The Eyes of Willie McGee: A Tragedy of Race, Sex, and Secrets in the Jim Crow South

by Alex Heard

  Even so, the language of this release lived on, and the Daily Worker forged it into a boilerplate dismissal of Mrs. Hawkins’s story. “The allegedly ‘raped’ woman, Mrs. Troy Hawkins, was asleep with a child in her bed…when the ‘attack’ was supposed to have occurred,” said a story from May 1950. “Her husband and other children were asleep in the next room. Neither the child in bed with her, nor her husband or other children, woke up during the alleged ‘rape.’”

  Whatever doubts Brad had about Sandra’s sleuthing, he was supportive, and he didn’t moan (at least not in front of me) when I suggested that she rendezvous with us in Laurel in a few days, to do some research and an interview. (She’d told me about an important living source, a man named Leroy Jensen who was a teenager living next door on the night of the crime.) Sandra was up for it, which meant Brad would be drafted for a road trip he hadn’t planned on. Before we left, Sandra phoned Dorothy, who said she would take a day off from work and meet us in Laurel.

  A couple of days later, Susan and I headed toward Laurel from Jackson, making a side trip en route to the town of Collins, the seat of Covington County, where Eliza Jane Payton was from. Bridgette had told me that Eliza Jane divorced Willie at some point, but she didn’t have details or documents. I guessed that, if the paperwork existed, it would be in Collins—and so it was, filed under “Magee.” The papers said she’d divorced him in 1946, by which time he was in jail. The main cause given was abandonment. McGee had left his family in 1942.

  Early that afternoon, we all met up at a sandwich shop in downtown Laurel and headed over to Jensen’s house, with Brad veering off to do something else. Jensen lived in the nicest part of the city, where all the big old houses and mansions were, though his place was a modest bungalow. He met us at the door and ushered us into his living room, where everybody perched on antique furniture and pulled out tape recorders and notebooks. Jensen was seventy-seven, blocky and strong, with a full head of brushy white hair that was as thick as a teenager’s. Apparently, he’d been quite a heartthrob in the 1940s—Sandra and Dorothy made this clear with a giggle or two before we went inside—and he was still an impressive-looking man. Only now he looked like a retired judge.

  The Jensens lived in the next house north on Magnolia Street, number 429. They weren’t native Southerners. They were of Scandinavian descent, and they’d made their living in the creamery business in other states before relocating to Mississippi. In 1940, after Jensen’s dad sold off an operation in Texas, he moved his family to Laurel to take over a plant that had failed.

  Jensen had a good memory, and he told stories in a way that showed it off, with frequent asides on things like railroad deeds and now-demolished hospitals and bank buildings. “My dad was a butter-maker by trade,” he said. “When we came to Laurel, there was an old creamery here that was built in nineteen…thirty…four or five, somewhere in that area. By the Daniels family. The name of it was Dan-Dee Dairy Products. D-a-n, hyphen, capital D, e-e. They operated three years and went bankrupt.”

  Leroy was eleven when the Jensens came to Laurel. By late 1945, at sixteen, his standard routine involved getting up at 3 a.m. to get dressed in time to work for his father before school. That’s why he was up and about on the morning of November 2.

  He emphasized that he didn’t see Willie McGee or anybody else who might have been a rapist. But he did see Mrs. Hawkins come screaming out of the house. It would have been hard to miss, he said, because the structures were very close together.

  “I was in the back bedroom, my mom and dad was in the middle bedroom,” he said. “And my sister was…was she home? Or was she still in nurse training? She was still in nurse training. My mother had woke me up to go on the milk truck, and, as I was dressing, I heard this god-awful scream, and I looked out the window, and…” He stopped and looked at the Hawkins sisters. “Does this bother y’all?”

  “Not one bit,” Sandra said.

  “And their mother came running across the yard, naked, to the back door of our house, and I hollered at my mother. She went and let her in, and she was just completely, you know, wrecked. And my mother put her in my bed and covered her. After that, things kind of settled down. My mother got hold of Dr. Beech, who was a doctor at the Masonite Hospital back then. He came to the house and sedated her.

