SELECTED COLUMNS
The following are a few of the columns I published in the Review of Jones County, a Laurel, Mississippi weekly newspaper from August of 2008 to April of 2009. A total of 40 columns appeared, all based on interviews I conducted with Laurel citizens on controversial topics, county legends, and local secrets. These included executions and lynchings, Civil War intrigues, Civil Rights activities, Klan atrocities, FBI investigations of the ‘60’s, African American life in the shadow of Jim Crow, unlawful biracial marriages, and secretive communities of “White Negroes.”
By publishing the columns locally, my intention was to “trouble the water” and force more stories to the surface. This strategy worked better than expected. People who had been waiting decades for the chance to tell their stories to someone with no political agenda and without the threat of retaliation contacted me to go on the record. These eyewitness interviews will be weaved into the narration of the book. I hold all copyrights and permissions.
The columns are sorted as to topic.
CONTENTS
Intro to the Series
Column 1 City Beautiful
Newt Knight: Emperor Of The Free State Of Jones
Column 14 Inventing Newt Knight
Column 15 Ethel Knight: Conscience of the Confederacy
Column 19 A Son’s Secrets
Rachel Knight: Slave, White Man’s Mistress And Mother To A Movement
Column 17 Rachel’s Children
Column 16 Butch Knight
White Negro Communities: Too White To Be Black And Too Black To Be White
Column 27 Piney Woods Relations Part 1
Column 28 Piney Woods Relations Part 2
Willie McGee And Mississippi’s Traveling Electric Chair
Column 2 The Legends of Willie McGee
Column 3 Faces in the Crowd
Column 4 Witness to an Execution Part 1
Column 5 Witness to an Execution Part 2
Column 7 Willie McGee was a Warning
Column 23 Seat of Judgment: Mississippi’s Traveling Electric Chair
Column 22 Mrs. Macie Gore: The Defiant One
Column 20 Healing Stories
Leontyne Price: Touched By Greatness
Column 25 Birthed by a Community
Column 26 Passing the Torch
Laurel, Mississippi: Athens in a Bubble
INTRO TO SERIES: COLUMN 1
City Beautiful
How a Confederate Deserter, an Opera Diva, a KKK Grand Wizard, and a Traveling Electric Chair Shaped Life in a Small Mississippi Town
While doing research for one of my novels, out of boredom, I looked through the archives for The Laurel Leader Call, my hometown paper to see what was going on the day that I was born. Nothing much of interest—mostly items about Truman, General MacArthur and Korea. But what I discovered happened the day before, on May 8, 1951, changed my life forever.
“Willie McGee Pays with Life!” the headline screamed.
I was amazed to learn that only six blocks away from Masonite Clinic, where I was about to be born, a black man named Willie McGee had been executed inside the courthouse in the state’s portable electric chair, the only one of its kind in the nation. I dug deeper and found passionate quotes about the case from the likes of Albert Einstein and Jean Paul Sartre and President Truman. Bella Absug was McGee’s defense attorney. I read of riots in Paris and demonstrations in Washington. There was a grainy photo of the familiar courthouse lawn, where1,500 white men, women and children, people I would grow up with, had gathered at midnight to witness the death of the young black father of four.
But I had never heard the first word about this notorious case that was, in its time, a cause célèbre. For a week leading up to the execution, the paper was filled with items about McGee. The day after the execution, on my birthday, not a word. It was if the town was trying to forget it ever happened.
I wondered, “What else haven’t I been told?”
Thus began a fascinating journey, at times surreal, heartbreaking and hilarious. It is the true story of a native son’s return to the town he thought he knew only to end up stepping through the looking glass into an alternate universe.
In riveting interviews, fellow Jones Countians, black and white, have been opening up to me, allowing me to glimpse behind the myths that I grew up with. Indeed what I discovered that this was not the place of my memory—the City Beautiful with its elegant mansions built by turn-of-the-century lumber barons, the wide, oak-lined boulevards, the proud Civil War history, the devotion to quality of life, art and culture. I learned this was at times a veneer the town wore like a pretty façade of Masonite paneling, which appropriately was an invention of one of its citizens, William Horatio Mason.
I found that while I was growing up in my “white child bubble” of privileged segregation, there was an entire world of which I was ignorant. A world peopled by KKK Wizards, a black opera diva, and a proud, bi-racial community known as the “Black Knights.”
I stumbled upon a century-old dispute that still raises the blood pressure of Jones Countians, both black and white, over the true character of Newt Knight, a Confederate deserter who some say took control of Jones County by force, appointed himself Emperor and sired families by both black and white women.
I uncovered the story of the town’s pariah, the Emperor’s last living child, Thomas Jefferson Knight, who sold peanuts on the steps of the First National Bank along with a self-published biography of his father. Thomas Knight was said to keep the racial secrets that could turn the county upside down.
There is the restless soul of a convicted rapist, whose last words to his people were, “Keep up the fight.“ And the black community that to this day is convinced of his innocence.
Well, this is the world into which I was born—an impossible tangle of custom, legend and myth. Willie McGee’s spirit, as it was leaving Laurel probably passed mine coming in, yet I would be a middle-aged man before I ever heard his name. I learned about Sam Bowers from movies like Mississippi Burning. By the time I heard of him, Newt Knight had been reduced to a quaint cautionary tale of race-mixing. Leontyne Price could have been from Sweden for all I knew.
In this series of columns, I will share with you what I discover along the way. I’m not conceited enough to think I can ever learn the whole truth about any of these events. It’s probably too late for that. The facts have become legend and legends are always shaped by the teller. Like Faulkner said, “Facts and truth don’t really have much to do with each other.”
My interest, and I hope yours, the reader, is to appreciate all the stories, factual or not, that shaped our lives as Jones Countians, and with pride be able to say, “Oh what mighty myths from which we have sprung!”
Newt Knight :Emperor of the Free State of Jones
Column 14
Inventing Newt Knight
Some people in Jones County claim two Bibles: The King James and The Book of Ethel, more commonly known as The Echo of the Black Horn. In 1951, Ethel Knight, a distant in-law of Newt’s, released her bombshell of a book. In it she spilled the beans, and named names while she was at it. Ethel simultaneously became the most praised and the most cussed-out woman in Jones County.
Ethel Knight had grown furious at how outsiders were portraying Mississippi in general and Jones County in particular. She was especially upset over the national attention given to the Davis Knight trial over in Ellisville. Davis Knight was a descendant of Newt’s on the black side of the family, but had been caught passing for white. In 1948, he was brought to court and sentenced to five years for marrying a white woman. It landed in the Mississippi Supreme Court. According to Ethel the national press was having a field day at our expense. She said she was sick and tired of watching outsiders “…distort the facts into wicked propaganda.” She wrote Echo to set the record straight.
Of course she wasn’t the first Jones Countian driven to revise Newt’s image. In 1865, to dispel the notion that the anti-Confederates led by Newt Knight were community heroes, the county changed its name for a while to Davis, after Jefferson Davis, hoping to remove all doubt as to their patriotism to the recently vanquished Confederate States of America.
Years later, as the stories about Newt became meaner and nastier, his son Tom wrote a book trying to redeem his dad. He claimed that Newt Knight wasn’t such a bad man after all. He was more like a Robin Hood of Jones County.
James Street, a Laurel newspaperman, came along in 1942 and penned the best selling novel Tap Roots, which for the first time raised the specter of race-mixing among the Knights. Though he didn’t use real names, everybody knew who he was talking about. I know of at least one family of black Knights, who at the time were passing for white in Hattiesburg, having to pack up and move to Memphis after that book came out. A few white Knights changed their name and moved to Texas.
The movie of the same title was released in 1948. About the only good thing the New York Times critic had to say about the film was that the star, Susan Hayward, was “… generously endowed by nature and further enhanced by Technicolor.” Still, it cemented Street’s depiction of the hero of the legend as an honorable man fighting for a noble, anti-Confederate cause. That same year Mississippi took Davis Knight to court for miscegenation. On top of that, Willie McGee had been sentenced to die and while the whole world protested his upcoming electrocution at courthouse. Once again Jones County had occasion to be splashed across the slick pages of Newsweek, Time, Life and Look. The sanctity and racial purity of the old Confederacy in Jones County was in shambles.
That’s where Ethel comes in. She decided to fight back. She rifled through trunks and attics, poured through courthouse papers, studied Civil War muster rolls, tromped through overgrown cemeteries, interrogated the old timers, and pieced together the “authentic” story of Newt Knight. Somehow she even got Tom, Newt’s ninety year-old son, to renounce his childhood hero, his own father, on the jacket of her book. Once again, Newt was depicted as a bushwhacking, cold-blooded, no good deserter. A traitor to both his country and his race. For a long while, that image stuck with a large part of the county.
But now it seems the pendulum is swinging back again. Victoria Bynum, a Texas college professor has recently written a highly respected book on Jones County that returns a little luster to Knight’s hero status. She even presents his fathering two races of Knights in a more positive light. Producer Gary Ross, whose movies include Seabiscuit and Big, has bought the rights and will be filming The Free State of Jones in the near future.
You may ask, how could there be anything left to tell about this old man, born over 170 years ago?
Recently, I was startled when I sat down with members from the black side of the Knight family. It was like I stepped through the looking glass. I was familiar with all the books written by white folks about Newt, but now I was suddenly witnessing a piece of the mystery that has been mostly ignored—those legends passed down through generations of black Knights. In these stories the names were the same, Newt and Rachel and Serena, but the heroes and the villains were reversed. “Where did these stories come from?” I asked.
Yvonne Bivins, one of the people present, told me that when she was a child and there was bad weather, they all gathered at their grandparent’s house, the kids huddling by the fireplace. While the storm was brewing, her grandfather would say, “Be quiet. The Lord is working.” When the storm subsided, the old ones began telling the stories to the children. It had the sound of the sacred.
I came to understand that these stories were indeed holy work. Each story had a moral, and the stories handed down to black kids taught very different lessons than the ones handed down to white kids. That’s when I understood. Folks fill in the blanks of Newt’s story to bear out their own truth. If Newt Knight had never been born, we would have to invent him, just to talk about who we are.
That’s why the story of Newt Knight just won’t die. It insists upon being born again and again. The need for the truth is a powerful thing. We humans just can’t abide an unsolved mystery. We turn our mysteries into myths, and myths change to suit the times, like Oedipus Rex or the Iliad. Within the myth of Newt Knight lie the unresolved paradoxes of our age, about race and family and country. The Myth of Newt Knight forever poses the question, “Who are we, really?” And the truth of the answer, like us, keeps evolving.
Column 15
Ethel Knight: Conscience of the Confederacy
The Hornes probably knew Ethel Knight best. Carolyn and Keith looked after Ethel the last ten years of her life, following the death of her husband and all of her children. Ethel even willed the Hornes the publishing rights to Echo of the Black Horn because she believed they would keep it going.
And they have. Echo of the Black Horn is presently in its ninth printing and still sells strong locally. Along with the family Bible, it is a cherished item in many a Jones County native’s home. A good portion of sales are from people replacing the one they loaned out and never got back. This book has a habit of disappearing.
Keith remembers the day he took Ethel to her doctor in Magee. There in the waiting room was a copy of Echo with a hole drilled in it. “They had run a chain though the hole and attached to the table so nobody would take it home. No telling how many they had went missing.” It’s true once you get into it, whether you love it or hate it, you just can’t put it down.
Carolyn and Keith went over to Ethel’s house every Sunday and Ethel would cook for them. And while she cooked, she told stories. Carolyn got smart and began bringing a recorder to tape Ethel as she reeled off one priceless bit of Mississippi history after another. Carolyn says she has hours and hours of Ethel talking while pots clanged and dishes rattled in the background. One day, Carolyn says, there will be another book.
“We might have to leave home if it ever gets published,” Keith laughs.
I asked what motivated Ethel to write Echo.
“Having married a Knight herself, she wanted to clear her husband’s name,” Keith explained. “Newt’s whole family was a total outcast. They wouldn’t allow them in churches. Some of that still exists. It’s a prejudice. People don’t even know why anymore; they just know they aren’t supposed to like them.”
But some people are proud of their associations to Newt. In Ethel’s book there is the story of a raid on Knight’s gang. Newt escapes, fleeing into the woods. A woman runs along side him, carrying her infant, but she begins tire. Newt snatches up the child and carries the baby in the crook of his arm. “Tomorrow,” Keith says, “we’re going to interview that baby’s grandson. He’s probably over 65 now.”
“Everybody knew Ethel,” Keith said, “and Ethel knew everybody. And she knew everything about everybody. If she had been born twenty years later, she would have been Governor.”
People would call her all the time with questions about their ancestry. “Ethel was one of those people who just loved to do for folks. To help you out,” Carolyn told me. “Folks were always dropping by to ask her questions about their roots. White and black. She would take time to help them all. She was very generous with her information.”
In an age when there were so many Knights passing for whites, people also came to Ethel with more surprising requests. Carolyn told of a woman whose daughter was engaged to a Knight. She called up Ethel and asked, “Has he got any black in him?” Ethel confirmed that no, the man was not of Rachel, Newt’s slave wife’s, line.
According to Keith, whenever a person in Jones County says they are a Knight, there is always that suspicion. He mentioned one group of Knights who got so tired of it they moved to Texas and changed their names to McKnight, (We’ll find out how blacks feel about this mixed ancestry in future columns!)
In her book, Ethel takes a strong stand against “race-mixing” and lauds the ideals of the Confederacy. She even dedicated her book “…to the memory of the Noble Confederates who lived and died for Jones County.” Not very politically correct nowadays. I was curious to know how Ethel reacted to this new breed of historians revising Jones County history once more, especially considering how her own account of things stood for so long. I could just hear Ethel railing against this new set of outsiders coming into Jones County to twist “facts into wicked propaganda.”
Keith told me of an encounter Ethel had with a stranger who dropped by her house one afternoon. Little did Ethel know that this white woman pumping her for information would turn around and write a popular book casting Ethel as a racist, calling her research into question, and suggesting that Echo was little more than a thinly disguised defense of white supremacy.
When that new book hit the shelves, Ethel was 93 and legally blind. “I had to read it to her,” Carolyn remembers. “You can only imagine how she felt. That woman took some mean swipes at Ethel.”
Indeed, Ethel felt personally betrayed and defamed, and sure enough her trademark temper was on display. Ninety-three or not, she wasn’t going to take it lying down. When the author came to USM to promote her new work, Ethel decided she would go face the woman.
She made sure to arrive early enough to get a seat right up front. And there she sat, stiffly in the third row of the packed auditorium, staring down the professor with a defiant glare. “She didn’t say a word,” Carolyn remembers. “She was too much of a lady for that.”
She didn’t need to say anything. Coming to stand with her was an incensed contingent from the Sons of Confederate Veterans, folks who honor Ethel because of her unrepentant stand for the Confederacy.
How did the professor react?
“It must have rattled her,” Keith laughed. “She seemed to lose her focus for quite a bit.”
Who wouldn’t, I wondered, with the full moral weight of the Confederate Army bearing down on you?
Column 19
A Son’s Secrets
If I close my eyes, I can still see him today, just as he looked back in 1955 when I was four years old. He stands forever in my memory on that scorching Laurel sidewalk in front of the Strand Theater, selling peanuts and chewing gum and candy bars, his white beard grown down to the bib of his tattered overalls. That old man scared the bejeebers out of me every time Momma took us to watch Roy Rogers movies on Saturday afternoons.
It took the full measure of my courage to approach him, clutching my nickel in my sweaty palm, while he studied me with those, steel-gray, old-man eyes. My heart galloped like Trigger as he plucked up my coin with his long yellowed nails and then examined it carefully before dropping it into his dirty coin sack. The second he handed me the little brown paper bag of peanuts I took off, fleeing for my mother, dizzy from a peril survived.
He died the next year at the age of 96, but it was not until after I was fully-grown that I learned the true identity of this Laurel landmark, derisively known as “the Peanut Man.” His name was Thomas Jefferson Knight and he carried secrets that could turn my hometown of Laurel, Mississippi on its ear. I wasn’t’ the only one he scared. He had a few grownups shaking in their boots as well. He knew the questionable ground from which we sprang.
