by Alex Heard
If Willie and Rosalee didn’t meet in 1945, then when did it happen?
The letters didn’t say, but there was a clue in statements Rosalee made a few months later, when she told Willie’s life story for a series of articles that ran in a left-wing newspaper called the New York Compass. Rosalee spun an elaborate tale, saying she was thirteen when they married, and that McGee had rescued her from parents who couldn’t do anything to improve her life.
She also mentioned that, when she went to see McGee in the Hinds County jail, she visited a cousin of hers named Marvin Murray, who was on death row for the alleged murder of a jailer in Wiggins, a tiny town an hour south of Laurel. The way Rosalee described it in the Compass, she was prevented from visiting McGee at first—only Bessie and his lawyers were allowed in—but because she was able to visit Murray, she caught glimpses. “They let me in to see him and sometimes I can see Willie off in the distance,” she said, “and I bring him some clothes with my cousin’s clothes, but I can’t talk to Willie.”
Various appeals to save Murray failed, and he was electrocuted on June 29, 1948. Rosalee said the visitation ban was lifted after Murray’s death, though the jailers were sadistic about it, telling her that Willie was next and even sitting her down in the electric chair, with a hood on her head, so she could “see how it felt.”
That sounds doubtful—the chair wasn’t stored at the Hinds County Courthouse—and I also wonder if Rosalee didn’t reverse the chain of events. That is, she may have gone to the jail, at first, for the purpose of visiting her cousin, and that’s how she initially met McGee.
My contact with McGee’s descendants kept up sporadically after I met them in Las Vegas that first time in 2005. Sometimes I’d talk on the phone with Bridgette or Tracey, or I’d e-mail them when I came across information I knew they’d want to hear. I told them about finding Evelyn Smith McDowell—who died in 2006—and Donna Poole Mills. I also sent them transcripts of the first and third trials, sent Bridgette copies of Eliza Jane Payton’s marriage license and divorce papers, and told them what I knew about Rosalee McGee’s real name.
I hoped we would travel to Mississippi together at some point—all three McGees, Donna, Liz Abzug, and me—but that wasn’t looking likely as the months went by. Everybody had jobs, so coordinating a trip like that wasn’t going to be easy, especially if Della decided to go.
Halfway through 2007, I had a different idea, which was to invite people to Santa Fe for a sort of reunion and informational swap meet. By that point, there were still a few people on the defense side I hadn’t found yet, but the final roster of invitees was pretty complete: Liz, Bridgette, Della, Tracey, Donna, and Todd Pyles. Everybody showed up except Todd, who said yes but then decided he wasn’t up for traveling.
They all came out on a weekend in July, arriving at different times. In a conference room of the building where I worked, I’d piled up things from my now-huge collection of McGee case material—five file drawers of clips, press releases, court documents, FBI files, correspondence, taped interviews, and photographs.
There was no plan except to let people meet one another, look at whatever they wanted, and ask questions. All of us had our areas of expertise. Liz has been deeply involved in watching over her mother’s legacy and papers (which, unfortunately, contain almost nothing about McGee). Bridgette, Tracey, and Donna were researching books they wanted to write—and they knew the most about their own families. By then I knew a lot about the trials, appeals, and the bigger picture: the political context of civil rights and anti-Communism in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and how that inevitably helped shape the outcome of the case.
Bridgette and Della left Las Vegas by car early on Saturday morning, with Bridgette’s husband, Harold, at the wheel. Liz was already in town but wasn’t coming in until midday. For a while on Saturday, Donna, Tracey, and I were there by ourselves, pawing through papers and talking. Donna, a kind-hearted brunette, didn’t know about the Rosalee-as-imposter angle yet, so that was a surprise to her. Tracey and I were talking about Rosalee when Donna said, “So Rosalee came in the picture—”
“We don’t know,” said Tracey, who spoke in a measured way and had a wise-looking face that sat under a big cascade of hair. “We don’t know who she is.”
“Oh, really? But she seems to, like, take over claim of the family.”
