The Ghosts of Mississippi

by Maryanne Vollers

  Her father was so light-skinned he could pass for white. He was, in fact, the son of a white man, which was common enough in the piney hills of Scott County.

  Jessie Wright’s daddy, the story goes, once shot a white man, or maybe two, or maybe just shot at them. The reason, it’s said, is that someone called him a “half-assed mulatto,” and he pulled his gun and started shooting. That was the last he was seen, at least officially, around Scott County. He hit the road to save his life. Over the years he’d show up from time to time.

  Liz Evers tells a story of how she and Eva were staying with her Aunt Dora, Jessie’s sister, down in Forest. One summer’s day a white stranger came to the door.

  “Aunt Dora!” Eva shouted. “There’s a white feller calling!”

  Dora took a look and laughed. “That’s no white man!” she said. “That’s your granddaddy.”

  Jessie Evers was a religious woman. She helped build the Church of God in Christ, the Pentecostal Holiness church just up the street in Decatur. She read from the Bible, and she reared her children with a firm, loving hand. The children went to church all day every Sunday. Jim was a Baptist, so sometimes they went to two churches. They weren’t allowed to carry on and go to dances. Ball games and church. That was all the entertainment that was allowed.

  As religious as she was, Jessie Evers had a spitfire in her too. She was a plump woman in her later years, but she moved herself like a queen. People would tease her, saying, “Mama Jessie, the way you walk, you carry your hips like each side is worth a million dollars!”

  “Baby, more than that!” she would laugh.

  She was an excellent cook, and her macaroni and cheese, fried corn, biscuits, and banana pudding were a minor legend in Decatur. Naturally she was very popular with visiting ministers around supper time.

  Liz remembers how it irked Medgar that the preachers would eat all the best food and leave scraps for the children. One Sunday he sat at the table and watched one buttery biscuit after the next disappear into the preacher’s mouth. When there was just one left, Medgar couldn’t contain himself.

  “Pass ’em!” he said, and reached across the preacher for the last biscuit. He got whipped for that.

  Medgar didn’t get whipped all that much. He had a mischievous streak — he would torment his sisters and sneak food, like all boys will — but he was basically a studious, serious child.

  Not like Charles. All their lives Charles and Medgar were held up against each other. Medgar was always the good boy, and Charles was the bad one. They were so close but so different, like flip sides of the same copper coin.

  Charles was sneaky and tough, prickly and defensive. He wouldn’t let anybody get the better of him, and in that he was like his father. Medgar was more like his mother. Good-natured. Tender.

  Charles would tease Medgar without mercy. He nicknamed him “Lope” after Brother Loper, a deacon in Mama’s church whom Medgar disliked. He pushed Medgar into the fishing hole to teach him how to swim.

  Still it broke Charles’s heart to see Medgar get cold or hurt. He would do things for him, like every frosty winter night when Daddy ordered the boys to bed, Charles would climb in first to warm up the spot where Medgar would sleep. Medgar was the only one who could reach him that way. Charles protected his younger brother like he would protect the soft part of himself.

  The neighborhood boys called Charles “Dermp.” That was the white man who would come into the Negro section to sell housewares and Bibles. Charles got that name because he would do anything to make a nickel: he would sell the tinfoil from cigarette packs, dig up scrap metal from old fields, sell pop bottles. Charles knew instinctively that money was freedom, money was power.

  Charles and Medgar hated the white salesmen who came to the Quarter. They would walk into a Negro’s house uninvited, without a knock, and sell their goods. Colored folks couldn’t sell to the whites.

  So Charles and Medgar look their small revenge, organizing little rebellions to help even the score. Things would go wrong. The furniture man’s tire would spring a leak, or the gate to the watermelon truck would swing open, spilling the melons all over the road. Medgar and Charles put bags on their heads to jump the white paperboys and scatter their newspapers. If Medgar and Charles weren’t allowed to be paperboys in their own neighborhood, neither would they. Mama had always taught them they were no better or worse than anyone else, and they believed her.

