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

by Alex Heard

  On July 11, she spoke in front of 9,000 people at Madison Square Garden; on the 22nd, she appeared at a mass meeting in Harlem. By the 25th, she was in Washington, D.C., with Patterson and others on a failed mission to gain an audience with President Truman. She was back in Jackson in time for the dramatic events that occurred there on July 25 and 26.

  During all these comings and goings, did the CRC realize Rosalee wasn’t the person it advertised? It should have. By 1950, even Mississippi newspapermen were aware that there were two women in McGee’s life. Commenting on Rosalee’s New York trip, a Leader-Call editorial said, “We have not heard whether Willie’s wife and mother are back in Laurel yet. Neither have we heard which wife of Willie the speaker…was. Willie has two wives and four children, we understand. One is of long standing and one of war-time date. Whoever she is, we’d say she was getting into bad company.”

  Late in 2007, I finally made it to Rosalee’s part of Mississippi—Holmes County, which contains the towns of Lexington and Durant—armed with my one piece of information: Her name was Rosetta Saffold, and she’d lived there once. That was still all I had.

  At times during and after the McGee case, Rosalee left Jackson and went home to stay with her parents, writing letters that featured two different Holmes County return addresses, but these were old and imprecise: mailbox numbers on Rural Route 3 in Lexington and Route 2 in Durant. Before coming to Mississippi, I’d sent letters and photocopies of her picture to a couple dozen people named Saffold, then I’d followed up with a call. Nobody had heard of her, and nobody could suggest anybody who might know.

  So, groping, I called a few small-town libraries, asking for the name of anybody who was known to be an African-American genealogy buff. At the library in Kosciusko—the seat of the next county to the east, Attala—a woman gave me a name and number for Katharine Carr Esters, a seventy-nine-year-old who lived in the country north of town. I called her. She was friendly and said I should come see her whenever I was in town. She knew of an elderly white couple who she thought might know about “the Durant Saffolds.” When my trip shaped up, I called again, and we set a time.

  I drove up from Jackson on a Thursday—about seventy miles—and found my way to Esters’s house, but nobody answered when I knocked. She’d told me on the phone that she was a dialysis patient, so I began to imagine the worst—that she’d dropped dead in there and nobody knew it yet. I walked around, ringing the front doorbell, looking for a big picture window to look through, checking the back. There was a private fishing lake out there, complete with a bait-and-tackle shack and a sign that read “Heritage House Mini-Lakes. Entrance fee: $1.50. Catfish & bass: $1.50 pound.” Unfortunately, it was closed, so I knew Esters wasn’t in there selling bait.

  Calling 911 seemed like overkill: For all I knew, she’d simply forgotten and left, and I didn’t see anything in the driveway or garage that looked like the family car. I took off and drove to the library, where a woman gave me a number for Esters’s niece. I left her a message, telling her about my concerns, and then aimed my car west toward Lexington. The only thing left to do was go to the courthouse and see if I could find anything in the old county records.

  About halfway there, my phone rang. It was the niece, telling me that Esters was all right. I’d guessed wrong, but not by much: She’d developed a blood clot in her left arm the day before and had to be driven to Jackson for emergency treatment. She was heading home now and would still be glad to see me if I could come by that night.

  When I got to Lexington, I was told at the courthouse that the records I wanted were stored off-site, at a repurposed commercial building down the street. I got set up in there for the familiar marriage-record hunt, but I wasn’t optimistic as I started pulling out the old ledgers. I figured I might find a record for Rosalee’s parents, Henry and Nancy, but I had no reason to feel sure that Rosetta Saffold had ever been married in Lexington. That was just a hunch. Now that I knew her maiden name was Saffold, not Gilmore, I wondered about the old Jackson Daily News story that called her “Rosie Lee Gilmore McGee.” Maybe Gilmore was a married name.