Tom was born in 1860, a year before the Civil War, long before Laurel existed, back when Jones County was wild frontier and the yellow pine stood as tall and as big around as sequoias. He remembered when farms were small, remote, and self-sufficient and most people were poor. They had an independent streak a mile wide. He came from stock that didn’t take kindly to authority of any variety—political, military or religious. If a man decided to desert the Confederate Army, as many did, rather than fight a “rich man’s war,” then so be it. Commitment in Jones County was to clan, not to country. And if a man wanted to raise-up children with a favorite slave mistress right alongside his white children, then that was the business of him and his clan.
Tom was there when slavery ended and Reconstruction came and went. He watched the Yankee lumber barons come down in the 1890’s with their insatiable sawmills and attempt to tame the county with laws, commerce and culture. He may have laughed at their naivety as they raised-up their magnificent Classical Revival courthouse and their splendid Georgian mansions and laid out their “City Beautiful” on ground that still trembled with violent memory.
That’s why Tom was dangerous. He knew the fault lines on which the city was built, the one hundred years of family secrets that lay waiting to be resurrected. Over the years, he had a first-row seat to the twin conundrums that had plagued Jones County since the Civil War. I’m referring to those widespread rumors about the county’s double-barreled bastardy: our legitimacy as true Confederates and our claims to racial purity.
Tom could tell you who was black, who was white, who was mixed and who was passing. And which proud Rebel-flag waving, Dixie-singing, “The South Will Rise Again” shouting patriots were descended from Confederate deserters, scavengers, traitors, cowards and murderers. He knew where all the bodies were buried, literally.
Tom had a handle on these things better than anyone else, not only because he was old, but also because he was the last surviving child of the great Emperor himself. I’m referring to the notorious Captain Newton Knight, the most infamous Jones Countian of all. Tom’s father was either the greatest hero or the biggest scoundrel who ever lived, depending on who you’re listening to. Nobody’s neutral. Folks in Jones County have been arguing about Newt Knight since the day he shot his brother-in-law Morgan for fooling with his wife. Morgan was not the first or the last to be ambushed by Newt.
What we know for sure is that Newt Knight had a small farm near what would one day become Laurel when the Civil War commenced. While serving in the Confederate Army, he came to the conclusion that the affair was “a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight,” and decided he would have none of it. He deserted and returned home to his clan. He gathered up a band of like-minded men and went on to take over much of the county by brute force. He even made some attempts to join up with Lincoln’s Union Army. As far as Captain Newt and his band were concerned, if Mississippi could secede from the Union, then Jones County could secede from Mississippi. Newt ambushed officers of the Confederate Army, shot them in the back, stole their supplies, eluded their patrols and terrorized their sympathizers. To Newt Knight, his alliance of local clans was the only government that mattered. He even gave himself the title, “Emperor of the Free State of Jones,” and held it until war’s end.
Newt died in the 1920’s, but the disagreements over his character became more violent as the years passed. People cussed, fist-fought and shot at each other over whether Newt was a coward, a traitor or a savior of the people. And it wasn’t just academic. A lot of folks had a father or an uncle or a brother who rode with Newt. The honor of entire clans was on the line.
That’s when Tom decided he would step into the fray. After all, who had a better right to tell the story than the heir-apparent to the “Free State of Jones,” the man grew up hidden away deep in the swamps, watched over by a fierce army of renegades, deserters and Unionists who had sworn dying allegiance to his bigger-than-life father?
Mostly a self-educated man, Tom decided to settle the matter by penning his own book. In fact much of what we know today about Newt can be traced to this crude little pamphlet Tom wrote in the 1930’s glorifying his daddy--The Life and Activities of Captain Newton Knight and his Company.
This was during the Depression and Tom had already become a familiar sight on Central Avenue hawking his peanuts, the product of a small roaster provided to the destitute so they could earn a few pennies. When Tom had scraped together enough coins to get a few copies of his book printed, he sold them right along with his peanuts and chewing gum for a dollar a copy, right there on the sidewalks of Central Avenue.
Newt Knight was a bona fide hero in Tom’s book. He recounted how many a Jones Countian worshiped this Robin Hood of the Piney Woods. Newt’s army defended the war widows, fed their babies, protected their crops from merciless Confederate foragers, and saved many from destitution. In the book are all the stories Tom had heard at his father’s knee. Tom even found someone to pen a few rough drawings depicting the most thrilling scenes, like battles, hangings and daring escapes through the swamps.
But Tom wasn’t in favor of airing the entire truth in his little book. There was a sizeable portion of his father’s story that Tom would just as soon people forget. The uncomfortable truth was Newt’s rebellion didn’t end with the War. He also had some very controversial practices after the war. In addition to the white family into which Tom was born in 1860, Newt raised up a mixed-race family with Rachel, a former slave of his grandfather, and her half-white daughter, Georgia Ann. He established for eternity in Jones County three branches of the family, one known as the White Knights, another as the Black Knights, and the third as the White Black Knights, lineages which would blur Jones County bloodlines and shock genealogists right up to the present day.
Not that such mixing was unheard of in the early days of Jones County. This wasn’t the Gone With the Wind South, populated by rich planters, plantation houses and remote slave quarters. Very few Piney Woods inhabitants owned slaves, but for those who did it was understood that when there was only one field in which to work, one table from which to eat, and only one or two shacks in which to sleep, master and slave were bound to share a unique kind of intimacy. The boundaries were not as rigid as many of many of my fellow Jones Countians would still like to believe. Most folks just didn’t flaunt it.
But Newt wasn’t one to be discreet. With his bad temper, good aim and long memory, he didn’t need to be. Only a fool would go out of his way to cross Newt or his clan—black, white or mixed. There are graves filled with fools to testify to that fact.
Some claim Newt Knight went so far as to try to breed a new race of people by urging his three branches to intermarry. Others said it was a loving thing he was up to, trying to dilute the black blood of his descendents to the point where the State of Mississippi had to decree them legally white. [i]
After the war, as Confederate monuments began to crowd the landscape and freed blacks were blamed for all manner of evil, Newt’s hero status was called into question. The Myth of the Glorious Confederacy had become the unifying religion of the South and strict segregation became the law. Newt was stripped of his sainthood. By the 1930’s not only was his stand against Jefferson Davis’s Confederacy now regarded as treasonous, his open race-mixing with Rachel and her daughter became, an abomination. He was widely cursed for giving rise to a tribe of “white niggers.”
As flattering as it was, Tom’s book did little to raise Newt’s stock. He watched as the tide of public opinion turned against his father and his family. The Knight clan became pariahs in a county they had once ruled.
After the Depression, Tom drifted into anonymous oblivion, known only as “the Peanut Man.” With the unchecked growth of his white beard, teenagers on bicycles would taunt the surly old scoundrel with shouts of, “Hey, you! Santy Clause!” just to hear him bark his reply, “Go to hell you goddamn sons a bitches!” In another day, his father would have shot them between the eyes. No one seemed to remember.
As history passed him by, the identity of that withered old man disappeared into the fog of memory. If people did remember who he was, they whispered when they pointed, as if not wanting to wake up any ancient secrets that lay napping at his feet.
In 1947, when he was 88 and seemed destined to die unknown, Thomas Jefferson Knight was pitilessly thrust into the spotlight. His father’s ghost returned with a vengeance to threaten the reputations of many a Jones Countian. A distant relative of Tom’s named Davis Knight got arrested for trying to “pass” as white and marrying a white woman. When the accused told the Jones County prosecutor to just try and prove it, a bizarre miscegenation trial began that tried to untangle the most complicated and lied-about bloodline in America. The entire nation watched.
Tom was dragged into a Jones County courtroom and asked to testify under oath, in the national spotlight, not about his father’s military heroics, but about his race-mixing. By this time Mississippi had gone rabid on the issue of segregation. Tom was forced to reveal in detail to his entire community how his father had committed the worst of all sins, loving a black woman, nearly a century ago, and siring and caring for her children. Tom had to identify himself as a member of a family of race-traitors and mixed-breeds. In order for him to defend his own standing as a white man, about the only thing he had left of value in the world besides his peanut roaster, he had to vilify his father as a Negro lover and traitor to his race. It’s sadly ironic that when Tom at last got a chance to speak about his father, it was to betray him.[ii]
They say Tom never got over it as long as he lived.
Tom Knight was perhaps the last person who could tell the real story of where we come from. He’d seen up-close the absurdity of race, the insanity of violence, the shallowness of our illustrious illusions. He could have shed a harsh light on all our myths, if somebody had asked. No one did. Yet he showed up downtown daily, selling his peanuts, stubbornly pricking memories that folks would rather not have.
I imagine him silently standing watch over Laurel through his final years, when the violence of the past finally caught up to the proud city. From where he stood on Central Avenue, he could easily look up Fifth at the Courthouse, the same grandiose Classical Revival structure he saw the rich Yankees erect fifty years earlier as a brash promise of a new beginning. It was supposed to represent the taming of a clannish wilderness, a testament to a new age of enlightened governance.
It’s not hard to image that Tom was there that day in 1942 when the fault lines shifted. That was the year a mob stormed the courthouse jail in Laurel and a black prisoner by the name of Howard Wash was taken out and lynched from a nearby bridge. The sheriff and his deputies were present but did little to resist. If that had happened in any other town in Mississippi not an eyebrow would have been raised. But it was a first for Laurel, the progressive little city of such bright promise.
The lynching was only the first in a remarkable convergence of disturbing events, all occurring within a span of a few years that would focus the world’s attention on the proud city Laurel, Mississippi. There would be the bestselling book that “outs” the county’s scandalous Civil War history. The five-year ordeal of an accused rapist who becomes an international cause célèbre and ends his life in Mississippi’s ghoulish traveling electric chair. The rise of a murderous Klan Wizard. The discovery of a local black girl with an operatic voice so remarkable, she is used to draw the attention of the world away from the sins of her city.
The contradictions that had never really resolved themselves would be laid bare. And Tom lived long enough to witness them all. But if he had opinions, he took them to his grave.
I wish he had hung around longer. I would like to have asked him, “Who are we and where do we come from? Where does truth end and myth begin? What are the untold stories that shape our destinies?” But he had been dead fifty years before I ever thought to put the questions to him.
Thankfully I’ve found others still living who have bits and pieces of the story. I’ve listened now to countless tales told by White Knights, Black Knights, White Black Knights and non-Knights. By relatives and friends of Willie McGee, Howard Wash, Leontyne Price, Sam Bowers and others. These names still provoke deep passions among the citizens of Laurel. I’ve been cussed out more than once for suggesting an opinion that ran counter to what folks have been raised up with.
So, it’s with some trepidation that I am going to share with you over the course of this book a few of the rich, complex and often contradictory stories that they tell.
Since Tom is no longer around to set me straight, I can’t vouch for what is factually true or false. But like the Italians say, “All stories are true. Some even happened.”
Rachel Knight
Column 16
Gregory “Butch” Knight
There is probably no sadder task in the world than trying to get to know your father after he has died. Yet Butch Knight told me that was something he was determined to do.
I first met Butch at a gathering of the Knights who proudly trace their roots back to the ex-slave Rachel and the infamous Newt. Some of their descendants are called “black Knights”. Some are called “white black Knights”, because of their Caucasian features. Their history is complex. They are caught right in the crosshairs of our absurd national obsession with color.
For instance, Butch’s father, Hayston Knight, was the great-grandson of Newt and Rachel Knight. Butch showed me a photo of his father. There was nothing in the picture that would cause me to think this man black. His features were of a light-skinned, fine-boned white man. Butch said many of the Knights with his father’s appearance were encouraged to leave the area so they could pass for white, and raise their children as white. Of course they could never return home, lest their children discover their ancestry. The break had to be complete. Those who stayed were pressured into choosing marriage partners with their shade of pigmentation or lighter. Never darker.
“Not my father,” Butch recalled. “He said that foolishness was going to stop with him. He said he wanted to marry the blackest woman he could find. He was going to break the cycle.”
Butch said his father never denied who he was. On his first day in the army, Hayston’s sergeant ordered all the whites in one line and all the blacks in another. When Hayston placed himself with the other black soldiers, the sergeant shouted, “Didn’t you hear me? I said, only the n______’s over there!”
Hayston said defiantly, “Well, I guess I’m in the right place because I’m a n______!”
In the 1950’s Hayston got a job with a local grocery wholesaler and because of his intelligence and his white appearance was given significant responsibility in managing the operation. He was also put in charge of breaking in the new white trainees, who were inevitably promoted over Hayston. The family believed that the stress and the humiliation sent him to an early grave.
“My daddy wasn’t proud. He could have passed,” Butch says. “I wanted to write about my father. How he had to live in the black world and work in the white world.”
Butch admits being ashamed of his father while he was alive, seeing one white man after the other promoted over him. And his father never talked back.
“I admire him now,” Butch admits, with tears in his eyes. “He did it for us, his children. So he could support his family.”
“I’m starting to understand the struggle he had to go through,” Butch continued, “Not white enough to be accepted by whites. And too white to be accepted by blacks.”
I encouraged Butch to write about his father, as I’m doing with my dad after losing him last year to cancer. Sometimes it’s a lonely undertaking, with many ghosts, especially those missed moments when feelings went forever unspoken. But writing it down seems to help soothe the grief.
I didn’t need to encourage him. Butch had already begun the research. He even went so far as to sit down with Ethel Knight, the author of Echo of the Black Horn, to see what he could learn from her about his father.
“What did you think about her book?” I asked.
“Lies,” he said, referring to the way she denied the black descendants of Newt Knight in her book. “But when I went to see her, she treated me like long lost kin. It was very strange.”
I offered to work with Butch on his father’s biography. I could tell he was feeling some sense of urgency. Then he explained. Butch’s father died when he was 58. “An aneurism. Runs in family,” Butch said. “Comes from both sides.” Butch went on to say that this year, he had turned 58. “I’m shaking in my boots.” His sisters who were present that day assured Butch that wouldn’t be the case for him. Butch didn’t appear comforted. I got the sense that he thought he might have waited until it was too late to discover the truth about his father.
Butch and I agreed to meet the next time I was in Mississippi and continue our discussion about his dad. I put together a list of questions for Butch and was excited about dedicating a chapter in my upcoming book about his search for his father. When I called from Minnesota to arrange a meeting, his sister answered the phone.
“Butch died last month,” she said. “He collapsed while he was out mowing his yard.”
I wasn’t sure why that hit me so hard. In a way, it was like losing my father all over again. Perhaps I had hoped that by helping Butch discover his dad, in the process, I could also become closer to mine.
But that’s not to be. Perhaps, in the end, that is something a person can do only for himself. And maybe, looking for our fathers is like looking for our reflection in a mirror that has gone dim. We can never get close enough to make it out.
I’ll miss my friend, and I hope that where he is now, the reflection he gazes upon is bright and true, and he has found what he was searching for.
Column 17
Rachel’s Children
I can’t help but think of the Old Testament Abraham when I hear stories about Newt Knight. Both men sired children by a wife and a slave. In Newt’s case it was Serena and Rachel. With Abraham, Sara and Hagar. According to religious texts, one of these women went on to become the matriarch of God’s chosen people. Exactly which one, depends on what you happen to be reading, your Bible or your Koran. Jews and Christians claim the wife Sarah and Muslims claim the handmaiden Hagar. Several Crusades were launched trying to settle that matter.
In Jones County, there’s always been a fierce crusade of competing stories about Rachel, the white account versus the black account. Like most stories, the white interpretation gets written down and called history, while the black story gets handed down by word-of-mouth and called folklore.
Growing up as a white boy, I swore by Ethel Knight’s written-down version. According to her, Rachel was a light-skinned temptress with blue-green eyes and flowing chestnut hair. But evil as the day is long. Ethel alternately calls her a vixen, a witch, a conjure woman, a murderer and a strumpet.
Serena, Newt’s white wife, is but an innocent captive, forced a gunpoint to live in this den of iniquity, and like Newt, powerless as Rachel’s sorcery wrecked and degraded their family.
