The Ghosts of Mississippi (2 page)

“Because he was colored, son” was all his father would say.

Medgar and Charles didn’t have to be told.

When they walked into town alone, they were vulnerable, two little barefoot colored boys open to the sport of whites. With Daddy it was different.

For some reason, Jim Evers wasn’t afraid of the white folks. He wouldn’t step off the sidewalk for anyone, and he got away with it.

Every Christmas Eve the white boys made a game of throwing firecrackers at the black shoppers to make them dance in the street. Jim Evers led his boys to the store and nobody threw anything at them. “They don’t bother us,” Jim told his sons. “Don’t let anyone bother you.”

Medgar and Charles saw how wild the old man could be one morning at the sawmill commissary. The story of what happened that day is part of the Evers legend now, often repeated and embellished with each retelling.

On this particular Saturday morning a small crowd of whites was gathered in the store, shooting the breeze around the flour sacks, when Jim Evers came in to settle his bill. Evers bought everything on credit, then paid up at the end of the week. He couldn’t read or write, but he had a talent for numbers, and he could figure sums in his head. And he wouldn’t be cheated.

The clerk named the figure, and Jim knew it was wrong, maybe five or six dollars more than he owed. He told him so.

“Nigger, you callin’ me a liar?” the white man asked. The others stopped talking and watched. Charles and Medgar stood by the door, too scared to move.

“I don’t owe that much,” Evers said quietly. “And I’m not goin’ pay it.”

The clerk reached behind the counter to get his gun, but Jim Evers moved quick. He grabbed an empty Coke bottle from a crate on the floor and smashed it on the edge of the counter.

“If you make another move, I’ll bust your brains out,” he said. He aimed the broken glass at the man’s throat.

The story has been told many times, in different ways. In one version the boys ran out the door and straight on home. The way Charles remembers it, he and Medgar each grabbed a bottle to help, but Jim Evers ordered them out the door. The old man slowly backed out of the store, the white men standing slack jawed, the little clerk shaking and sputtering with outrage.

“I’ll kill you, nigger,” he shouted.

“You better not move,” said Evers as he made the door.

The boys expected the white farmers to pour out after them, whip them or worse, so they started to run.

“Don’t run, don’t run,” said Evers. “They’re nothing but a bunch of cowards.”

They walked home together. Charles remembers his daddy putting his big rough hands on the boys’ heads. “Don’t let anybody beat you,” he told them.

Charles took his father’s words to heart. He was always willing to get the first lick in. That was how he and Medgar were different. Medgar was a peacemaker.

Charles tested his strong head against other boys, even against his father.

“You be quiet,”Jim Evers might tell him when he mouthed off at the table.

“No,
you
be quiet!”

BAM! Jim would knock him in the temple, lay him out. Charles took what Daddy said and lived by it.

Medgar listened to Mama. Mama would pray for you. Charles would come home after a fight with another boy, and she’d say, “Don’t do that; do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

“But
Mom,
he’s kicking my behind!”

“No, don’t fight, that’s not the best way.”

But Jim Evers would say, “Knock his head off!”

One morning the family was gathered around the table for Sunday breakfast. It was the bottom of the Depression, breadlines everywhere, hardly any work to go around. The Everses’ table always had something, eggs from the chickens, biscuits, maybe some bacon left over from hog-killing time. Charles sat on one side of his father and Medgar on the other, and the family got to discussing the commodity lines downtown for the out-of-work.

“Boys, let me tell you something,” said Jim Evers. “I don’t ever want to think of one of you in that soup line, heah? If I thought we were gonna be in that shape, have to go in that soup line, I’d kill every one of you and kill myself too! Don’t you ever get on no soup line, get no commodity.”

In the quiet that followed, Charles looked at his father, the old man’s face hard with anger, and imagined him actually killing them all.

