The Ghosts of Mississippi (15 page)

Medgar Evers didn’t have any bodyguards. But he did have James Wells, who had come by to check on him.

Wells had been fishing that day, but he stopped at the meeting on his way home. He had a bad feeling. Evers was gathering up a group of students to drive them home. Wells told him to get on back to his family; Wells would lake care of the students. Medgar said no, he had to go see his lawyer later anyway. So James Wells drove home.

At about 11:30 p.m. Medgar pulled up to Jack and Aurelia Young’s house, hoping to find something to eat. He knew Aurelia Young had a crowd staying with her, and she always kept a pot of something on the stove. He didn’t want Myrlie to have to get up and cook for him when he got home.

Jack was the only black lawyer in Jackson, and he spent most of his time working for the NAACP. He had put himself through law school while working as a postman. Aurelia was a gifted composer who taught music at Jackson State. They were close friends of the Everses.

Aurelia was on the phone when Medgar came to the door. She was talking to Jack. He was telling her they needed some more mimeograph paper at the law office. They were preparing a brief to respond to the injunction against demonstrations in Jackson. Was that Medgar? Great. He could bring it.

Medgar didn’t stop to eat. He went back to the Masonic Temple to get the paper. Gloster Current, who was visiting the Youngs, offered to go with him. When they got to the temple, Gloster looked up at the clock. It was ten minutes to midnight.

Evers got the paper, then drove his boss back to the Youngs’s house. Current picked up his rental car to drive the supplies to the law office.

Medgar dropped him at the door and shook his hand, holding it for a long time. Gloster was leaving town the next morning for an NAACP conference.

“Mississippi will never be the same,” he told Gloster. “It will never be the same.” He let go at last and said, “I’m tired. I want to get home to my family.”

Then he drove off.

The heat settled in that night of June 11, 1963. Myrlie Evers propped open the bedroom window, and the air filled with the heavy scent of honeysuckle carried in on a sluggish breeze.

That evening Myrlie had allowed the children to wait up for their father. She had moved the television into the bedroom. She let the dog, Heidi, out to wait at the front door. Then she lay down on the bed. By midnight the baby was sleeping and Myrlie was half-dozing, while the two older children watched a late movie.

Just before 12:30 a.m., the children heard the sound of their father’s car and the crackle of tires on the drive.

“There’s Daddy!”

Evers parked his pale blue Oldsmobile behind his wife’s station wagon. The assassin was waiting in the overgrown lot across the street. He had cleared out a nest in a honeysuckle thicket two hundred feet from the Everses’ front door.

Medgar Evers wore a white shirt that night, and it must have glowed like a beacon in the crosshairs of the sniper’s scope as Evers climbed out of the car and into the moonlight. He picked up an armload of paperwork and NAACP T-shirts, then slammed the car door shut.

Betty Coley wanted to get out of the house for a while. She had been arguing with her mother all night, and she thought she might as well go for a walk to cool off. Kenneth Adcock, the seventeen-year-old boarder, went along with her.

It was late when they left, about 11:15. The streets were lit by moonlight. The two talked as they walked in the torpid night air, down Merrydale Street, where they lived, down Missouri, past the Negro neighborhood on Guynes, and across Delta Drive to Hawkins Field, the airport, just a short stroll to the west. They watched the planes landing and taking off. It was after midnight when they began to retrace their steps back home.

Kenneth Adcock remembers passing the intersection of Guynes and Missouri and his shoulder brushing against the overgrown honeysuckle in front of a vacant lot. He remembers seeing the headlights of a car on Guynes Street. Then something exploded in the bushes, right behind him.

There is something about a close shot that leaves a vacuum behind, as if the blast sucks all the air out of the atmosphere around it. Things slow down while your senses rearrange themselves. As Betty Coley and Kenneth Adcock stood in the road, in that frozen moment, they both heard the same thing: the crunching of undergrowth as someone ran back into the woods.

The bullet smashed into Evers’s back, just below the right shoulder blade. The slug tore through him, then through a window and a kitchen wall, before it glanced off the refrigerator and landed on a counter. When Myrlie Evers ran to the front door, she found her husband sprawled facedown, one arm stretched out, his fingers still gripping the house keys. Medgar had somehow dragged himself around her car, leaving a jagged trail of blood.

When Darrell and Reena heard the shot, they pulled Van down to the floor, just like their daddy had taught them. Then they followed their mother to the door.

Myrlie was hysterical. The children ran over to their father’s body, screaming, “Daddy! Get up!”

Houston and Jean Wells were asleep when they heard the shot next door. Houston looked out the window and saw Medgar lying facedown on the ground. Wells grabbed his pistol and crept outside. Whoever was doing the shooting was about to find out that there weren’t going to be any more soft targets on Guynes Street. Wells fired a shot in the air. Jean called his brother James to come help.