As a child of Jim Crow, this narrative satisfied my budding sensibilities about race. In my white-bubble world, there could never be any possibility of true love or affection between a white man and a black woman. Nor would any white man sire children by a black woman and then choose to live amongst his mixed-race offspring. Unless of course, the black woman had either seduced him unmercifully or mysteriously conjured him, or both. It just wasn’t possible that he actually loved her, or her children.
Imagine my surprise when I heard, as they say, “the rest of the story.” It was as shocking as sitting down in church and listening to the preacher get up and declare from the pulpit that Abraham’s birthright went to Hagar’s kid Ishmael, instead of Sarah’s son, Isaac, and it was we Christians who were the infidels! Boy would that turn some peoples world upside down!
I felt something akin to this when I listened to a gathering of Rachel’s descendents tell me their side of things. First of all Rachel wasn’t some immoral viper. To Pat and Flo and Peggy, Rachel was a role model—a strong black woman with no legitimate authority in a racist society, doing what needed to be done for her children, regardless of the cost to herself. Somebody you would like your daughter to grow up like.
“Was she the green-eyed slave with long flowing hair like Ethel said?” I asked.
“She was what we called a Guinea Negro,” answered Yvonne, another of Rachael’s great-grandchildren. “That means she was dark, not light-skinned like Ethel writes. She had course hair and she was short. Similar to Australian aborigines. She was mixed, but not white-looking.”
It was beginning to sound like a white conspiracy against Rachel, but then Yvonne let me in on a little secret. Whites weren’t the only ones who liked the story of Rachel appearing white. “That’s the way some of my cousins who pass for white want her to be depicted. They deny that they had any black in them so they don’t want Rachel to be black, either.”
“That was partially Newt’s fault,” Yvonne continued. “My mother said that Newt was trying to cleanse the black out of Rachel’s children. Because of the one-drop rule, he wanted to get rid of that drop of black blood. That’s why he married his white children to each other black children.” Yvonne grins at her relatives around the table. “As for me, I proudly claim my one drop!”
There is a burst of laughter. All these women agree on that point.
“And how about the part about being Rachel being a vixen and a witch?” I asked.
“It was always assumed that the slave was to blame for the husband’s indiscretions,” Yvonne explained. “She had to have some special power over him. It couldn’t be that he cared for her.”
Yvonne was right. That’s what I was always told. Slave owners were mostly noble men and succumbed only when mightily tempted. Why else would Newt isolate himself from his community and willingly be labeled as a deviate if he weren’t bewitched?
“In my family we believe that Newt really loved Rachel,” Pat said.
“It was not a casual relationship,” Yvonne added. “And he loved all of his children. My understanding is that they were all raised up on the same land. They all lived together, played together, ate together. My grandmother was Newt’s granddaughter, said she didn’t know she had a drop of black blood until she was all raised up.”
“I guess you can’t believe everything you read,” I said. “How do the black Knights feel about Ethel’s book?”
“My grandfather was Warren Smith,” Yvonne said, “He was Rachel’s grandson and he said that Ethel’s book was a pack of lies. Said she was smart enough to create an entertaining account of Newt and Rachel’s relationship. But unfortunately,” Yvonne concluded, “white people tend to believe every word.”
Yvonne was right. I sure did. But now I’m not sure what to think. Rachel’s people have got me thoroughly confused. That’s what happens when folks start messing with the stories you were raised on.
So it comes down to that old, nagging question once more—which story is true? The truth is…I don’t know. I think they all might be. The way a story shapes a person is the truest thing there is.
The Italians say it better: All stories are true. Some even happened.
White Negro Communities
Column 27
Piney Woods Relations
Yvonne Bivins had to make a choice very few Americans have forced upon them. She could live as a black woman or a white woman.
Yvonne’s ancestry is enmeshed with the Knights of Jones County. She was born into one of the so-called “White Negro” communities that sprang up after the Civil War all over through the Piney Woods. These communities grew up around Piney Woods plantations, actually no bigger than farms. There’s Six Town and Soso in Jones County and Kelly Settlement and Sheeplow in Forrest County. Her community is called Kelly Settlement and located about seven miles outside of Hattiesburg.
Hold on to your hats and I’ll tell you how Kelly Settlement came into existence. John Kelly, an early petitioner in Mississippi Territory, purchased 640 acres on the Leaf River. His son, Green Kelly had a liaison with a slave named Sarah. Sarah had children by her white master, by a white neighbor and by another slave on the farm. That made three sets of children, a total of eleven.
This may surprise you. It sure did me. But according to Yvonne, it was not an uncommon practice for Piney Woods slave owners, perhaps because of the intimacy created by these modest estates that demanded close-quarters living, to provide for all their offspring, regardless of color. We just don’t hear about it. Newt Knight was vilified not because he sired darker offspring, but because he refused to deny them.
Green Kelly was more discreet. When he died he left a parcels of land for the children of each set. The children Kelly personally sired were bequeathed land on the Monroe Road. The ones sired by the white neighbor received land on the Eatonville Road. The ones sired by the slave got land over on the River Road. Kelly Settlement was, and still is to a great degree, populated by Kelly’s bi-racial lineage.
In Soso, only a road divides the black descendants of the major slave owner of that time from his white descendants. Yet, it is two separate worlds.
Through the years, most of these settlements have isolated themselves from the population at large. Many of the children were sent away to “pass,” heading off to the West or North to blend into the white world. Sometimes they were so successful, their children and grandchildren were unaware of their heritage. I’ve heard tales of proud white people rifling through courthouse records to trace their family tree, probably trying to discover a Confederate colonel or two, and screaming out in alarm when they find a “B” (black) or an “M” (mulatto) by an ancestor’s name.
Yvonne says that passing locally was out of the question, as whites kept tabs on you. And sometimes blacks would call you out in public, either by referring to you by your first name, instead of “Mr.” or “Miss.” Or perhaps asking you about some common relation known to be black while a white person was listening.
Some light-skinned blacks moved no farther than Hattiesburg to pass. A great aunt of Yvonne’s was a brilliant seamstress. Her customers were mostly from the wealthy Jewish community of Hattiesburg and they encouraged her to pass as white. She bought a house on the end of 4th Street, next to the tracks, right on the border between the white section an the black section.
When the census taker came around, she told him they were Indian. Darker relatives were not received at the front door and were asked to go around to the back. Things were turning out fine until Tap Roots was published, outing many of the black Knights who were passing. One of the great aunt’s boys tried to enter the white section in the Saenger Theater downtown and he was kicked out because now the family was suspect. Unwilling to revert to living as black, Yvonne’s great aunt bought a boxcar and packed up her home and moved to Memphis. As a side note, Yvonne says that when she died, her aunt was buried in the white cemetery in Memphis shared by Elvis’s mother. So maybe she finally got what she wanted.
Next week Yvonne’s tale continues with the story of those light-skinned blacks like her grandparents who opted to stay in the Piney Woods, where they were seen by most as too white to black, and too black to be white.
Piney Woods Relations
Part 2
I interviewed Yvonne Bevins last summer on her mother’s front porch. Yvonne’s grandfather built the house in 1925 in the Kelly Settlement, one of several White Negro Communities that sprung up in the Piney Woods after the Civil War, populated by what people called back then mulattoes. These light-skinned blacks were known to be offspring of the local plantation owner and one or more of his slaves. As Yvonne discussed last week, it was common for children to be sent out of Mississippi to pass as white. But what happened to the ones who chose to stay put, like her own family, in a land where many considered them too white to be black and too black to be white?
Yvonne told me that those who remained in the community had a time of it, too. They were encouraged to marry other light-skinned blacks. Yvonne said that often the “paper bag” rule was enforced when it came to picking a spouse. In other words, don’t marry anyone darker than a paper bag. Or as Yvonne’s grandfather warned, “Keep to your own kind.”
Yvonne’s grandmother, who could have passed for white, stayed and proudly claimed her “one-drop.” When whites asked her why she chose to live as a black, she told them, “Because if I were white, I’d be a poor white and would rather be a dog. And if I were Indian I would be on some reservation. No thank-you, I’d rather be a N_____!”
Being light-skinned attracted other kinds of unwelcome attention. Yvonne remembers when she was teenager, a stranger came to her mother’s house, took one look at her and her light-skinned sister and commented to her mother, “You’re sitting on a gold mine here,” referring to the price some men would pay to be with a girl with that shade of skin.
Yvonne also told me the story of a white man named Knight, stalking through her neighborhood, looking for sex. “He got upset when I told him we were probably kin.”
An interesting dilemma developed among those who remained. To find eligible marriage partners who were suitably light-skinned, families had to make excursions to other White Negro communities to seek out husbands and wives for their children. “That’s how my ancestors got involved with the Knights,” Yvonne says. “My kin went over to Soso from Smith County to find people who were as white-skinned as they were. I wondered how the White Negro Community in Soso interacted with the local black population. “They didn’t associate with dark-skinned blacks socially. They couldn’t go to school with whites and wouldn’t go to school with blacks. Many chose to be educated in the school Anna Knight began in Jones County at Gitano.”
Anna was the daughter of Newt Knight and Rachel’s daughter George Anne, a racially mixed woman. Yvonne said, “The Seventh Day Adventists will tell you she opened the school for religious reasons which is true, however the school was built for her light-skinned relatives who didn’t want to attend school with blacks.” Even today, darker skinned Knights and lighter-skinned Knights descendants have separate family reunions.
Yvonne admits that there are deep-rooted cultural differences that kept the light-skinned and the dark-skinned apart. “The white Negroes grew up closer to white plantation owners, around music and reading, china, crystal and fine linen. So there was definitely a class barrier. It’s the difference between the house slave and the field slave. That’s why these communities would isolate themselves. In fact, when one of Yvonne’s Knight kin actually married a dark skinned man, they had to move to Washington D. C. because her family didn’t want her around.”
And there were reasons for darker skinned blacks to feel resentful. Light-skinned blacks seemed to get preferential treatment from whites. For instance, according the Yvonne and her cousins, white employers favored hiring them as light-skinned blacks. They would put them “up front” in banks, department stores and other places where services were provided to white people. They figured our lighter skin would be accepted more easily by white customers.” For example, as the first step in integrating schools in Hattiesburg the administration decided to integrate the staff. It was decided to send light-skinned blacks to the white schools. When the faculty met in a general assembly for the first time, blacks looked around in disbelief. All the blacks had the same shade of skin—they were all light.
Yvonne acknowledges the insanity of this obsession with color and believes the time for shame about the past is over. The way to do it is to make sure the truth gets told about this perplexing, but little understood facet of Southern culture.
What motivates her?
Yvonne, who identifies as black, went to historically black colleges, worked for civil rights and married a black man, has one burning desire.
“All roads lead back to Rachel Knight,” she says. “Her story is our story. She’s been put away in the closet. Because of the rough treatment by people like Ethel Knight in her book, Echo of the Black Horn, Rachel’s descendants have denied her blood. According to Ethel and those like her, Rachel is where the evil came in and infected the white race. My own family wouldn’t defend her name because they were made to feel so ashamed. Until recently, we didn’t even know the names of Rachel’s children.”
“But now,” Yvonne says firmly, “Rachel needs to be heard without prejudice.”
She may be right. If we can understand Rachel’s story, perhaps we can understand the quagmire of race itself.
Willie McGee
Column 2
The Legends of Willie McGee
No place in the world has more legends than Jones County, other than maybe Ancient Greece. I’ve talked to folks who still look for Newt Knight’s buried treasure in riverbanks and in secret caves. Then there’s that stuff about Jones County seceding from the Confederacy when Mississippi seceded from the Union. One of my favorites is the legend of Rachael Knight, a slave woman who lived deep in the Piney Woods and whose supernatural powers helped shape the history of Jones County.
Even an event that happened as recently as 1951 has already taken on the proportions of legend. I’m referring to the Story of Willie McGee.
This was one of the most extensively covered cases of its day. In my office here, I have piled on my desk feature stories from Life Magazine, Time Magazine, The New York Times, Christian Century, The Commonweal, the Nation, and Newsweek. That doesn’t even include the international press the case attracted. I can flip through the yellowing pages and see the black and white photos of McGee being escorted back and forth between the jails in Jackson and Laurel, dazed and in chains with a phalanx of state guards summoned to prevent threatened mob action. Of Willie McGee sitting glum, slumped over in his cell, a cigarette burning between his fingers. Of his sheeted body being carted out of the Jones County Courthouse into the care of Pete Christian, a local black funeral home owner in Laurel.
Willie McGee was everywhere. And then almost the very next day he vanished. With all the national attention, and out of respect to the victims, much of Laurel just wanted the whole thing done with. But the story didn’t die. There were those predictable conversations between friends and neighbors, whispered in hush tones. One person says, “How could such a thing be?” and the other surmises an answer, “The way I hear it was...” and thus a legend is born. The facts become more and more illusive.
But there are some things we do know for sure. Willie McGee, 32 and a father of four, was a black man who in November of 1945was arrested for raping a young Laurel housewife, the mother of three little girls, in her home. He was tried in Laurel and found guilty by an all white jury of rape and sentenced to die in the electric chair. Those last two facts are significant.
The make-up of the jury would factor in the case being overturned twice by the State Supreme Court and cause the ordeal to drag on for over five years.
The fact that McGee, a black man, was condemned to die for a crime Mississippi had never executed a white man for, gave fuel to those around the world who wanted to put the South’s race relations on trial.
Also put on trial was the character of the rape victim, herself, even as her husband continued to work at the post office downtown and her daughters tried to have normal childhoods in the Laurel public schools.
Finally, we can be sure that Willie McGee, prosecuted by City D.A. Polly Swartzfager, was found guilty by a jury a third and last time. And, for the third time and last time, Judge F. Burkitt Collins imposed the death sentence. This one to be carried out in Laurel.
On May 8, 1951, at 12:05 a.m., it was. The body of Willie McGee is buried in Pachuta.
We can agree on those facts. But that’s about where consensus ends. If you ask a white person of a certain age what they remember about the case, they will talk about the “execution.” But if you happen upon a black Laurel citizen, he will more than often use the word, “lynched.”
It’s typical of that great Black/White divide we see in opinion surveys from Rodney King, to O.J. Simpson, to Katrina to what happened in Jena, Louisiana. In a way, you could say we are separated by our stories.
Over the next few weeks, I’m going to share the stories that I have been told. We’ll look at Willie himself and hear from those who remember him. We’ll learn about his wife, who spoke on his behalf to packed houses up North. We’ll get to know the family of the victim, though, I will not print her name, upon request of those who remember the family fondly and suffered with them through the ordeal.
I will share stories of how the event dramatically shaped the lives of Laurel’s children of the time, both black and white. We’ll talk about the major players of the day, who had to handle this political hot potato, people whose names we know today only because we drive on a street named after them.
You’ll hear about some sinister forces at work in Laurel at the time. Like the two opposing factions of thugs who used lies, intimidation and death threats to ensure that the verdict went their way. Though they wanted different outcomes, they were equal in their viciousness.
Why bring it up now? Why not let it lie? These are questions I’ve been asked.
For one thing, it’s a fascinating subject and most folks enjoy a good story.
Secondly, if stories shape who we are, then they also shape people who are different from us. By listening to their stories, we just might understand them better.
And thirdly, get ready, because not one but two major books are coming out over the next couple of years about the Willie McGee case. My guess is we are about to be in the national spotlight again. Laurel and Willie McGee could get the same notoriety as Emmitt Till and Bryant’s Grocery, and Birmingham Church and its Sunday morning bombers, and Neshoba County and the three civil rights workers, Beckwith and Medger Evers. Seen through the lens of 1950’s Jim Crow, Laurel could be cast as the latest site where there is evidence of a disgraceful perversion of justice.
So when they come looking for us, CNN and MSNBC as well as the sightseers and curiosity seekers, snapping pictures of the Confederate Monument and the Courthouse, asking, “Is this where they lynched Willie?” as they surely will, we better get our stories straight.
