The Ghosts of Mississippi

by Maryanne Vollers

  He trained at San Diego and shipped out with the Second Marine Division for the first Battle of Guadalcanal and the Solomon Islands campaign. Beckwith saw some action and then cooled his heels in New Zealand for nine months. He took up reading for the first time and managed to memorize the entire Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. In November 1943 his division was positioned to join one of the bloodiest campaigns of the Pacific, in the Gilbert Islands.

  The Tarawa atoll had been British territory until the Japanese captured the island group in December 1941. They had heavily fortified an air base at Betio, and that was the object of the Marine assault.

  In Line of Departure, a book later written about the Battle of Tarawa, Corporal Byron De La Beckwith is mentioned as a “happy-go-lucky youngster,” who went into battle with copies of the Bible and The Rubaiyat in his pack. The stroppy little Marine also carried a straight razor in case an enemy soldier jumped him during the assault. He was a forward machine gunner on an amphibious tractor vehicle in the first wave of Marines to land at Betio.

  The night before the landing Beckwith prayed “fervently” to keep from showing fear. The next morning, as Beckwith’s amtrak churned across the shallow reef, the invading force came under withering fire. There were nearly 5,000 Japanese troops dug in on Betio. There were 5,600 Marines and 125 amtracs to take the beach.

  Four hundred yards from shore, Beckwith’s .50-caliber machine gun jammed. Rather than hit the deck with his fellow Marines, who were taking heavy casualties as bullets ripped straight through the armored bow, Beckwith scrambled aft and yanked out the .30-caliber gun. He wrestled it forward and placed it in the forward mount. Beckwith kept firing as the amtrac hit a reef one hundred yards from the beach. Then a spray of machine gun fire splintered the gun mount and jammed his weapon. As the story was told, Beckwith still didn’t duck. Rather than discourage the men, a third of whom were wounded by now, he made a show of pretending to fire the big gun. This, of course, drew Japanese fire right at him, and he was flipped back to the deck with a bullet in the thigh. The vehicle made it to shore, dispatched the Marines who could still walk, and withdrew with the wounded, including Beckwith.

  As it pulled back, the vessel was hit by a mortar round. Beckwith and the others plunged into the sea. Machine gun fire continued to rake the water.

  “Disperse!” someone yelled.

  “Disperse, hell!” shouted Beckwith. “Submerge!”

  Beckwith dove and grabbed onto coral as bullets dropped around him. He floated in that reef for hours until the battle subsided and he was rescued by a light tanker. From there he was evacuated to the hospital ship Solace to begin a long rehabilitation. His war was over.

  Tarawa was one of the most savage battles in the history of the Marine Corps. In Beckwith’s unit of 500 men there were 343 casualties. In all 1,027 Americans were killed and 2,292 wounded. Of the Japanese troops defending the atoll only 17 survived.

  Beckwith returned to Greenwood at the end of the war with a Purple Heart, which he gave to Uncle Will. He also brought home a bride. Mary Louise Williams was a Wave, a big, dark-haired, broad-hipped woman from east Tennessee. They met while he was recuperating from his wounds.

  She was not at all the southern ideal of a suitable gentleman’s wife. Although her family descended from Roger Williams, she was considered lower-class by Greenwood society. She was not ladylike. Her nickname, in fact, was “Willie.” And she spoke with a grating hill twang, not a soft Delta drawl. She talked loud and she swore like a sailor. She drank hard.

  Beckwith was deeply in love with her. Their marriage distanced him from his rich planter cousins, but Delay didn’t seem to care. He came visiting with her anyway, proud as he could be. But people noticed that he would sometimes correct her in front of them, criticize her grammar or her manners, and she would get mad. Before long there would be a fight. As the years went on, the fights got worse.

  Delay and Willie lived in the big old George Street house for a time after the war. Then Beckwith used the G1 Bill to buy a small place in town. Before long Willie gave birth to a son, who was named after his father. They called him “Little Delay.”

