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

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The Eyes of Willie McGee: A Tragedy of Race, Sex, and Secrets in the Jim Crow South Page 24

by Alex Heard


  Poole was entering dangerous territory. Sullens was the kind of man who fought back, so it was no surprise that his defense lawyers paved the way for a counterattack. Poole was questioned in Jackson by local attorneys Thomas Watkins and H. V. Watkins, who tried to establish that he knew perfectly well that the CRC was a group with Communist ties. Poole hunkered down, acting as if he were being grilled by HUAC itself, clamming up or claiming ignorance about most of what they wanted to know.

  “What kind of organization is the Congress of Civil Rights?” he was asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do you know where their principal offices are?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Do you know whether or not they maintain an office or representative in the State of Mississippi?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Do you know the purpose of the organization?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  His memory lapse was almost total: Poole said he only recalled the last name of the out-of-state attorney who hired him (“Abzug”), that he didn’t know where she lived, and that he’d conferred with her only once.

  He was also pressed about the issue of Mrs. Hawkins’s consent to the rape. Poole had been clear on that, but the Watkinses, like the Mississippi Supreme Court, seemed to think he had something darker in mind. Tom Watkins may have heard rumors about the affair story when he worked with Dixon Pyles before the second trial, because he indicated a general awareness that an unacceptable theory was floating around.

  “Did you or not,” Poole was asked, “on one or more occasions prior to, during, and after said trial make the statement that you had proof of the fact that the prosecutrix had had previous relations with Willie McGee?”

  “No,” Poole said. “I never would have made a statement to the effect I had absolute proof to that effect. But I did, in reviewing the woman’s testimony…argue the same question that Forrest Jackson argued and that Dixon Pyles and Dan Breland argued, that because of some of the woman’s own testimony it would indicate that there might not have been a lack of consent.”

  Neither of these attacks had staying power. Poole wasn’t a Communist and he hadn’t defamed Mrs. Hawkins. But Sullens’s lawyers revealed another strategy, one that was easy to overlook but would ultimately prove fruitful: They started asking detailed questions about Poole’s dealings with small-fry clients, for whom he had handled routine matters like divorces and injury claims. Several years would pass before it became clear what that was all about.

  When I set out to start answering basic questions about Rosalee McGee—who she was, where she came from, where she went—I discovered that it wasn’t going to be easy, and that the methods I used to find the Hawkins and McGee families wouldn’t work in her case.

  I wrote another letter to the People’s World, but this time there was no magic call from someone with the answer. Over time, I tracked down sons and daughters of people affiliated with the defense—including Bella Abzug’s youngest daughter, Liz, a lawyer based in New York; Dr. MaryLouise Patterson, a pediatrician also living there; and Margaret A. Burnham, a lawyer and professor based at Northeastern University in Boston. None of them knew what became of Rosalee.

  The trickiest part was that the name Rosalee McGee was, most likely, an alias. I doubted that she and McGee were ever legally married, since his divorce from Eliza Jane Payton didn’t happen until he was already in jail. For a while, Rosalee was a prominent person—her name appeared in scores of newspaper articles between 1949 and 1951—but once the case was over, she dropped out of sight. Judging by a couple of old newspaper stories I had, it looked as if she’d stayed involved with the CRC. In a 1955 New York Times story, she turned up, alongside William Patterson, at a federal hearing on whether the CRC should be required to register as a Communist-front organization under the Internal Security Act. She refused to answer a question from a Justice Department attorney on the grounds that it would “intimidate me.” Patterson stepped in to say she meant “incriminate.”

  Still, the material I had offered small hints here and there. A Jackson Daily News story from June 7, 1950, referred to Rosalee as “Rosie Lee Gilmore McGee,” which made me wonder if Gilmore was her maiden name. And Jessica Mitford’s papers on the McGee case, which are kept at Ohio State, contained an old newspaper profile about Rosalee that yielded another useful clue. It was datelined Detroit, and it featured biographical information I hadn’t seen anywhere else.