Column 3
The Faces in the Crowd
I’ve looked at those newspaper photos taken on the eve of Willie McGee’s execution hundreds of times. The grainy shots of the crowd. I couldn’t make out the faces, but I often wondered if they really were the bloodthirsty mob described by the international press. And there was that odd picture of the boy up in the tree looking into the courtroom where the traveling electric chair had been set up. Who was he? Why was he there? What did he see through the window that night? I had to find out, so I began looking for clues.
I first listened to what Sam Bowers said about that day. He remembered that he was servicing his pinball machines at a store across from Masonite. Still over a decade away from being the Imperial Wizard of the KKK, he had only been in Laurel for three years. He said that afternoon he witnessed a group of men spontaneously get up a lynch mob. He said they weren’t loud. There was no speech making. They fully expected for the courts to step in as they had two times before on Willie’s proscribed death day and save him in the nick of time. This group of citizens was going to make sure that Willie McGee didn’t cheat death again. Sam said he watched as one of the men calmly walked over to his desk in the store, pull a pistol from a drawer, and tuck it under his shirt. With growing admiration, Bowers watched as the men departed the store and headed for the courthouse. He didn’t join them, but Bowers said they left him inspired with a new sense of purpose.
When they got to the courthouse that afternoon, the men found that a crowd of over 200 had already gathered. But there was no Willie McGee. With the entire world watching their every move, Governor Wright and Mayor Gartin were not going to risk a lynching. They had conspired to keep McGee in Rankin County’s “lynchproof” jail until the last minute when they would whisk Willie into Laurel accompanied by a well-armed state guard. The lynchers would have to wait like everybody else.
Roy Hammond told me that at about 5:30 that day he got off work from Laurel News Stand, hopped on his bike and headed straight for the courthouse to see the going’s on. Only 14 at the time, he said he was awed at what he saw. The crowd had swollen to almost a thousand by that time. “They weren’t yelling or screaming,” he said. “Some remember a frantic mob. But the way I remember it, they were somber, almost reverent.”
Jean Holifield was 19 and told me she had been working late at her church, the Kingston Assembly of God. Her minister, Reverend Yates, a man she admired greatly, was a real Christian and a voice of the community. She said Brother Yates loaded them all up in the car to go to the courthouse. “He was just that kind of person. He wanted to see if there was anything he could do to help.”
Mrs. Holifield remembers waiting in the car while Rev. Yates made his way through the multitude, all the way up the steps and through the door of the courthouse where the execution was going to take place. It was dark now and the car became engulfed by a surge of people, spilling from the lawn and sidewalks and crowding into the streets.
Carolyn Horne said she got there later that night. Only a child she remembers gripping tightly to someone’s hand, perhaps her mother’s. The crowd was close, and she recalls looking up and noticing how the lights from the courthouse shown through the trees. She told me she didn’t realize exactly what was going on, but knew it wasn’t good. She was frightened. The crowd was not loud, but somber. People talked low and serious to the persons next to them.
Anne Sanders remembers that night well. It was nice, spring weather, cool enough for a sweater, she said. But once you got in the crowd, you warmed up quick. Mrs. Sanders was already a seasoned reporter for the Laurel Leader Call, and had covered each of McGee’s three trials. But her interest was also personal. She told me that she lived across the street from where the rape occurred. She was acquainted with the victim and her family, and had gone to extra lengths to dispute the stories the international press was reporting, dragging the reputation of her neighbor through the mud.
Mrs. Sanders had been invited by the paper’s editor to join the victim’s family, along with members of the international press, to witness the execution. She declined. Mrs. Sanders took her post outside with the crowd, under the courthouse balcony where the bailiff would eventually appear, either to announce another reprieve, or the fact that Willie McGee was dead and the nearly six year ordeal had finally come to an end.
Rev. Raymond L. Horne was a cub reporter for the Leader Call at the time. He was also in the crowd that night, standing close to the front door of the courthouse. He didn’t even have a press card, but he was a curious young man and already a dedicated reporter. Even though there was no chance of getting into the courthouse, he felt he needed to be there nonetheless. He knew it was history in the making.
Above the rumble of the crowd and the roar of the generators, Rev. Horne thought he heard someone call out his name. He looked up and saw a man in uniform. It was his friend, Paul Craven, who had the job that night of guarding the door to the courthouse.
“Raymond!” his friend called out, “You belong in here!” He swung the door open for Rev. Horne.
That’s how Raymond Horne got to be a firsthand witness to history.
Jim Clark was still a boy, living in Myric with his mother. His uncle operated a streetcar and used to bring back all the talk out of Laurel. He said that when his uncle told him about the electrocution, they all got in the truck and headed off to Laurel.
“Why did you go?” I asked Mr. Clark.
“I was a kid and ain’t heard of nothing like it before. It was big news.” Then he dropped the bombshell. “I shimmied up that water oak and took me a peek through that second story window.”
I couldn’t believe my luck! Had I actually found the boy in the tree? The boy that Jimmy Ward of the Clarion Ledger had caught with his camera almost 60 years ago? Indeed, Mr. Clark said he was that same boy. Over half a century later, both the water oak and the boy remain firmly rooted in Jones County. Mr. Clark, who still resides in the Myric Community, said he was only up in the tree for five minutes. He looked in and saw the back of the electric chair, but then they got frightened and went home, afraid of what the black community would do once McGee had been executed.
The thing that all these people above have in common is that they are all white. The only African-Americans that were on the scene were Willie McGee and his preacher. But that doesn’t mean black Laurel citizens do not have a story to tell about that night. They certainly do. They were also witnesses. It’s just that their story has not been told... yet.
Column 4
Raymond Horne: Witness to an Execution
Part I
His speech is gentle, but undergirded with a quiet authority. You can tell he must have been a good preacher. But that wasn’t always Raymond Horne’s ambition. His father, who later began Horne’s Nursery on his farm north of Laurel, was a Depression era minister, and as a youngster Raymond’s silent prayer was, “Oh Lord, anything but that!”
For a while it looked like he would have a career in the newspaper business. He studied journalism at Anderson College in Indiana and edited the school paper. In 1951 he got a job with Laurel Leader Call as the farm editor at 35 dollars a week. Plus he got to write the obits.
Rev. Horne said he believed he could have made it in the newspaper business, if the Lord hadn’t had other plans for him. He seems to be blessed with that journalistic urge to know “the rest of the story.”
Horne wasn’t even supposed to be covering the Willie McGee case. That was reserved for seasoned reporters, like Odell McRae and Anne Sanders, but he couldn’t stay away. His instincts told him he needed to be there the night of the execution. This was history.
His lifelong friend, the late Paul Craven, must have thought so, too. Deputy Sheriff in 1951, Craven was guarding the courthouse door that night, and as soon as he spotted his buddy in the crowd of over 1500 people, he called out, “Raymond, you belong in here.”
At 11:00, an hour before the scheduled execution, Raymond entered the courthouse, climbed the marble steps and stepped into the chancery courtroom. The electric chair had already been set up. The forbidding contraption faced the courtroom with its back against the judge’s bench. He was one of 60 men, most of whom were standing around, talking in small groups. Reporters from all the nationals were there.
“I was only a young pup,” he said, and he was feeling privileged to be in the room at all. He wasted no time in claiming a seat before somebody “found him out”. He chose a chair in the jury box, front row, center, only a few paces from the waiting electric chair. He sat there for an hour, silently observing.
At midnight everyone turned to see two guards escorting a dazed looking black man into the courtroom. This was the first time Horne had laid eyes on Willie McGee. The condemned was wearing a light blue shirt with sleeves cut at the elbow and a pair of dark blue trousers. He had on loud yellow socks under bedroom slippers that whispered quietly as he shuffled his feet across the courtroom floor. Horne saw that McGee’s head had already been shaved.
Horne said that one thing he would never forget was how one of the guards had hooked his finger in McGee’s belt and appeared to be lifting him up and pulling him forward, guiding him toward the chair. Willie didn’t resist, meekly following the guard’s lead. In fact, Horne said, McGee had no reaction at all. He had the appearance of a man drugged.
Horne watched as McGee voluntarily sat down in chair, and as leather straps were fastened around his abdomen, wrists and ankles. The slippers were carefully placed a few feet away by the bench.
Willie McGee made no statement. The only words he uttered were, “Is the Rev. Patterson here?” At that, a black preacher showed himself and took his place by McGee’s side, Bible in hand. McGee never looked up at the preacher.
Next the executioner put the metal skull-shaped electrode on McGee’s head and a wide leather band across his face, covering his eyes.
So far, everything had been done at the height of efficiency. It had taken them only three minutes from the time McGee entered the courtroom to the time the executioner threw the switch.
Horne said he heard a loud, “Walloom!” and he saw McGee lift up in the chair. And then a few seconds later, there was another jolt, but this time, the body offered no response.
Dr. S.F. Carr, the county health officer put a stethoscope up to Willie’s chest. His smooth, dark skin was now covered with prominent goose pimples.
That was when people begin to get up and leave. But not Horne. He had picked up on something he found curious and naturally he was determined to check it out. Dr. Carr was standing over the body, but apparently not doing much of anything. Horne walked over to the doctor and asked him straight out, “What are you waiting for?” Doctor Carr explained that there is still brain activity after electrocution, and he was waiting for that to cease.
When Horne looked down at Willie McGee, he could see that the body still trembled. Soon, even that sign of life died away.
With no questions left to ask, nothing left to record for posterity, Raymond Horne descended the stairs and exited through the front door of the courthouse. He stepped into the crowd to make his way home, speaking to no one.
Next Week the interview with Raymond Horne will continue, beginning with his visit to the funeral home where McGee’s body lay.
Column 5
Raymond Horne: Witness to an Execution
Part II
As Raymond Horne exited the courthouse, the grim memory of what he had just witnessed weighed heavily upon him. The crowd was still there, anxious for any news at all, but as he headed down the courthouse steps and winded his way through the throng, no one bothered to stop him. Here was a man who had been an eyewitness to one of the grimmest episodes in the annals of Mississippi justice, and no one even asked him about it.
Laughing, Rev. Horne told me he probably looked too young to know what was going on.
But even after all that, Horne couldn’t let go of the story. He had an obit to write. Instead of calling, which was the usual practice, he showed up in person at Christian’s Funeral Home, where they had taken the body.
“I will never forget,” he said, “I walked in, and I saw the casket. It was dead quiet. There was not another soul to be seen. ” It just Horne and the body of Willie McGee.
Horne peered into the casket. “I remember two things,” he said. “First, how nicely they had dressed Willie. And second I saw the wide blister around his head from where they had electrocuted him.”
The day of the execution, The Laurel Leader Call published an editorial entitled “A Clean Sheet,” in which the paper congratulated the citizenry on how well they handled the McGee ordeal and to call upon the town to turn the page on the past and start fresh.
Horne was surprised at how fast that page was turned. He said as soon as he was executed, all mention of Willie McGee disappeared. It was if it never happened.
But Horne knew that it had. He had seen it with his own eyes.
A few years after the McGee execution, the Lord called Horne to the ministry. He says flatly that he has no regrets. But from talking with him that spring morning, I’m willing to wager that two things come close, and they both have to do with Willie McGee.
Horne read in all the papers what had happened after he left the courthouse that night. When they brought the body of McGee out under the sheet, the crowd had let out an earsplitting cheer. He said that wasn’t called for. The occasion was a somber one, not one for celebration. It wasn’t worthy of Laurel to be remembered that way.
And the second regret might be this: the account he wrote detailing what he witnessed that historic night never saw the light of day.
In 1982, Rev. Horne was asked to contribute his memories to a book recognizing Laurel’s centennial commemorative. Ever the newspaperman, he recalled in journalistic fashion the significant events he had witnessed since he came to Laurel as a three-year old in 1930. He detailed the history of the 4H Club, the development of hospitals in Jones county hospital, the beginnings of the broiler business, and of course his most dramatic memory, began with, “I remember the Willie McGee Case...”
When he scanned the book on publication, he was surprised to see that they had omitted his recollections of the execution. He called the editor only to be informed that the editorial board wanted to “keep that story buried.” It seemed “The Clean Sheet Policy” asked for by the Laurel Leader Call was still in effect.
His recollections have remained unread, until today.
When I asked him how he felt about his remembrances from 60 years ago finally being published, he said flatly, “I believe in history. It needs to be told like it happened. You shouldn’t leave things out because somebody might not like it.”
Things have come full circle now for Rev. Horne. He lives on the land he plowed as a boy during the Depression. And he’s returned to an old love. He has just completed a book on the history of camp meetings and has begun research on his seventh family history. In addition he has self published a half dozen church histories. Always eager to know “the rest of the story,” his journalistic gifts are still paying off.
Column 7
Harvey Warren: Willie McGee was a Warning
Many folks know Harvey Warren from his impassioned editorials. He’s had several printed in the Laurel Leader Call and the Clarion Ledger and the Jackson Advocate. Harvey is a man of strong opinions. When my mother heard that I was going to meet with him, she was in awe. “He must be brilliant!” she said. Others have asked me to find out if he was crazy or not. So, I didn’t know exactly what to expect when I went to interview Mr. Warren.
What I found was a well-educated, soft-spoken, extensively traveled man with an insatiable appetite for history and justice, and some carefully considered views about race in America. He wasn’t the ranting lunatic some told me to expect.
Besides his degrees from California State at Sacramento, Harvey Warren has had first hand experience with matters of race. His father was a plumber who claimed Sam Bowers as one of his clients. Young Harvey tagged along on jobs to several of Sam’s business’s on the black side of the tracks and remembers a reserved, well-mannered man whose trademarks were a freshly ironed shirt and kakis with careful creases, and he always drove a car the same shade of light blue. Harvey said he looked up to Bowers because he carried himself like a civilian soldier.
Later, Harvey had friends who worked at John’s Restaurant and often spotted Bowers there having intense conversations with other white men. But everybody stayed on their side of the race line and paid the white men no mind. Harvey has since wondered while his friends were pouring Bower’s coffee, if these men weren’t openly planning the bombing of a church or a synagogue or someone’s home, never giving a thought that a black employee might overhear.
But the thing that struck me most about Harvey’s story was his recollections of the Willie McGee trial. Harvey said he was only six at the time of the execution. McGee’s relatives lived on Harvey’s street and for most of his young life, rumors of McGee’s daily beatings and torture hung heavy over the neighborhood, filling folks with fear and dread. When it was finally over, the overall feeling in the black community was one of sad relief. People thought that perhaps, after over five years of incarceration in white jails, Willie McGee was better off dead.
After the execution, Harvey said that many black fathers forced their sons to go to Christian’s Funeral Home where the McGee’s body lay. “But it wasn’t for the viewing,” Harvey said, “It was for the message.”
When he resisted looking at McGee’s body, his father lifted young Harvey up and held him above the casket. Then his father pronounced to the six year old, “This is what happens with you mess with white women.” But Harvey can’t remember what he saw. He blocked it out.
He may not remember the sight of McGee’s body, but he never forgot that experience. Nor did he forget when, four years later, soon after the Emmitt Till lynching, his father became furious with his son when he heard Harvey come whistling down the street. It shocked Harvey. His whistling had always been a source of pride. In fact several people I interviewed remember Harvey as a boy who sure knew how to whistle a tune. They even called him “The Whistler.”
But after word got back to Laurel that a boy not much older than Harvey had been beaten, shot, tied to a gin fan and thrown into the Sunflower River, all for whistling at a white woman, Harvey’s father warned his son he’d better never catch the boy whistling again. Something so innocent as whistling your favorite love song had become a matter of life and death to an eleven-year old boy.
As I talk with folks, black and white, who lived through this time, I often wonder what impact these early impressions could make on a young child’s life.
Harvey shared with me a story that helped me better understand. When he was in California working on his masters degree in government, there was a girl whom he really liked. He can remember her name to this day, forty years later. She was white. Even though she was in his study group, he could never bring himself to initiate a friendship with her. Every time he tried, it all came back. The memory of being held above the casket of a dead man. A father’s warning, ”This is what happens when you mess with a white woman.” Any words of friendship were choked off by fear. “It becomes part of your DNA,” Harvey explained. “The fear and the caution never leave you.”
