One Night in Mississippi Read online

  When you are in Mississippi, the rest of America doesn’t seem real; and when you are in the rest of America, Mississippi doesn’t seem real.

  – Robert “Bob” Moses

  Table of Contents

  Part 1 - Earl

  Prologue

  Part 2 - Warren

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Part 2 - Earl

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Part 2 - Warren

  Chapter 24

  Part 3 - Earl

  Chapter 25

  Acknowledgements

  Earl

  Prologue

  The boy we took wasn’t much older than I was. Eighteen, maybe nineteen. At the time, I couldn’t even say for sure what we were doing or why we were forcing him to get into the car. He was just standing by the side of the road when we found him and he told us he was out looking for his brother. Uncle Patrick had said he was a troublemaker, and I didn’t question it. Didn’t question any of it, really. Don’t think things would have been much different if I had. Things would have happened exactly the way they happened, except maybe I wouldn’t have been a part of it. They certainly wouldn’t have been any different for the boy in the back seat of Uncle Patrick’s Studebaker.

  My father was in another car that had already driven up ahead. I was sandwiched in the front seat between my uncle and another man I’d just met a few hours earlier. The boy sat behind us, alone. Uncle Patrick nudged me.

  “You all right, Earl?”

  “Yeah,” I replied. “I’m OK.”

  I looked in the rear-view mirror. The boy was quiet, gazing out the window as we drove. I wished I was somewhere else, and I’m sure he did as well, but it was too late now, for both of us. He knew what was coming as well as I did. We were two boys who had played at being men, and we were on our way to pay the price.

  Warren

  ◀ 1 ▶

  Mississippi, 1965

  We had intended to lay my brother to rest on Sunday, but we had to postpone our plans while we waited for the body. The authorities had said they would need a week for the autopsy, and that the body would be delivered to the family at that time, but seven days stretched to ten before Graden was finally brought home to the farm for burial.

  During the wait there had been no message from the sheriff or the medical office, and when two men showed up and unloaded the corpse from the back of their pickup, there was no apology either. Graden’s body was wrapped in a green tarp bundled with twine. The men laid it on the front porch and asked my father to sign for it as if it were a package he had ordered from a department store catalogue and told him that both the tarp and twine would have to be returned. My father’s face was impassive, but his hand shook slightly when he reached for the pen. He couldn’t read, but he took a few moments to look over the sheet anyway before scratching his name.

  I watched from the side of the house as the men drove away. There was no laneway — the area surrounding the house was devoid of grass, although weeds somehow managed to flourish. My sisters, Glenda and Etta, would pick the weeds once a week as well as collect fallen pecans from the tree by the front porch. Then they would sweep the entire area with coarse brooms, keeping the dirt lawn as immaculate as any green one. Swirls of dust kicked up behind the truck’s tires, partially obscuring it as it headed off down the dusty red road into town. The edges of the pickup shimmered liquidly in the heat, a child’s picture coloured outside the lines.

  I dipped a bucket into the well and took a long, cool drink. I dipped the bucket a second time, splashed water onto my hands and face, and then went into the house to put on my church clothes.

  ◀︎ ▶

  The lot was not a large one, but it belonged to us, and that in itself was significant. My father had bought the house and the farm from a white store owner for three hundred dollars — all the money that he had managed to save during long, hard years as a tenant farmer. The work had marked him. His face was dark and wrinkled, the skin on his arms was papery thin, revealing the tendons and ropy muscles underneath, and the knuckles on his hands were so swollen that he couldn’t close them into a fist. Still, I had never heard him complain. It was a proud day for any black man in Mississippi to come to own a piece of land, and he had probably never dreamed that he would someday have to bury his son on it.

  Pastor Lonny and a few family members had arrived the night before the originally planned funeral day, and my father had to find space for them during the delay. The house was not very big to begin with, just a wooden shack set up on cinder blocks with a small porch in the front and a set of steps in the back. In some spots there were spaces between the floorboards large enough that you could see the ground underneath, and when it stormed, the boards lifted and bowed, and sometimes had to be hammered back in place after the storm had passed There was a narrow hallway with two rooms on either side, each square and plain with a single window. On one side of the house were my parents’ room and a kitchen; on the other side, one bedroom for Graden and me and another for Glenda and Etta.

  When Pastor Lonny arrived, he was given our room. The women were split among my parents’ and sisters’ rooms, so during the three-day wait Graden and I, two uncles, and eight cousins were relegated to sleeping on the floor of the kitchen and the hallway, our bodies locked together in the cramped space like jigsaw pieces. On the third night I was overcome by the heat of too many bodies. I took my blanket and picked my way through the maze of legs and arms out to the porch. Glenda and Etta were already there, perched on the top step.

  Etta looked up at me.

  “Can’t sleep?”

  “Too damn hot,” I said sitting next to her. “And Uncle Jerry snores.”

  “So does his wife.”