  “She is a Negro woman,” the story said. “Her name is Rosalee McGee. She is 28 years old. She was married when she was 13. She is the daughter of Henry and Nancy Safford. They were poor farmers in Lexington, Miss. They had 10 children who worked, with their parents, on the tiny farm, from dawn till dark to keep body and soul together.”

  I sent the names to a friend from Vanderbilt, E. Thomas Wood, a journalist who does genealogical research as a hobby. He guessed that the name was really Saffold, which he said was more common in that part of Mississippi than Safford. He sent me a page from the 1930 Census that looked as if it might be about the right family. Just below the names Henry and Nancy Saffold was the name Rosetta. The record said she was eleven years old in 1930, which meant she was born around 1919. That sounded right, but it wasn’t an exact match: Rosetta isn’t the same as Rosalee. Was it really the same woman?

  While I looked for Rosalee leads, I tried to get somewhere with that other great mystery: the connection between Bertha Mae Crowell and the Hawkins family. The picture Dorothy Hawkins had shown me in September 2006 was definitely a shot of the person I’d interviewed—I’d taken a digital snapshot of Bertha Mae, and the resemblance between her younger and older selves was easy to see. A few months later, I proposed the next logical step to Sandra, Dorothy, and Bertha Mae: that we all get together, compare notes, and see what we could figure out. Everybody agreed.

  By then, Bertha Mae had temporarily moved to Mesquite, Texas, where she was staying with her daughter and son-in-law for an extended period. It was up to us to do the traveling, so, one weekend in December, Sandra, Dorothy, and I all got ourselves to Mesquite. On Saturday morning, we met in the lobby of my hotel, climbed into the car, and took off to pay our visit. Sandra brought one of her sons, who was curious to see what happened but asked that I not use his name.

  When we got to the right address—a nice house on a typical suburban street—I knocked on the front door. There was no answer, and I had a queasy feeling that Bertha Mae had either forgotten the appointment or decided she didn’t want to go through with it.

  In fact, she was in there by herself doing a jigsaw puzzle—her daughter was off at her church, and her son-in-law was out also—so it took her a minute to walk to the door. Dressed in a bathrobe, she flashed her big smile and took us into a living room, where we sat around on chairs and couches and began our rather strange conversation.

  After the opening pleasantries, Dorothy pulled out her photo album and opened it to the old picture of Bertha Mae, Ann, and Sandra. Nobody was sure where it had been taken, but it was dated as being from 1942. Dorothy thought it might have been taken at her aunt’s house in Laurel. Bertha Mae had no idea.

  “How old do you think you are in that picture?” Sandra said.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I must be in my twenties, don’t you think? Probably my twenties, because I’m eighty-eight now. How old are these children?”

  “I think I was five,” Sandra said.

  “Well, I’m eighty-eight now.”

  “I’m going to be seventy in March. I’m sixty-nine. So that—”

  “So I’m eighteen years older than you.”

  “That’s pretty much what I figured.”

  If the picture was taken in 1942, Bertha Mae would have been twenty-three or twenty-four. As she’d told me previously, her mother worked for Willette’s sister, LaVera Hooks, who lived with her husband at thirteenth Street in Laurel before they moved to Hattiesburg. Bertha Mae said she used to hang around with her mother
while she worked. As the Hawkins sisters were aware, she had also told me that she was sometimes at their house on South Magnolia.

  “Do you mean hanging around Aunt LaVera’s house on Thirteenth, or our house on South Magnolia?” Dorothy asked.

  “I go to Billie house too,” she said. “I used to go to Billie house all the time on South Magnolia. I knew everybody on that street.” She named a couple of South Magnolia residents she’d known; they matched names of neighbors whom the Hawkins sisters remembered.

  We were going in circles about houses and neighbors and dates when Bertha Mae changed the subject in her sudden way. “But you know what, I don’t…I don’t believe Billie was raped,” she said. “I never would believe she was raped, because the night they say that boy raped her, he gambled all night long with my brother.”