Medgar and Charles had a half-brother, Eddie, who was a wanderer. Eddie was a good fifteen years older than Charles. When the boys were half grown, ten and thirteen, they would listen to Eddie’s stories of his travels. He used to ride the rails, he could never sit still, and the young brothers thought he was hopelessly glamorous. They would ride the rails from Decatur to Newton and back, just to be like Eddie.

One day Eddie came home complaining of a headache. He took to bed and died without ever seeing a doctor. The family thought later it must have been a brain tumor.

Charles was crushed. It was the first time anybody that close to him had died. He couldn’t eat and he couldn’t cry. He would just sit on the porch, listening to the trains roll through town.

Mama Jessie took in boarders to make extra money, and one of these men taught Charles to drive a car. He also taught him the bootlegging business.

When Prohibition ended, Mississippi stayed dry. There were enough Baptists to vote against liquor in every county and enough sheriffs and tax collectors getting rich from payoffs that nobody wanted to ruin the system. This didn’t mean liquor wasn’t available, or even sold openly in some places. The illegal sale of liquor was even taxed by the state — it was called the bootleg tax. Bootlegging was big business, and Charles wanted in. So he found out where the boarder bought his whiskey wholesale, and he started buying it too. Jim and Jessie Evers hated bootlegging, and they never knew what he was doing.

Charles would never touch a drop — he never has in his life, he says. And he never smoked or gambled. It was a waste of money, for one thing. And he wouldn’t have anything control him, nothing habit- forming. He always had to be in control.

Charles later went to live in the town of Forest with Mark Thomas, an uncle who owned a funeral business. Since Charles could drive, he helped out with the ambulance-hearse. And when Uncle Mark was out of town, Charles would sometimes take Medgar to Vicksburg, where he could buy bottled whiskey from Louisiana. Charles would load it up in the back of the hearse and run back to Forest with the siren wailing. Nobody would think to stop a Negro ambulance.

Charles would stack the liquor behind the bottles of embalming fluid in his uncle’s storeroom and sell pints to the honky-tonks in Scott County. It was the beginning of his serious business career.

When Medgar Evers outgrew the one-room schoolhouse in Decatur, he had to walk the twelve miles to the nearest Negro high school in Newton. Eventually he boarded there during the week. There was never any question that he would go to school or that he would finish. Even the girls in the Evers family got some higher education, and that was rare in those days. But then World War II came, and Medgar dropped out in the eleventh grade to join the army. Charles had already signed up.

The war separated the brothers at last. Charles was sent to the Pacific, and Medgar went to Europe. Medgar sent his salary home to his mother. A person could keep an account at the post office, up to twenty-five hundred dollars. Medgar filled his limit. Charles sent money home as well. By the time the brothers came back from the service, there were four new rooms on the house and indoor plumbing, and the old woodstove was gone at last.

The photograph of Byron De La Beckwith in his high school annual reveals a somewhat homely boy with slick black hair brushed from a wide forehead, prominent ears, intensely friendly eyes, and a broad grin. His is a salesman’s face, the face of a future Rotarian, Kiwanian, or Shriner. It is the face of someone who has to compensate for the fact that the list of activities printed under his picture shows only one entry: Study Club, 3. It is the face of someone who won second place in two senior categories. He was voted the second friendliest boy and second wittiest boy in the Greenwood High School Class of 1940. If there had been a category for most eccentric, Beckwith might have, for once in his life, come in first.

His Greenwood neighbors remember Byron De La Beckwith as a sweet, lonely child. He was raised by men, very strange gentlemen bachelors who lived in a big, spooky old house near the center of town. His father died when he was five, and he was twelve when his mother succumbed to cancer. It was a somewhat unmentionable disease in those days. Her death made Beckwith even more conspicuous in a small town where he had the social disadvantage of being born in California. He was an outsider, and he was an orphan in a community that valued conformity and tradition. His strongest suit was his family name and his relation to the Southworths and the Yergers and the Kimbroughs, who were among the oldest and most powerful families in the Delta.

