without trouble.

  Lewis and India rented a house at 112 Kansas Avenue, at the corner of Carolina Avenue, in the Fort Pickering section on the city’s southern edge. In those days, this was a suburban and mostly black part of town. The house was a roomy, long and narrow, two-story frame structure with a yard on two sides and a stable in the back, in the middle of what might be called today a mixed residential and industrial zone. It was a busy, noisy, smelly, and gritty place. A wood yard was directly across the street, and the Milburn Gin and Machine Company, which occupied an entire city block and included various manufacturing shops and storage areas, was diagonally across. The depot for the Kansas City, Memphis and Birmingham Railroad lay one block to the west. Tracks from one of its branches passed right in front of the Thomases’ house and forked several doors away; another set of three tracks ran directly behind the stable in their backyard. The screech of steel wheels and the howls of steam whistles as trains went back and forth on all sides, the billows of acrid black coal smoke, and the dust that settled everywhere must have been a shock at first for country youngsters like Frederick and Ophelia, who were used to the lush green vistas, placid bayous, and sweet-smelling breezes of Coahoma County.