James Eldridge Cassidy, with his soft, easy voice and soothing smile, was irrepressibly friendly. He came off the farm with a fifth-grade education, raised by relatives after his father died, inclined to treat friends and strangers as part of an affectionate extended clan. When he moved to town in the twenties, he found his niche as the deliveryman for Southern Ice, first riding a horse-drawn wagon along the oiled dirt roads and later driving a refrigerated truck down the paved streets. By either means of transporta-tion, he was proud of being the iceman of Hope, a job that allowed him to greet scores of people each day, entering their houses as though he were a member of the family, hauling slabs of ice on his back in a big black leather strap, his clothes dripping in sweat from the effort of carrying fifty -and seventy-five-pound blocks from the street to oak ice boxes in his customers’ kitchens. Hope, the seat of Hempstead County, with a population of eight thousand, was the sort of place where everyone knew everyone else, but to know is not necessarily to like. Eldridge Cassidy was universally liked, a salt-of-the-earth fellow who let boys ride along with him as helpers and who invariably stopped to assist anyone who needed a tire fixed or an appliance repaired.
Eldridge doted on his only child Virginia, whom he called “Ginger.” He insisted on buying her new books for school rather than used ones so that she would not be embarrassed in front of her girlfriends, most of whom came from wealthier families. He was reduced to tears once, apologizing profusely, when he lacked the money to buy her an Easter dress. Sometimes at night, when Edith was shrieking at him, he would slip out to the front porch with his daughter and tell stories and watch the cars go up and down Hervey Street and listen to the screech and whistle of trains rolling into the depot two blocks away. By the time Virginia was twelve, Eldridge would offer her a swig or two of his whiskey. He was an antiprohibitionist, brought up among bootleg distillers, and believed that keeping things from people would only make them want them more. Virginia worshiped her daddy, while fearing her mother, but she took parts of her personality from each of them: Edith’s task-oriented determination, and occasional temper, along with Eldridge’s congeniality.
Virginia worked during her teenage years as a waitress at the Checkered Café at the corner of South Main and Third Street downtown, and immersed herself in activities at Hope High School: National Honor Society, press club, library club, music club, science club, freshman class secretary, student council member. Yet she was also regarded as a lighthearted, unaffected girl who loved to laugh and to flirt. Her self-defining quote under her picture in the senior class yearbook was: “I’d like to be serious but everything is so funny.” In a section entitled “Just Imagine,” where graduates assumed opposite personalities, she was teased with the line, “Just imagine Virginia Cassidy with a sophisticated nature.” And in a “Last Will and Testament” in which seniors passed along a character trait, she wrote: “I, Virginia Cassidy, will to Mary Jo Monroe my magnetic attraction for boys.” As a young girl, she scoffed at her mother’s penchant for bold makeup, but by the end of high school she was practicing the first brush strokes of the painted face that would become her adult trademark: her dresser upstairs on Hervey Street was cluttered with mascara, lipstick, eyeliner, and eye shadow.
Virginia’s senior yearbook was not a traditional leatherbound book with glossy paper, but a special edition of the local newspaper, the Hope Star. It was published on May 28, 1941, and the entire front page of the broadsheet was taken up by a staged photograph portraying the unpredictability of the world the seniors would enter after high school. Two students were shown standing on the stage of the school auditorium, gazing with earnestness and fear at an oversized die that they had tossed into the air, wondering whether it would land on the side that said “War” or the side that said “Peace.” Only a few days later, the federal government procured tens of thousands of acres of prime farmland on the outskirts of town for the construction of the Southwest Proving Ground, where the Army would test rifle shells, small bombs, and flares for use in the coming war. The proving ground became a metaphor for the Hope High graduates. They felt explosive, ready to prove something, recalled Jack Hendrix, one of Virginia’s classmates. “There was a sense of getting on, getting away, getting out of Hope.”