“Pretty much. That’s why we want to know who she is.”
I told Donna about Rosetta Saffold and the letters, pointing to a file folder full of them and saying, “She just sort of announced herself to the Civil Rights Congress and said, ‘Greetings! I am the wife of Willie McGee—’”
“Yes,” Tracey said, “her first letter was to Patterson in 1949.”
“I’ve been trying to figure out if the Civil Rights Congress was aware of the discrepancy,” I said, “and I think they probably were, because—”
“I think it’s very difficult for them not to be,” Tracey said.
As we looked at pictures of Rosalee—a striking woman who seemed right at home in the suits and hats she wore while making public appearances up north—Donna asked why the CRC would go along with such an elaborate deception. Tracey gave what I assumed was the right answer: They were creating a better public image for McGee, a man who had enough problems already.
“They wanted a prettier picture, probably, of Willie,” she said.
“You know, a married man with children, something to pull for…sympathy. That’s what I think happened.”
Later, though, Tracey made a point I didn’t agree with, something that Bridgette brought up when she arrived that afternoon. They both found it hard to believe that a “country girl” like Rosetta could have been plucked out of obscurity, taken north, and repackaged to become a viable public figure.
I didn’t find that odd at all. It happened frequently during those old cases, when wives or mothers of imprisoned black men were brought north to testify about life under Jim Crow. It didn’t matter if the refugees were rough around the edges; that was part of their authenticity. The CRC had brought Bessie McGee up north, and the same tactic was used during the Scottsboro and Martinsville Seven cases. After Scottsboro Boy Haywood Patterson escaped from Alabama in 1948, he was arrested by FBI agents two years later in Detroit. The CRC mounted a successful attempt to prevent his extradition back to Alabama, after which it deployed him as a public speaker.
Tracey saw it differently. Later, while I was telling Donna about the CRC’s efforts to publicize the case and turn McGee into a cause, Tracey said she was grateful they’d done all that, but it made her uneasy. “On the other side of it,” she said, “I can’t get rid of the feeling that they also manipulated it.”
How so? “Well, I’m curious as to what connection there is with Rosalee. And how that came about.”
Just before this, the rest of the McGees had called from the road: They’d had car trouble, and for a while it looked like they might not make it. In the interim, Liz showed up with her partner, a woman named Erica Foman, coming into the room on a wave of Abzugian energy. I’d sent her the third-trial transcript. She’d never seen it before, and soon after she settled in, I asked for her assessment.
“It was ridiculous!” she said in a New York accent that brought her mother to mind, laughing and waving it off. “Today, they would throw it out at the first hearing.”
We talked for a bit, and then I took everybody to a different room, where we watched videotapes of interviews with Dixon Pyles and a black woman from Laurel named Rose McGee. They’d both been interviewed on camera in the 1970s by a British crew that was making a documentary about Jessica Mitford. Copies turned up in Mitford’s papers at Ohio State.
As we watched, it was interesting to see how people reacted to Pyles, who, to me, was a familiar Southern type: a smart, loud, old-fashioned lawyer who liked to tell stories and jokes. But he gave Tracey and Liz the creeps, and to them, it seemed evident—as it had to historian Gerald Horne—that Pyles’s defense of McGee must have
been half-hearted. I found that strange, because I didn’t hear Pyles say anything they should have objected to. He even reiterated his opinion that McGee was innocent, saying, “I never believed that he was guilty of rape.”
The point isn’t that they were wrong or I was right: It’s that we had such different reactions to the same information. To me, this pattern was starting to seem like a hidden code that might explain some of the McGee case’s persistent mysteries.
By now I had a mountain of facts, but I still didn’t know what really happened. Most likely, I never would, and I was beginning to suspect that a similar uncertainty had probably been a burden for almost everybody involved in the case. I didn’t think any of the lawyers or judges really knew the truth—much less anyone who read about McGee in newspapers and magazines at the time. But then, as now, people on both the left and right arrived at their passionate opinions based on a mix of information, misinformation, prejudices, and wishful thinking.
