by Alex Heard
“He wasn’t that,” she said. Then she abruptly started talking about Mrs. Hawkins. “What I was told, as a young woman in my twenties, was that he and this lady were going together and they got caught. And that’s when they had her say rape.” She tried to think of who told her this but couldn’t. “Because you see, in them days, you couldn’t go with no white woman,” she said. “Not down in Mississippi.”
Bridgette cut in with a theory I hadn’t heard before: that McGee and Mrs. Hawkins had had a child together—the twenty-month-old girl, who supposedly was conceived during their affair. The reason McGee crawled into Willette’s room that night, she said, was to visit his own offspring. Bridgette said the baby was starting to show “the black heritage” and that this triggered the frame-up.
“So it shows up in this child?” I said.
“Yeah. But they wouldn’t allow that to be submitted into the trial.”
That sounded far-fetched, and it was the first example of something I would encounter often as I learned more about the McGee case: Somewhere along the line, it stopped being only about verifiable facts. It had become a ghost story, a malleable myth whose realities, lessons, and undercurrents varied tremendously, depending on the perspective of the teller.
At the same time, it was a true story with a terrible ending: McGee lost his life in a humiliating public execution. Della wasn’t ready to open up to me about how it felt to have that in her past—I wondered if she ever would be—but Bridgette was less reticent. I asked her why she was doing this research and what she hoped to accomplish with it.
“I want it to be exposed,” she said. “I think it’s time. I want it to be exposed. I want the truth to be known. I know he wasn’t a perfect man. But if he was killed that way, I want it to be known.”
She said her mother, on her deathbed, had made Bridgette promise to keep looking into the case until she found out what really happened. She wasn’t sure yet what to do about the things she learned; that was something she was praying over.
At this point, Harold cut in and asked, “Would there be something they would do as far as, um, the state of Mississippi maybe acknowledging that the trial was, like, pretty much set up?”
“That’s what we’re thinking,” Bridgette said. “I mean, we know half the people are dead that were involved in the trial. So we’re saying…it does not bring him back, but just the recognition that they committed a crime…. Because they never proved any rape. It was her word against his word.”
I went to Mississippi on my first research trip in the spring of 2005, driving from Santa Fe to Laurel, detouring south for a weekend-long stopover in pre-Katrina New Orleans. It wasn’t the smartest way to get there—total road time, twenty-two hours—but it was worth it. I love the terrain of southern Louisiana and Mississippi, where you can see everything from cypress swamps to blinding sun-and-sand panoramas to highway stretches where the trees are so thick and close that it feels like you’re spinning down a giant green hallway.
I took I-59 out of New Orleans on a Sunday afternoon, heading north and east through the west side of Mississippi’s boot heel, past small towns like Picayune, Poplarville, and Lumberton. The first real city you come to is Hattiesburg, followed by Laurel, which is only about 140 miles from New Orleans. I stopped long enough to drop my stuff at a hotel, then I drove to a place thirty miles farther north: a tiny town, a few miles off the interstate, called Pachuta. I had a fragment of an old newspaper story, published in an African-American newspaper in 1951, that said McGee was buried there somewhere.
In 1951, cemeteries were segregated, and I’d called ahead looking for a funeral home director who might know where the old black graveyards were. I found somebody in a nearby town, Quitman, who said the place I wanted was called Campbell’s. But he couldn’t give me directions. He just knew the name.
Where was Campbell’s? There was nothing in the phone book, so I started knocking on doors, driving back and forth over country roads on a warm, soft-breezed spring afternoon. I banged on the door of a beat-up trailer home with a deputy sheriff’s car parked out front. No answer. I startled a white man in the back office of an empty church. I went inside a convenience store and approached the first person I saw, a tall, heavy black woman in her fifties who was dressed in shorts, bedroom slippers, and a tentlike T-shirt.
“Campbell’s?” she said, frowning and thinking. “Naw. Hold on.” She rounded up every person in the place, as if I were on an important mission. “This man needs to find Campbell’s cemetery. Anybody know?” Nobody knew. She looked perplexed that she couldn’t help.