Beckwith’s maternal grandfather was Lemuel Purnell Yerger, who ran off to join the Confederate army when he was sixteen. He rode as a courier with the wild Tennessee general Nathan Bedford Forrest until he was wounded and captured by Yankees. After the war the young man returned from a P.O.W. camp, still a private but with a limp and a legend that enhanced his status in town. He soon started calling himself the Colonel.

L. P. Yerger set up a law practice and married well, to Susan Fisher Southworth, a Delta socialite from a family of planters. The Yerger family had cotton land as well, a 10,000-acre plantation called Glen Oak on the Tallahatchie River.

The Colonel and his wife had four children, the youngest of whom was a high-strung, attractive girl named Susie Southworth Yerger, Beckwith’s mother. There are more stories than facts available about “Miss Susie,” as she was called all her life. Some say she was among the most popular debutantes in the Delta. Others say she had mental problems. Certainly Miss Susie was overshadowed by her flamboyant first cousin Mary Craig Kimbrough, who married the socialist author Upton Sinclair. Mary Craig later wrote a book about her life in Greenwood, appropriately titled
Southern Belle
. It captures perfectly the idealized life of the Southworths and Kimbroughs.

“I was born in the midst of vast cotton plantations,” she wrote. The South of her childhood was, she said, “an enchanted land.” She described her family as “these proud white people [who] thought they were the lords of creation, and no ‘damyankees’ could make them change their minds or their ways. Pleasure was their chief concern, and they sought it and had it, just as their parents had done in the old days.”

In fact this enchanted land was a child’s fantasy; the Delta was nobody’s paradise. It was a dull, flat, utilitarian landscape that flooded or parched, sweltered or froze depending on the time of year. It was a place of pestilence and isolation — so bad that few stately homes were actually built in the alluvial flatlands, but instead were set in the hills of Carrollton or Vicksburg, or somewhere high up in the breezes and out of the typhoid.

The Yergers and Kimbroughs were exceptional. Delta folk to their bones, they built their big houses in Greenwood. They saw no reason to look any farther than Memphis, the shopping capital of the Delta. They lived chasing the myth of the Old South, and they passed the fantasy down through generations.

No one knows precisely why Miss Susie ventured to Colusa, California, to visit her great-aunt Sallie Green. She may have simply needed a change of scenery. Certainly she needed a husband, since she was still a spinster at twenty-five.

Aunt Sallie found a match for Susie in Colusa: Byron De La Beckwith, the town’s twenty-nine-year-old bachelor postmaster. The couple were married back in Greenwood in 1912. Her father, the Colonel, wore his Confederate uniform, and people remarked at the time at the sea of gray coats at the wedding reception, as the aging veterans paraded their colors.

A picture of Miss Susie taken that year shows a handsome but wan woman with long, thick chestnut hair twisted up in the fashion of the day. Her chin is strong, her nose straight, but there is an air of melancholy about her that could have been the photographer’s sad music or something of her own.

A picture of Beckwith shows a compact, square-jawed, black-haired man. His lips are thin and pursed, the eyes not friendly, as he poses in his stiff California National Guard uniform.

The young couple settled in Colusa and soon moved into a brand- new Craftsman-style bungalow.

For a native of Mississippi, Colusa would not have seemed terribly foreign. In fact it was like a little Delta town that had died and gone to heaven. It was a conservative community with broad, tree-lined streets, churches, neatly tended houses, and serious citizens of good pioneer stock. It was laid out in a rich, flat valley along the volatile Sacramento River, which was held back by a familiar barrier of earthen levees.

After eight years of marriage, Susie and Byron De La Beckwith finally produced a child. He was born in the nearest hospital, in Sacramento, on November 9, 1920. The baby was named Byron De La Beckwith, Jr., although years later he would refer to himself as Beckwith the Sixth.