I was having lunch with my cousin at the Reserve the other day, and I related Harvey Warren’s story. A look of surprised recognition passed over my cousin’s face. “Oh, that’s what they meant!”
“That’s what who meant?” I asked.
She said that when she was a teenager in the ‘60’s she had a job at Pasquale’s Pizza. My cousin has always been the adventurous type and she decided she wanted to become friends with the two black girls who also worked there. Nobody she knew had black friends. They all decided they would go to the drive-in to see a movie.
Her new friends went home with my cousin so she could change out of her work clothes. While my cousin was dressing she called out to the girls to come join her in the bedroom. They adamantly refused to do so.
“Don’t be silly,” my cousin said. “I don’t mind.”
One finally explained, dead serious, “We can’t. It’s bad luck to see a white woman without any clothes on!”
My cousin thought it a silly superstition at the time, only to learn, over forty years later, the grave significance of that custom, handed down by generations of black mothers and fathers, in an effort to keep their children alive.
Column 20
Healing Stories
After sitting down with dozens of Jones Countians and listening to their memories of Willie McGee—his arrest for raping a white woman, his three trials and finally his execution in the traveling electric chair at the Laurel courthouse—I had hit a dead end. The next logical step would be to interview the surviving family members of both McGee and the rape victim, but where were they? The world seemed to have swallowed them up.
I was about to give up on the story when a couple of chance occurrences put me on a new track.
While sitting in the Forrest County courthouse, poring over transcripts from the second of McGee’s trials, I turned the page and there it was. Someone had slipped a scrap of paper between the pages with a name, address and phone number. It took a moment to understand what I had found. It appeared to be the contact information for the victims’ eldest daughter! Just to make sure, I asked the County Clerk, and she said, yes, one the victim’s children had been there within the last year searching for information about her mother’s case.
I held onto the paper for weeks, wondering if I should call or not. People who remembered her had told me how she had never gotten over the trauma of the trial and its aftermath. I didn’t want to cause her additional pain.
Finally I dialed the number. It’s funny. I was half expecting to hear the youthful voice of the pretty majorette her fellow classmates had described to me. An older woman picked up, then it occurred to me that she must be in her seventies by now. But behind her words, I still detected the shy girl who had stirred the awkward sympathy of her classmates. Several had told me they hadn’t known what to say to a girl whose mother had been raped by a black man in 1940’s Mississippi. Especially, they said, after the McGee’s defense team began to suggest that it was not rape, but an affair. This had to have made her feel isolated and alone, no matter how well intentioned her friends.
We had a long, intense conversation. There were tears as well as flashes of anger. The wounds were still fresh, the memories sharp and clear. We talked of many things, but she asked me to respect her privacy and not make the content of our conversation public. I agreed. But it was clear that the tragedy that befell her family over sixty years ago still haunts her today, and is still shaping her life.
A few days later, a second twist of fate occurred. I got an email from the family of Willie McGee. They now live in Nevada. McGee’s granddaughter said that a relative in Laurel sent her Aunt Della, Willie McGee’s eldest daughter, a copy of a column I had written about her father. They said they wanted to meet with me and tell their story. Of course I said “yes.” I’ll be flying out to meet with them at the end of January.
Fate has brought me in contact with the eldest daughter from each family, two children whose lives have been shaped by heartbreak. According to my math, they were both nine years old when McGee was arrested for the crime, and neither was ever the same again. Both were forced by fear and shame to leave their homes. Both were innocent of any wrongdoing, yet each had to carry a profound burden of guilt and disgrace. It began to occur to me that what these two women have in common is far greater than what separates them.
But this tale of shared stories doesn’t end there. Let me tell you of another incident that came to my attention a few weeks ago. In 1974, Albert Atkins, a 19 year-old black man, was shot and killed in Laurel by a white man named Ronald Hannah, 22, the son of a Jones County pastor. Jessie Atkins, the victim’s older brother, told me that this incident, which sparked demonstrations and a riot, eventually destroyed his family. Not only did it take away his best friend, his brother Al, but the loss also led to his grandmother’s succumbing to the overwhelming grief of losing her favorite grandchild. Because the killer was never charged with a crime, his father was unable to get over the injustice. He began stockpiling guns, filling the house with dozens of them, even obtaining a .357 Magnum, identical to the weapon that took his son’s life. He was never the same again. His health rapidly deteriorated and he died a young man. Today, Jessie’s mother still mourns silently, unable to speak of her loss.
Jessie told me that he was determined to avenge his younger brother’s death. He remembers the night he went to the home of the only Hannah he could find in the phone book. He drove by the house for 3 or 4 hours with a loaded gun in his lap, waiting for someone to show himself. He wasn’t even sure it was the right house. The next day his brother, struggling for his life in his room at the Community Hospital, looked up a Jessie from his bed and said, “Brother, let it go.”
Soon after his brother’s death, Jessie, who had served his country in the military, was sent to Parchman for drug possession and distribution. He roamed around aimless from job to job, bitter about his loss, blaming Ronald Hannah for destroying his family. Jessie resented the fact that the white boy would go on to graduate from college, get married and have a chance at a normal, happy life.
Today Jessie has finally got his own life together. He has tried to do as his brother had asked thirty years earlier, to “let it go.” He’s a hard worker and now owns several properties in Atlanta. He has found Christ and is an ordained minister. He is in a good marriage.
But even today, when he speaks of his brother, he breaks into tears. There is only one thing that he wants. He would like to sit down with his brother’s killer and listen to his side of the story.
“Maybe,” Jessie said, “Ronald will say something that will make me understand. Maybe he would even say he regrets it happening. That would help me and my mother so much.”
The thing I’m learning about stories is that they are never done. A story lives forever, never ceasing to reshape itself, and in the process, it reshapes us. In many stories, if you listen carefully, you can hear a profound ache, a plea for healing and resolution. And because stories don’t die, they give us a second chance at redemption.
I hope the time is near for the two daughters, now both 72, to sit in the same room and tell their stories to one another. I wish the same for Jessie and his brother’s killer. I would like to think it possible for them to talk with each other across race, across time, across guilt and blame and shame. I can’t help but believe they know each other better than they think. And I believe they need each other more than they know. I even believe their stories can redeem each other’s pain.
Someone once said, “In relationship we are wounded and in relationship we are healed.” And sometimes, it is the person who has been a part of the wounding, who holds the secret to our healing. Only they can tell the story that makes us well.
Column 22
Mrs. Maycie Gore: The Defiant One
When you go around asking complete strangers to reveal their memories about past events—like Willie McGee, the Knights, Leontyne Price, Sam Bowers and the KKK—you get a lot less and a lot more than you bargained for.
I secretly hope that this person will be the one who finally solves the mystery and fills in the blanks. To that degree, I am always a little let down. Each person holds only his piece to the puzzle.
But then again, I end up getting more that I could have hoped, because many people, along with that bit of information, offer something even more valuable. A glimpse into their own history. They give me the gift of their life.
I’m thinking now of Mrs. Maycie Gore. Indeed she has memories of Willie McGee. She was 18 and working at Snow White Cleaners across from the jail and says she can still see Willie gazing forlornly out the window of his cell. The word in the black community was that he was there for a crime he didn’t commit. Maycie and the other black workers would pool their nickels and pennies and carry the fistful of change over the jailer, telling him it was for Willie, to buy cigarettes.
That was her total memory of Willie McGee. Maybe it doesn’t say much about Willie, but it says volumes about Mrs. Gore. That act of generosity was also an act of defiance. She is not the kind of person who allows the hopelessness of a situation to rob her of the ability to act, even if the act is only symbolic. She will not surrender without a stand. She told me, “You have to find a way to defend yourself, to satisfy you conscience.”
She said, “I guess I got it from my daddy. Nobody called him nigger and walked away.”
That seems to be the theme of her life. As a child she could do nothing about being forced to sit in the back of the bus on a wood plank “reserved” for black people, while the white kids got to ride up front. But that didn’t stop her from pulling those same kids out of the tree and beating them up when they threw rocks at her brothers.
She tells me another story. When she was a young teen she got a job with her sisters in the kitchen at the downtown Walgreens. Blacks were hired to cook the food that only white folks were allowed to eat. One day while they were fixing a sandwich for a white boy, the girls noticed him laughing at them, and mouthing the word, “nigger.”
The sisters couldn’t change the segregationist practice at Walgreen’s lunch counter, but they knew they had to do something to “defend their conscience.” One of the sisters spat onto the boy’s sandwich before she placed the bread on top. While the boy ate his sandwich, the girls stared at him and giggled. He had no idea what was so funny.
“Now it was our turn to laugh,” Mrs. Gore chuckles. She winks at me. “Always be good to your waitress.”
In 1964, when she let a white freedom worker from Michigan stay in her home, the Klan threatened to dynamite her house. “I remember plenty of nights, hunkering down in the hallway with my family, waiting to be blown up.” But she let the boy remain with her all summer.
Later in the 1960’s she ventured out to an organizing meeting for the Freedom Democratic Party being held at the old Providence Church. Only 10 people had the courage to show. Mrs. Gore was elected secretary.
The next day the white press printed her full name and address in the paper, placing her and her husband’s lives and jobs at risk. One of her jobs was watching the children of a white preacher in Laurel who was rumored to be in with the Klan. Several times before, he had tried to pump Maycie for information about what “the colored were up to.” This was just before Chaney, Schwerner and Goodman’s bodies were found up in Neshoba County. When she went to work the next day, the preacher was sitting at the breakfast table with the paper in his hand.
“If you are going work for me, Maycie, you’re going to have to curtail your activities.” She was silent. She simply walked over the refrigerator, reached on top to get her purse, and left the preacher sitting there.
The incident only strengthened her conviction to be a community organizer. Later she worked setting up Head Start schools driving all over Jones and Wayne Counties, recruiting parents.
“Of course what we were really doing was registering people to vote, and the Klan knew that.” Again there were threats on her and her family’s life. Unmarked cars full of white men were always tailing her.
At 78 Maycie Gore hasn’t slowed down. She’s still a fighter, whether it is going up against City Hall to keep the beer joints out of her neighborhood or protecting Laurel’s trees.
The day I visited her she was still riled up about a comment Sarah Palin had made about Obama, putting him down because he was a “only” a community organizer.
But she found a way to fight back and satisfy her conscience. John McCain sent her a fundraising letter admonishing her “not to sit idly by” and let Obama win. Mrs. Gore said she took a pencil and underlined that part of the letter and then wrote, “Senator McCain, don’t worry. I will not be sitting idly by, because I am a COMMUNITY ORGANIZER and will be out there organizing to make sure you don’t win!”
And of course that’s what she did.
By the way, when I left her house that day, she was still considering whether or not to mail that letter—without a stamp—forcing McCain/Palin to pay the postage. Like with Willie’s cigarettes, it may be only small change, but the value to her conscience is priceless.
Leontyne Price
Column 25 Touched by Greatness Part 1
I couldn’t write a book about Laurel without mentioning Leontyne Price, the local African American girl who grew up to become the most renowned opera singer in the world. Yet I wanted to say something that hadn’t been repeated a million times before.
Here’s what I believed I knew for sure: Mary Violet Leontyne Price was discovered while doing chores in the mansion of a wealthy white woman. The Laurel banker’s wife, a very cultured and open-hearted lady was astonished when she overheard Leontyne singing and promptly took the young girl under her wing. Paid for her schooling. Got her into Julliard. Opened the doors to high society. And before you know it, Leontyne Price is the star of the Metropolitan Opera, touring Europe, entertaining presidents, premiers and crowned heads. This was one of my favorite stories as a child. I wanted it to be true.
It sounded just like the Cinderella fairytale: a poor girl, a scullery maid perhaps, chafing her fingers raw, scrubbing the pots of rich folks, is one day magically transformed by a kindly fairy godmother into a beautiful princess.
It is a story that made me swell up with pride as a white Mississippian. It offset the hateful criticism that is often leveled against our State where race is concerned. In fact, after moving to Minneapolis, I’ve recited that story to skeptical Northerners more than once as evidence of white Mississippi’s benevolence toward blacks. It was a great defense against Sam Bowers and the KKK.
However, in the process of speaking with Laurel’s African Americans about Leontyne, my fairytale account was not much appreciated. I think what caused the most discomfort was my asking, “Do you remember when Mrs. Chisholm discovered Leontyne?”
When all else fails, listen. So I began asking for their accounts of how the opera diva got her start. And is often the case when I begin collecting stories across the color line, the telling of this familiar story changed. Many of the details were the same, but the center of gravity shifted. Mrs. Chisholm and her kind generosity is mentioned, but more as an afterthought. It was not the focal point of the story.
I learned from blacks who knew her, Leontyne’s greatness was seen as inevitable. Finding someone like Mrs. Chisholm to open up doors for her was destined. It was not charity. Leontyne was already “discovered.” If anything, her greatness discovered Mrs. Chisholm, not the other way around.
That is not the first time I’ve run into this predicament with African Americans. I assume that we are speaking the same language and then suddenly find we are reading off different scripts entirely.
The first time centered around the movie, To Kill A Mockingbird. You know the story. The one in which the brave and honorable Atticus Finch takes up the cause of a hopeless black man, falsely accused of raping a white woman. I tear-up every time I see the movie. I want to be as pure as Atticus Finch. In fact, year after year, in the American Film Institute’s poll, he is voted the number 1 greatest movie hero of all time. I mean, who doesn’t love that story?
You’d be surprised.
I was discussing the movie with Don, a black friend of mine in Minneapolis, and he flat out said he wouldn’t let his kids see the movie or read the book.
I was dumbfounded. “Why not? It makes us feel so good about each other.”
“That movie makes white people feel good about themselves. But it makes black folks sick to their stomachs.”
Don explained that to him the story reinforces the lesson that blacks are helpless victims and they have to find a white man to save them. “It’s flattering to you as a white man. It’s humiliating to me as a black man. I want my kids to have more self-respect. I don’t need anyone else telling them that they are victims.”
That was a real eye-opener. Same movie, different morals. Who was right? It sounded a lot like the arguments I’ve gotten into over O.J!
Blacks who remember the Price family don’t deny the importance and the generosity of Mrs. Elizabeth Chisholm. They love her for what she did. But they believe that Leontyne was touched by greatness long before this benevolent lady came along. Yes, Mrs. Chisholm is still an important piece of the story, but she is not the story.
In fact, there are two other women, both black, who replace Mrs. Chisholm in the starring role. One is Leontyne’s musical mentor Mrs. Hattie V.J. McInnis, a teacher not only at Oak Park Vocational High School, but a life-long educator to the entire community. The other was Laurel midwife Mrs. Kate Price, not only Leontyne’s mother, but a mother all her people could claim.
What I discovered was a long-ago, almost forgotten, web of community. It was an invisible village, a conspiracy that operated under the radar of Jim Crow. To a large degree it was led by proud, strong-willed black women, unwilling to let segregation and discrimination deprive their children of a splendid future. The goal was to ensure that found greatness was not an accident. That children did not have to depend upon luck or charity to achieve their dreams. Their conspiracy launched surgeons, lawyers, political scientists, college professors, star athletes, Army generals, concert pianists, and yes, operatic superstars. Each summer throngs of alumni still find their way back to the shrine of Oak Park to pay homage to those who have gone before, who nurtured them and protected them from the disease of self-hate and despair.
Mrs. McInnis and Mrs. Price are gone now, as are many in that conspiracy. I’ll be writing more about them. There are only a few folks left to tell their story, and to grieve their loss.
It is indeed a new day, filled with great promise and hope for equality. But many of the remaining elders in the black community look at the current state of the village and wonder, who will re-weave the web that discovers greatness in each child?
Perhaps there is still much we can learn from them while their voices are still with us. Perhaps we should ask.
In future columns, you’ll be hearing from the elders. I’m interviewing people like Mrs. Elner Andrews, Rev. Catherine Arrington, Mrs. Gladys Austin, Mrs. Mrs. Rose Donaldson, Mrs. Macie Gore, Mrs. Bertha Crowell, and Mrs. Rose Thompkins. I’ll ask these gracious ladies to share lessons, memories and counsel on how to weave a web of community greatness. If there are others whom you think should be heard from, please let me know.