It was 12:45 a.m., June 12, 1963, when Detective Captain B. D. Harrell picked up the ringing telephone at Jackson police headquarters. The caller said there had been a shooting at 2332 Guynes Street. Harrell told Fred Sanders and John Chamblee, the two detectives on duty, to drive right over there. He told the dispatcher to radio for the nearest patrol car to respond to the scene.

Aurelia Young picked up the phone again, thinking it was Jack wanting something else. She heard Myrlie Evers on the line, wailing and weeping.

“Medgar’s been shot!”

That couldn’t be, Aurelia thought. Medgar was just here.

“Well get off the phone!” she said. “I’ll get a doctor!”

Aurelia tried to call Jack at his office, but the line was busy.

When Gloster Current reached Jack Young’s office, the phone was ringing. Myrlie was on the line, shouting that someone had killed her husband.

Gloster and Jack Young jumped into Jack’s car. They stopped to pick up Aurelia and headed toward Guynes Street. Young kept a gun in the glove compartment, and he checked to be sure it was there.

James Wells lived on Crawford Street, only a few minutes south of Guynes. When his sister-in-law called, he jumped in his truck, where he knew there was a loaded shotgun, and raced up Delta Drive toward Medgar’s house. He turned onto Missouri Street where it hit Delta and was almost at the intersection of Missouri and Guynes when he saw a man running between two houses, heading toward the highway. He couldn’t see whether the man was white or black. It seemed he was tall, but then Wells was sitting in a pickup, and it was hard to tell. The man’s clothes were dark, but he wore white shoes that glowed in the moonlight as he ran.

At this point James Wells figured the gunman was still out there; maybe there was a whole group of them. So Wells got out of his car and fired the shotgun at the ground, hoping to scare them off.

Wells reached the Everses’ driveway just as his brother Houston was carrying out a mattress to lift Medgar into his station wagon. It looked bad. A cop car was at the house, with two uniformed patrolmen just sitting there watching. People from all over the neighborhood were gathering in the driveway.

Myrlie, who was thirty years old and strong, clawed through the crowd to climb into the station wagon with her husband, but her neighbors held her back. The squad car pulled out in front of the station wagon to escort it to University Hospital.

Medgar Evers came awake during that ride to the hospital. He tried to sit up. He mumbled and thrashed and fought while his chest filled with blood. Houston Wells, who was driving, remembers the last thing he said before he died was, “Turn me loose.”

Myrlie Evers was left behind in the bloody carport with her weeping children and the stunned, murmuring neighbors. The street filled with squad cars, then reporters and photographers arrived, popping flashbulbs and trampling the lawn. Myrlie felt a searing, molten hatred rising through her. If she had a machine gun, she thought, she would mow down every white man in the crowd. She had no doubt who murdered her husband. His name didn’t matter; it was all of them. She could have killed them all.

As soon as he got the call, Dr. Albert Britton, the Everses’ family doctor, drove straight to the University of Mississippi Hospital, where Medgar was taken. When Britton got there he found the emergency room doctors trying to revive Evers. Britton didn’t think they were moving fast enough. He could not treat his old friend because he was a Negro and this was a white man’s hospital. But Britton made sure the doctors knew who they were working on.

“This man is Medgar Evers, field secretary of the NAACP!” Britton told them.

One of the white doctors whispered, “Oh, my God.”

Dr. Britton sat by Medgar’s side. He realized there was nothing anyone could do for the man. Evers’s chest was torn to pieces. It was amazing he could still breathe. Britton called his name, and Medgar turned his head, gulped for air, and was gone.

By the time Jack and Aurelia Young and Gloster Current arrived at the Evers house, Medgar had already been moved. Aurelia stayed with Myrlie while the men went to the hospital.

Aurelia Young had never seen so much human blood before, and it was not as she had imagined. It was thick, like blobs of jelly; it didn’t run. Myrlie couldn’t keep still. She kept walking out onto the carport, stepping over those blobs of blood, and Aurelia kept coaxing her back inside, trying to keep her occupied. She started to pack some of Medgar’s things to take to the hospital, although they knew it was probably hopeless.

Another friend, Hattie Tate, walked into the bedroom. She couldn’t speak. There had been a phone call. Hattie’s face was like a crumpled paper bag. Medgar’s death was all over it. Myrlie took one look at Hattie Tate and fell down weeping.

Dr. Britton drove over to see what he could do for Myrlie. He held her as he told her he was there with Medgar at the end. She was already starting to ask herself whether she could have saved him if she hadn’t panicked. Britton assured her there was nothing anyone could have done to keep Medgar alive. On the level of reason she believed him. On another level she never would.

The children were across the street at a neighbor’s house, still crying and hysterical. Myrlie had to gather up everything she had left in her to go over there to calm them down. Then she had to tell them that their father was dead.