By now Beckwith, Sr., had inherited a small fortune from his late father’s real estate ventures. He acquired a title and abstract company in Colusa and bought himself a 700-acre farm on the east bank of the Sacramento River, where he planted prune trees. Outwardly he seemed like a solid businessman. But Beckwith was a heavy drinker, and, apparently, a philanderer and a gambler. Before long all of his properties were heavily mortgaged.

Beckwith, Jr., would later say that his childhood in Colusa was pleasant enough “to a point.” Beckwith’s mother, increasingly unable to cope with her life, had a startling habit of locking her son in the hall closet. He claims it never scared him. All he had to do was calm down and smile, and the door would open. Others say the hyperactive child was sometimes locked in his nursery for hours.

The father was an avid hunter who collected hundreds of rifles, knives, pistols, and swords of all descriptions. He sometimes took the family to a rustic, shotgun-style cabin high in the mountains at Berry Camp, where he fished and hunted deer. One early photograph of “Little Delay,” as he was called, taken when he was a toddler, shows him with curly, golden baby locks down to his shoulders, wearing a little playsuit and holding a small revolver in his pudgy fist. Another picture reveals a slightly older boy, his hair trimmed in what might be his first haircut, looking serious and leaning possessively against a bolt-action rifle that is taller than he. In the foreground is the body of a buck his father had shot.

Beckwith has another enduring memory from his California childhood. He remembers the white robes and tall caps of the Ku Klux Klansmen when they walked through town. The twenties were the heyday of Klandom in America. There were two million known members. In 1925 forty thousand hooded marchers converged on Washington, D.C. The Klan vote elected at least two U.S. senators and a raft of governors, including the governor of California.

The main enemies then were Jews and Catholics, not to mention the “Yellow Plague” in the West — the Chinese, Filipinos, and Japanese, and every other sort of enterprising immigrant.

Beckwith recalls seeing the Klansmen and describes the sensual impact that moment had on him. He wrote in one letter, “In the drugstore soda fountains — cafes, etc. in California in the 20’s, robed Klansmen with tall dunce caps (seemingly made of a good grade of white poster board), neat and clean — snow white — would take turns in walking through the towns just to be seen and were then as prominent as the bell-ringers, volunteers who used to drum up money for the Salvation Army! And now that too is fading.”

In August 1926 Beckwith’s father died of pneumonia. His death certificate mentioned “contributory alcoholism.” He was forty-two years old. His son was not quite six.

Unfortunately for all concerned, Susie Yerger Beckwith was now alone with her young son and practically destitute. The estate, including the prune orchard, was sold for fifty-seven thousand dollars, all of which went to pay debts. Her family dispatched a sober, responsible nephew, Yerger Moorehead — who was also a lawyer — to bring Susie and the boy back to Mississippi.

The Yergers lived in a big, gabled, wood-frame house on George Street in Greenwood. It was a fine, tree-lined street with large, stately homes and lots of children running on the sidewalks.

In 1926 both the Colonel and his wife were alive. Miss Susie’s forty-two-year-old bachelor brother, Will, still lived at home. There were plenty of people to occupy “Little Delay” and places to explore. Beckwith especially liked the attic, where guns and books were stored. An old muzzleloader interested him more than the books.

Beckwith was a rambunctious boy, and he remembers his childhood as happy and indulged. “I am an only child and a spoiled child,” he would later write, explaining why he demanded to have things exactly his way.

There was a lot to learn about southern manners, and Delay learned it the hard way. Once an uncle whipped his behind for responding to a request with “Okay,” instead of the required “Yes, sir.”

Delay was astonished by how many black faces he saw in Mississippi. He had known only one Negro before in his life, and that was Aunt Sallie’s housemaid. The boy was constantly talking and asking questions, and one night at dinner he asked his cousin Yerger Moorehead what they were and where they all came from.

Yerger smirked and told him that that’s what happens to smart-aleck white boys from out west who ask too many questions: they get rolled in gumbo mud and hung on the fence to dry. When they come down, they’ve turned into black pickaninnies. The six-year-old sat wide-eyed and believing, as six-year-olds will, and stopped asking questions for a while.

