by Alex Heard
On February 3, 1951, McGee signed an affidavit before the Hinds County chancery clerk that gave his account of what had happened between him and Mrs. Hawkins, and it would color every event from then on. He’d told the story privately to his trial lawyers in 1946 and 1948, but this version was simpler because it was stripped of two dramatic plot elements: There was no mention of McGee’s impregnating Mrs. Hawkins and not a word about their alleged scheme to murder Troy.
McGee either forgot these details (which seems impossible), dropped them because they weren’t true or because he was afraid he’d be lynched, or dropped them because his lawyers told him he had to. In any event, the “double indemnity” plotline was gone. It was replaced by a more conventional tale of a lust-driven affair that came to an end when McGee, as he told it, was caught by Troy Hawkins and framed to save Willette’s reputation.
The 1946 version was much longer and featured a different timetable about when the affair started. It began with McGee’s account of his life story, in which he listed various jobs he’d held up through 1941. The years between 1941 and 1944 were largely skipped, but he said the affair started in August 1944. He didn’t mention doing household or yard work prior to then for the Hawkins family. He said Mrs. Hawkins had flirted with him once when he offered to carry something for her, but that the affair didn’t commence until she invited him inside her home one day to wash windows and wax floors, seducing him in a bedroom.
In 1951’s compressed version, McGee only mentioned working at Masonite, saying he was there “in the late nineteen thirties” and that, during this period, he started doing house and yard chores for various white people in Laurel, including Troy Hawkins, who had worked at Masonite at the same time. He didn’t say when the affair began, only that Mrs. Hawkins made sexual overtures while he was inside the house, and that he returned frequently for more encounters. McGee feared the consequences, so “I went to California about the year 1944 because I knew what was happening would one way or another come out and get me killed.”
Thus, the new version had McGee running away from the affair in the same year that, in the old version, it started. Later—McGee didn’t say when—he came back, and Mrs. Hawkins “renewed the acquaintance.” She would turn up at his house looking for him, which made his wife suspicious. He alluded to the same incident that Rosalee had described in her statement from July 25, 1950, in which Mrs. Hawkins harassed them on the streets one night. That story was absent from his 1946 account.
The most interesting new detail concerned what allegedly happened when Troy discovered the truth. In 1946, McGee said he had gone to the Hawkins home on the Thursday night before the alleged rape, had sex with Willette, and backed out of the murder plot. Now, in 1951, McGee said that “the night before the night on which they claim I raped her”—which meant Wednesday, October 31—“I went by the house about 10:30 or a little later to get some money from her. While I was there Mr. Hawkins unexpectedly came in and I was in the house although I was not at the time doing anything wrong and Mr. Hawkins said angrily, ‘What in the God Damn Hell does this mean,’ and he grabbed me and I shoved him back and I ran out of the door. That night I came to the house on foot. The following night when they claim I raped her, I had the truck but I did not go to Mr. Hawkin’s [sic] house or anywhere near it.”
McGee’s implication was that Troy and Willette decided to hoax the rape and frame him, to cover up their shame and get revenge. The statement concluded with McGee explaining why he hadn’t told this story before. He said he had but that his lawyer, John Poole, “told me that if I said anything about it I’d get both him and myself killed.”
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BARE-LEGGED WOMEN
On February 5, the Mississippi Supreme Court set a new execution date for McGee: March 20, 1951. Bella Abzug and John Coe were already working on new federal appeals, and this time they included details of the affair, making McGee’s bombshell story part of the package from then on.
The claim started showing up in left-wing newspapers just before Abzug and Coe presented it in court. The Daily Worker mentioned it first, on February 25, summarizing what McGee had said and adding something that wasn’t in his statement: the charge that Mrs. Hawkins “threatened to cry rape and place him at the mercy of the lynch mob if he didn’t agree to the relationship.”
That language was from CRC press materials, which appear to have taken details from both Rosalee’s and Willie’s statements and, in the process, added a few new twists. The Daily People’s World used the same information in a story published on March 2, which claimed, “The relationship was well known in the community, thus moving white supremacists to press feverishly for McGee’s death.”
Abzug and Coe presented their new material on March 5, when they filed a petition for habeas corpus with Judge Sidney Mize, who heard them at the federal district court in Vicksburg. Their summary contained more precise dates than McGee’s affidavit. They said Willie and Troy first started working together at Masonite in either 1936 or 1937 and that, “[b]eginning about the year 1941,” McGee began doing odd jobs for the Hawkins family. The affair started a year later and continued with only two interruptions: during McGee’s army service in “1942 or 3 and by a later period of residence in California after he was discharged from the Army.” During all this time, they said, the Hawkins family lived at 435 South Magnolia Street in Laurel.
That was wrong—the Hawkinses were in Indiana for part of that time—but what is more interesting is how messy the affair story was becoming. Already, it was a blend of two different stories by McGee, a fabricated story by Rosalee, the lawyers’ input, and new flourishes supplied by Communist journalists like Harry Raymond.