  Still, the world of black and white is hazy to a young child. Black or white, all a child knows at first is his family, and only as years go on do the outlines of the outside world take shape and sharpen. The rules of race, the stilted etiquette that goes along with it, is as incomprehensible as all the other rules a child must learn: wash your hands before supper, go to bed before dark, don’t go out of the yard, stay out of puddles, always call a white man mister, always say yessir or no ma’am, never look them in the eye. Never show them what you feel.

  In the rural south in the days of Jim Crow, the story was the same everywhere. It is a story told by blacks and by whites, by boys and girls who grew up together until they reached a certain age, when suddenly the shadow of race fell between them. In one summer, over a few weeks, sometimes in an afternoon, they would lose their friend and, in a way, their innocence.

  It happened to the Evers boys like it happened to all the others. Medgar and Charles used to play with the Gaines children, Margaret and Bobby, the children of the family that hired Mama Jessie to clean and cook. All through childhood the Evers and Gaines children would run and tumble and nap together. And then one day Mama wouldn’t let the boys come with her to the Gaines house anymore. Margaret was getting too old for them to come around.

  One of Medgar’s best friends was a white boy who lived nearby. One summer he stopped coming over. Before long he was standing in the street with his white friends, and when Medgar walked by, he called him a nigger.

  Nobody had to remind the Evers brothers of how it was.

  Every weekday Medgar and Charles walked to school a mile or more, along the tracks and across the muddy roads of Decatur. Sometimes a bus full of white kids going to their own school passed by, and the children screamed names at them, and the bus driver ran hard into the puddles just to watch the colored boys jump. They often got to school covered with mud.

  The town of Decatur lay on the edge of the hill country, midway between Philadelphia, Mississippi, and the main road that would later become Interstate 20. It was a part of the state where most of the white folks were dirt farmers, and they outnumbered their black neighbors. The whites were a different breed here than they were in the Delta or on the Gulf Coast. Their ancestors came from Appalachia, and they spoke their words with a hard mountain twang. They were clannish and insular, fundamentalist Protestant, and, as a group, they had little tolerance for anyone different.

  Decatur in the thirties was as segregated as it gets. The colored folks couldn’t even drive their cars into town on Saturday. They had to park them at the edge of the Quarter and go in on foot.

  Town was the domain of whites, enemy territory. A black man knew he’d better keep his eyes down, and God help him if a white woman should brush against him on the sidewalk. That alone could get him beaten, even lynched. The best policy was to just walk in the road, get right off the sidewalk if a white was on it. Do your trading in the shops where you could, and head back to the safe part of town.

  There were ways around most rules, even the biggest ones. The white men who prowled the Quarter for Negro girlfriends called the practice “backdoor integration.” It was something the white men might brag about in certain company.

  But if a black man got caught with a white girl, he was as good as dead, or bound for Chicago forever, if he was lucky enough to get out of town.

  Everybody knew what happened to Willie Tingle.

  The full story is passing out of living memory around Decatur, and the old folks remember only what they were told as children. Everyone agrees on this: Willie Ting
le was somehow involved with a white girl — whether he wrote her a letter, insulted her, or actually slept with her depends on who’s talking. He was grabbed by a mob of white men right off the streets of Decatur, dragged past the Quarter, tied to a tree outside of town, and shot.

  Jim Evers knew Tingle. Medgar was in his early teens when he was lynched. The killers stripped Tingle’s body and left the clothes to rot under the tree where he died. Years later Medgar would talk about that lynching, how it disgusted him that a few men could grab Tingle and not one Negro in the town would try to stop it. For months after the killing, Medgar would visit the pasture where it happened and stare at the scraps of clothes, the bloodstains rusted brown, and remember. Charles recalls asking his father why Mister Tingle had to die.

  “Because he was colored, son” was all his father would say.

  Medgar and Charles didn’t have to be told.

  When they walked into town alone, they were vulnerable, two little barefoot colored boys open to the sport of whites. With Daddy it was different.

