Authors: Tracy Sugarman
“This gentleman is the very first Claybourne to reach the Delta,” Willy explained. “Henry Percival Claybourne, great-great-grandfather to my husband, Lucas, on his father’s side. Henry Percival was a very successful ship owner who made a fortune carrying supplies to the occupying Northern troops down here from his home port in Plymouth, Massachusetts.” Noting the astonished look on Ted’s face, she grinned. “One nation, indivisible, Ted! Everybody came from some place.”
As they entered the living room, a large, heavyset man in his late twenties turned from his conversation with Emily. With his rumpled dark brown hair, soiled khakis, and muddy field boots, Lucas Claybourne looked like a slightly aging running guard from Ole Miss. He was deeply tanned from the Delta sun, a man who would be most at home outside, perhaps a little uncomfortable among the colorful chintz and floral draperies of Willy Claybourne’s living room. He stood up, frowning, from a couch. A Bermuda fireplace held great pots of flowering fuchsia. Hands in his pockets, he quietly regarded Willy and the journalist.
“Luke, honey, come meet Mr. Mendelsohn.”
Shake hands with the son of a bitch? Let Willy do it. His eyes remained still.
“Lucas!” Her voice was cutting.
Jesus, Willy! Just what the fuck is this Jew reporter doing in my house? What the hell do you want from me?
He remained stonily silent but finally he nodded. “Lucas Claybourne, Mr. Mendelsohn.” He cleared his throat. “Wilson and Em were telling me about your meeting at Bobby Joe’s station.”
Ted smiled. “Well, if Miss Kilbrew here hadn’t bailed me out with her brother, I think I’d still be there.”
“Doesn’t surprise me.” His voice was deep and lazy. “Em’s been almost family with us for a long time. Real close.” The voice had a cool edge. “Anything her best friend Willy asks her to do, she usually obliges. Hard to turn down a friend. No matter what.”
Mendelsohn nodded to Emily who stood stiffly by the fireplace. “When I went to pick up the wheel, Miss Kilbrew, I don’t think your brother was very happy about the whole thing. So I’m really obliged to you.”
She nodded briefly, her fingers picking lint from her skirt. “BJ’s not my brother. He’s a half brother. We’re not a whole lot alike.” Abruptly she sat back down on the couch.
“Mr. Mendelsohn needed someone to offer a little Christian charity, Luke, and that’s what Em got BJ to do.” Willy turned to Ted. “Em and I teach Sunday school together down at Shiloh Baptist, so I know about her good heart, Ted. But best I can remember about BJ from high school, nobody wrote ‘good heart’ in his yearbook!”
Irritated, Luke broke in. “Who the hell’s business is it if BJ has a good heart? That what this journalist is tryin’ to find out?” His eyes narrowed. “Willy and Em were tellin’ me that’s what you are. That so?”
Ted folded his arms. “I think of myself as a reporter, Mr. Claybourne. I think a journalist gets paid better.”
“Why don’t you all sit down,” said Willy. “Mr. Mendelsohn works for
Newsweek
, Luke. They sent him down here for the whole summer. Whole summer sounds more like a journalist than a reporter to me!”
Luke Claybourne settled on the edge of the sofa, his eyes intent on the interloper. “A journalist?” He turned to regard Willy. “Never had a journalist in our home before. Em and I were just talking about that. My wife is full of surprises, isn’t she, Em?” Emily reddened, but remained silent.
A young black maid entered the room, bearing a tray of glasses, a bucket of ice, and a pitcher of iced tea. Ted recognized her immediately: Eula, Jimmy Mack’s girl. She had been with Jimmy the night they all had arrived in Shiloh. Her eyes flicked briefly to his and her head made an imperceptible negative nod. She paused behind the couch, waiting for Willy to notice her. “You can put it on the coffee table, Eula. Just leave the tray. I’ll pour the iced tea. You could bring the cookies in.” Eula nodded politely and silently left the room.
Ted watched Willy fill the glasses and settle on the floor, her back against the couch, and heard her mutter, “Lord have mercy,” as she sought to get comfortable. “Two more months till the baby comes.” Her eyes locked on his. Bright eyes, filled with curiosity, as if she were waiting for some yet unimagined curtain to go up. This was not a usual part of the afternoon entertainment, Ted thought. The lady seemed to have her own agenda, and he was the pigeon she had brought to the table. And it was painfully clear that Luke Claybourne was not happy that Ted Mendelsohn was on the menu.