  I found her parents soon enough: Henry and Nancy were married on January 23, 1916. But as I went through page after page of names, I didn’t see Rosetta Saffold or any close variation. And then, in the last ledger, almost at the end of the S names, there it was: Rosetta Saffold, spelled “Rossetta” in this instance. On December 13, 1941, she’d married a Lexington man named George Gilmore Jr. He was twenty-five, she was twenty-two. The only other information was a preacher’s name (L. B. Benson) and her father’s name, Henry. It was definitely her.

  That night, at the home of Katharine Carr Esters, we sat in her den while she wearily described her health adventures. Her blood clot required a surgical procedure, which she had after her grandson zoomed her down to Jackson. “I have a Lincoln Town Car,” she said matter-of-factly, reclining her long, large body on an adjustable bed while she talked. “It’s just as comfortable as the ambulance ride to me.”

  I didn’t understand what the procedure involved—she described it as “a reaming, when they cut your skin open and go up in to there.” Sadly, she wasn’t the only family member with health problems: Her niece’s husband, who had cancer and was undergoing chemotherapy, had just lost all his teeth. “He had a tooth the size of an orange because of an infection, and they had to pull every tooth in his head,” she said.

  Stating the obvious, Esters said that, with all this reaming and pulling going on, she hadn’t had time to check on the people she’d told me about, but she would. I told her about the Gilmore-Saffold marriage license, and she said she would most certainly ask around about any Durant-and Lexington-area Gilmores too.

  She didn’t do any of that—that week or ever—but I didn’t mind. As usual, it was more than enough to get a chance to talk to a Mississippi old-timer. Esters had had an amazing life, which she wrote about a few years ago in a self-published memoir called Jay Bird Creek and My Recollections. (She sold me a hardcover copy on the spot; it was a bargain at $20.) Once I absorbed enough details about her past, I couldn’t help but notice a few similarities between her struggles and those of Rosalee McGee.

  Esters was born in 1928 in rural Attala County, in a three-room log cabin that was typical of the houses that country blacks lived in back then. “Rural dwellings for black folk were mostly just rustic huts,” she recalled in her book. “…Ordinarily just two rooms were heated: the kitchen and the bedroom where parents slept. That room, with an open wood-burning fireplace, doubled as a living room.”

  Her great-grandfather was a white Civil War veteran named Alfred Carr who’d had a black mistress, Ceeley Johnson, from whom Esters was descended. Her father was a black World War I combat veteran who’d lost a hand in a sawmill accident in 1927. Pushed into share-cropping by the Depression, he refused to work in that dead-end system, so the family lived off a disability pension he received. Esters’s mother had arthritis and was bedridden for days at a time, and two of her brothers, including her twin, had died young. As a child, she hauled a lot of water around the house and farm, tended animals, and picked cotton while extracting whatever education she could from second-rate country schools.

  She’d learned her alphabet at home, writing on the backs of can and flour sack labels. Later, starting in 1938, she got some of her education at a Presbyterian-affiliated boarding school near West Point, Mississippi. But she didn’t graduate: Family financial problems forced her to move north to New Jersey before she finished her senior year. She lived with relatives and earned paychecks that helped with the money crisis back home.

  Esters got married there in 1947 to Sam Sanford, a soldier who turned out to be a womanizer. They had two kids together, whom she took care of by herself when he was sent off to Guam. She lived for a few months with his family in Tennessee, in a dilapidated house that she tried to improve with money she earned as a cotton-picker. Her in-laws looked down on that—picking cotton was low-class work—but they change
d their minds when she started bringing a lot of money home. “I was able to pull from 400 to 550 pounds a day where most women only pulled from 100 to 150,” she wrote. “I was proud of myself and in the end they were all very pleased, too.”

  Her marriage to Sam ended in the early 1950s, and she settled in Milwaukee, remarrying there and finding jobs with the Urban League and a Veteran’s Administration hospital. Because of her precarious financial situation, she placed the two children with her Tennessee in-laws, sending them money for upkeep, and they weren’t reunited for several years. In the 1960s, Esters got involved in civil rights politics in Milwaukee. She moved back to Mississippi in 1972, where her experience in community organizing led to appointments on the state mental health and probation and parole boards.