  “I left…oh, I guess after an hour. I left and went to work. And then, to finish the story as I knew it, I wasn’t pressing, but my mother told me that they took her on to the hospital for an examination and all. But she was”—he pointed at his forehead—“I mean, it’s burned right here that she was just completely torn up.”

  “I’ve never been able to remember,” Sandra said. “Did she have any clothes on? Did she have a top on?”

  “Naked,” Leroy said firmly. “She did not. She was naked.”

  “I’m not sure I would have seen her. I heard her. But what she looked like, I never have been able to…I never knew—”

  “I remember it like it was yesterday. I ran in and told my mother that she was at the back door. I did not know what had happened. I went to the front of the house rather than, you know, than being back there and seeing her.”

  “Right,” I said. “And you were the first person to see her in that condition?”

  “When she came across the yard, and when my mother went to the back door and got her, and put her in my bed, that’s when I saw her. I saw her come across the yard.”

  “And I’m sure you heard her,” Sandra said.

  “Oh, gosh, yes. She was screaming.”

  That was all he remembered, but it gave me plenty to think about. Either Jensen was sitting there lying or Mrs. Hawkins did come screaming out of the house. I didn’t think he was lying. Whatever took place and whoever did it, something terrible happened to her that night.

  “Did you ever hear the story that Mrs. Hawkins was having an affair with Willie McGee?”

  That was me two days later, back in Laurel, by myself this time. I was interviewing a nice old lady I’d just met, asking what might be called my default question, since every interview tended to come around to it sooner or later.

  “All that was lies,” she said emphatically.

  “You don’t think she was having an affair with McGee?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “And that’s because…. It didn’t seem like something he would do?”

  “I just think it’s a lie. Mister, you don’t know how folks do lie. I don’t think Willie McGee had an affair with her. I don’t think he been over to her house, tell you the truth about it.”

  “You think he got framed?”

  “Framed because he’s a black. And that was the only black out there that they could frame. At that time, anything could happen.”

  The woman was an eighty-eight-year-old African American named Bertha Mae Crowell, and she was telling me about an unusual theory—one that, to her dismay, I had trouble understanding. In my defense, her solution to the McGee mystery was the most complicated one I’d heard so far. First, Mrs. Crowell firmly believed he was innocent. (No surprise there. Though I didn’t talk to everybody in Laurel, I think it’s safe to assume that most local blacks who’ve heard of the case would say the same thing.) But she didn’t buy McGee’s love-affair story; she thought he made it up to try to save his skin. (This was a big surprise. I’d only heard a few people say that, all of them white.)

  The big twist was this: She didn’t think there’d been a rape at all. The truth, she said, was that Mrs. Hawkins only thought she’d been raped, because something was wrong with her mind—a mental abnormality that, as Crowell put it, caused her to have “crazy ideas and fits.”

  In her reckoning, the real story was a tragic blend of delusion and injustice that started with a bad dream. On the night of the alleged rape, Mrs. Hawkins woke up before dawn from a nightmare, convinced that she’d been ravished in her bed by a black intruder. She screamed and told her husband, who, not knowing any better, called the police. Given the setting and
circumstances—1940s Mississippi, a terrified white woman, a black rapist apparently on the loose—the police had to find somebody to blame in a hurry. McGee got tagged when he turned up in Hattiesburg and appeared to be on the run.

  Which he was, but Crowell said he was running because he’d lost his employer’s money in a gambling game, not because he’d raped anybody. He was terrified about what his white boss or the police would do to him. “I think because he gambled away that money, and he was on his way off, they just got him,” she said. “That’s my idea.”

  It sounded pretty wild, but Crowell wasn’t just some random person with a theory. Assuming she was telling the truth about her own life story—and she seemed every bit as trustworthy as Jensen—she was in a good position to know things about both McGee and Mrs. Hawkins. She said she was inside one of the gambling houses the night before the alleged rape, and that she saw McGee playing poker with a group of men that included her late brother, Elijah Williams. She also said she knew Mrs. Hawkins. Crowell’s mother, Mary Williams, used to work as a maid for Mrs. Hawkins’s sister, LaVera Hooks. As a result, Crowell, who would have been twenty-seven in late 1945, was sometimes at both households during the day, either helping with chores or simply hanging around.