“You have a beautiful place Mr. Claybourne. I appreciate Mrs. Claybourne’s invitation to come here.”
“Thank you,” Claybourne said curtly. “We like to think that we are hospitable to people that bear us no ill will. But we’re not used to having journalists here. Are you planning on taking notes? Taking our pictures? Recording the exotic redneck flora and fauna of Magnolia County? Tell you the truth, Mendelsohn, I’m not sure how to talk in front of a—” He hesitated. “A journalist from New York.”
Mendelsohn placed his glass carefully on the table. “I’m not sure you understand what I’m down here to do, Mr. Claybourne. I’m not an outrider for Martin Luther King or the NAACP or any of the other civil rights organizations. I’m down here to try to understand what’s happening on the ground. And when I get a handle on what these student volunteers are feeling and doing, and what folks who live here are feeling and doing, then I’ll write my story and send it to
Newsweek
. And if I still have questions, I’d like the chance to come back and talk to you.”
“So you’re just down here doin’ a job, like Willy said?” Lucas eased back in the couch, his voice skeptical. “Willing to look on both sides of the highway?”
“That’s true. But I don’t want to misrepresent myself to any of you.”
Willy frowned and exchanged glances with Emily. “Misrepresent? What you told Em and me wasn’t so?”
“What I told you was so. But I didn’t tell you enough. I’m not just a reporter who happened to get assigned to Mississippi.”
Luke Claybourne hiked forward on the couch. His deep voice filled the space. “Didn’t just happen to get assigned? That’s what you’re sayin’?” His voice rose. “Then what brought you here, Mendelsohn?”
“Me. I wanted to be here.” The room was silent.
“What about
Newsweek
?” Claybourne’s voice was a challenge. “That a little misrepresenting, too?”
“I’ve worked for
Newsweek
in Washington for a lot of years, Mr. Claybourne. When I told them I wanted to come here, they said go write your story. Take as much time as you need. I’m here as a reporter to cover what I think is going to be an important story. I thought you deserved to know that.”
Luke Claybourne got up abruptly from the couch and walked the length of the room, pausing at the window. When he returned, his face was troubled. “I appreciate that, Mendelsohn, but you’re not neutral. You’re living in the Sanctified Quarter.”
Eula returned from the kitchen. She moved quietly from person to person offering pastries, pausing at Emily’s side as the usually reticent woman turned to confront Mendelsohn. “You’re living with those niggers in the Quarter?” Em’s thin voice was strident. “Sleeping with those niggers?” Her outrage echoed in the room. “And you came down here to do that?” Finally noticing the waiting maid with her tray, she motioned impatiently. “I don’t want any!”
“Where better to try to understand what those students are learning and experiencing?” asked Mendelsohn. “So when Mrs. Claybourne told me that she had questions I might answer and invited me here, I was hoping to see from the inside part of the Delta I haven’t seen.”
Willy intervened. “I invited him, Luke, because there are a whole lot of questions I wanted to ask him, and he promised to answer them. That a good enough reason for askin’ him here?”
Impassive, Eula remained standing. “Anything else, Miss Willy?”
“That’ll be all,” said Willy. Eula picked up the empty glasses, but paused at the kitchen door.
“Em’s questions are fair, Ted,” said Willy, “and we’d all like to get some answers.”
Luke’s powerful voice was vehement. “I don’t know about the ladies, but I sure as hell want some answers, Mendelsohn.” Elbows on his knees, he leaned forward, ready to charge. “Tell us how those beatnik freedom riders you’re livin’ with can presume to come into our state, not knowing squat about our people or our customs, and tell us how to live our lives.”
The reporter shook his head in disagreement. “They think they’re here to help Negroes in Mississippi change their lives, not yours.” The two men seemed planted, facing each other across the coffee table. From the corner of his eye, Mendelsohn could see the solitary figure of Eula. “They think black Americans ought to know about their history, ought to know about their own heritage. And they sure as hell believe that they should have the right to vote.”
“Who in hell asked them to come?” Luke looked at Eula by the kitchen door. “You ever ask them to come, Eula? Any of your kin over in Sanctified Quarter? No, indeed. I’ll tell you who asked them to come. The Communists.”
Em chimed in. “That’s sure right. Bobby Joe showed me an article in the
Clarion
sayin’ J. Edgar Hoover himself says these freedom riders are all Communist dupes. Saw it myself, Luke!”