Column 26 Leontyne Price: Touched by Greatness Part 2
“There was complete stillness in the sanctuary. The great diva stood in majestic pose. The hands had come to rest in an angelic, prayerful attitude. The shoulders lower almost imperceptibly. She was in complete control of the moment. Then she began to sing. ‘Oh, Holy Night,’ rose up in a voice that was so much fuller than I had ever heard. She made the room feel larger, more spacious than the 400-seat sanctuary. She was using the entire room as her instrument. And then when she got to the soaring verse, ‘Fall on your knees, oh hear the angel’s voices,’ someone in the balcony screamed a great scream of emotion. It was a powerful moment.”
Those are the words of Jerry Donaldson, describing to me his cherished memory from Christmas, 1962. Only a junior at Oak Park High School, he had been chosen to accompany the legendary Leontyne Price for the special Christmas Service at Laurel’s St. Paul’s Methodist Church. That moment, Jerry told me in our phone conversation, was life-changing. He was inspired to become a successful musician himself. On that day, Jerry was no doubt touched by greatness. But how did that moment come to be? How did a 16 year old boy find his way into such an auspicious position?
It was by no accident. I’ve learned that during Jim Crow there were two indicators of greatness for children in the black community. One was to graduate from Oak Park and the other was to be birthed by Miss Kate Price, Leontyne’s mother, the community midwife. If you had one of those things in your favor, you had a good chance.
Jerry Donaldson had both. Miss Kate attended his mother at his birth in 1945 and he graduated Oak Park in 1963. And he has gone far. He’s an accomplished concert pianist who lives now in Berkley, California.
“Oak Park was a point of pride,” Jerry says. “It attracted dedicated professionals who had experiences to expand our dreams. And because of Masonite, you had a strong middleclass. With a middleclass you can attract and pay teachers. We got teachers who had a lot of world experience. We could have been very closed and provincial people. But instead we were involved in the world.”
That’s the way Oak Park was in those days. Cleveland Payne, a Laurel historian, writes beautifully of Oak Park Vocational High School and its role in shaping life and culture in the black community from 1928 until its doors closed in 1970.
At Oak Park, Jerry Donaldson’s music teacher was Mrs. Hattie V.J. McInnis, Leontyne Price’s former mentor.
“In music room at school,” he recalls, “Mrs. McInnis hung pictures over the blackboard of Leontyne Price and Roland Hayes, and Natalie Hendaris, all accomplished black musicians. She would put these images in front of us and groom us. She gave us something to aspire to.”
And just as Mrs. McInnis had groomed Leontyne years earlier, her duty was now to champion Jerry. It was customary for Mrs. McInnis to accompany Leontyne at her Laurel performances. But this time, Mrs. McInnis claimed she was getting too old and requested that Jerry stand in for her. Jerry believes it was Mrs. McInnis’s way of saying, “You’re time has come.” It was to be a rite of passage.
When he showed up at the Price house to meet Leontyne for the very first time, Jerry soon got the feeling that everybody was in on the plan except for the great diva.
He rang the bell. “I was in great anticipation. Foolish enough not to be nervous,” Jerry remembers. Then from somewhere in the house heard Miss Kate call out, “Oh, Leontyne, there’s a young man to see you!”
What followed was a not too encouraging exchange of words between mother and daughter. It was clear that this was not Lenotyne’s idea. After a long, nervous wait, Miss Kate appeared as if nothing at all was amiss and lead Jerry back to meet her daughter.
“I walked into her room and there she was, her regal head wrapped in a turban and looking very world-weary from her travels. She pronounces dryly, ‘Mother says, you are going to play for me tomorrow at church.’”
“’I say, ‘Yes.’”
“’I have some songs that are not going to be too hard,” she said, studying him warily. ‘Perhaps we should go over to the church and practice.’”
And that began a twenty-year relationship. He went to hear her perform every chance he got, beginning with those packed and famously “integrated” Oak Park recitals in segregated Laurel.
“A few whites always reserved their seats together,” he recalls. “They got the first four rows. The ladies were heavily furred and gentlemen were sheepish, having been hauled out for the cultural event.”
When she toured a city near where he was studying or working, she always put Jerry on her guest list for visitations backstage after the shows. She displayed a keen interest in his future, offering phone numbers of contacts who could advance his career.
Once she asked what his plans were, and he told her he was saving to buy a Steinway grand piano. Much to the consternation of her manager who was in the dressing room with them, she pulled out her checkbook and wrote him a $400 check for the down payment. The last time he saw her was in San Jose. She was in her eighties.
Jerry has no doubt that he owes a great deal to Leontyne Price. But he reserves his highest praise for that conspiracy of women who recognized his greatness and who decided that his time had come.
Laurel, Mississippi: Athens in a Bubble
(Columns 18. 19, 21. 24)
FAULT LINES
Twenty-six years after the Civil War ended, the Yankees took over Laurel, Mississippi. There were no shots exchanged, only money. Not that Jones County had never seen Yankees before, but until that point in time, we had successfully avoided being occupied by them. After all, Jones County got its name from John Paul Jones whose famous line was “I have not yet begun to fight!” That pretty much summed up Jones County. They’d fight anybody, anytime, anywhere, for the right to be left alone to their own ways.
The county got the nickname of “The Free State of Jones” for more that one reason. Before the Civil War, it was hard to get anybody to stay, much less hold any kind of public office. When you were in Jones County, things always looked better some place else. Nothing but endless pine forests and poor farming land. So for a large part of the County’s history, those who remained were free from any form of government and learned to work things out for themselves, every man the master of his own world, regardless how meager. This even extended to family rearing. If the few men who owned slaves wanted to procreate with one and raise up two families side-by-side, it was nobody’s business but theirs.[i]
When the Civil War commenced, this attitude of fierce independence, combined with the relative scarcity of slavery dampened enthusiasm for seceding from the Union, and Jones County became a refuge for Confederate deserters, Union sympathizers, and those who believed that just because Mississippi seceded from the Union, they didn’t have to. That’s when “The Free State of Jones” got its second meaning. Jones County fancied itself an independent republic. The message was loud and clear, “just let us be!” The heroes of Jones County were not grey-clad soldiers, but backwoods men and women employing any means, fair or foul, to stay alive, feed their families, guard their farms, and steer clear of what they called, “a poor man’s fight and a rich man’s war.”
Respect for authority gained little headway after the Civil War, either. Families made do on small plots of land cut from the seemingly endless forests of pine. Family clans were the only widely accepted form of government. For many years following the War, nobody was much interested in this forlorn swampy stretch of wilderness, and we were left happily to our own devices.
Then the North ran out of trees.
Mississippi’s dense forests of yellow pine attracted wealthy Northerners. They sent their land buyers down to the Piney Woods to gobble up vast acreages, clear-cutting everything within reach of a railroad track and hauling it away to more civilized locations, leaving behind a plague of abandoned shantytowns. Every time they laid a mile of tract, a shantytown spouted up. It was said you could throw a stone from sawmill to sawmill all the way to the Gulf of Mexico. Like an enormous hoard of locusts, the teams would deplete the land, then move on to the next stop, leaving behind abandoned mills, rotting shanties, and ravaged wasteland. It wasn’t pretty, but it was standard business practice. 2
In 1891 Laurel was in line to become the next abandoned shantytown. That’s when Our Marvelous Yankees rode in from Iowa to the rescue. The Gardiner brothers traveled south by train and within the first few moments of setting foot in Mississippi were slick-talked by a Jones County sawmill owner into buying him out of his failing operation, lock, stock, and barrel. For a generous $64,000 they got the ramshackle operation that had already cleared every tree that could be ox-carted to the depot and 16,000 acres of timberland that nobody could get at. The bare, stump-strewn community was such a blemish on God’s earth that the former owner had even refused to name it after himself, not wanting to sully his reputation by having his memory forever associated with that hovel of a settlement. Instead, he called it Laurel, after a flowering bush that grew locally. Unfortunately, the plant was toxic to livestock and had to be eradicated.
We were quick to discover these weren’t your regular run of Northerner. You could say we found them peculiar. This was the age of robber barons—Rockefellers, Vanderbilts, Carnegies—the “Captains of Industry” who were known for amassing great fortunes while keeping their employees impoverished. These were men who operated as absentee landlords, extracting all the wealth from an area and then spending their plunder in more affluent surroundings.
There is an old Laurel saying that underscores this uniquely Gardiner eccentricity. “While others came to rape, pillage and leave, Our Yankees raped, pillage and stayed.”
The two Gardiners brothers, along with their kin the Eastmans, promptly announced they were going to pack up their socialite wives and their privileged children, vacate them from their fine Iowa mansions and elite schools and transplant them to the bleakest, most isolated settlement in Mississippi, which by the way, had to be the most Yankee-averse State in the Nation.
The Gardiners and the Eastmans believed they could raise up a civilized paradise by starting from scratch right there in the Piney Woods. But the question remained, if you were going to civilize anybody in the whole wide world, why would you start out with folks as obstinate and primitive as the backwoods people of Jones County, where the only thing in abundance was acres of yellow pine, too far removed from the railroads to be much good to anybody except outlaws in hiding and razor back hogs?
I can imagine the day Catherine Marshall Gardiner, the Grande dame of our Yankee clan, disembarked at the stump-stubbled depot, and looked around at what her husband had got her into. There she was in her satins and silks, a woman of wealth, breeding and class, on a first-name basis with the nation’s moneyed elite, standing on a rough-plank loading platform, surveying her new home. Goats and pigs roamed among shacks that had never seen a pane of glass or a real cook stove.
She wrote to a friend soon after, “Although things are a bit crude, the people are real neighborly.” Spoken like the most devoted of foreign missionaries. While the men created wealth, she threw all her energy into as civilizing this rough-edged populace with a religious zeal that fueled her ambitions until her the day she died.
Her early reports back home encouraged the other branches of the family. They all followed, the Gardiners and the Eastmans, Our Marvelous Yankees, as rootless and oblivious as clouds, scouting out prime locations for their heavenly palaces in the Piney Woods.
The men worked with a vengeance, tearing down the old sawmill and investing a fortune to bring in an engineering genius from Milwaukee to design a state-of-the-art milling operation. They hired local workers and paid better than market wages.
To everyone’s surprise, this included Black laborers.
Perhaps they hadn’t read the papers.
The year before the founders arrived, Mississippi ratified the notorious Constitution of 1890 that put the Negro back in his place, by eliminating his right to vote, sanctioning segregation, and ensuring he would never be a political or economic threat to a White Mississippi man again.
But in the Eastman-Gardiner never-never-land, Black laborers worked side-by-side with Whites, both in the camps and in the mill. They even promoted some Black workers to foremen. Our Yankees were indeed treading dangerous waters.3
There were those who thought that the Panic of 1893 was the lumber barons just desserts for flouting social conventions. Construction across the nation halted and demand for lumber dried up. Laurel’s marvel of a mill, the one that cost Our Yankees the last of their capital, sat idle. They could not afford to pay their laborers, White or Black.
This is when folks were sure the Iowans would show their true colors. Any other lumber baron would tell their workers to get lost, every man for himself, and when business picked up, start over with a fresh crew. After all, it wasn’t like Our Yankees owed these backwoods laborers their loyalty.
Besides the newspapers, Our Yankees hadn’t read the management books of the day either. Hard-nosed businessmen of the day, like Andrew Carnegie, all agreed you couldn’t be sentimental and make it through these rough times. In those days laborers were locked out, starved, beaten and shot just to show who the boss was.
The Eastman-Gardiners saw things differently. They told their workers if they agreed to accept a drastic cut in pay, that when times improved the company would give them a raise and reimburse them for any back pay lost during the crisis. Management and labor made a mutually beneficial deal that most 21st Century companies couldn’t pull off. After seven months of living hand-to-mouth, better times returned, and the owners not only kept their promise but also donated the entire first year’s profits, $600, toward the building of a school for the workers’ children. Eastman Gardiner Lumber did better than survive.
In 1901, President Theodore Roosevelt outraged White Mississippians when he invited Booker T. Washington to the White House for lunch. James K. Vardaman rode that outrage all the way to the Mississippi Governor’s Mansion. He promised if elected he would close all schools for Blacks. “An educated nigger,” he espoused, “is the waste of a good field hand.” He was overwhelmingly elected.3
Our Yankees must have missed his inauguration speech. They went about constructing schools for their White and Black workers alike, dangerously pushing the limits of Jim Crow. These Yankees were building their empire in a bubble, shielding it from the prevalent racist and monopolistic practices of the day. They figured their money and shrewd business-savvy would keep safe from the menace building around them.
They were right. Under Vardaman’s administration, Laurel got the credit for a lumber boom that dramatically boosted the State’s chronically ill economy. By the end of Vardaman’s term of office in 1908, Mississippi ranked 3rd in the country for lumber production. Laurel alone would soon turn out 1,000,000 board feet of lumber—a day.
Word was getting out about this miracle in the Piney Woods. The locals called it “The Magic City”. Northerners doubted the rumor of “enlightened labor practices” in of all places, Mississippi. And in a lumber camp to boot, sites notorious for drunken brawls, knifings and every other kind of unsavory practice that lonely, demoralized men could devise.4
No, the Northerners figured, it had to be a hoax.
In 1912, the Atlantic Monthly decided exposed the lies and dispatched a reporter to Laurel. And to make the story even more dramatic, they sent a woman. She admitted to coming with very low expectations, probably just hoping to get out alive. She wasn’t much comforted when, on the way down, a fellow passenger assured her that all the talk about hookworm in the South was just a conspiracy to keep Northern capital away. Nor was she thrilled when she arrived in Laurel and saw the “fields of blackened and ragged stumps,” or when a yellow cow ambled down the sidewalk toward her searching for something to chew on.
Of course she was rightly impressed with the modernity of the equipment, able to cut deeper into the forest than ever before. But what really caught her eye was on the monstrous steam-powered loaders, whose primary purpose was to lift immense logs and set them onto the waiting train cars.
Yet that’s not what sent her estimation of Laurel soaring. She noticed that not only were the giant machines conveying logs; they were also being used to lift and remove prefabricated housing units. Our Yankees had devised a way for the usual crew of four hundred workers to take their homes with them every time they changed camp. And since they could have homes, they could have families. Our Yankees had done the impossible. They had transformed vicious, depressing, uncivilized logging-camps into pleasant moveable villages, complete with wives and children and schools and churches. No more endless track littered with dead shantytowns.
And education? At that time Mississippi was spending an average of $6.17 per White pupil. Laurel spent $20. Laurel schools, in 1912, were already acknowledged as best in the State.
To top it all, the woman reporter discovered that founders’ benevolence extended to Negroes. They too were provided with schools and churches, houses and health care, just as were the Whites. This was unheard of anywhere else in the nation, much less the South. While Mississippi spent next to nothing on the few existing Negro schools, and seemed set on burning those down, Laurel was not only constructing them but also liberally funding them. That reporter could see right off Our Yankees had a knack for pushing the prevailing system of segregation as far as they could get away with legally.5
Word spread. Men looking for fair pay, descent employment and a little respect found their way to Laurel. The school system attracted families from all over and new businesses sprang up, included three more sawmills. First-generation free Blacks, whose only option had been to place themselves back into bondage under the sharecropping system, came for the chance of being treated like human beings and they gave rise to the first Negro middle class in Mississippi, some say in the South. Front Street grew into an unbroken string of Black-owned businesses and professionals. They exhibited a sense of upward mobility found nowhere else in the South. According to a Northern paper, “By the 1920s Laurel’s black population evoked a confidence and culture that paralleled the socioeconomic ascension and development of many northeastern black communities.”7
SPLENDOR IN THE SWAMP
Catherine Gardiner had been busy as well. She hit upon an idea that would put as deep an imprint upon Laurel as her husband’s business practices. A well-traveled woman, she was aware of the revolutionary thinking taking hold in cities like Chicago, Detroit and Washington D.C. called the “City Beautiful Movement.” This progressive urban philosophy espoused that the character of the citizenry could be enhanced and civic virtue inspired through beautification and monumental grandeur. This spoke to Catherine’s prophetic spirit. Until now only major cities had embraced the concept. Laurel was a speck on the map with just 8400 people. But that didn’t dampen Mrs. Gardiner’s grandiose visions. She got busy and began advocating.