John Salter was asleep in his house on the Tougaloo campus when he heard a knock at the door. He reached for the .44/40 Medgar had loaned him and shouted through the door. The voice of his friend George Owen, a Tougaloo official, called back. George Owen had bad news. Medgar Evers had been shot. Salter called Houston Wells, who told him that Medgar was dead.

Dave Dennis had just come back from Canton after an exhausting night of organizing. He was drifting to sleep when the phone rang in his Maple Street apartment. The news that Medgar was dead sat like a stone inside him. He couldn’t make himself go to the house, or the hospital, or the funeral home. Instead for the next few days he hung on the fringes, like a shadow, where he could be comfortable and invisible to all but his own people.

The police were crawling all over the place for the rest of the night. One detective asked her if Medgar had any enemies, and she laughed. He asked if Medgar had been having an affair, and she tried to throw him out.

Myrlie wondered what had happened to the family dog during all this commotion. She’d never heard her bark, and there was no sign of her now. Much later, when the shepherd finally came home, the light seemed to be gone from her eyes.

Television news crews had arrived before dawn, and they set up their lights in the driveway. The footage that survives from that time shows the essential elements of the crime scene: the thick blood on the concrete, the cars, the crowd of distraught people huddled at the front door around Myrlie Evers. She wears a light-colored dress, and there is a look of shock and distraction on her face as she waves her hand dismissively at the crowd or the lights or the scene itself, as if she could wash it all away with a gesture. Her eyes are the eyes of a blind woman.

The camera follows the detectives as they measure the crime scene. It lingers on a neat hole in the front window. Then the camera moves inside the house, and you can imagine these white strangers tramping through the hallways, gaping at another hole in the living room wall beneath the bronze plaque — some sort of award — and into the kitchen. There is a spotless ceramic sink, a wire rack of draining dishes, a watermelon set out on the counter for the next day’s lunch, and a pencil stub on the counter marking the spot where the bullet that killed Medgar Evers came to rest.

It was Detective Fred Sanders who found the bullet, wrapped it up, put it in his pocket and marked the spot. Sanders and his partner, John Chamblee, then traced the path of the bullet back to the window. They completed the trajectory by standing next to the hole in the window and shining a flashlight beam over the car and the spot where blood marked the place where Evers had been hit. The beam traveled across Guynes Street, over a triangular corner of lawn and a four-foot chain-link fence. From there the beam crossed Missouri Street and illuminated a clump of honeysuckle under a sweetgum tree in an overgrown vacant lot.

Outside the detectives got down on hands and knees, and shining the flashlight over the grass in the corner lot, they looked for signs that the dew had been disturbed by footsteps. They checked the fence to see whether any dust had been brushed away, perhaps by a gunman leaning against it with a rifle. They found nothing.

The detectives turned their attention to the vacant lot. That was where they found a sniper’s nest carefully hollowed in the honeysuckle and a path leading back toward Delta Drive, to the dark end of a parking lot attached to a burger joint known as Joe’s Drive In.

Chamblee examined the spot in the bushes where the grass was flattened. There were no spent cartridges, no cigarette butts, no gum wrappers, nothing left behind. All he found were freshly mashed leaves and a broken branch forming a hole in the thicket four and a half feet above ground level.

It was a spot perfectly concealed from passersby, or customers at the stores out on Delta Drive, two hundred feet west. A man standing in the hollow would have had a clear view of Medgar Evers’s house and driveway.

Detective Sergeant O. M. Luke arrived around eight in the morning. All kinds of gawkers and newspaper people were hanging around. Cars were everywhere, and maybe fifteen cops were stationed around to make sure things didn’t get trampled worse than they were. It was already getting hot.

Luke and his partner, R. O. Turner, drove over to University Hospital, where an autopsy was being performed on the body of Medgar Evers. An orderly handed them an envelope containing all the personal effects removed from the body.

When the detectives examined the contents, they learned that Medgar Evers died with $1.12 in change in his pocket. They were curious about an address book with, according to their written report, phone numbers and addresses of “people out of state and no doubt cohorts in his work.” A number of papers were tucked into the address book, but they were glued together by dried blood. They pried open one folded yellow note paper to find a five-dollar bill and the receipt for a donation from Mr. Clennon F. Jones of Jackson.

The detectives methodically recorded the contents of Medgar Evers’s pockets, creating a catalog of the physical concerns of his finished life. His checkbook showed a balance of $109.33. An Elks Club membership card was dated June 11, 1963, the last day of his life. His wallet contained two poll tax receipts, a hunting and fishing license, a driver’s license, a Western Union credit card, a Bell System card, and an Air Travel Card. Other cards showed his membership in the Farish Street YMCA, the AFL-CIO, the M. W. Stringer Masonic Lodge, the American Veterans Committee, and the NAACP.