  I’d told Sandra and Dorothy about Bertha Mae’s “nightmare theory” a while ago—I didn’t want to set them up for a shock. They weren’t shocked because they didn’t believe it. Their view was that Mrs. Hawkins’s mental problems were triggered by the rape, and that before then she was perfectly normal. I was curious to see if either of these different takes on reality, aired at the same time in the same room, would change anybody’s mind.

  Nothing changed on either side. Bertha Mae was sure she had it right, and the daughters were sure they had it right. I didn’t know who was right—I still don’t, though my gut feeling is that it’s very hard to believe the whole case happened simply because of a bad dream that persisted as a giant misunderstanding.

  I was just as interested to see how the women related to each other because they were emblematic of a divide about the case that I encountered every time I went to Laurel. Black people, whether they had their facts straight or not, tended to think McGee was innocent, that he was yet another victim of a pattern of injustice and cruelty that was a shared part of their histories. McGee had lost his life, like so many others, so it was only natural for them to gravitate toward explanations that put him in the most favorable light. White people did something similar. Their understanding of the case was usually a mix of fact and myth too, and though they didn’t deny that Jim Crow courts were often unjust, they wanted to believe that, in this instance, McGee had gotten a fair trial and the system had worked.

  It was an irreconcilable difference influenced by race and background. What impressed me about Bertha Mae, Sandra, and Dorothy was that they managed to talk about the case, disagree completely, and still enjoy getting a chance to see each other again. There was a lot of mutual affection and laughter in that room, along with inconclusive memories, head-shaking, and puzzled frowns.

  “Do you remember telling me that you saw Mrs. Hawkins inside her house, waking up from a nightmare?” I asked Bertha Mae at one point.

  “Yeah, she would wake up from nightmares.”

  “Tell me about it. What did you see?”

  “I can’t remember all that. I just remember Billie had nightmares, just like me.”

  “I thought you actually observed her one day, waking up terrified.”

  “Yeah, I been to her house when she woke up and have a nightmare. Like she’s dreaming, and then she tell me her dream.”

  Before long, she repeated her theory about the rape. “I believe she dreamed,” she said firmly. “I don’t believe it happened.”

  “I have a question,” Sandra cut in. “If you don’t think it really happened, why do you think our lights and telephone would have been not working?”

  “I don’t know. I just don’t know. But I really don’t believe the lady…you couldn’t make me believe it.”

  Sandra said she clearly remembered that “we had no lights. And what mother did was, she ran out screaming. And of course that woke all of us up and we all—”

  “Did you see him?” Bertha Mae asked.

  “No, ma’am.”

  “All right. Anybody can run out screaming. I can jump up in the air with a nightmare and run out screaming. I really don’t believe he raped her.”

  During the rest of the conversation, we went back and forth between small talk and talk of the crime. Bertha Mae didn’t budge: She knew what she knew. When challenged on this, her fallback position was that, unless somebody saw Willie McGee running away from the scene with their own eyes, she would never believe it.

  The Hawkins sisters didn’t budge either. After we left, we went to lunch at a local chain and talked about the interview. Sandra’s son was impressed that Bertha Mae remembered so much. He didn’t say what he thought about her nightmare notions.

  Sandra did, rejecting them without any apparent feelings of doubt. Referring to her mother, she said, “Bertha Mae has confused the time element. Mother did, she would wake up in the night screaming and running…. But I really think Bertha Mae has confused the time.”

  On the Rosalee front, a breakthrough came when I went to the Library of Congress in early 2007 and finally got a look at the archived materials of the CRC, which weren’t available in New Mexico. That’s when I found out that the papers contained dozens of letters written by Willie, Bessie, and Rosalee—something that wasn’t mentioned in any of the books or clips I had at that point. Among other things, the letters confirmed that Rosalee’s maiden name was Saffold.