A month before, in February, Raymond had written a CRC-and Communist Party–sponsored pamphlet called Save Willie McGee, which based its arguments on the old claims used at the clemency hearing in 1950. There was no mention of an affair back then, and the pamphlet did nothing more than hint at it, relating a rumor that Troy and Willette had had a fight on the night of the rape. Henceforth, the Daily Worker would write about the affair as if it were an established fact. Not only had it happened, the paper would argue, it had been widely known in Laurel for years.
There was one other thing in the mix—a second alibi. Abzug and Coe had a new affidavit in hand, taken on March 4 from Florida-based Hettie Johnson. Her story was that McGee was at her house all through the night of the rape, drinking and gambling. She said her husband and some other men had a game going across the street that migrated to her house around 11:00. McGee and Bill Barnes were part of the group, and Johnson recalled hearing McGee say he was “going to take a chance with some of the company’s money.”
Johnson got sleepy and lay down, but she was in a sufficiently “wakeful state” to feel sure that the game kept going and that McGee stayed put. Around daylight an argument broke out, with Johnson’s husband threatening to hit McGee over the head with a pistol. McGee lost his temper because he’d gambled away Laurel Wholesale Grocery cash that wasn’t his to lose.
“Willie said he had messed up the boss man’s money and he would have to go to his wife and get some,” Johnson said. He left in the company truck, accidentally hitting another man’s truck with enough force that “a small piece was knocked off of the body of Willie’s truck, which lay in the street the next day.”
Johnson said she’d been prepared to tell this story at the first trial and was subpoenaed, but with the trial in progress she was taken aside at the courthouse and threatened for having allowed gambling and bootleg whiskey in her home. Her details sounded specific: Wayne Valentine served the subpoena, she said, and at the courthouse she was “taken into a little room where there were some soldiers and two policemen or deputy sheriff’s [sic] with guns, and some gentleman who was acting for the state….”
The affidavit contained one other notable detail. Johnson said she was working at the time as a maid for “Mrs. Delia Lennon”—the correct spelling was Leonard—who was Mr
s. Hawkins’s aunt, and that she went to work at her home at 7:30 on the morning after the rape.
“[W]hen she got there,” the statement said, “…Mrs. Lennon said that something awful had happened that night to ‘Bill,’ as Mrs. Wiletta Hawkins was known, and Mrs. Lennon said that a ‘nigger’ had come into her house and raped her.” Johnson asked her how they knew the rapist was black. Leonard said Willette had felt his hair. She added that “Mrs. Hawkins might have had a nightmare, and ‘she was hoping that that was what it was,’ because she did not see how Mrs. Hawkins could have been raped with her husband and children in the next room.”
Taken together, the new information was tantalizing and confusing. Johnson’s statement could have been checked out—starting with the damaged truck and Mrs. Leonard’s comments. But it was also puzzling, because it took McGee’s alibi in two directions. He was innocent because, yes, he was regularly having sex with Mrs. Hawkins inside her home, at her insistence. He was also innocent because he wasn’t there the night she was raped.
Mize didn’t linger over the mysteries. He rejected all of them, saying the defense lawyers should have presented any new evidence at the third trial. He refused to grant a stay to permit time for further appeals, so Abzug and Coe hurriedly moved their petition up the line, going first to the Fifth Circuit, which also said no, and next, on March 15, lodging an appeal for a stay with the U.S. Supreme Court.
In her 1977 book, A Fine Old Conflict, British-born writer Jessica Mitford tells the story of her adventurous involvement with the McGee case during these months, in a chapter called “Mississippi.” It starts with a cross-country road trip that she and three other CRC-sponsored women made in March from Oakland, California, to Jackson, where they went door to door trying to solicit public support for McGee—usually with dim results. It climaxes with the group, whose members called themselves the White Women’s Delegation, trying one last tactic on its way out of the state: On March 20, they dropped in unannounced at Rowan Oak, William Faulkner’s stately home in Oxford—a small, historic university town in north Mississippi. Their goal was to convince the great man, who four months earlier had won the Nobel Prize, to issue a statement on McGee’s behalf.
“We asked a gangling, snaggle-toothed white boy for directions to Faulkner’s house,” Mitford recalled in the book, a memoir of her fifteen years as a Communist Party member. “‘Down the road a piece, past the weepin’ willa tree,’ was his response, which I took as augury of our arrival in authentic Faulkner country.”
There aren’t any pictures of this meeting, but judging by photos taken around the time of the trip, the women would have dressed up. Rowan Oak, now owned and maintained by the University of Mississippi, is a large white Greek Revival house with a distinctive entrance: a brick walkway leading through an alley of tall cedar trees to a columned portico. After tapping over the bricks, the women rang or knocked and Faulkner himself invited them in. Mitford doesn’t say where they sat, but he probably took them into a parlor that opened up to the right, or to a library on the left, which contained simple white bookshelves he’d built by hand.
Wrapped in a velvet smoking jacket, the silver-haired novelist spoke in what Mitford called “convoluted paragraphs…of murky eloquence” about his belief that McGee was innocent. “I was desperately trying to take down everything he said in my notebook, and frequently got lost as he expatiated on his favorite themes: sex, race, and violence,” she wrote. “The Willie McGee case, compounded of all three, was a subject he seemed to savor with much relish; it could have been the central episode in one of his short stories.”