Tiny Laurel with its pig trails and rutted tracks, sitting on the edge of the Tallahala Swamp, almost overnight became a city of broad boulevards, lined with oak saplings. They were planted as if to show Mrs. Gardiner’s faith in the majesty of her vision.
And just as they had worked within the segregation laws of the day, City Beautiful conformed to certain class distinctions that were respectfully observed in the layout of the city grid. Each level of society was assigned its own street. Just as New York’s Fifth Avenue was a symbol of wealth, Laurel was to have its own majestic Fifth Avenue where the lumber barons erected stately mansions. Fourth Avenue was reserved for managers, third for foremen. Second and First were for workers and their families. Merchants got 6th and 7th. Class and industry were in perfect balance.
Between 1903 and 192O magnificent buildings appeared like Imperial Faberge eggs, each one outdoing the previous in elegance and uniqueness. There were the splendid Georgian, Jeffersonian Revival, and Classical Revival mansions built by the barons. The merchants erected Queen Annes, Colonial Revivals, and Mediterranean style homes. The Episcopal Church on 5th Avenue was Romanesque Revival, while a Presbyterian Church was designed in Neo-Gothic style and erected across the street. There was a Beaux Arts Courthouse and a Prairie-Craftsman Style City Hall inspired by Louis Sullivan. All of this was within a four-block area!
The lumber company’s headquarters was now an opulent Italianate mansion copied from a Roman villa built in the 1540s. Three hundred and fifty buildings, private, commercial and public, went up in bold classical revival styles. The town never had a population much over 20,000 people yet boasted the finest collection of late 19th and early 20th century revival architecture in the South.
The Gardiners engaged the firm of Frederick Law Olmsted to landscape a city parkway system for tiny Laurel. Olmstead, known as the "father of American Architecture,” designed the country’s first public spaces including New York City's Central Park and the grounds surrounding the U. S. Capitol. The National Recreation Association declared Laurel as having the best park system of any small town in America.
And naturally in those days when you thought of golf courses, you immediately Scotland came to mind. So, Seymour Dunn the famous Scottish golfer and noted designer was dispatched to lay out the local golf course. Professional golfers of the day swore it was the best 18-hole course in the nation.6
The local school system became so renown, the prestigious University of Chicago declared that it would accept any Laurel High School graduate without an entrance exam.
The family even transformed their person grief into the city’s glory. The tragic death of the sole male heir to the baron’s empire in 1921, at 23, provided Catherine and her relations with the opportunity to shape the character of Laurel schoolchildren generations to come. As a memorial to the young man, the family built a Georgian Rival mansion to house a public art gallery, the first in the State. The founding families contributed from their own extensive collections, donating important 19th and 20th-century paintings by such noteworthy American artists as Winslow Homer, Albert Bierstadt, George Inness, John Frederick Kensett and Ralph Albert Blakelock. Works by John H. Twachtman and John Singer Sargent were acquired soon thereafter.
When the average person thought of Mississippi, a world-class art museum was not the first thing that naturally came to mind. Take a barefoot boy growing up on a hard-scrabble Jones County farm, set him down on the marble floors of the Lauren Rogers Museum of Art, and just see what happens. I have. One hour in that magnificent temple, located in the poorest State in the nation, lifts a child forever above his Piney Woods horizon, irrevocably altering how he perceives the world and his place in it.8
I can only imagine what Catherine Gardiner and her kin told these internationally renowned designers, architects, engineers and artists to get them to come to Laurel, Mississippi at the turn of the century. What were they thinking as their trains pushed deeper and deeper into backwoods America, past dirt-road depots, shantytowns and falling down tenement shacks, hollow-eyed children doomed to ignorance, hookworm and pellagra, void of any sign of culture and grace, only to be met at the Laurel station by starry-eyed Yankees with open checkbooks and grandiose visions of Athens in a bubble?
Of course there were plenty of times Our Yankees put aside their noble illusions and bowed to popular sentiment. Like in 1911 when the town to erect a Confederate memorial to dispel once and for all, any lingering doubts about Jones County’s loyalty to the late glorious cause. George S. Gardiner was asked to fund the grand marble and granite monument. He contributed $1,200 and the following quip: “You see there a handsome monument erected with Yankee money to the Confederate dead of the Free State of Jones which seceded from the Confederacy after the Confederacy seceded from the Union.”
No doubt he was beginning to understand the fault lines on which he had built his city.
More surprising though, was how little Our Yankees were challenged for their racial tolerant practices. Across the rest of Mississippi, things had only gotten worse for Blacks since the Vardaman administration. Jim Crow was the rule, and most Blacks were shackled to a tenet farm system called sharecropping which seemed to be designed to put them deeper into debt each year.
In 1916 Theodore G. Bilbo was elected governor and proposed a solution to the “race problem.” “I’m the best friend the nigger’s got in the state of Mississippi,” Bilbo declared. “I’m trying to do something for ‘em. I want to send ‘em back to Africa where they belong.”
That period was tragic for Blacks all over the country. It seemed that in every city that African Americans could compete in the workforce and create a viable middle-class, Whites instigated a riot to level the community. From 1917 to 1923, twenty-six race riots erupted. Over a thousand Black citizens were slaughtered by White mobs, their homes and businesses burned.
Then why not Laurel, with its conspicuous Black middle class located in the most racially explosive state in the nation?
An Eastern reporter in 1912 explained the good relations between Blacks and Whites this way. “In general, race troubles seem to arise where the poor Whites are ignorant and inefficient, and so have some reason to fear competition.” But the writer went on to say Laurel Whites were “absolutely opposite…responding to any opportunity for education and self-help.” Mr. and Mrs. Gardiner’s plans to build character into the nature of the work as well into the fabric of city life seemed to be paying off handsomely.9
It allowed Catherine Gardiner to push the envelope even further. When she read an article in the New York Sun about the state of Negro education, she openly questioned Laurel’s commitment to Black education. After learning that black school children received one quarter of the funding appropriated to White education, she spearheaded the building of new schools for blacks, contributing $10,000 and challenging both the city and the Black community to match it. They did, creating a unified effort, ingeniously bridging cultural, class and racial divisions.
In 1928, Oak Park opened its doors, becoming the center of a conspiracy that operated under the radar of Jim Crow. In order not to upset the White supremacists, the school was officially termed a vocational school, which implied teaching only basic life skills and useful trades. Yet Catherine Gardiner and the Black community heroically set about creating an institution that attracted and paid for the best Black teaching talent from around the country. Oak Park launched surgeons, lawyers, political scientists, college professors, star athletes, Army generals, concert pianists, and operatic superstars.10
CRACKING OF THE BUBBLE
Laurel reached its zenith in the 1920s. The founders had ceaselessly advocated civic responsibility, cultural development, and industrial growth, infusing the community with art, traveling theaters, Chautauqua lectures, books, and jobs. Laurel claimed more millionaires per capita than any city in the nation. A host of Black chauffeurs drove their mistresses to the Piggly Wiggly to shop on Fridays. Upstairs maids, downstairs maids, cooks and butlers often lived in their own quarters on the alleys behind the mansions, flaunting small town segregation codes. Things were good, and they looked like they could stay this way forever.
If only the trees hadn’t given out.
By this time there were four milling operations in Laurel, and the lands were depleted. And of course, there was the Great Depression. Even the city in the bubble wasn’t immune from that.
For half a century, the barons had ingeniously used every tool at their disposal to keep their City Beautiful from succumbing to its violent past. Yet the fissures of class and race had always run beneath the town’s foundations. As the Eastman-Gardiner dynasty became less of a force economically, their social and cultural clout to hold together those disparate elements waned as well. The fault lines on which they built their dreams were shifting.
But even as their influence waned, they were able to bequeath new life for their child. With the forests played out, one thing they had was plenty of sawdust. The families sent off to for Thomas Alva Edison’s chief engineer, (again, why not the best?) and charged the young man with coming up with a use for the mountains of waste. By a combination of science and accident he hit upon a revolutionary invention—artificial wood. His name was William Horatio Mason, and he named the product after himself: Masonite. The company grew into an industrial behemoth that would carry the city forward, long after the barons were gone.
By the 1940s, Our Marvelous Yankees, who had come in like clouds, were in retreat. The children no longer graduated from local schools. Their women traveled in the glamorous circles of big city life. They kept 12 room apartments on Manhattan’s Upper East Side and townhouses in Georgetown. The men took jobs on Wall Street. They golfed with Presidents and became involved in international intrigues. A grandson of Catherine’s began what was to become the CIA. They say he was the one who dubbed it “The Mighty Wurlitzer.” They were citizens of the world now.11
Even the Grande Dame Catherine Gardiner, now widowed, seemed to lose her relevance in the face of the encroaching world. She spent much of her time traveling from continent to continent, collecting baskets and exotic artifacts. It was not uncommon to find this type of bizarre item in the local paper.
Mrs. George Gardiner, recently returned from another tour of the world, has made a gift of 24 new baskets, two grass skirts from New Zealand, a poi that a new Zealand girl would wear on her head and few other strange in interesting bits she has picked up, here and there, in her sojourn in the Malay Archipelago. Laurel Leader Call, September 5, 1935.
The temples still stood. Mrs. Gardiner’s seedlings grew into majestic oaks. Each year fourth graders trooped through the art museum to see the second smallest basket in the world and the medieval suit of armor and the Samurai swords. They were told the story about the poor rich boy who died young in 1921 and had his honeymoon mansion rebuilt into this glorious institution. The founding families had taken on the aura of an ancient race of giants.
Their names were still on the streets and etched into the stone lentils of the buildings, but they themselves dime in the memory of its citizens. William Horatio Mason moved into his mansion, not on 5th Avenue with the benevolent barons, but on 6th with the merchants. He was a scientist and entrepreneur, not a molder of character and community. Besides, Laurel was now too industrially diverse and too much a part of the global market to be shaped by one family’s dream, no matter how noble. The “real world” had finally arrived.
As one pragmatic White Laurelite of the time put it, “We’re suffering a terrific hangover from benevolent paternalism. There’s a death struggle to keep up public institutions which were endowed privately, now that the endowments are no longer adequate. We’re used to having poppa foot the bill.”12
What the founding families saw as necessities for shaping the kind of character and civic virtue that could hold a community together across culture, class and race was now as viewed as an unwelcome tax burden.
It is said that every success sows the seeds of its own destruction. It’s possible that the community built upon those old fault lines was always destined to shake apart, as the tectonic plates of history shifted. Laurelites were soon to discover that they couldn’t keep their past waiting in the wings forever.
Notes:
[i] Victoria Bynum, “White Negroes in Segregated Mississippi: Miscegenation, Racial Identity, and the Law,” Journal of Southern History LXIV (May 1998).
2 Noel Polk, A Human Perspective: Mississippi’s Piney Woods, (The University Press of Mississippi 1986), 21-24. Polk, a Mississippi State professor is also the author of Outside the Southern Myth (University Press of Mississippi, 1997) which contrasts the Piney Woods folks of Mississippi with their better known, cotton-rich “…julep-sipping, plantation owning…” cousins in the Delta.
3 Sally Vardaman Johnson, interview with author. Johnson is the great-granddaughter of Mississippi’s notorious governor, James K. Vardaman, known as the “Great White Chief.” Besides advocating the burning of African American schoolhouses, he publicly promoted lynching as a way to enforce White supremacy.
4 Southern Lumberman 28(1 July 1895).
5 Ethel Puffer Howes, “The Aesthetic Value of Efficiency,” The Atlantic Monthly CX (July 1912), 81-91.
6 Lavish Laurel, The New Orleans Times-Picayune, 23 August, 1996.
7Albany Evening Journal, 24 June, 1922.
8 A local tradition that dates well before integration calls for schools to provide fourth-grade students from all the schools in the area, Black and White, a guided tour of the museum. Many older Laurelites, including myself, recall this day being a seminal experience in their emergent worldviews.
9 Ethel Puffer Howes, 88.
10 Cleveland Payne, interview with the author. Payne is a 1957 graduate of Oak Park, a retired college professor and local historian for Laurel’s African American community. He is the author several books including, The Oak Park Story: A Cultural History (National Oak Park High School Alumni Association, 1988)
11 Alexander Chisholm Lindsey, interview with author. Lindsey’s great-uncle was Frank Gardiner Wisner, raised in Laurel, and chosen by Dean Acheson in 1947 to create CIA covert operations. His life of international intrigue and his tragic death are the subjects of several books on the CIA. Lindsey’s grandmother, Elizabeth Wisner Chisholm and granddaughter to the original lumber baron, once overheard her housekeeper, a teen-aged Leontyne Price, singing while she worked. Mrs. Chisholm sent the girl to Julliard and served as her accompanist, filling local venues with black admirers as well as with Laurel’s White elite, effectively integrating Mississippi audiences years before the Civil Rights movement.
12 Laurel Leader Call, 30 April, 1941.
The following are a few of the columns I published in the Review of Jones County, a Laurel, Mississippi weekly newspaper from August of 2008 to April of 2009. A total of 40 columns appeared, all based on interviews I conducted with Laurel citizens on controversial topics, county legends, and local secrets. These included executions and lynchings, Civil War intrigues, Civil Rights activities, Klan atrocities, FBI investigations of the ‘60’s, African American life in the shadow of Jim Crow, unlawful biracial marriages, and secretive communities of “White Negroes.”
By publishing the columns locally, my intention was to “trouble the water” and force more stories to the surface. This strategy worked better than expected. People who had been waiting decades for the chance to tell their stories to someone with no political agenda and without the threat of retaliation contacted me to go on the record. These eyewitness interviews will be weaved into the narration of the book. I hold all copyrights and permissions.
The columns are sorted as to topic.
CONTENTS
Intro to the Series
Column 1 City Beautiful
Newt Knight: Emperor Of The Free State Of Jones
Column 14 Inventing Newt Knight
Column 15 Ethel Knight: Conscience of the Confederacy
Column 19 A Son’s Secrets
Rachel Knight: Slave, White Man’s Mistress And Mother To A Movement
Column 17 Rachel’s Children
Column 16 Butch Knight
White Negro Communities: Too White To Be Black And Too Black To Be White
Column 27 Piney Woods Relations Part 1
Column 28 Piney Woods Relations Part 2
Willie McGee And Mississippi’s Traveling Electric Chair
Column 2 The Legends of Willie McGee
Column 3 Faces in the Crowd
Column 4 Witness to an Execution Part 1
Column 5 Witness to an Execution Part 2
Column 7 Willie McGee was a Warning
Column 23 Seat of Judgment: Mississippi’s Traveling Electric Chair
Column 22 Mrs. Macie Gore: The Defiant One
Column 20 Healing Stories
Leontyne Price: Touched By Greatness
Column 25 Birthed by a Community
Column 26 Passing the Torch
Laurel, Mississippi: Athens in a Bubble
INTRO TO SERIES: COLUMN 1
City Beautiful
How a Confederate Deserter, an Opera Diva, a KKK Grand Wizard, and a Traveling Electric Chair Shaped Life in a Small Mississippi Town
While doing research for one of my novels, out of boredom, I looked through the archives for The Laurel Leader Call, my hometown paper to see what was going on the day that I was born. Nothing much of interest—mostly items about Truman, General MacArthur and Korea. But what I discovered happened the day before, on May 8, 1951, changed my life forever.
“Willie McGee Pays with Life!” the headline screamed.