  Beckwith’s old friends and cousins noticed that he was cockier than before, as if he figured he could take on anything and anybody. Beckwith was drinking quite a bit, going out at night with other couples and men who had been through the war. He had always been mischievous and carefree; now he was edgy and more serious than before. He had a strong opinion about most everything. And there was something else: he was bitter. About what, it was hard to say. Nobody can remember him carrying on about blacks and Jews in these days. His bitterness didn’t seem to have a focus. There was just a hardness to him that hadn’t been there before, a pervading sense of loss and regret and disappointment at the way things were.

  To those who knew him casually Beckwith was still as gregarious and courtly as ever. His natural eccentricity percolated to the surface time and again, manifesting in harmless ways. It showed up as exaggerated courtesy, strange jokes, and increasing religious fundamentalism. None of these things set him that far apart in the rural South, where eccentricity was expected and deep religious beliefs were the norm. Beckwith even seemed to be joining Greenwood’s postwar middle class. He found his calling as a salesman for the New Deal Tobacco Company. The little firm, owned by a family of Italian immigrants, issued him a car, which he used to hawk cigarettes and snuff to one-room country stores up and down the Mississippi Delta.

  It is tempting to imagine him then, tooling along the arrow-straight back roads, through towns named Panther Burn, Money, and Midnight, passing in the dust, unaware, another car bearing a traveling businessman, a veteran, a black man whose path would someday cross with his own.

  4

  Brave New World

  America needed soldiers, and it didn’t care what color they were. For the first time black men were actively recruited for combat. But the services were still segregated in World War II and Medgar Evers was assigned to the 325th Port Company, where only the officers were white. The 325th followed the Normandy invasion into France and moved inland and south with the Allied troops.

  The names of the cities were like strange music to a seventeen-year-old from Mississippi: Le Havre, Cherbourg, Antwerp. Europe was exotic and exciting, and the white folks didn’t seem to have the same attitudes as those back home. There was no Jim Crow, not once you got away from your unit. Even there it was different. There was a white lieutenant who took an interest in him, encouraged him to work on his vocabulary and take pride in himself. Medgar was befriended by one family of French farmers, and he even started courting their daughter. He felt comfortable with whites for the first time in his life. For the first time, he learned that the whole world wasn’t like Mississippi.

  Charles was learning his own lessons on the other side of the world. In basic training he ran crap games and sold bootleg to the soldiers, always on the hustle. That was nothing new. Then he was shipped to the Pacific theater — Australia, then New Guinea. He served with a battalion of combat engineers. He hurt his leg jumping into a foxhole and got reassigned to administrative duty. It increased his business opportunities.

  After the Philippine invasion, Charles Evers found a new line of work. He opened his first brothel in Quezon City. He had ten girls working for him, turning tricks for five dollars each — twice that for officers. It was an integrated establishment and, Charles insists, a clean one. Money was money, and Evers was going to make it by providing services to those in need.

  Meanwhile Charles took some classes in English at the University of Manila business school. That was where he met a good Filipino girl named Felicia. Charles loved Felicia like he never loved anybody before or since. He never even slept with her. He wanted to marry her, but there was no way to do it. He couldn’t stay in the Philippines, and he couldn’t take Felicia back to Mississippi because she was part French and her skin was white. He knew they wouldn’t survive five minutes back home. When he shipped out,
it just tore him up. He knew he would never see her again.

  Medgar also left his French girlfriend behind. He even had to stop writing to her once he got back to Decatur. If certain people found out that he had a white girl in Europe, then Medgar and his family would be in terrible danger.

  The war changed the Evers boys, but it didn’t change Mississippi. Medgar and Charles Evers went overseas to fight fascism and now they had to live under it in their own country. It wasn’t right, and there wasn’t anything to do but change it.

  So in the summer of 1946, Medgar, Charles, and a handful of other young veterans from Decatur took the first step toward resistance. They registered to vote.

  At first they made a big show of walking into the registrar’s office, and they were turned away. Later they quietly slipped onto the rolls. Of the nine hundred or so registered voters in Decatur, they were the only blacks.

