by Alex Heard
When Faulkner wrote about the interplay of crime, accusation, and rumor that could lead to a lynching or a legal lynching—which he did in the 1931 short story “Dry September” and the 1948 novel Intruder in the Dust—he didn’t have to look far for background material. Though Oxford wasn’t among the worst lynching towns in Mississippi, lynchings had happened there, and Faulkner would have known about a couple of them.
When he was ten, an accused murderer named Nelson, or Nelse, Patton was killed by local vigilantes who chased off the sheriff, knocked holes through walls of the Oxford jail, shot Patton, scalped him, and hanged him on the courthouse lawn. In 1935, murder-trial defendant Ellwood Higginbotham—whose jury, in the opinion of some townspeople, was taking too long to reach the desired guilty verdict—was taken from jail, driven out of town, shot, and hanged. “[T]he black put up a strong fight, but was subdued by the mob and a well-rope looped over his head,” the Clarion-Ledger reported. “In the struggle the negro managed to get the noose in his mouth and fought so strongly that the mob finally took a tire tool to get the rope loose from his jaws.”
When Faulkner addressed lynching as a theme, he was, true to form, tugged in two directions. “Dry September,” which appeared in the January 1931 edition of Scribner’s Magazine, tells the story of an innocent man, Will Mayes, who gets lynched because of a false rumor that he sexually assaulted a white spinster named Minnie Cooper. For dramatic reasons—and perhaps for taste reasons—Faulkner shied away from depicting the lynching itself. Readers were shown the events leading up to it and the aftermath, but not the killing, so the story delivered tension in place of horror. Nonetheless, the political message was clear: Lynching was wrong, it sometimes led to the death of innocent men, and its continued existence was a curse on the land.
So said Faulkner the artist. The next month, Faulkner the opiner wrote a letter about lynching to the editor of the Commercial Appeal, and he sounded like a different person. Headlined “Mobs Sometimes Right,” it was a response to an earlier letter from a black man named W. H. James, a resident of Starkville, Mississippi, who had written to express his general gratitude to women of Mississippi who had joined a Southern anti-lynching advocacy group. “The good women felt that something needed to be done,” he wrote. “…I feel that we have some friends who will protect us against the crime which has been perpetrated against so many of us without even a possible chance to prove our innocence or guilt.”
For some reason, this irritated Faulkner, who wrote a long reply arguing that, while mob justice was wrong, he had never heard, “outside of a novel or a story,” of a lynching victim who had “a record beyond reproach.” He failed to mention that he had just published a short story starring such a man.
“It just happens that we—mobber and mobbee—live in this age,” he concluded. “We will muddle through, and die in our beds, the deserving and the fortunate among us. Of course, with the population what it is, there are some of us that won’t. Some will die rich, and some will die on cross-ties soaked with gasoline, to make a holiday. But there is one curious thing about mobs. Like our juries, they have a way of being right.”
Seventeen years later, Faulkner published his grand statement on the subject: Intruder in the Dust, the story of Lucas Beauchamp, an innocent black man accused of murdering a rural white named Vinson Gowrie, whose relatives were known to be violent and vengeful. Lucas is not only blameless, he’s clever enough to control his own fate by convincing two white people to perform dangerous detective work that proves his innocence.
From the get-go, Faulkner meant for Intruder in the Dust to be read as both an artistic and a political statement. “The story is a mystery-murder though the theme is more [the] relationship between Negro and white,” he said in a letter to a book agent, “…the premise being that the white people in the south, before the North or the govt. or anyone else, owe and must pay a responsibility to the Negro.”
For all its literary trappings, the novel was partly a defense of the “middle road.” When Lucas is arrested and taken to jail in downtown Jefferson (Faulkner’s fictional version of Oxford), lynch talk is already in the air. Lucas calls out to the book’s other central figure, a white sixteen-year-old named Charles “Chick” Mallison Jr., that he needs help from Chick’s Uncle Gavin, a local lawyer. By this point, we know from a flashback that Lucas and the boy have met before. On a winter day four years earlier, Chick had fallen through creek ice while rabbit hunting. Lucas warmed him up inside his cabin, refusing to accept money and leaving Chick with the gnawing sense of being indebted to a black man.