  In short, she’d become a local big shot, a status that was compounded by the fact that she was a second cousin of Kosciusko’s most famous former citizen, Oprah Winfrey. In 2006, Winfrey presented Kosciusko with a major civic gift, a $5.5-million Boys & Girls Club. Standing next to her at the ribbon-cutting ceremony was none other than Katharine Carr Esters, who had helped organize early meetings between Winfrey and town officials.

  In the context of the McGee case, what interested me about Katharine’s story was how it related to Rosalee. A major theme of Jay Bird Creek is the importance of education, faith, and a work ethic to a person trying to overcome disadvantaged circumstances. But, no doubt, that path didn’t work for everybody in Jim Crow Mississippi. If I was reading Rosetta Saffold right, she’d had it very hard herself. Judging by the content and literacy level of her letters, there was no way she’d ever had the chance to go off to a boarding school.

  But Rosalee was smart and capable in her own way. With two kids, no skills, and a place at the bottom of the socioeconomic pecking order, she did what she had to do: She hustled.

  ten

  COMMUNISTS COMING HERE

  On February 9, 1950, Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy began to make his first national splash, telling an audience in Wheeling, West Virginia, that the State Department was infested with Communist spies. No recording of the speech survived, and people argued forever after about whether McCarthy actually said “I have here in my hand” a list of 205 known infiltrators.

  Three days later, in a follow-up speech in Reno, Nevada, he lowered the number to fifty-seven but repeated the theme: America was losing the global conflict with Communism, thanks to enemies within. The Soviet Union was in control of Eastern Europe; China had become the People’s Republic on October 1, 1949; and East Germany was established on the 7th. Two weeks before that, on September 23, President Truman announced that “an atomic explosion had occurred within Russia in recent weeks,” a preface to the world’s learning that the Soviet Union definitely had the bomb.

  To McCarthy—and to millions of people who believed in him—that many losses in such a short time couldn’t have been an accident. He said the people on his list, all burrowed inside the State Department, were “individuals who would appear to be either card-carrying members or certainly loyal to the Communist Party, but who nevertheless are still helping to shape our foreign policy.” These people were like Judas, selling out the United States to its enemies, but they were even more dangerous because they were motivated by ideology, not greed. “One thing to remember in discussing the Communists in our Government is that we are not dealing with spies who get 30 pieces of silver to steal the blueprints of a new weapon,” he said. “We are dealing with a far more sinister type of activity because it permits the enemy to guide and shape our policy….” He focused particular wrath on Alger Hiss, the former State Department official who on January 21 had been found guilty of two counts of perjury, one of them for denying that he had ever passed secret government documents to ex-Communist Whittaker Chambers.

  Alas, the United States was about to begin dealing, very publicly, with the problem of spies who stole new weapons—a story that began to unfold on February 2, when British theoretical physicist Klaus Fuchs, who worked on the Manhattan Project, was arrested in London and charged with giving A-bomb secrets to the Russians. Over the next few months, it came out that American citizens were involved. David Greenglass, a machinist at Los Alamos who was originally from New York, was arrested in June. July and August saw the arrests of Greenglass’s brother-in-law, Julius Rosenberg, and his sister, Ethel, both of whom were eventually executed for conspiracy to commit espionage. Julius’s lawyer was Emanuel H. Bloch, a New Yorker who, up until the moment of Julius’s arrest, was devoting much of his time to the defense of Willie McGee.

  Capping the first half of 1950, on Sunday, June 25, the North Korean army turned a simmering conflict into a hot war when it crossed the Thirty-eighth Parallel and invaded South Korea. The United States would be entangled in combat operations there for the next three years, at an eventual cost of more than 36,000 American lives.

  Although there was never a good time for Communists to show up in Jackson, Mississippi, the summer of 1950 was as bad as it got. Nonetheless, that July rapidly moving events—pegged to McGee’s July 27 execution date—forced a confrontation between the CRC and city and state authorities.