A few minutes later, I was driving around lost when I pulled up beside a middle-aged black man riding down a woodsy side road on a bike. He said he knew people who knew where Campbell’s was, but could I give him two dollars first? Sure, I said. He pointed down the road and said to go that way and “look for the Jordans.”
A half mile farther in, I found Cleaven Jordan, a short, wiry black man in his late sixties who was working on a car in front of a ranch house. Two younger men looked on and a small dog wiggled and whined as I rolled down the window to explain myself.
“Yeah, I know Campbell’s,” he said, tilting his head and smiling.
“But why do you want to find it?” I told him I was researching the Willie McGee case. Maybe he’d heard of it?
“Oh, yes,” he said softly.
I talked on, telling him I’d recently met one of McGee’s two surviving children and one of his granddaughters. They were gathering information, and we were sharing what we found out.
“OK,” he said, as if that was all anybody needed to hear. “Well, the thing is, I know all about Willie McGee. So you might want to just pull over.”
After I parked, Jordan walked us a few paces down the road, heading south, and then stopped. Standing there, which was nowhere in particular, he took a deep breath and started in on a capsule history of the case.
“Willie McGee was a man who liked women and they liked him,” he began. “Along in there after the war, he got messed up with a white woman and her husband found out. So she called rape on Willie to save her own neck.” I waited for more but that was it. He paused to try and retrieve additional details about where McGee was executed and buried.
“Hold on a second,” he said, pulling out a cell phone. “I’m going to call my uncle. He might know something more.”
The uncle said Campbell’s wasn’t the right place. He told Jordan to send me to a pair of rural church cemeteries a few miles west of the interstate. “He thinks he’s in one of those,” Jordan said cheerfully. “You have to remember that when people say Pachuta, they mean them little country places too.”
Twenty minutes later, I pulled up to a redbrick Baptist church called Mt. Pleasant. Nobody was there and the chapel door was locked. In a big downward-sloping lawn behind the building, backed by a thicket of swishing hardwoods, pines, and scrub trees, sat an austere old graveyard. There were dozens of headstones scattered around, many inscribed with the name McGee: Cecil C. McGee, Father Burkie McGee Sr., Elzie Mae McGee. But no Willie McGee or Jasper McGee Sr.—Willie’s father, who’s supposed to be buried there near him. About a third of the graves were unmarked, nothing more than dents in the earth or sunken concrete slabs without headstone or label.
Was McGee in there? I inspected every grave I could find, crawling around to read hidden markers and finger worn lettering. Nothing. I felt sure he was, but he was still out of reach.
Over time, I was able to locate the materials I needed to understand the McGee case better—including a complete transcript of the first trial, which had been missing for years—but there were moments during that initial trip when it seemed like there were nothing left to find but rumors.
Early in the morning on Monday, I started out at the Jones County Courthouse, a two-story building made of brick and stone with tall entryway doors, wide hallways, and big wavy-paned old windows. The courthouse is positioned between Laurel’s now depressed downtown
and its nicest residential neighborhoods, streets built up during the city’s bygone glory days as an agricultural-industrial center fueled by the harvesting and processing of pine trees. For block after block running north, the streets were lined with beautiful homes and a few outright mansions.
The courtroom where McGee died was locked, so I spent most of my time in a side room off the circuit clerk’s office, a small, crowded space where the large bound ledgers of marriage licenses are kept. In McGee’s time, the records were maintained separately by race, and I started with a ledger from the 1930s labeled MARRIAGE RECORD COLORED. It didn’t take long to find the paperwork. McGee and Eliza Jane Payton got their license on April 15, 1935, when he was twenty-one and she was eighteen. She was from Collins, a small town twenty-seven miles to the west. Her parents were named Joe and Eliza Payton. McGee’s parents were named Jasper and Bessie.