Gavin and Chick go see Lucas in jail. Gavin doesn’t believe Lucas is innocent—he assumes he’ll lose the case and hopes, at best, to save his life. After Gavin leaves, Chick goes back inside and Lucas calls in the old debt, asking him to help prove the truth by digging up Gowrie’s body, to show that he was shot with a different handgun than the .41 Colt that Lucas owns. In a passage loaded with meaning about the future sources of change, Chick ponders why Lucas would ask him to do such a thing—rather than his uncle or the sheriff—and recalls an earlier episode involving an old black man who chose to trust him with a secret instead of a white adult. “Young folks and womens, they ain’t cluttered,” the man had said. “They can listen. But a middle-year man like your paw and your uncle, they can’t listen. They ain’t got time.”
After that comes a far-fetched series of events. Chick, along with a black teenage friend named Aleck Sander and an old woman named Eunice Habersham, ventures into the dark heart of Gowrie country at night to exhume Vinson’s corpse. They find another man’s body, unmistakable evidence that something is wrong. Various twists and turns follow, and by the end Lucas is exonerated and freed.
Surprising things—even a few heroic things—happened during the long, sorry history of lynching, but there was never a story with this combination of Huck Finn plot elements. Why did Faulkner stray so far from reality? One obvious and positive reason was to create a black character who wasn’t merely a victim. But as New Yorker literary critic Edmund Wilson noticed in his 1948 review, there was a reactionary theme under the surface.
“The book contains a kind of counterblast to the anti-lynching bill and to the civil-rights plank in the Democratic platform,” he wrote. In a long speech by Gavin, Wilson detected what he took to be Faulkner’s position on civil rights: Southerners themselves, white and black, would solve their problems in time. But if the white South were pushed too hard, blacks would be thrown, in Gavin’s words, “not merely into injustice but into grief and agony, and violence, too, by forcing on us laws based on the idea that man’s injustice to man can be abolished overnight by police.”
Unlike most of Faulkner’s novels, Intruder in the Dust was well-suited to the big screen, and MGM bought the rights. It was filmed on location in Oxford in 1949, during a much-covered springtime shoot that employed a number of locals as actors and extras. The movie, which premiered in Oxford in October of that year, was hailed for its realistic depiction of Southern race relations. But it wasn’t realistic—it was a fantasy about what ought to have been. MGM filtered out the novel’s voice and complexity to emphasize the detective story and the overall sense of heroism.
Of course, a realistic depiction of lynching wouldn’t have gotten made in 1949. Whatever its faults, Intruder in the Dust was a daring project because it addressed the subject on any level. For its part, Oxford became the setting of a unique sociological experiment: How would its white citizens react to a story that depicted their town as the source of mob passion?
“Admittedly, there was much concern about the public relations problem of bringing negro actors into this small Southern city to make a motion picture of the South’s racial problems,” the Oxford Eagle reported. John Popham called it a “ticklish situation” in a New York Times story.
They reacted pretty well, partly because they caught the Hollywood bug. MGM met them more than halfway by observing all the written and unwritten race codes. Juan
o Hernandez, a Puerto Rican actor who played Lucas, stayed at the home of a local black undertaker and said nice things about greens and fatback. When MGM thanked Oxford’s officials, merchants, and extras in a full-page Oxford Eagle ad, it segregated the names by race.
So, as breakthroughs go, this one was limited. But man-on-the-street interviews after the premiere showed that the movie inspired serious reflection among some of Oxford’s citizens.
“It’s a shocking story, but definitely a true picture of Southern attitudes,” said Jack Odom, a former Ole Miss football player who had a speaking role as a truck driver. “A lot of people I talked to didn’t know what to make of it…. I was that way myself, but after I got home and thought about it, I began to realize that it is a true story of a misunderstanding and of how the colored people are treated. The ending is left up to the audience. People are running away, and the audience has to decide whether they’re running away from the negro after he was proved innocent or whether they were running away from themselves or the truth.” Odom’s take? “They were running away from themselves.”