VIRGINIA got away to the nearest big city, Shreveport, fifty miles south in Louisiana, to study nursing at Tri-State Hospital. It was there, two years later, on a midsummer night in 1943, when she was working the late shift, that she met Bill Blythe. At least he called himself Bill in Shreveport. His family back in Texas knew him as W.J., the initials for William Jefferson. He went by other names with other people who had various claims on his affection. He could not be stuck with one identity, or even one birth date. His family placed his date of birth as February 27, 1918, but in his military records he said that he was one year and six days older, born on February 21, 1917. Vital statistics, in any case, were of no interest to Virginia Dell Cassidy on the night she caught sight of Bill Blythe. Whether he was twenty-six or twenty-five, his history did not matter, nor did hers. The moment she saw him, with his confident, fun-loving demeanor, sparkling blue eyes, broad shoulders, and sandy-brown hair, she forgot about an old boyfriend from Hope whose ring she had worn for four years. Blythe was “a handsome man,” she would say later. “But you see handsome all the time. This was some strange and powerful attraction. Love at first sight.”
Blythe had arrived at the hospital with a female companion, but if that was a forewarning, it was lost on the student nurse. While the woman, who had complained of sharp abdominal pains, ended up in the operating room for an emergency appendectomy, all Virginia could think about was whether Blythe was married or engaged to the patient and, if not, how she could snare his attention. She flirted through eye contact, and as Blythe was leaving, halfway out the door, he turned around, came up, looked at the ring on Virginia’s finger, and asked what it signified. “Nothing,” she said, and their romance began. In later recollections of the episode, Virginia never explained who the other woman was or what happened to her. She said Blythe portrayed himself as a traveling salesman who had made a brief stop in Shreveport on his way back to Sherman, Texas, his home town, to enlist in the Army. He was so struck by her, Virginia recounted later, that he decided to stay in town, find an apartment, and take a job selling Oldsmobiles.
There is a contradiction at the center of that version of events. Blythe’s military records show that he already had been in the Army for two months by the time Virginia said she first saw him. He was inducted by Selective Service System Board 2 in Caddo Parish, Louisiana, on April 24, 1943, and entered the service in Shreveport ten days later, on May 3. That means that rather than just passing through Shreveport, as he had implied to Virginia, he must have been there already for several months. There would have been no need for him to return to Sherman to enlist since he had already done so in Shreveport. It remains a mystery how he simultaneously managed to be in the Army and work at a car dealership, just as it is curious how Virginia, who by her account was with him almost every day during their courtship, could be unaware of his military status. But everything about Bill Blythe was contradictory and mysterious. He constantly reinvented himself, starting over every day, the familiar stranger and ultimate traveling salesman, surviving off charm and affability. Anyone doubting his persuasive powers need know only this: When Virginia brought her parents down to Shreveport to get their blessing for her to marry him, it took him only minutes to win over the skeptical, tough-minded Edith.
They were married in Texarkana on September 3, 1943, less than two months after they had met and five weeks before he would be shipped overseas. It was a classic wartime wedding, performed in private by a justice of the peace, bonding two people who knew little about each other’s past and less about their future except that they would soon be separated. Virginia assumed that the man she was marrying had never been married before. She never asked, and Blythe never told. She knew that he had grown up on a forty-acre corn, cotton, an
d chicken farm on the road between Denison and Sherman on the north Texas plain; that he was the sixth of nine children of Willie Blythe and Lou Birchie Ayers; that the Blythes and Ayers came out of Corinth and Ripley, Mississippi; and that he began working at a dairy at age thirteen when his daddy got sick. She knew that he got a job as a mechanic when his daddy died, and that he eventually left home for the life of a traveling salesman, determined to become rich, roaming Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Arkansas, Tennessee, and all the way out to California, selling heavy equipment for the Manbee Equipment Com-pany. She knew that much and she knew that when she looked at him, she “became weak-kneed”—and that was all she knew.
She did not know about the December 1935 marriage license filed across the state line in Medill, Oklahoma, recording the marriage of W. J. Blythe and Virginia Adele Gash, a seventeen-year-old daughter of a Sherman tavern owner; or about the divorce papers filed in Dallas a year later, after Adele had left the Sherman farmhouse and WJ. had sent her clothes on in a suitcase.
She did not know about the birth certificate filed in Austin, Texas, on January 17, 1938, two years after the divorce, listing W. J. Blythe as the father of Adele Gash’s baby boy, Henry Leon Blythe.