  From the sound of things, her memory was good, though I noticed a point or two where she seemed off. Mainly, though, I was struck by the number of things she got right. Without any prompts from me, she correctly remembered one of the places McGee worked (Bethea Grocery), named the street the Hawkinses lived on, knew that Willette had a family nickname (“Billie”), and recalled how many children she had. Initially she got that number wrong, but she corrected herself.

  “She was a pretty woman,” she said. “Had two pretty…I think she had about three children. Did she have three?”

  “Three girls.”

  “Three girls,” she said. “Pretty girls.”

  Her memory of Willette’s physical appearance was inaccurate, however. She described her as a “regular-sized lady, a nice-sized lady” with blonde hair. But Willette had dark hair, and she was so thin that you probably wouldn’t forget it. All in all, it was a typically puzzling combination. Crowell was giving me an honest account of what she believed to be the truth—I had no doubt about that. But there was static in the transmission. As usual, it was impossible to know exactly what to think.

  One thing was certain: I’d been lucky to run into her. Only minutes earlier, I was a few streets away from Crowell’s house, talking to another black woman, Margaret L. Cooley, who had graduated from Oak Park High School in 1951. Cleveland Payne had given me her name, and I dropped by to ask about life in Laurel in the 1940s and 1950s. She’d heard of McGee, of course, but she didn’t know much beyond the standard plotline, so she tried to think of somebody with more direct experiences. Crowell came to mind, and, in typical Laurel fashion—helpful, informal, immediate—she picked up the phone and called her.

  “Bertha Mae?” she said. “This is Margaret. I got a man here who wants to know about Willie McGee.” Pause. “OK.” She turned to me.

  “She say to come on.”

  I drove to Bertha Mae’s place—a long, narrow house just a few blocks away—knocked on a screen door toward the back, and found her sitting in a big stuffed chair in her living room, amid the usual medicine-bottle clutter of an old person with ailments. She was barefoot and had on a no-frills nightdress; her hair was pulled straight back from a fleshy, friendly, and bright-eyed face.

  Crowell was born in 1918—a year when World War I was still going on and nineteen blacks were lynched in Mississippi, including four just up the road in Shubuta—so she’d lived through nearly a century of changes that would have seemed like science fiction to someone back then. She’d been in Laurel most of her life, and during our talk she occasionally detoured into random memories from the past, her needle skipping across the decades without transition.

  “Let me tell you something,” she said at one point. “When I was a girl, we had an insurance man…I will never forget it. The Ku Klux Klan used to parade…that was before your time. They used to come down the boulevard with hoods over their head, parading. Mother and I were standing there at a parade one night, and Momma looked down at this man’s foot and saw a shoe. And Momma said, ‘That’s my insurance man!’ Come to our house every week collecting a quarter for insurance, and he was the Ku Klux Klan!”

  That was before my time, all right—around 1928, I guessed, since she said it happened when she was ten. The Klan of that era was as above ground as the Rotary Club, so a public march in Laurel wasn’t hard to visualize. But the image of a black mother and child standing on the curb, taking in the show, stopped me.

  “You saw Klansmen marching around this town?”

  “They had parades down the boulevard,” she said, frowning and peering at me through her goggle-lens eyeglasses. “That’s how Momma knowed the shoes!”

  “It was OK for black people to be there watching?”

  “Sure, you can stand there watching. They ain’t going to say anything about you watching. It’s a parade.”

  Getting back to McGee, I asked her to talk about the house where the gambling took place. She couldn’t remember whose it was, but she recalled being there and seeing McGee and other men, including Elijah Williams, playing poker. She left around 10:00, but Elijah told her later that McGee stayed put all night.

  “They gambled till day,” she said firmly.

  “And Willie lost money?”

  “Lost the company money.”