Jessica Mitford was living in the Bay Area, working and writing under the name Decca Treuhaft, when the CRC put out its latest call to action about McGee in early 1951. The name she went by then was a combination of her childhood nickname, Decca, and the last name from her second marriage, to labor lawyer Robert Treuhaft. At the time, she was a housewife and Communist Party activist, not a professional writer yet. Her breakthrough books—Daughters and Rebels, a memoir of her aristocratic upbringing in England, and The American Way of Death, an exposé of the U.S. funeral industry—were still a decade off.
During the climax of the McGee case, Mitford was running the Oakland CRC office. As she recalled in A Fine Old Conflict, she opened the mail one day to find an urgent McGee appeal from New York, asking chapter members to send money, organize local actions, and provide volunteers who would travel to Mississippi to protest in person. By design, the participants would all be white women, a dramatic way to show Southerners that the very people they hoped to “protect” were disgusted by what Mississippi was about to do.
“[A] White Women’s Delegation sounded to me like a marvelous idea,” Mitford wrote. “…I was determined to be part of this great conclave.”
For the most part, Mitford describes the experience as a romp—“a thrilling adventure” and “a welcome breather from diapers and housework”—but it took real courage to do what she did. She was thirty-three in early 1951, the mother of three young children. Back then, just getting to Mississippi by car from California was a challenge. Setting out on March 5, she and the three other CRC delegates—Louise Hopson and Billie Wachter, both Berkeley housewives, and Evelyn Frieden, a union shop steward in the Bay Area—drove all the way to Jackson, with stops for meetings and canvassing en route.
They covered more than 2,600 miles on the old U.S. highway system, and they had no idea what might happen at the end of the road. They were going to Jackson as card-carrying CRC troublemakers, at a time when anti-McGee feelings were more intense than ever. Eight months earlier, in the summer of 1950, McGee’s CRC supporters had been severely beaten. For Mitford and her crew, jail time was a strong likelihood, and worse things were possible.
Mitford handled the challenge with a brand of energy and drive that was a product of her unique background and her status as a breakaway rebel—not just from middle-class convention, but from her own family. Born in 1917, in Gloucestershire, England, to David Freeman Mitford, a British lord, and Sydney Bowles, the daughter of a member of Parliament, Jessica was one of the famous Mitford sisters, women whose glamour, achievements, and political escapades mesmerized and appalled the British public throughout the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s.
Two of the sisters, Pam and Deborah, led fairly conventional upper-crust lives. The oldest daughter, Nancy, born in 1904, was a fiction writer best known for The Pursuit of Love (1945) and Love in a Cold Climate (1949), novels that took her family’s quirks and spun them into comedy with an edge. At the center was the blustering figure of Matthew Radlett, a terrapin-hided xenophobe inspired by David. On the walls of the family estate, Matthew proudly displayed a trenching tool he had used to slaughter “the Hun” during hand-to-hand combat in World War I. To amuse himself, he liked to chase his daughters through the woods with hounds.
The real David wasn’t this crusty, and though he was far to the right politically, he was never a big fan of Adolf Hitler. But two of his daughters, Diana and Unity, were great admirers of the Nazi leader, becoming infamous prior to World War II because of their public embrace of fascism. They were exposed to fascist ideas in the 1930s, at a time when figures like Hitler and Mussolini were seen by some upper-class Brits as an acceptable bulwark against the great threat from the east: Soviet Communism.
Their youthful dabblings became more serious in early 1935, when Unity was in Munich having lunch at an outdoor restaurant called the Osteria Bavaria. She was on hand hoping to be noticed by Hitler—who, as she knew, ate there regularly—and it worked. He spotted her one day and had an aide invite her to his table, initiating a friendship that continued until the outbreak of the war. British and American newspapers never got tired of reporting that Hitler once called blonde-haired Unity “the most perfect Nordic beauty in the world.”
Diana was already married when she met Sir Oswald Mosley, the head of the British Union of Fascists, a right-wing political party founded in 1932. They started an affair, left their spouses, and were married in a private ceremony in 1936 that took place at the home of Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels. Looking on with a fatherly smile was Hitler himself. Their political activities continued, and during the spring and summer of 1940, they were arrested separately in England and locked up until 1943.