Nor did she know about the marriage license filed in Ardmore, Okla-homa, on August 11, 1938, recording the marriage of W. J. Blythe and twenty-year-old Maxine Hamilton, or about Maxine’s divorce from Blythe nine months later, in which the judge ruled that WJ. was “guilty of extreme cruelty and gross neglect of duty … in that he refused to provide for her a place to live, and within two weeks after their marriage he refused to recognize her as his wife, that he abandoned and deserted her in Los Angeles, California, and refused to furnish her transportation to her parents in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.”
Virginia did not know that in 1940, WJ. married Adele Gash’s little sister, Faye, and divorced her after a few months, though his motivation in that arrangement seemed to be not love but a desire to avoid marrying another young woman who claimed to be pregnant with his baby.
She did not know about the birth certificate filed in Kansas City in May 1941 listing W. J. Blythe as the father of a baby girl born to a Missouri waitress to whom he also might have been briefly married.
Bill Blythe married Virginia Cassidy without telling her any of that, and within weeks he was gone off to war, sailing away on a troopship headed for the Mediterranean as a technician third grade with the 3030th Com-pany, 125th Ordnance Base Auto Maintenance Battalion. For several months, he was stationed in Egypt at a base in the desert outside Cairo, repairing engines and heavy equipment used in the North Africa campaign. On May 1, 1944, his battalion boarded Transport No. 640 in Alexandria and sailed across to Naples, then marched thirty miles inland and set up shop near the town of Caserta. The technicians and mechanics of the 125th kept the war machine in motion, rebuilding engines, reconditioning transmissions, retooling trucks and tanks, and salvaging junked vehicles for usable parts. Their base looked like a piece of transplanted industrial Detroit.
They were a long way from the fighting. They worked ten-hour days, with Sunday afternoons off, and were able to pass off the worst assignments to Italian civilians and prisoners of war. They had two base theaters, one open-air and one enclosed, where they watched movies five nights a week. There were softball games and boxing matches. Joe Louis came by one night to referee the bouts. A USO baseball tour brought in Leo Durocher of the Brooklyn Dodgers. Every night during the summer, groups of soldiers went into town to swim at the Royal Palace swimming pool. There were weekend trips to Naples, Anzio, Florence, Rome, and the beach at Capua. They encountered social diseases, malaria, and occasional food poisoning.
By the time Blythe reached Italy, Virginia had graduated from nursing school and was back in Hope, living with her parents on Hervey Street and working as a nurse. Bill Blythe had never lived in Hope; he barely knew it, but he listed it as his place of residence on his military papers. Virginia wrote him daily letters about her life there, and put him on the mailing list for Hometoum News— a folksy mimeographed letter written by “Mister Roy” Anderson, an unreconstructed Confederate who mixed news of the town with state and national events, describing blackberry blossoms “white as drifted snow,” the G.I. Bill of Rights, Masons taking the Degree, crappie biting in the lake, the ammunition tests out at the Southwest Proving Ground rattling windows five miles away. In one letter, old Mister Roy contrasted his life in Hope with that of a G.I. from New York:
He has seen the tall Empire State Building and Radio Center with millionaires in ’em and I have seen tall pecan and scaly bark hickory nut trees with squirrels in ’em. He has seen Central Park with swans on the lagoon—’ve seen Grassy Lake with wild ducks on it. He got watermelons from a Dago fruit stand, I got mine from a melon patch in the moonlight. He pays a florist $1.50 each for gardenias; I get em in Vera’s garden. When he dies, he will have paid pallbearers, I will have six friends to tote my weary wornout body.
All of which brings me to say this: I got a letter from a homesick kid the other day addressed to: Roy Anderson, Hope, Arkansas, God’s Coun-try. Ain’t it true?
Bill Blythe had no plans to stay in God’s country when he got home from the war. He had a job waiting for him in Chicago, selling heavy equipment for a company that he had worked for before the war, and he intended to pick up Virginia and take her up there. Virginia, in her later recollections, said that she reunited with him in Shreveport in November 1945, after he had already made a stop in Sherman. But his military records indicate that Blythe did not arrive home from Italy until December 1 and was honorably discharged at Camp Shelby, Mississippi, on December 7, mustered out with $203.29 in his pocket after serving two years, seven months, and fourteen days. If he then visited Sherman before his rendezvous with her in Shreveport, it is unlikely, given travel times in those days, that they could have seen each other until December 10. This is inconsequential except for one thing: the timing of the conception of William Jefferson Blythe III. For years afterward, there were whispers in Hope about who little Billy’s father was, rumors spawned by Virginia’s flirtatious nature as a young nurse and by the inevitable temptation of people to count backwards nine months from the birth date to see who was where doing what.