  As the primary approached, somebody noticed what had happened, and the nightly visits began. At first it was concerned white people who would knock on Jim and Jessie Evers’s door, warning them that their sons were making a mistake. Then black proxies would show up with the same message and the same vague threats.

  The night before the election, Senator Theodore Bilbo visited Decatur. He told the white people of Newton County that the best way to keep a nigger from voting was to visit him the night before.

  Medgar and Charles and Jim Evers stayed up that night. The brothers set up a cross fire on the road to the house, Medgar with a .22, Charles with his army carbine, but nobody came to visit.

  The next morning, July 2, 1946, was Medgar Evers’s twenty-first birthday. The town of Decatur was so still and empty you could feel the trouble through your skin. Medgar and Charles and the neighbor brothers A. J. and C. B. Needham and two other friends put on their good clothes and walked together to the courthouse. There were rough white men in every doorway, farmers and pulp haulers. The Evers brothers knew every one of them.

  Charles had a pistol in his pocket; C.B. had a .22 strapped to his ankle. The group split up and tried to get in different entrances. Medgar and Charles walked in the front.

  Charles remembers one of the rednecks calling out, “You niggers gonna wind up getting yourself killed, and everyone around you killed.”

  Charles wheeled toward the man. He felt half crazy anyway, like it was time to put it all on the line. Then he felt a tugging at his shirt sleeve and a quiet voice. “Charlie, it ain’t worth it,” said Medgar, and he slowly backed them out the door.

  “You better not follow us!” Charles shouted back, as the six men retreated across the courthouse square. Nobody followed. It only proved to Charles that the white man was a coward, just like his daddy had told him. The people in Decatur might have thought the black veterans were whipped, but Charles and Medgar told themselves they were just waiting for their time to come. Someday they would vote.

  Medgar had been working as a construction laborer after the war while he decided what to do with his life. The incident at the Decatur courthouse seemed to give him some direction. He decided to finish his education and be somebody.

  World War II was the great social leveler in Mississippi. Not only did it reveal the modern world to a generation of farm boys, but postwar programs, like the GI Bill, offered them their first ticket to that world. Veterans were eligible for scholarships. In 1946 Charles was already enrolled at Alcorn College in southwestern Mississippi. Medgar was able to attend a special high school on the campus until he got his diploma.

  Alcorn Agricultural and Mechanical College was the main state college for black students in Mississippi. Jackson State had opened, but Alcorn was the best and oldest public institution. It had been founded on the grounds of Oakland College, a Presbyterian finishing school for the sons of white cotton barons before the Civil War. After the war the white school closed, and the state bought the campus to create a school for the education of newly freed Negro men. It emphasized vocational training in farming and industry.

  When Medgar Evers arrived on campus, all that remained of the original school was Oakland Chapel, a stately Greek Revival edifice that had been built by slave labor, and a rolling lawn of massive live oaks and magnolias.

  Alcorn was a liberal arts school with a limited curriculum. What it did best was turn out teachers for the segregated school system. In 1946 a black teacher’s average salary in Mississippi was $426 per year. A white made $1,211. The educational system was as outrageously unequal as the salaries. Negro children were expected to attend school only a few months of the year when they weren’t needed in the fields. At that time fewer than one-quarter of black children made it to high school, while 62 percent of white children reached the ninth grade.

  Medgar Evers wanted no part of that system. He decided to study business administration. He wanted to own his own business, be his own man. Charles majored in social sciences.

  Both brothers made the football team, and Medgar became a star halfback. Charles always found a way to make a buck, even in college. He started a taxi service for Alcorn students. He and Medgar even sold ham sandwiches out of their dorm room for a profit.

  Meanwhile Medgar was making a name for himself. Not only was he a football star in a sports-obsessed state, but he also was on the track team and debating team, and in the choir and the business club. He edited the campus newspaper. He worked with the YMCA and took part in interracial discussions at Millsaps College in Jackson. He was listed in the national publication Who’s Who Among Students in American Colleges and Universities. He was the editor of the 1951 Alcorn yearbook.