Unity made it into Hitler’s inner circle and seemed to be in love with him, though her biographer, David Pryce-Jones, concluded that there probably wasn’t a sexual relationship. There’s no question she understood what Nazism was all about. She fantasized that Germany and Britain would unite against the Soviet Union, and she hinted that she might do something drastic if the two countries went to war. After Poland fell, word trickled out of Germany that Unity had fallen “mysteriously ill.” Her condition remained unknown for months, even after her parents succeeded in bringing her back to England in January 1940. “One report was that she had been shot after a violent quarrel with Herr Hitler, who once gave her a specially made swastika badge,” the New York Times reported. “Another was that she had been found poisoned in Munich.”
In fact, she had put a pistol to her head and pulled the trigger. The bullet entered her brain and lodged at the back of her skull, but she’d somehow survived. Disfigured, partially paralyzed, and mentally impaired, she was later taken to the west coast of Scotland and lived out her days at a family property on Inch Kenneth Island, among villagers who generally treated her with kindness, as someone who had suffered enough. After her death from meningitis in 1948, an obituary writer called her “a lonely figure who spent most of her time walking the windswept moors with her spaniels.”
With so much to rebel against, Jessica made the most of it. She was the sixth of the seven Mitford children—there was also a brother, Tom, who died in 1945, fighting against the Japanese in Burma—and she served notice early that she would blaze her own trail. At eleven, she started socking away money in a “running away account.” As a teenager, she augmented her homeschooling curriculum with self-education about issues like poverty, privilege, and economic injustice.
“I became an ardent reader of the left-wing press, and even grudgingly used up a little of my Running Away Money to send for books and pamphlets explaining socialism,” she wrote in A Fine Old Conflict. “…When Boud [Unity’s nickname] became a Fascist, I declared myself a Communist. Thus by the time she was eighteen and I fifteen, we had chosen up opposite sides in the central conflict of our day.”
At first the spat was almost funny, but the gulf became real as t
hey marched off in different directions. Jessica had a precocious younger cousin named Esmond Romilly, a nephew of Winston Churchill’s who, by 1935, was publishing a left-wing student magazine called Out of Bounds. Newspapers loved writing about Churchill’s “red nephew,” and Jessica developed a crush on him before they met. When the Spanish Civil War started in 1936, Esmond joined the International Brigades that formed to fight the fascist-backed troops of General Francisco Franco. He saw combat, and though he wasn’t wounded, he came down with a severe case of dysentery that got him shipped back to England.
Esmond and Jessica met in early 1937, during a country-house weekend. They hit it off, and he agreed to her suggestion that they run away to Spain, where he would work as a war correspondent. They eloped to Bilbao, and the Mitford family had yet another news-making daughter on their hands. British foreign secretary Anthony Eden used his influence to track them down, but there was no bringing them back.
“The story, with considerable embellishment, made headlines in all the papers, and many European ones, for weeks,” Mary S. Lovell wrote in The Sisters, one of several books about the Mitford clan. “‘Another Mitford Anarchist,’ ‘Consul Chases Peer’s Daughter,’ ‘Mixed Up Mitford Girls Still Confusing Europe.’” Unable to marry in Spain because of legal pressure applied by Jessica’s father, they made it official on May 18 in Bayonne, France, with both their mothers present and Esmond shaking a fist at conventionality. “Threats of imprisonment make no difference,” he said in a press release. “We both regard marriage mainly as a convenience….”
The couple spent the next few years in Britain, Corsica, and the United States, combining a life of social activism and scraping by. They moved to America in early 1939, living at various times in New York, Miami, and Washington, D.C., while plugging away at odd jobs like bartending, saleswork, and freelance writing. In 1940, they co-wrote a series of Washington Post articles that repackaged their experiences as the escapades of two love-struck kids. In pictures that accompanied the articles, Esmond was dark, cheerful, and handsome; Jessica brown-haired, round-faced, and pretty.