  “So you think once the police caught him, for stealing that money, they said, ‘Let’s go ahead and say he raped her’?”

  “Yeah, I’m sure they did. They had to put it on somebody.”

  She remembered being in the family car the next day—along with her brother and “another lady,” all en route to Hattiesburg—and seeing McGee on the side of the highway, trying to hitch a ride. They didn’t pick him up. Elijah, not eager to be seen since he’d won some of McGee’s money, ducked down in the seat.

  Crowell didn’t testify at any of the trials—nobody asked her to, and if they had, she would have played dumb. In 1945, she could have gotten in serious trouble if she’d tried to go public with her theory about Mrs. Hawkins. Half a century later, it still sounded bizarre. And yet Crowell insisted—repeatedly, impatiently—that what she described was fact.

  She said Mrs. Hawkins had a mental problem that showed up during her menstrual period, which took the form of terrifyingly realistic nightmares. “She was crazy when she menstruated,” she said. “When she had that menopause that ladies go through, she was nuts.

  “My idea is she must have dreamed that he did that. You know, jump and say somebody done something to her or something had happened? She just had nightmares. You ever heard of a talking nightmare? Well, that’s what she had. When she laid down to take a nap when she got menopause on.” Crowell said she saw this firsthand, during the times she spent around the Hawkins household with her mother.

  All through her discussion of this, though, there was a sketchiness that made me wonder if she was conflating events from different time periods. She used menstrual and menopause interchangeably. She mentioned being “in school” when these events happened, but she couldn’t say when it was. She would have been around nineteen by the time Mrs. Hawkins had her first child; so if there was any babysitting going on, Bertha Mae was already out of school.

  I squinted at her, concentrating. She squinted back, trying to understand what my problem was.

  I asked her to carefully describe what she saw that made her think Mrs. Hawkins had a hysterical reaction when her period occurred.

  “Well, she just had it. She just…I think it was something like a spasm. You ever heard of a spasm? She had something like that, like she was crazy or something.”

  “Running around, or yelling, or what?”

  “Jumping up and…when she sleep, maybe wake up and have one of them spells. But, um, she was a
good woman. She’s just…I think she was half nuts to me.”

  “You were in the house in the daytime or nighttime?”

  “The daytime, when she took a nap. Anytime she go to sleep during menopause. They said that when she sleeped, she dreamed.”

  “‘They’ said that?”

  “Everybody said she dreamed! I dreams too! But she had nightmares.”

  We went around and around, but there wasn’t much more to say, and for Mrs. Hawkins things came down to a split decision. Crowell thought she was innocent of the charge leveled against her for years: that she cornered McGee into an affair and then ratted him out. But to buy into that, you’d also have to accept that Mrs. Hawkins was crazy, and that she and Mr. Hawkins, who must have realized eventually that she’d dreamed it up, decided to stick with their story, even though it meant sending McGee to an unjust death.

  So, in Crowell’s reckoning, Mrs. Hawkins was only partially absolved of guilt. During our conversation, she’d said several nice things about her, but that changed sharply toward the end. Crowell told me she believed that both Willette and Troy carried a curse because of McGee’s death, and that the way they died was no accident.

  “You know, God don’t like ugly,” she said. “Did you ever notice that? Do you know what happened to Billie Hawkins and her husband?”

  I said I did.

  “They had a car wreck and got killed,” she said, nodding, as if that settled the point. “See? God don’t like ugly.”

  That night, Susan and I paid a visit to Dorothy Hawkins at her home in central Mississippi. Dorothy, unlike Sandra, didn’t seem ready for tape recorders or notebooks, so I sat on my hands and we talked. After a while, she invited us over to her kitchen table to take a look at a family photo album, and I finally got to see a picture of Willette Hawkins.

  Along with that, there was one other surprise in store. As I flipped through the album, I came to a yellowing, poorly focused picture of a young black woman sitting outside—on the steps of what looked like a back porch—with two blonde-haired little girls leaning against her. A caption scrawled below the picture identified them as “Ann, Sandra, and Bertha Mae.”