There was also a wedding license for Troy and Willette Hawkins, whose maiden name was Dorothy Willette Darnell. They were married on March 16, 1934, when he was twenty-five and she was twenty. Later that day, at the public library, I found a front-page story in the local newspaper, the Laurel Leader-Call, which explained what became of them: On March 25, 1967, Mrs. Hawkins was killed in a car accident inside the Laurel city limits, with Troy at the wheel. He survived the impact but died later at the hospital. There wasn’t a word about the McGee case, and no picture of either of the deceased.
After looking at the licenses, I asked a clerk to bring me whatever she had on McGee. She came back with a folder containing a few scattered pages, including the original indictment, the witness list, verdict slips, and a motion for a continuance from the second trial, which was held in Hattiesburg after a judge ordered it moved out of Laurel. The lead defense lawyer for that one was Jackson-based attorney Dixon Pyles.
Pyles died in 2000, but later that day in Hattiesburg, I met one of his sons, Todd, a retired lawyer who was nice enough to drive down from Jackson and escort me to an archives building at the University of Southern Mississippi, where papers from Pyles’s legal career are kept. The collection was still being processed and was off-limits to researchers, so Todd—a friendly man with a bushy moustache and a courtly Southern accent—spent an hour looking at the finding aid to see if the McGee case was referenced in there. He saw no sign of it.
“To tell you the truth, I don’t think you’re going to find it in here,” he said. “I think he would have given all that stuff to the next lawyer who worked the case.”
Later, the circuit clerk in Hattiesburg, a woman named Lou Ellen Adams, took me to an off-site storage facility where older court records were kept, material that was originally moved as a result of a courthouse fire years earlier. As she’d confided when I phoned her, I wasn’t the first person to ask about McGee. One of Mrs. Hawkins’s daughters had come through months before, looking for the second-trial transcript.
She didn’t find it, and once we got to the facility I could see why. The site was a defunct commercial space in an old shopping center miles from the courthouse. The interior was dark and dusty; mildew in the air stung my throat. On makeshift shelves, in disintegrating boxes, and heaped on the floor in crazy piles, were thousands of old indictments and trial transcripts. It would have taken weeks to look at it all, so I gave up and left.
The next day, back in Laurel, I spent the morning with a sixty-four-year-old African-American woman named Evelyn Smith McDowell, whom I’d been introduced to by a local author named Cleveland Payne. Payne has written several books about the history of blacks in Laurel, and he said he thought McDowell was related to McGee—a distant cousin or something like that.
She lived in a poor part of town, in a long, run-down brick apartment building on the south side of the railroad tracks that split Laurel in two. After greeting me at her front door, she marched me straight through her apartment to a tiny outdoor patio, took a seat in the blazing morning sun, and started shouting answers to my questions. McDowell was short, heavy, and hard of hearing, and had lost most of her front teeth. She was wearing a shiny dirty-blonde wig and a stretched-out gold T-shirt. She did most of the talking.
She started by telling me about a long-dead aunt who had owned a neighborhood grocery store when she was a child. “She lived at 239 South Eighth Avenue,” she said, “and she was the first black lady that had a grocery market on that end of town.” This aunt used to hold evening dances at the store, and Willie McGee, as a young man, would come to them. McDowell claimed to remember seeing him in the early 1940s, when she would have been, at most, a preschooler.
“What was he like?” I asked at one point.
“He was a soft-spoken person,” she said. “To me, he was kinda shy. You would have to kinda force him into talking. He was handsome! But he was very neat. He had deep creases in his pants, he wore white, pretty shirts, and he smelled good all the time. Women liked that he was very clean and kept his hair cut. He was a very handsome man. He wasn’t pretty, but he was handsome enough for you to notice…. The ladies were after him. He wasn’t after them.”
The story she’d heard about the affair represented yet another variation: McGee, she said, was having sex with both the white woman and the woman’s maid. He went away for a while at some point—to Las Vegas or Los Angeles with a friend named T-Bone. When he returned, his plan was to marry the maid and move west, but the white woman wouldn’t allow it. She didn’t mind him messing around with the maid, but she would never let him leave the state.