The problem with the evidence I had was that you could take any piece of it, hold it up to the light, and interpret it in a way that fit whatever you wanted to believe. Everybody did this, on both sides. Bertha Mae knew McGee was innocent, and there was no telling her otherwise. Mrs. Hawkins’s daughters knew he wasn’t, and their minds didn’t seem open to the possibility that she might have been emotionally imbalanced even before the alleged attack.
The McGees, for their part, were sure Willie was blameless, even though they knew he was a man who had lived on the wild side. Tracey told me once over the phone, “The picture we’re getting as we talk to relatives is that Willie was a dog. He was a dog on two legs.” But somehow it never occurred to the McGees that he might actually have gotten drunk one night, and, in an act of lust, desperation, or rage, crawled through a window to get his hands on something that white society said he could never possess.
For all I knew, I was doing the same thing, and I thought about this when we watched the Rose McGee interview. Rose, a friendly old woman from Laurel, wasn’t related to Willie McGee, but she did have an indirect connection to the case. She was a sister of Hettie Johnson, the woman John Poole had wanted to call at the third trial. She said she’d worked as a maid at various times for Mrs. Hawkins’s other sister, Thelma Floyd, for Mrs. Hawkins’s mother and aunt, and for Mrs. Hawkins herself. She said Willie’s mother had worked for Willette’s parents, and that Willette grew up knowing McGee. According to her, their forbidden affair started with this childhood acquaintance. “Billie and Willie,” she said, “they began to be friends, and they grew up to be lovers.”
Of course, she also said that McGee ran away to Chicago, not Nevada or California, and that his mother’s name was Rose. To me, it sounded like another Laurel rumor, and I had trouble believing that Willie and Willette had been sandbox sweethearts. Liz and Tracey found it more convincing, but I had to wonder if they didn’t know enough about the case to be adequately confused.
Della, Bridgette, and Harold made it to Santa Fe in the early afternoon, but they called and said they were having trouble finding their way into town. I told them to park it where they were—a McDonald’s way out on Santa Fe’s main commercial drag—and I’d come get them. When I got there, Della was standing outside the vehicle, on blazing blacktop, scowling over the glow of a peppermint blouse. Her mood didn’t improve much for the rest of the day.
Part of the problem was simple: She felt bad. Della was old, they’d had a tough drive, and she’d gone from 2,000 feet to 7,000 feet in a few hours, which would give anybody a headache. But she was generally cranky that day, and once we got her situated around the table, she wouldn’t talk about much of anything except her irritation with Rosalee McGee.
“OK, there was this lady from Mississippi, had four kids, gave our name, and she was trying to get Social Security for her kids in Mississippi,” she explained to Liz and Donna as she looked at a picture of Rosalee that I’d pulled out. “A gentleman that helped us out was a schoolteacher and that’s how we got Social Security, through this teacher. That’s why I say this woman here is not my mama, and I wished I knowed where she’s at because…she probably dead now.”
Bridgette was less talkative than the first time we’d met, but, like Tracey, she said she didn’t think Rosalee was a real country person. “She went on after that to still work for the CRC, right? So I’m thinking this lady was already in politics, and somebody hired her.” She didn’t believe Bessie McGee wrote the letters attributed to her either. “Somebody wrote those letters for her,” she said.
That day, it started to feel as if the McGees and I were heading down separate paths. It seemed obvious that Della, for one, would never be able to believe that I was trustworthy enough to tell her family’s story. She also felt, I think, that I was stealing something that belonged to her. Liz mentioned that afternoon that I was working on a book, news that Della took in with a display of suspicious surprise, as if I’d been sneaky about it.
I hadn’t been sneaky—I had fact-checked my proposal with Bridgette and notified her promptly when I got a contract, so the book was no secret. But I didn’t say anything, trying to imagine how this weekend might look to Della. I’d laid out all these documents, thinking I was being helpful, but to her it probably seemed like a show of force. (I know more about this now. Let me handle it.) The McGees weren’t financially comfortable in the way the Hawkinses were, and, no doubt, Della hadn’t been handed many gifts by life.