Beckwith had disliked Yerger Moorehead from the outset. He thought he was strict and dull and sarcastic, but he was more or less safe from the man as long as his mother was around or he was out of sight.

His eccentric uncle. Will, took day-to-day responsibility for the boy. Little Delay spent summer days out at the Glen Oak plantation, the large family-owned cotton farm that Will managed.

There Will was known to the servants and farmhands as “Master.” They called Delay “Little Cap’n.” Beckwith would later recall these plantation days as an ideal arrangement. He felt the races were happy in their separation, kind after kind, as it says in the Bible. The “nigras” expected the white man to care for them and to be courteous and soft-spoken. The white man expected loyalty and subservience. The white man, he came to believe, was put on earth “to rule over the dusky races,” and this was how it was done.

Delay joined the Boy Scouts and spent his idle days with his friends in the swamps killing birds and garfish and turtles and frogs with their .22 rifles. A boy in the Delta had to know how to shoot.

The Colonel died in 1928, and his wife followed him four years later. Neighbors on George Street remember the peculiar, old-fashioned mourning Miss Susie put herself through. For months she would wear only black, then only white, and then only lavender.

The Depression cut hard into the Delta way of life. A lot of big farms went broke, and the banks in Greenwood closed one after the next. Fortunes were halved and halved again, and the great tracts of cotton land that the Yergers and the Southworths controlled dwindled.

Still, depending on the price of cotton and the yield of Glen Oak, Beckwith’s family would sometimes have enough money to journey en masse to the health spas at Battle Creek, Michigan, or nearby Allison Wells. Going to spas was a fashion of the time, but there must have been more of an attraction for Miss Susie. She was occasionally hospitalized — some say for mental disorders — while a cancer slowly spread through her body.

Delay noticed his mother was spending more and more time in her room, skipping family meals. She assured him she was getting better, just resting. He would often sit with her in the evenings, watching as she brushed her long brown hair, and she would tell him stories about his father and their life in California.

Through those hours with his mother, and through the letters his father had written to Will, which Delay was later given, he learned that his father had some strong ideas on race and culture. The Chinese, he wrote, were diligent people, but unwelcome in America “because their pagan practices and racial characteristics can not fit into Caucasian culture nor civilization.”

Beckwith has said that after his father, Uncle Will was the main male influence in his life. He would spend endless hours in the creaking old house, listening to stories about the War Between the States, also known in these parts as the War of Northern Aggression.

The Greenwood relatives, the Yergers and the Southworths and Morgans and Kimbroughs, were all Confederate patriots of the first order. Their exploits were drummed into young Beckwith, as they were drummed into so many white boys of the South, boys born in defeat but still talking about the glory of the lost cause.

The stories gained new luster with each passing year. The women devoted themselves to keeping the faith alive. Beckwith’s grandmother, Susie Fisher Southworth Yerger, helped create a monument to the fallen Confederate heroes in front of the Greenwood courthouse. She was the model for one of the stone figures: a brave rebel woman cradling a fallen soldier.

Beckwith’s aunt, Mrs. Allan McCaskill Kimbrough (born Mary Hunter Southworth, and Mary Craig’s mother), was, along with his maternal grandmother, a friend of Varina Davis, wife of the Confederate president. Mrs. Kimbrough’s crowning achievement was to restore Beauvoir, the Jefferson Davis house on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, and turn it into a monument and a home for Confederate veterans. To this end she gave a rousing speech before the state legislature in 1917, echoing the sentiments that were heard, would be heard, at the house on George Street in Greenwood for many years. She said to them: “The old South has not forgotten, and the young South will ever remember the great lessons of heroic faithfulness which is its final inheritance. . . . None in the history of the world shows greater courage nor fidelity to a principle than does the conduct of the Confederate men and women who are our ancestors. Theirs was called the defeated cause. It has never been defeated and stands triumphant today before the world.”