They left after two hours, and then Mitford called William Patterson in New York to tell him about the interview. Patterson was excited—Faulkner’s opinions would make news—but he told Mitford she had to get him to sign a release, so he couldn’t deny his own words later. Mitford trooped back to Rowan Oak and found Faulkner, who was doing horse-stable chores with a black employee. Standing there in manure-splashed hip boots, he scanned and initialed a statement Mitford had written, then supposedly mumbled, “I think McGee and the woman should both be destroyed.”
“Oh don’t let’s put that in,” Mitford said, scurrying off to her car.
Whether it happened like that is debatable. The “snaggle-toothed white boy” sounds contrived, as if Mitford took a wrong turn onto Tobacco Road, and “Mississippi” is written in a style that blends fact with manufactured comedy, which Mitford sometimes did during her long career as a humorous memoirist and muckraking journalist. The interview was real, though, and the story got picked up in newspapers. Faulkner wasn’t quoted directly. He had asked Mitford to paraphrase what he said, and she honored that. But what she got was juicy enough.
Oxford, Mississippi—William Faulkner, 1950 Nobel Prize winner for literature, whose novels on Mississippi life are world-famous, has expressed his belief that Willie McGee, Mississippi negro worker awaiting execution on a false rape conviction, is innocent and should be freed….
Explaining that he did not for a moment doubt McGee’s innocence, Faulkner agreed that new evidence proving perjury by the woman who charged McGee with “rape” was also true.
Mitford published an account of the interview a few days later in the Daily People’s World, writing that Faulkner “said the McGee case was an outrage and that it was good we had come. He said Southerners would listen to us where they wouldn’t listen to men.”
What she didn’t mention was that Faulkner started backing off almost immediately. An editor at the Memphis Commercial Appeal who saw the press release called Faulkner’s longtime friend Phil “Moon” Mullen, an Oxford newspaperman, to tell him it sounded like trouble. Mullen went out to see Faulkner, who, after listening to Mullen’s assessment of the likely fallout, pointed at his typewriter and said, “Sit down and write what you think I should say.” In a follow-up release, Faulkner retreated a bit but stood by his stance that McGee’s life should be spared.
“I do not want Willie McGee to be executed, because it will make him a martyr and create a long lasting stink in my native state,” he wrote. “If the crime of which he is accused was not one of force and violence, and I do not think it was proved that, then the penalty in this state or in any other similar case should not be death.”
Predictably, there was a backlash in Mississippi. On March 28 in Laurel, District Attorney Paul Swartzfager, who had known Faulkner during his school days in Oxford, labeled the comments “so untrue as to make the blood of any red-blooded American boil.” Faulkner had either been “seduced by his own fictitious imaginations or has aligned himself with the Communists.”
In a letter to a friend two days later, Faulkner moaned that he’d been bewitched. “Those people, all women, knocked on my front door without warning, no telephones in advance or anything,” he wrote. “They told me who they were, and I should have known their commie bosses wanted only a chance to use me, since I don’t think any of them really give a damn about McGee….
“I was wrong, I spoke out of turn. Was stupid, since my opinions could not change things, besides, they were private opinions which I had no intention of airing to anyone, since, as I told the people, I knew too little about the facts of the matter to go on record. I have learned a lesson, though.”
Actually, Faulkner had learned this lesson before and would learn it again. For a writer whose themes weren’t overtly political, he had a knack for getting in hot water by sounding off about subjects like Willie McGee, the Attala County massacre, and, a few years later, the lynching of Emmett Till.
His fame was double-edged. It gave him international standing as a wise man and an oracle, but it put him in a hopeless position when race was on the table. If he spoke up, most Mississippians expected him to inform the rest of the world that the existing system—segregation, white supremacy, and enforcement of the social order through any means necessary, including violence—was justified. Northerners sometimes assumed, wrongly, that he was “progressive” in the way a Henry W
allace supporter would have recognized, so they were disappointed when he sounded more Mississippi than Manhattan.
Politically, Faulkner was a Southern Democrat from a genteel, slightly threadbare background. This meant he wasn’t a Snopes, the kind of man likely to turn up cheering at a Bilbo rally. But it also meant he wasn’t comfortable with federal civil rights legislation, lectures from Northern intellectuals and politicians, or Communist Party anything. Faulkner once joked that left-wing literary colleagues of his day, describing how they perceived his politics, assigned him the label “Gothic fascist.”
In any event, it usually worked better when he expressed his sweeping ideas about history and race in fiction instead of commentary. In 1956, in a widely publicized Q & A with a newsmagazine called the Reporter, he said he opposed both locally enforced segregation and federally enforced integration. So what was he for? His preferred path was a “middle road” that involved changing things at a slow, safe pace set by the South. Moving too fast would cause bloodshed and revolt, he predicted, adding, “[I]f it came to fighting I’d fight for Mississippi against the United States, even if it meant going out into the street and shooting Negroes.” This caused as much trouble up north as his McGee comments had in the South. He tried to make it go away by insisting, lamely, that he’d been “grossly misquoted.”