Mendelsohn listened attentively before replying. “From what I’ve seen, I think Hoover’s wrong. I’m getting to know these kids. I came with them. They’re smart kids, and they’re nobody’s dupes. But some of them are more smart-ass than smart. One of the kids from Cornell, a pre-law student, was pulled over by the Highway Patrol when he was going 25 miles an hour down Highway 49 at midnight. He was so angry that he tried to lecture the patrolman about the patrolman’s infringement of his constitutional rights. For his trouble, he was busted and sent to the work farm over in Sunflower. He’s still there. I went to see him and he’s a mess. A good kid who won’t be smart-ass again while he’s down here. But he’s nobody’s dupe. I’d bet my paycheck he’s never met a Communist.”
Willy shook her head. “It wasn’t a work camp that made all those kids scruffy. I never saw white kids look like that. Where’d they find these characters, Ted?”
He shrugged. “Stanford, Harvard, Columbia, Howard. . . . Doesn’t matter. They’re middle-class kids who are stealing a summer to work down here. And they’re not staying at the Jackson Sheraton.”
“There’s no excuse for being unclean. Soap doesn’t cost much.”
“No excuse? But there are reasons, Willy. Those kids are on the roads every day, knocking on doors, trying to register voters. Roads aren’t paved in the Sanctified Quarter. The only showers they get are when it rains. Most of the kids do their laundry in kettles over the fire in the backyard.”
Luke’ s face was livid. “Not everybody in the Quarter does their laundry in kettles! A lot of them work for me. They live different from us. They are different from us.” He paused, his eyes fixed on the reporter. “I know my people and they know me, and you don’t know them and you don’t know me. People down here know their place, Mendelsohn. We do. And the Nigras do. We’ve learned to get on together over generations, and we don’t need or want people ridin’ in and tearin’ up everything we’ve built.”
“Amen!” Em’s face was high in color. “Tell him about seeing the congressman’s son, Willy.”
Willy turned to Mendelsohn. “You act like you believe Mississippi is enemy territory, Ted. You don’t really understand what we feel, or why we feel it. Early last week Luke and I were watching television and there was an interview with Robert Carter, the congressman’s son. He had just arrived in Shiloh with your people. Looked like such a nice clean-cut kid. I said to Luke we ought to bring him out here, have him meet our son, Alex, get to know us down here.”
Luke snorted in disgust, imitating Willy. “Let’s bring him here! Another great idea from the hostess of the Delta, Wilson Claybourne!”
Willy grew pink but plunged ahead. “Well, the very next day Em and I were drivin’ through the Quarter on the way to pick up Eula, and we see Robert Carter, big as life, walkin’ hand in hand with a nigger girl! I could have killed him!” She stopped, embarrassed by her outburst. “Maybe not. But I wanted to!” Eula’s attentive but serene expression never altered. Silently, she pushed back on the swinging kitchen door and disappeared. No one but Mendelsohn seemed to notice.
“You just don’t understand, Ted. I can see it in your face. But you weren’t born and raised in a place that is mostly black. Every day, growing up in Shiloh, I was surrounded by Nigras. Thousands of them. And I had to be special, feel special, or I would have drowned. I couldn’t stand them shoving against me, touching me.”
Em’s voice rose in anger. “Willy’s right! You don’t understand. You judge. And magazines like yours crucify us. They read in your northern papers that we’re all bigots down here. They lump us all together and never miss giving us a black eye.”
“You’re wrong,” Ted said. “Mississippi gives Mississippi a black eye.”
“That’s what I mean!” Em interrupted, almost shouting. “’Cording to you, it’s always us poor redneck fools who are wrong!”
When Mendelsohn broke the silence he sought to answer the distraught Emily. “Let me ask you a question, Miss Kilbrew. What do you think my editor was going to do with the story I filed from Shiloh last week? I’d gone over to Greenville to check some court records and when I pulled out of the courthouse parking lot in the evening I was chased, ninety miles an hour, all the way back to the Sanctified Quarter. I had to outrun a souped-up pickup truck with two guys leaning out the windows with shotguns. Two shots I heard, but I wasn’t counting, I was too busy watching my rear view mirror.”
Em’s brittle laugh hung in the room. “Down here that’s what we call the good ol’ boys just havin’ sport.”
Mendelsohn stared at Emily who busied herself with her glass of iced tea. “Sport?” His voice was acid. “When I made it back to the Quarter I hid my car behind the Chapel and spotted the truck that had chased me. It was parked at your brother’s gas station. And when I reported what happened to the sheriff the next morning, he laughed. ‘Somebody just havin’ some good, clean fun.’ I ought to lighten-up, he said.”