  She rolled her eyes and nudged her shoulder into me. The crickets that usually filled the night were mostly silent, and the three of us sat there, huddled in our blankets in the dark until Etta spoke again.

  “I just want this to be over. They always take the best of us.”

  Glenda tightened her blanket around her neck and stood abruptly, walking back inside without looking at me.

  “I’m sorry,” Etta said. “I didn’t mean nothing by it. Don’t let her bother you.”

  “It’s all right. Can’t be hurt by what’s true.”

  She put her hand on mine.

  “Warren, he was bent on this. There wasn’t anything to be done.”

  I said nothing, and she let it go. We cooled ourselves in the night air before picking our way back inside to lie down among the mass of bodies, she in her room and I on the hallway floor.

  After the truck delivered my brother’s body and drove away, the family gathered at the southeast corner of the yard where my father had dug the grave. He had hit hard-packed clay about four feet down and had to settle for that depth. I had sat in the backyard at times and watched him, unable to hold a shovel with my crippled right hand, a painful reminder of my place bestowed on me by a grease-slick white boy during one of my rare visits into town. The doctor had to sever the ring and pinky fingers just ahead of the second knuckle, leaving useless, wiggling nubs. The middle and index fingers were curved inwards towards the palm, the tendons too damaged
to stretch them straight. The entire hand was withered, the palm and the back dark with scar tissue.

  I was unable to help my father in any way other than to bring him water and the occasional piece of bread or cured meat, which he accepted in silence, not looking at me. Other times, I simply couldn’t watch and had to go back to the house.

  The head of the grave was marked with a plain wooden cross, and Pastor Lonny stood beside it as he delivered his eulogy. I heard very little of it. I stood off to the side, away from the rest of the family, and stared off over the pastor’s shoulder. Rows of cotton trailed out behind him, blooming white tufts speared on cracked and drying twigs. Beyond that, a small patch of peanut plants, then the woods, thick patches of pine and oak and chestnut. There were deer in the woods as well, feeding on wild oats and peas, and in the dense underbrush, the occasional sign of trails left behind by the Indians who had hunted them.

  I looked around the makeshift congregation, who were turned towards the pastor, their heads bowed. A rare breeze drifted across the yard, bringing with it the faint but undeniable stench of filth from the outhouse, but if anyone noticed, they gave no sign. The pastor continued, “A young man of passion, of vision, of commitment. One of our brightest lights snuffed out far too soon, and all our lives are a darker place for it. But if each of us keeps but a piece of his memory alive, then we also keep a piece of that light alive.”

  The breeze died as suddenly as it had come up, and the stifling heat reclaimed the now-still air. Tiny black gnats resumed their buzzing around the sweat-soaked necks and faces. No hand was waved to deter them.

  When the pastor had finished, he nodded at my father. The coffin was a simple pine box that he had built, with four makeshift handles. There was nothing to put inside as a cushion, and I thought I heard my brother’s remains bump against the side as my father and my uncles lowered the box into the shallow grave. I stared at my father with a sudden and unreasonable anger, but he returned my look with an expression so fierce it made mine seem pale. Pastor Lonny offered a final benediction, my mother dropped a single flower atop the pine coffin, and the ceremony was closed with a moment of silence.

  I bowed my head, but my jaw was clenched. I had ignored most of the eulogy, but I didn’t have to hear it to know that it was a long, drawn-out, and overly dramatic summary of how Graden had lived, with not one word about how he had died. Just as there hadn’t been one word said about it among ourselves in the months since he had first gone missing. Papa had kept working the field, Mama had kept tending the kitchen, and Etta and Glenda had kept doing their chores. Everyone had carried on, but no one had talked about it. We had turned inward when we most needed to come together, and no one more so than I.

  Anger swelled up inside me, and I understood that it was Graden’s anger that I felt. I remembered a day when Mama had taken Graden with her while she went to do some cooking and cleaning for a white family. I was out in the field when they returned, and when I walked into the house, Graden was standing in the hallway looking at the floor.

  “What’s wrong with you?” I asked.

  He was only seven at the time, but when he lifted his head, the expression on his face frightened me. He was enraged.

  “We got holes in our floor.”

  “Be glad we got a floor,” I said. I was hoping he would laugh, but he didn’t.

  “White folks don’t have holes in their floors. They got shiny floors and bright walls and big windows.”

  “If you start thinking about all the things that some folks have that we don’t, you’re gonna be standing there for a long time.”

  He continued on as if I hadn’t even spoken. His eyes were fiery.

  “Papa always braggin’ about how hard he worked to buy this place, but it ain’t nothing but a pile of sticks.”

  I grabbed him by the shoulders and steered him outside, turning my head quickly to make sure no one else was nearby.

  “You better not ever let Mama or Papa hear you talking like that.”

  “Why? It’s true. What’s wrong with saying what’s true?”

  “Maybe it is. But true or not, ain’t no sense in saying something that you can’t do anything about.”