  During 1949 and early 1950, things had changed markedly in terms of public awareness about McGee’s situation. Thanks to Patterson’s tireless efforts, he was no longer obscure, and his story was now being covered in publications like the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Newsweek. Recognizing this, Patterson decided to build on what the CRC had done during its anti-Bilbo fight in 1946 and 1947. This time, it would send a sizable out-of-state delegation of protesters to Jackson to sound off in hopes of stopping the execution. Once these plans became known, the city bristled in anticipation of a conflict that seemed likely to turn violent. Setting the tone was a legendary local newspaper editor who loved nothing more than a good battle: Frederick Sullens.

  “Probably no U.S. editor is quite so tough, colorful, eloquent, prolific and unmindful of editorial niceties as 65-year-old, 185-pound Frederick Sullens of the Jackson (Miss.) Daily News,” Time said in a 1943 profile marking the newspaper’s fiftieth anniversary. “…[F]or 38 of those 50 years [it] has come wet from the presses bristling with Sullens’s own pugnacious personality. He is perhaps the only survivor of the old Southern-womanhood-must-be-defended school of journalism, whose exponents backed up their words with their fists and divided all office visitors into two classes: 1) those without horsewhips; 2) those with.”

  Born in 1877 in Versailles, Missouri, Sullens came to Mississippi in 1897 to cover a murder trial. He didn’t like Jackson at first, but he stuck around and took a job at the city’s oldest daily, the Clarion-Ledger. The place he came to love wasn’t much to look at—population 5,000 or so, it was a backwater city with dusty streets and shabby buildings, still smarting from its Civil War days as “Chimneyville,” when it was conquered and burned before and after the fall of Vicksburg.

  Jackson’s natural setting was scenic but buggy. A muddy river, the Pearl, slithered past to the east, where water moccasins wriggled about in dark, soggy woods that you could see from the bluffs downtown. There were yellow fever outbreaks every year from 1897 to 1899, and Sullens caught the disease himself. He also launched an editorial campaign to clean the city up, getting behind a $100,000 sewer system that critics considered a boondoggle.

  “You can imagine my surprise and disappointment to discover it was a dingy, dreary-looking country town,” Sullens told one interviewer. “…I’ve been here ever since, and, having written millions of words in praise of Jackson, it is now rather safe to draw the conclusion that I like the place. In fact, I love it. Today I’d rather own a magnolia sapling in Jackson than the Empire State Building in New York.”

  Sullens quit the Clarion-Ledger in 1905 after a fight with his publisher, who cut one of his pieces—a theatrical review—in half. (“I tore up the galleys and told him he could take his job and go to hell.”) He signed on as city editor of the Jackson Daily News; the following year
he became editor and later bought the paper. There he reigned for the next half century, focusing mainly on Mississippi matters—especially politics and race—but always with an eye on national and world events.

  His style of journalism was personal, vitriolic, biased, often sentimental, and he kept readers well informed about his attachments to Mississippi’s natural splendors, Pekingese dogs, and Christmas. (A holiday tradition was Sullens’s Christmas Eve editorial, described in his obituary as “lasting literature…almost Biblical in its purity.”) He could be funny in a Menckenesque way. Once, after reading that President Warren G. Harding liked to pour gravy on his waffles, he wrote, “Henceforth and hereafter suspicion and dread will dog his footsteps….” But too often he wasn’t funny at all, ranting about race, Yankees, and Communists in ways that sounded like open incitements to violence.

  According to legend, Sullens would get so agitated while writing his front-page column—“The Low Down on the Higher Ups,” launched in the 1930s—that he would shed articles of clothing while he typed, ending up nearly naked. “The following item published years ago probably best exemplifies the tenor of his column,” Colliers said in a 1947 profile. “‘Jim So-and-So (naming a prominent state official) came to my office today. I beat hell out of him, his son, and his dog. If anybody else is looking for trouble, he’ll find a well-preserved man in his middle fifties well able to take care of himself.’”