  For some reason, Jim Evers wasn’t afraid of the white folks. He wouldn’t step off the sidewalk for anyone, and he got away with it.

  Every Christmas Eve the white boys made a game of throwing firecrackers at the black shoppers to make them dance in the street. Jim Evers led his boys to the store and nobody threw anything at them. “They don’t bother us,” Jim told his sons. “Don’t let anyone bother you.”

  Medgar and Charles saw how wild the old man could be one morning at the sawmill commissary. The story of what happened that day is part of the Evers legend now, often repeated and embellished with each retelling.

  On this particular Saturday morning a small crowd of whites was gathered in the store, shooting the breeze around the flour sacks, when Jim Evers came in to settle his bill. Evers bought everything on credit, then paid up at the end of the week. He couldn’t read or write, but he had a talent for numbers, and he could figure sums in his head. And he wouldn’t be cheated.

  The clerk named the figure, and Jim knew it was wrong, maybe five or six dollars more than he owed. He told him so.

  “Nigger, you callin’ me a liar?” the white man asked. The others stopped talking and watched. Charles and Medgar stood by the door, too scared to move.

  “I don’t owe that much,” Evers said quietly. “And I’m not goin’ pay it.”

  The clerk reached behind the counter to get his gun, but Jim Evers moved quick. He grabbed an empty Coke bottle from a crate on the floor and smashed it on the edge of the counter.

  “If you make another move, I’ll bust your brains out,” he said. He aimed the broken glass at the man’s throat.

  The story has been told many times, in different ways. In one version the boys ran out the door and straight on home. The way Charles remembers it, he and Medgar each grabbed a bottle to help, but Jim Evers ordered them out the door. The old man slowly backed out of the store, the white men standing slack jawed, the little clerk shaking and sputtering with outrage.

  “I’ll kill you, nigger,” he shouted.

  “You better not move,” said Evers as he made the door.

  The boys expected the white farmers to pour out after them, whip them or worse, so they started to run.

  “Don’t run, don’t run,” said Evers. “They’re nothing but a bunch of cowards.”

  They walked home together. Charles remembers his daddy putting his big rough hands on the boys’ heads. “Don’t let anybody beat you,” he told them.

  Charles took his father’s words to heart. He was always willing to get the first lick in. That was how he and Medgar were different. Medgar was a peacemaker.

  Charles tested his strong head against other boys, even against his father.

  “You be quiet,”Jim Evers might tell him when he mouthed off at the table.

  “No, you be quiet!”

  BAM! Jim would knock him in the temple, lay him out. Charles took what Daddy said and lived by it.

  Medgar listened to Mama. Mama would pray for you. Charles would come home after a fight with another boy, and she’d say, “Don’t do that; do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

  “But Mom, he’s kicking my behind!”

  “No, don’t fight, that’s not the best way.”

  But Jim Evers would say, “Knock his head off!”

  One morning the family was gathered around the table for Sunday breakfast. It was the bottom of the Depression, breadlines everywhere, hardly any work to go around. The Everses’ table always had something, eggs from the chickens, biscuits, maybe some bacon left over from hog-killing time. Charles sat on one side of his father and Medgar on the other, and the family got to discussing the commodity lines downtown for the out-of-work.

  “Boys, let me tell you something,” said Jim Evers. “I don’t ever want to think of one of you in that soup line, heah? If I thought we were gonna be in that shape, have to go in that soup line, I’d kill every one of you and kill myself too! Don’t you ever get on no soup line, get no commodity.”

  In the quiet that followed, Charles looked at his father, the old man’s face hard with anger, and imagined him actually killing them all.

  Medgar and Charles had a half-brother, Eddie, who was a wanderer. Eddie was a good fifteen years older than Charles. When the boys were half grown, ten and thirteen, they would listen to Eddie’s stories of his travels. He used to ride the rails, he could never sit still, and the young brothers thought he was hopelessly glamorous. They would ride the rails from Decatur to Newton and back, just to be like Eddie.

  One day Eddie came home complaining of a headache. He took to bed and died without ever seeing a doctor. The family thought later it must have been a brain tumor.