  He shrugged my hands off him and walked away. I never forgot Graden’s expression that day. It was my brother who saw more clearly than any of us the hypocrisy and hopelessness that we swallowed like candied treats. It was Graden who tried to convince us that we should want more, that we could be more. It was Graden who took a stand, time and time again, even when the people around him begged him not to. It was Graden who took a stand and hoped that I would stand with him.

  I spat on the ground, then remembering where I was, looked up to make sure I had not been seen. No one moved. If they heard me at all, they reacted the same way they did to the gnats buzzing around them, to the injustice of Graden’s murder, and to every oppressive act and action that kept them from ever rising above a station that they meekly accepted as their own.

  They did nothing.

  ◀ 2 ▶

  Detroit, 2008

  I opened the door and entered the near-empty apartment. One brown-cushioned chair and one loveseat. One leather recliner, the arms torn and rupturing foam. A wrought-iron coffee table set between them. The same mismatched furniture that was here when I moved in three years ago. The walls were bare, smudged, and yellowing. The water-stained ceiling shed occasional paint flakes onto the loosening curls of the carpet, and when the couple in the apartment above fought or fucked, the living room took on the feel of a lightly shaken snow-globe.

  These were the places I had lived in since leaving Mississippi: A wooden lodge on an abandoned lot in rural Tennessee; an attic above a flower shop down the street from my sister’s house in Philadelphia; a mould-infested hostel that slept eight to a room off the campus of Loyola University.

  I’d dropped out of college with one semester remaining, because graduating from college was Graden’s dream and I didn’t feel I should be the one to achieve it. If I’d stayed, I could have been an engineer. Instead I took work cleaning out horse stalls on a farm in Kentucky. I worked on a dock in Maine, gutting fish. I loaded railway cars. I worked in lumberyards and on road crews and in a leather tannery. Once, I apprenticed for a cabinet maker, but the work was too fine for my crippled hand. I would trace the old man’s curls and grooves with my fingers, the wood sometimes still warm from the cutting, wistfully admiring the detail, but I could never match the work myself.

  I drifted with no destination and no desire to stay in any one place. As a boy growing up in Mississippi, I had always planned on taking over the farm from Pa and raising my own family there. I’d never expected to leave the county, much less the state, but after Graden’s death I had run so far that I had seen near half the country before I found a purpose again.

  The cabinet maker kept a small television in his shop so he could watch baseball games while he worked, and it was there that I saw the news that would shape the rest of my life. Images of a soft-jowled man, close-cropped hair starting far back on his forehead, heavy glasses. I sat in a chair, broom in hand, and listened to the newsman detail the conviction of Byron De La Beckwith, twice let go on charges in the 1963 murder of NAACP activist Medgar Evers, but now convicted, thirty-one years later. They walked him down the steps of the courthouse while crowds shouted, jubilant on one side of the steps and outraged on the other.

  I remembered gathering on the steps of a similar courthouse in Jackson, watching eight men walk free after the charges against them were thrown out. There hadn’t even been a trial for Graden. The judge heard the charges and the evidence, dismissed them, and after months of waiting, the whole thing was over in the space of a few minutes.

  The cabinet maker appeared in the doorway. I’d never told him or anyone else about my brother, but he must have seen something in my face while I sat in front of the television, because he simply nodded at me and took the broom from my hand.

  “It’s all right,” he s
aid. “Go home.”

  I stayed up all night, watching the news coverage. Experts debated the right and wrong of the conviction while the same footage looped through, over and over, but all I could think about was standing on those courthouse steps so many years ago, helpless.

  I started to gather every piece of information I could about my brother’s case. I kept a folder with articles, notes, names, and dates. I obtained a copy of the autopsy report. I never went back to the cabinet maker’s shop, but I think he expected as much when he sent me home. I was restless. I was fifty-four years old when I saw De La Beckwith convicted. I had wasted so much time, and now I couldn’t sit still.

  At the end of each work day I would return to whatever place I had found at the time, aching and often dirty, and start carefully writing out letters to lawyers and politicians. I kept it all to myself at first, but I needed a permanent address where I could receive responses, so I called Etta, who now lived in Philadelphia. She agreed, and I made daily visits to post offices, hoping for a packet of forwarded mail from her. At first all I received were a few vague, noncommittal replies. I wrote letters to the FBI and to the Justice Department, and they responded with form letters assuring me they would look at the case, but carefully explaining how backlogged they were.

  Yet they continued to pursue convictions. In 2001, Thomas E. Blanton, Jr. was sentenced for his role in the 1963 bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, a blast that had killed four young girls who were inside preparing for a sermon to be titled “The Love That Forgives.” In 2005, Edgar Ray Killen was found guilty of three counts of murder in the 1964 slaying of civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner in Mississippi. He received three consecutive twenty-year sentences. He was eighty years old.

  I expanded my letter-writing campaign to include newspapers and television stations, and that’s when things took off. Etta was swamped with mail, and I received new packages from her almost every day. The official agencies were still cautious in their responses, but the reaction of the media and the public was overwhelming. I began to give interviews.