Meanwhile, the Willie McGee story seemed to have value, but other people were extracting it. Never mind that the story was so confusing and fragmented and error-filled that it didn’t have any real substance until you invested a few thousand hours in it. People had been taking things from Della her entire life. I imagine she saw me as the latest in a long line of plunderers.
Rosalee had a busy spring and summer in 1950, marked by stress, fear, and the start of an exciting new chapter in her life. During this period, she exchanged several letters with Lottie Gordon, a woman in the New York office who ran the CRC’s Prisoners Relief Committee. Gordon arranged for Willie to receive Bible tracts and newspapers and for Rosalee to get $5 checks and boxes of clothing. “Please let us know how many children you have, what their ages are, what size clothes they wear, if they have any special interests,” Gordon wrote in late February. “We cannot promise much, except that we will do whatever is possible.” Rosalee wrote back with the ages and sizes.
in your letter you as me how meny children i have. it is four of them ages 12, 11, 9, 8, three girls 1 boy.
Ablige,
Rosalee
Oldest Girl Wear Dress
14. shoes 6 1/2
next girl [size] 12
shoes 5 1/2
son wear shirts size
10 or 12 shoes 5
Fourth wear 10 or 11
shoes 4 1/2
Why did she bother to pretend? To help McGee, and to survive. For all practical purposes, Willie and Rosalee were a couple by then—they even sent out a Christmas card one year—and they needed to present a unified front as a family under siege. Willie must have worried that the CRC would drop him if they knew he’d abandoned his wife and children in 1942. Meanwhile, Rosalee needed subsistence money, and her association with McGee wasn’t helping her job prospects. In early April she wrote:
i work so hard and i be so tied when I get home. you see i had a hard time getting a job in town so i am working in country. i had a good Job i mean what you call good here. soon as the Lady found out i was willie wife she didn’t wont me to get of to go see him. she did lots of talk about him i didn’t thank was right so i quit and every where i would go seem like she would beat me there. i stop telling my real name. I love my Husband altho some time i don’t feel like going but i will have to until he is free again to help me with kids. he cryied sunday when i tol him i had to walk almost two miles to get to my job…i told he not to worry i get by. Easter is just another day with me. as long as he is alive and i can see him i pray every nits to my fath
er in heaven to please let him come back to me just one more time.
That summer produced more evidence that Rosalee had two children in her custody. In June and July 1950, Gordon made arrangements with the directors of a summer camp in New York State, called Kinderland, to send “the McGee children” north sometime during July and August. Kinderland was one of several camps from that era that served the children of leftists and Communists. The letters that passed between Lottie and Rosalee leave no doubt: Somebody was heading north. “I hope that by the time you get this, you also received a large package of clothes which I sent you last week,” Gordon wrote on July 10. “This package has a lot of stuff that the children will be able to use in camp…we will be able to take care of [them] at the camp for one month.”
Another factor in Rosalee’s deception may have been ordinary opportunism: Her exposure to the CRC gave her a glimpse of a different world outside of Mississippi, and she wanted to see more of it. In May 1950, the CRC paid for her first trip to New York, where she debuted as a public figure at a CRC event called the “100 Cases” dinner, which publicized government attacks on various Communist and left-wing leaders. On hand were people like William Patterson, Paul Robeson, and Vito Marcantonio. In a photograph from that night, Rosalee is standing next to Robeson, staring up and beaming as if she were looking at Zeus.
The Daily Worker profiled Rosalee on June 18, telling the inspirational but false story of her life as Mrs. Willie McGee. “Before Mrs. McGee could come north, she had to place her four children…where they would be safe,” the story said. “Two…are being cared for by a sister in Ohio; the other two are with their grandmother…. Until she came north a few weeks ago, Rosalee McGee was working in the little Mississippi town where she lived with her husband and children before the KKK state administration of Mississippi reached out against her family.”