  Like his brother Charles, Medgar dated a lot of women. He never committed to one of them until Myrlie Beasley arrived at Alcorn.

  They met during her first afternoon on campus in the fall of 1950. She was a seventeen-year-old freshman, a tall, thin girl with a strong face that could be beautiful or handsome, depending on the set of her jaw. Her hair was shoulder length and carefully straightened.

  She was standing in her first pair of high heels with a cluster of other freshmen women in front of the student union. Medgar came by with a group of football players, casually checking out the new talent. He saw Myrlie leaning against a lamppost, chatting with a new girlfriend.

  “I think you better get off that light post,” said Medgar. “You might get electrocuted.”

  Myrlie answered with a coltish toss of her head.

  Medgar Evers was tall, good-looking, older than the other students, and polite, with a subtle sense of humor. What he liked about Myrlie was that she was sheltered and innocent and naive. What she liked about him was that he wasn’t.

  Myrlie Beasley was born on March 17, 1933, in the river port city of Vicksburg. Her mother, Mildred Washington Beasley, was only sixteen. Her father, James Van Dyke Beasley, was a twenty-eight-year-old delivery truck driver. The couple separated when Myrlie was an infant, and she was taken in by her paternal grandmother, Annie Beasley. Although her parents drifted in and out of her life in an amiable way for the rest of their days, it was Grandmother Beasley who reared her. Myrlie called her Mama.

  Myrlie grew up in a world of women, in the heart of the Negro middle class in Vicksburg. The family had status. Mama was a retired teacher who had been trained at the Hampton Institute in Virginia. Myrlie’s namesake, Aunt Myrlie Polk, also was a schoolteacher, and her husband, John, was a county agent for the Department of Agriculture.

  There were other strong women in her life. Her mother’s mother, Alice Washington, lived across the street and worked as a domestic servant for a rich white family in town. And in one room of Mama’s house lived Myrlie’s great-great-grandmother, Martha Hoover, an ancient blind woman who had been born in slavery. The Beasley side of the family was so light-skinned because Grandma, as they all knew her, had been “taken in” by a white overseer named McCain. She gave birth to his son, Mama’s father, who looked just like a white man.

  Myrlie remembers her childhood home as a warm and secure place. Aunt Myrl
ie taught her piano; Uncle John indulged her with rides in his shiny black Ford and trips to the candy store. She was the only child, and she was treated like a precious diamond, and as carefully guarded.

  Grandmother Washington cooked and cleaned for a white family, the Robinsons. They were the only white people Myrlie knew.

  She remembers visiting the Robinsons every Christmas to play the piano. Mama would straighten her hair and dress her in white tights and her very best dress. It was always an exciting day, but Myrlie instinctively bristled at having to come in through the kitchen door, not the front door, like the other guests. It was a small but painful nick in her self-esteem, the kind most whites could never, can never understand. Myrlie would play for the family. There would always be a gift for her under the tree. But she was never invited to stay and open it. She left the way she came in.

  There was never a moment when Myrlie Beasley didn’t know that she was a Negro in a white world. She would later say that she knew what she was the moment she took her first breath, born in a bedroom at home instead of a hospital.

  As she got older, she learned the rules of race by instinct, by osmosis. Segregation was just part of the air you breathed back then; it was the way things were. When she went to town, the buses, the water fountains, and rest rooms were separate for whites and blacks, and she knew there were things whites had that she couldn’t use, like pools and libraries. But nobody challenged segregation in her world. Nobody even discussed it.

  Mama and Aunt Myrlie sheltered her as best they could. But there was no way to disguise the meaning of the shabby, used uniforms the Magnolia High School football team had to wear. If you wanted to escape that world for a while in the flickering unreality of the picture show, there was still the dirty “buzzard’s roost” where you had to sit, up away from the white kids, to remind you of what you were. It spoke in a language as loud and clear as the voices that called “nigger” from the shiny yellow school bus as it passed you by.