  Charles was crushed. It was the first time anybody that close to him had died. He couldn’t eat and he couldn’t cry. He would just sit on the porch, listening to the trains roll through town.

  Mama Jessie took in boarders to make extra money, and one of these men taught Charles to drive a car. He also taught him the bootlegging business.

  When Prohibition ended, Mississippi stayed dry. There were enough Baptists to vote against liquor in every county and enough sheriffs and tax collectors getting rich from payoffs that nobody wanted to ruin the system. This didn’t mean liquor wasn’t available, or even sold openly in some places. The illegal sale of liquor was even taxed by the state — it was called the bootleg tax. Bootlegging was big business, and Charles wanted in. So he found out where the boarder bought his whiskey wholesale, and he started buying it too. Jim and Jessie Evers hated bootlegging, and they never knew what he was doing.

  Charles would never touch a drop — he never has in his life, he says. And he never smoked or gambled. It was a waste of money, for one thing. And he wouldn’t have anything control him, nothing habit- forming. He always had to be in control.

  Charles later went to live in the town of Forest with Mark Thomas, an uncle who owned a funeral business. Since Charles could drive, he helped out with the ambulance-hearse. And when Uncle Mark was out of town, Charles would sometimes take Medgar to Vicksburg, where he could buy bottled whiskey from Louisiana. Charles would load it up in the back of the hearse and run back to Forest with the siren wailing. Nobody would think to stop a Negro ambulance.

  Charles would stack the liquor behind the bottles of embalming fluid in his uncle’s storeroom and sell pints to the honky-tonks in Scott County. It was the beginning of his serious business career.

  When Medgar Evers outgrew the one-room schoolhouse in Decatur, he had to walk the twelve miles to the nearest Negro high school in Newton. Eventually he boarded there during the week. There was never any question that he would go to school or that he would finish. Even the girls in the Evers family got some higher education, and that was rare in those days. But then World War II came, and Medgar dropped out in the eleventh grade to join the army. Charles had already signed up.

  The war separated the brothers at last. Charles was se
nt to the Pacific, and Medgar went to Europe. Medgar sent his salary home to his mother. A person could keep an account at the post office, up to twenty-five hundred dollars. Medgar filled his limit. Charles sent money home as well. By the time the brothers came back from the service, there were four new rooms on the house and indoor plumbing, and the old woodstove was gone at last.

  3

  The Veteran

  The photograph of Byron De La Beckwith in his high school annual reveals a somewhat homely boy with slick black hair brushed from a wide forehead, prominent ears, intensely friendly eyes, and a broad grin. His is a salesman’s face, the face of a future Rotarian, Kiwanian, or Shriner. It is the face of someone who has to compensate for the fact that the list of activities printed under his picture shows only one entry: Study Club, 3. It is the face of someone who won second place in two senior categories. He was voted the second friendliest boy and second wittiest boy in the Greenwood High School Class of 1940. If there had been a category for most eccentric, Beckwith might have, for once in his life, come in first.

  His Greenwood neighbors remember Byron De La Beckwith as a sweet, lonely child. He was raised by men, very strange gentlemen bachelors who lived in a big, spooky old house near the center of town. His father died when he was five, and he was twelve when his mother succumbed to cancer. It was a somewhat unmentionable disease in those days. Her death made Beckwith even more conspicuous in a small town where he had the social disadvantage of being born in California. He was an outsider, and he was an orphan in a community that valued conformity and tradition. His strongest suit was his family name and his relation to the Southworths and the Yergers and the Kimbroughs, who were among the oldest and most powerful families in the Delta.

  Beckwith’s maternal grandfather was Lemuel Purnell Yerger, who ran off to join the Confederate army when he was sixteen. He rode as a courier with the wild Tennessee general Nathan Bedford Forrest until he was wounded and captured by Yankees. After the war the young man returned from a P.O.W. camp, still a private but with a limp and a legend that enhanced his status in town. He soon started calling himself the Colonel.