  She wrote at least three dozen times between mid-1949 and 1953. In mid-1949, she announced her existence to the CRC twice—first on May 20 and again on June 18—perhaps because she was on the move and didn’t want to risk missing their reply. The first letter was sent from 102 West Church Street in Jackson. The second letter’s return address said only “Laurel, Miss.” The wording was slightly different in each but the gist was the same: Rosalee was letting the CRC know that she existed, that she was McGee’s legal wife, and that she, Willie, and their four children desperately needed help.

  “To The Civil Rights Congress,” the first one said. “I am the wife of Willie McGee who have been behind iron bars since Nov. 1945. We have four children and no one to help me with them and I have been very quite until he get this last sentence in April. I am a poor colored woman and I need my husband with these four kids to help me haveing to send two away to Neb. and I wont to no will he go to the chair on June 3. Please save him for me.”

  Like most of Rosalee’s letters, this one had a lot of accurate information in it, showing that she knew what was going on. The “last sentence in April” was the Mississippi Supreme Court’s decision to uphold McGee’s guilty verdict. June 3, 1949, was the new execution date. In this and the second letter, which she mailed to Patterson, she also displayed an awareness of the Laurel rape case involving Laverne Yarbrough and the five-year-old black girl.

  “There are many other crimes did and their life wasnt taken even in this same county of Jones I live in,” she told Patterson. “Some one but not my race did crime on a 5 year old colored child his life was not taken.”

  Despite what Rosalee said, the “four kids” weren’t with her—they were out west with Eliza Jane Payton. Nor had she ever been a permanent resident of Laurel. But it seemed likely that one or two children were under her wing. She mentioned the possibility of sending two kids off to Nebraska, and she offered to send pictures of McGee, herself, and “our oldest child.”

  For Rosalee, the pressing issue was money. “Please help my husband to get some other sentence if you can,” she wrote. “I don’t have any money. I will work to help him save his life…. Please let me hear from you all at once.”

  The letters were written in several different hands—other people must have taken down her words for her, at least sometimes—and she signed her name in many different ways, including Rosalee McGee, Rosalie McGee, Rosie Lee McGee, Rosalee Etta Safford, Rosalie Etta Safford, Rosalie Etta Saffolds, and Rosalee Safford. Over the years, she used three different addresses in Jackson, one in Laurel, and one each in the towns of Durant and Lexington, where she had originally come from.

  Once Rosalee got started, she was a diligent correspondent, writing frequently that summer and
fall. On July 19, 1949, after McGee’s June 3 execution was delayed, she wrote to tell the CRC that McGee was sick and that he was being harassed in jail.

  “What I wanted to tell you is the jailer got angery because you wrote him about Willie,” she said. “[H]e blew up at Willie and wonted to know how did you all know about it…. i told him i didn’t know no more about C.R.C. than what was wrote up in the paper.”

  On September 2, after the first U.S. Supreme Court appeal had been filed, Rosalee sent a letter indicating that neither she nor McGee was quite up to speed on developments. McGee, for example, wanted to know if “Lawyer Poole” was still representing him.

  But they definitely understood what it meant when the Court said no in October. “Willie is almost crazy,” Rosalee wrote. “[H]e wont to hear from you…he did all right until Monday after he read the paper and the U.S. turn him down. Lawyer Poole say he happen heard from you all in some time in fack he told me he was not McGee lawyer any more and there wasn’t any more to be done.”

  Patterson wrote Rosalee and Willie separately, saying, in his stately way, that the fight was still on. “The United States Supreme Court has ruled against Willie, but you must not despair….

  “We are not giving up. You must not. The fight for Willie’s life will yet be won.”

  Before long, the CRC realized that Rosalee’s letters had value as a tool for generating support and funds, and it started telling her story in press releases. “Ever since the frame-up began in November 1945, Rosalee McGee has been writing in an effort to save her innocent husband’s life,” said a release from October 31. That wasn’t true, and unless CRC officials had forgotten what was in their own files, they should have known McGee wasn’t living with a loyal wife when he was arrested. Louis Burnham’s report from December 1945 specifically said he was separated.

 

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