Nine months before August 19, 1946, Tech 3 Bill Blythe was still in Italy. Virginia heard the talk. Her answer was that Billy was born a month early. He had been induced weeks ahead of schedule because she had taken a fall and the doctor was concerned about her condition.
VIRGINIA Blythe had little time to get to know her husband. Two months in 1943 before he shipped out. One week in Hope at the end of 1945. Three months in Chicago in early 1946, living high up in an old hotel. And of those Chicago days, subtract the many nights that he was out on his sales route, driving around Illinois and Indiana in his dark blue 1942 Buick Sedan. By May 1946, Virginia was back in Hope. She and Bill were waiting for a house to open up in suburban Forest Park so they could move in, and until it was ready it made more sense for her to live with her parents than in the hotel, pregnant and alone. Altogether, she was with him less than six months.
May 17 was a Friday afternoon, the end of Blythe’s work week on the road. The house in the suburbs was ready. He turned his dark sedan south and drove toward Hope to pick up his wife and to bring her back. He headed diagonally through the flat farmlands of Illinois, past Effingham and Salem and down to the tip at Cairo, where he drove west across the Mississippi River into Missouri. At ten-thirty he pulled into a service station in Sikeston and refilled the tank. Then he sped into the night mist along Route 60, determined to make it to Hope before dawn. It seemed that everyone was out on the road that night, moving too slowly for Blythe’s taste. He passed Elmer Greenlee, who was on his way home after closing his roller rink. He passed Roscoe Gist, who was driving home with his wife after a night at the movies. He passed both men so fast that they took note of the big, dark Buick as it went by. Three miles west of town, one of Blythe’s front tires blew
out. The car swerved across the oncoming lane and cut through the corner of a field, rolling over twice and landing upside down near the service ditch of a farm road intersecting the highway. Greenlee arrived at the scene a few minutes later. The doors to the Buick were closed. The radio was still playing. The headlights shone into a nearby field. The car was empty.
Soon a crowd gathered. Several men turned the Buick over, fearing they might find someone crushed below. Two hours later, Chester Odum and John Lett were wading in a nearby drainage ditch when they spotted a hand. They pulled Blythe’s body out of a shallow pool of stagnant rainwater. Coroner Orville Taylor, who was at the scene, determined that Blythe had probably crawled out the driver’s side window and staggered toward the highway, only to fall into the ditch. The only bruise on his body was a bump on the back of his head. “Salesman Drowns in Ditch After Car Turns Over,” read the headline in the Sikeston newspaper the next day. In the Hope Star, it was front-page news: “Husband of Hope Girl Is Auto Victim.”
Eldridge Cassidy drove up to Sikeston to recover the body. The funeral for William Jefferson Blythe was held that Sunday at one o’clock at the First Baptist Church of Hope. He was buried in Rose Hill Cemetery in a plot that Eldridge had already bought for himself, his wife, his daughter, and his daughter’s husband. Billy was born three months later.
ON the day that Billy Blythe was born, the latest edition of National Geographic arrived in the mail with a pictorial feature on the new Arkansas: “Louder than hounds or fiddles are the challenging voices of this born-again Arkansas as it shouts to make itself heard above the roar of new paper mills and aluminum factories.” But not everything was new in the New South in the summer of 1946. On that same August day, baying blood-hounds and a rifle-toting posse surrounded a swampy hollow on the edge of Magee, Mississippi, flushing out two black World War II veterans who had been falsely accused in an ambush shooting. In Georgia that day, a series of lynchings of black men inspired Governor Eugene Talmadge to declare that, while he ran the state, “such atrocities will be held to a minimum”—a promise that, according to a wry editorial writer in the Arkansas Gazette, would “not mean much to the person or persons so unfortunate as to constitute the minimum.” On that day in Columbia, Tennessee, a jury was being chosen for a race riot trial, and in Athens, Alabama, a probe had begun into the beating of several blacks.
First In His Class Page 3