“When the lady found out about Willie was having a personal affair with this black lady, it was all well and good as long as it was going to be here in Mississippi,” Evelyn said. “But when they decided to leave and go to California together, she got all upset about this rape thing.”
I told her I’d heard that everybody in the black sections of Laurel knew the affair was going on.
“Yeah, we did know. Everybody knew, but wasn’t nothing we could do about it.”
“How did they know?”
“Hey, they would be out in the car, and she’d be kissing him! They would come down through here and there wasn’t anything anybody could do about it, because this is what she wanted to do.”
“But wasn’t that dangerous?”
“Not really. At that particular time, whatever white people said was all right…. The only way you’d get lynched was if she hollers about that you raped her…. If you were black and I was white, as long as I didn’t bother saying you were trying to rape me, it was all right.”
McDowell also talked about the execution, which happened when she was nine. On the afternoon of May 7, 1951, she darted around in downtown Laurel, staying out of the way but peeking here and there to see what was going on. “It was just like something was waiting to happen,” she said, with awe in her voice. “It wasn’t noisy, it wasn’t nobody demonstrating anything. But you could feel it, the tension in the air.”
McDowell didn’t go near the courthouse that night, but she said she clearly remembered that the lights in her part of town went out every time the current was applied to the electric chair, a signal to the downtrodden blacks of Laurel about what would happen if they crossed the line. That didn’t sound possible—the chair was powered by a generator—but I shut up and listened. McDowell went on to say that, the next day, black schoolchildren, including her, were taken in groups to “the Pete Christian funeral home” to view McGee’s body. This was done to teach them a lesson.
“My third-grade teacher, Miss Della Hodge, had us children all in line, and we was just like a couple of ducks, walking across the street,” she said. “They had us to go and look. They said, ‘This is an example to black boys, if they mess with white women.’
“I was terrified,” she said. “You could see that he was a human being, but he was just like a piece of charcoal. He was just black, black, black—burnt black.”
The following Sunday, at a bookstore in a suburban shopping center in Jackson, I finally met two of the Hawkins sisters: Sandra, the mi
ddle daughter and the person who had kept in contact with Mary Mostert, and Dorothy, who was the baby in the bed on the night of the rape. They agreed to meet me after I sent a long e-mail explaining my interest in the case and how I proposed to handle researching it.
Dorothy lived in Mississippi; Sandra was passing through with her husband. Both sisters were in their sixties, and both were the kind of tastefully dressed Southern women I’d seen a thousand times before. I had aunts, now mostly gone, who looked like both of them.
Even before we sat down, I knew which one was Sandra thanks to a high-school yearbook photo I’d found in Laurel. A former majorette, she had big eyes and a friendly face and a manner that made her easy to talk to. Dorothy was more closed-off, though she opend up some as we talked. When I could, I sneaked glances at her, looking for outward signs of “the black heritage.” There weren’t any.
Dorothy worked in a public school system and was nearing retirement, one of several reasons why she was leery about discussing the McGee case in any kind of media context. In tune with that, I didn’t take notes. They were interviewing me, not vice versa, and during a two-hour grilling about my motives, I felt as if I were making, at best, modest progress toward getting them to believe that I could tell their story without bias. Richard Barrett came up early on, and they accepted my explanation about him. The harder part was convincing them that I wasn’t a professional liar. Journalists weren’t high on their list of trustworthy people.
Dorothy, especially, seemed scarred by having lived with the case. At one point, she asked if I had any idea where the McGee children were. When I said yes, she looked shocked and went silent. She didn’t ask for additional details.
Though meeting the sisters was difficult, it was a valuable reminder of how explosive the case still was for both families. Like Bridgette, the Hawkins sisters believed that they owed it to their parents’ memory to correct lies about who they really were, yet they were smart enough to see how risky it was for them to go anywhere near this subject. After all, their side won: McGee was put to death. Half a century later, who would want to listen to a couple of Deep South white women complain that their mother got a raw deal?