I was amazed to learn that only six blocks away from Masonite Clinic, where I was about to be born, a black man named Willie McGee had been executed inside the courthouse in the state’s portable electric chair, the only one of its kind in the nation. I dug deeper and found passionate quotes about the case from the likes of Albert Einstein and Jean Paul Sartre and President Truman. Bella Absug was McGee’s defense attorney. I read of riots in Paris and demonstrations in Washington. There was a grainy photo of the familiar courthouse lawn, where1,500 white men, women and children, people I would grow up with, had gathered at midnight to witness the death of the young black father of four.
But I had never heard the first word about this notorious case that was, in its time, a cause célèbre. For a week leading up to the execution, the paper was filled with items about McGee. The day after the execution, on my birthday, not a word. It was if the town was trying to forget it ever happened.
I wondered, “What else haven’t I been told?”
Thus began a fascinating journey, at times surreal, heartbreaking and hilarious. It is the true story of a native son’s return to the town he thought he knew only to end up stepping through the looking glass into an alternate universe.
In riveting interviews, fellow Jones Countians, black and white, have been opening up to me, allowing me to glimpse behind the myths that I grew up with. Indeed what I discovered that this was not the place of my memory—the City Beautiful with its elegant mansions built by turn-of-the-century lumber barons, the wide, oak-lined boulevards, the proud Civil War history, the devotion to quality of life, art and culture. I learned this was at times a veneer the town wore like a pretty façade of Masonite paneling, which appropriately was an invention of one of its citizens, William Horatio Mason.
I found that while I was growing up in my “white child bubble” of privileged segregation, there was an entire world of which I was ignorant. A world peopled by KKK Wizards, a black opera diva, and a proud, bi-racial community known as the “Black Knights.”
I stumbled upon a century-old dispute that still raises the blood pressure of Jones Countians, both black and white, over the true character of Newt Knight, a Confederate deserter who some say took control of Jones County by force, appointed himself Emperor and sired families by both black and white women.
I uncovered the story of the town’s pariah, the Emperor’s last living child, Thomas Jefferson Knight, who sold peanuts on the steps of the First National Bank along with a self-published biography of his father. Thomas Knight was said to keep the racial secrets that could turn the county upside down.
There is the restless soul of a convicted rapist, whose last words to his people were, “Keep up the fight.“ And the black community that to this day is convinced of his innocence.
Well, this is the world into which I was born—an impossible tangle of custom, legend and myth. Willie McGee’s spirit, as it was leaving Laurel probably passed mine coming in, yet I would be a middle-aged man before I ever heard his name. I learned about Sam Bowers from movies like Mississippi Burning. By the time I heard of him, Newt Knight had been reduced to a quaint cautionary tale of race-mixing. Leontyne Price could have been from Sweden for all I knew.
In this series of columns, I will share with you what I discover along the way. I’m not conceited enough to think I can ever learn the whole truth about any of these events. It’s probably too late for that. The facts have become legend and legends are always shaped by the teller. Like Faulkner said, “Facts and truth don’t really have much to do with each other.”
My interest, and I hope yours, the reader, is to appreciate all the stories, factual or not, that shaped our lives as Jones Countians, and with pride be able to say, “Oh what mighty myths from which we have sprung!”
Newt Knight :Emperor of the Free State of Jones
Column 14
Inventing Newt Knight
Some people in Jones County claim two Bibles: The King James and The Book of Ethel, more commonly known as The Echo of the Black Horn. In 1951, Ethel Knight, a distant in-law of Newt’s, released her bombshell of a book. In it she spilled the beans, and named names while she was at it. Ethel simultaneously became the most praised and the most cussed-out woman in Jones County.
Ethel Knight had grown furious at how outsiders were portraying Mississippi in general and Jones County in particular. She was especially upset over the national attention given to the Davis Knight trial over in Ellisville. Davis Knight was a descendant of Newt’s on the black side of the family, but had been caught passing for white. In 1948, he was brought to court and sentenced to five years for marrying a white woman. It landed in the Mississippi Supreme Court. According to Ethel the national press was having a field day at our expense. She said she was sick and tired of watching outsiders “…distort the facts into wicked propaganda.” She wrote Echo to set the record straight.
Of course she wasn’t the first Jones Countian driven to revise Newt’s image. In 1865, to dispel the notion that the anti-Confederates led by Newt Knight were community heroes, the county changed its name for a while to Davis, after Jefferson Davis, hoping to remove all doubt as to their patriotism to the recently vanquished Confederate States of America.
Years later, as the stories about Newt became meaner and nastier, his son Tom wrote a book trying to redeem his dad. He claimed that Newt Knight wasn’t such a bad man after all. He was more like a Robin Hood of Jones County.
James Street, a Laurel newspaperman, came along in 1942 and penned the best selling novel Tap Roots, which for the first time raised the specter of race-mixing among the Knights. Though he didn’t use real names, everybody knew who he was talking about. I know of at least one family of black Knights, who at the time were passing for white in Hattiesburg, having to pack up and move to Memphis after that book came out. A few white Knights changed their name and moved to Texas.
The movie of the same title was released in 1948. About the only good thing the New York Times critic had to say about the film was that the star, Susan Hayward, was “… generously endowed by nature and further enhanced by Technicolor.” Still, it cemented Street’s depiction of the hero of the legend as an honorable man fighting for a noble, anti-Confederate cause. That same year Mississippi took Davis Knight to court for miscegenation. On top of that, Willie McGee had been sentenced to die and while the whole world protested his upcoming electrocution at courthouse. Once again Jones County had occasion to be splashed across the slick pages of Newsweek, Time, Life and Look. The sanctity and racial purity of the old Confederacy in Jones County was in shambles.
That’s where Ethel comes in. She decided to fight back. She rifled through trunks and attics, poured through courthouse papers, studied Civil War muster rolls, tromped through overgrown cemeteries, interrogated the old timers, and pieced together the “authentic” story of Newt Knight. Somehow she even got Tom, Newt’s ninety year-old son, to renounce his childhood hero, his own father, on the jacket of her book. Once again, Newt was depicted as a bushwhacking, cold-blooded, no good deserter. A traitor to both his country and his race. For a long while, that image stuck with a large part of the county.
But now it seems the pendulum is swinging back again. Victoria Bynum, a Texas college professor has recently written a highly respected book on Jones County that returns a little luster to Knight’s hero status. She even presents his fathering two races of Knights in a more positive light. Producer Gary Ross, whose movies include Seabiscuit and Big, has bought the rights and will be filming The Free State of Jones in the near future.
You may ask, how could there be anything left to tell about this old man, born over 170 years ago?
Recently, I was startled when I sat down with members from the black side of the Knight family. It was like I stepped through the looking glass. I was familiar with all the books written by white folks about Newt, but now I was suddenly witnessing a piece of the mystery that has been mostly ignored—those legends passed down through generations of black Knights. In these stories the names were the same, Newt and Rachel and Serena, but the heroes and the villains were reversed. “Where did these stories come from?” I asked.
Yvonne Bivins, one of the people present, told me that when she was a child and there was bad weather, they all gathered at their grandparent’s house, the kids huddling by the fireplace. While the storm was brewing, her grandfather would say, “Be quiet. The Lord is working.” When the storm subsided, the old ones began telling the stories to the children. It had the sound of the sacred.
I came to understand that these stories were indeed holy work. Each story had a moral, and the stories handed down to black kids taught very different lessons than the ones handed down to white kids. That’s when I understood. Folks fill in the blanks of Newt’s story to bear out their own truth. If Newt Knight had never been born, we would have to invent him, just to talk about who we are.
That’s why the story of Newt Knight just won’t die. It insists upon being born again and again. The need for the truth is a powerful thing. We humans just can’t abide an unsolved mystery. We turn our mysteries into myths, and myths change to suit the times, like Oedipus Rex or the Iliad. Within the myth of Newt Knight lie the unresolved paradoxes of our age, about race and family and country. The Myth of Newt Knight forever poses the question, “Who are we, really?” And the truth of the answer, like us, keeps evolving.
Column 15
Ethel Knight: Conscience of the Confederacy
The Hornes probably knew Ethel Knight best. Carolyn and Keith looked after Ethel the last ten years of her life, following the death of her husband and all of her children. Ethel even willed the Hornes the publishing rights to Echo of the Black Horn because she believed they would keep it going.
And they have. Echo of the Black Horn is presently in its ninth printing and still sells strong locally. Along with the family Bible, it is a cherished item in many a Jones County native’s home. A good portion of sales are from people replacing the one they loaned out and never got back. This book has a habit of disappearing.
Keith remembers the day he took Ethel to her doctor in Magee. There in the waiting room was a copy of Echo with a hole drilled in it. “They had run a chain though the hole and attached to the table so nobody would take it home. No telling how many they had went missing.” It’s true once you get into it, whether you love it or hate it, you just can’t put it down.
Carolyn and Keith went over to Ethel’s house every Sunday and Ethel would cook for them. And while she cooked, she told stories. Carolyn got smart and began bringing a recorder to tape Ethel as she reeled off one priceless bit of Mississippi history after another. Carolyn says she has hours and hours of Ethel talking while pots clanged and dishes rattled in the background. One day, Carolyn says, there will be another book.
“We might have to leave home if it ever gets published,” Keith laughs.
I asked what motivated Ethel to write Echo.
“Having married a Knight herself, she wanted to clear her husband’s name,” Keith explained. “Newt’s whole family was a total outcast. They wouldn’t allow them in churches. Some of that still exists. It’s a prejudice. People don’t even know why anymore; they just know they aren’t supposed to like them.”
But some people are proud of their associations to Newt. In Ethel’s book there is the story of a raid on Knight’s gang. Newt escapes, fleeing into the woods. A woman runs along side him, carrying her infant, but she begins tire. Newt snatches up the child and carries the baby in the crook of his arm. “Tomorrow,” Keith says, “we’re going to interview that baby’s grandson. He’s probably over 65 now.”
“Everybody knew Ethel,” Keith said, “and Ethel knew everybody. And she knew everything about everybody. If she had been born twenty years later, she would have been Governor.”
People would call her all the time with questions about their ancestry. “Ethel was one of those people who just loved to do for folks. To help you out,” Carolyn told me. “Folks were always dropping by to ask her questions about their roots. White and black. She would take time to help them all. She was very generous with her information.”
In an age when there were so many Knights passing for whites, people also came to Ethel with more surprising requests. Carolyn told of a woman whose daughter was engaged to a Knight. She called up Ethel and asked, “Has he got any black in him?” Ethel confirmed that no, the man was not of Rachel, Newt’s slave wife’s, line.
According to Keith, whenever a person in Jones County says they are a Knight, there is always that suspicion. He mentioned one group of Knights who got so tired of it they moved to Texas and changed their names to McKnight, (We’ll find out how blacks feel about this mixed ancestry in future columns!)
In her book, Ethel takes a strong stand against “race-mixing” and lauds the ideals of the Confederacy. She even dedicated her book “…to the memory of the Noble Confederates who lived and died for Jones County.” Not very politically correct nowadays. I was curious to know how Ethel reacted to this new breed of historians revising Jones County history once more, especially considering how her own account of things stood for so long. I could just hear Ethel railing against this new set of outsiders coming into Jones County to twist “facts into wicked propaganda.”
Keith told me of an encounter Ethel had with a stranger who dropped by her house one afternoon. Little did Ethel know that this white woman pumping her for information would turn around and write a popular book casting Ethel as a racist, calling her research into question, and suggesting that Echo was little more than a thinly disguised defense of white supremacy.
When that new book hit the shelves, Ethel was 93 and legally blind. “I had to read it to her,” Carolyn remembers. “You can only imagine how she felt. That woman took some mean swipes at Ethel.”
Indeed, Ethel felt personally betrayed and defamed, and sure enough her trademark temper was on display. Ninety-three or not, she wasn’t going to take it lying down. When the author came to USM to promote her new work, Ethel decided she would go face the woman.
She made sure to arrive early enough to get a seat right up front. And there she sat, stiffly in the third row of the packed auditorium, staring down the professor with a defiant glare. “She didn’t say a word,” Carolyn remembers. “She was too much of a lady for that.”
She didn’t need to say anything. Coming to stand with her was an incensed contingent from the Sons of Confederate Veterans, folks who honor Ethel because of her unrepentant stand for the Confederacy.
How did the professor react?
“It must have rattled her,” Keith laughed. “She seemed to lose her focus for quite a bit.”
Who wouldn’t, I wondered, with the full moral weight of the Confederate Army bearing down on you?
Column 19
A Son’s Secrets
If I close my eyes, I can still see him today, just as he looked back in 1955 when I was four years old. He stands forever in my memory on that scorching Laurel sidewalk in front of the Strand Theater, selling peanuts and chewing gum and candy bars, his white beard grown down to the bib of his tattered overalls. That old man scared the bejeebers out of me every time Momma took us to watch Roy Rogers movies on Saturday afternoons.
It took the full measure of my courage to approach him, clutching my nickel in my sweaty palm, while he studied me with those, steel-gray, old-man eyes. My heart galloped like Trigger as he plucked up my coin with his long yellowed nails and then examined it carefully before dropping it into his dirty coin sack. The second he handed me the little brown paper bag of peanuts I took off, fleeing for my mother, dizzy from a peril survived.
He died the next year at the age of 96, but it was not until after I was fully-grown that I learned the true identity of this Laurel landmark, derisively known as “the Peanut Man.” His name was Thomas Jefferson Knight and he carried secrets that could turn my hometown of Laurel, Mississippi on its ear. I wasn’t’ the only one he scared. He had a few grownups shaking in their boots as well. He knew the questionable ground from which we sprang.
Tom was born in 1860, a year before the Civil War, long before Laurel existed, back when Jones County was wild frontier and the yellow pine stood as tall and as big around as sequoias. He remembered when farms were small, remote, and self-sufficient and most people were poor. They had an independent streak a mile wide. He came from stock that didn’t take kindly to authority of any variety—political, military or religious. If a man decided to desert the Confederate Army, as many did, rather than fight a “rich man’s war,” then so be it. Commitment in Jones County was to clan, not to country. And if a man wanted to raise-up children with a favorite slave mistress right alongside his white children, then that was the business of him and his clan.
Tom was there when slavery ended and Reconstruction came and went. He watched the Yankee lumber barons come down in the 1890’s with their insatiable sawmills and attempt to tame the county with laws, commerce and culture. He may have laughed at their naivety as they raised-up their magnificent Classical Revival courthouse and their splendid Georgian mansions and laid out their “City Beautiful” on ground that still trembled with violent memory.
That’s why Tom was dangerous. He knew the fault lines on which the city was built, the one hundred years of family secrets that lay waiting to be resurrected. Over the years, he had a first-row seat to the twin conundrums that had plagued Jones County since the Civil War. I’m referring to those widespread rumors about the county’s double-barreled bastardy: our legitimacy as true Confederates and our claims to racial purity.
Tom could tell you who was black, who was white, who was mixed and who was passing. And which proud Rebel-flag waving, Dixie-singing, “The South Will Rise Again” shouting patriots were descended from Confederate deserters, scavengers, traitors, cowards and murderers. He knew where all the bodies were buried, literally.
Tom had a handle on these things better than anyone else, not only because he was old, but also because he was the last surviving child of the great Emperor himself. I’m referring to the notorious Captain Newton Knight, the most infamous Jones Countian of all. Tom’s father was either the greatest hero or the biggest scoundrel who ever lived, depending on who you’re listening to. Nobody’s neutral. Folks in Jones County have been arguing about Newt Knight since the day he shot his brother-in-law Morgan for fooling with his wife. Morgan was not the first or the last to be ambushed by Newt.
What we know for sure is that Newt Knight had a small farm near what would one day become Laurel when the Civil War commenced. While serving in the Confederate Army, he came to the conclusion that the affair was “a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight,” and decided he would have none of it. He deserted and returned home to his clan. He gathered up a band of like-minded men and went on to take over much of the county by brute force. He even made some attempts to join up with Lincoln’s Union Army. As far as Captain Newt and his band were concerned, if Mississippi could secede from the Union, then Jones County could secede from Mississippi. Newt ambushed officers of the Confederate Army, shot them in the back, stole their supplies, eluded their patrols and terrorized their sympathizers. To Newt Knight, his alliance of local clans was the only government that mattered. He even gave himself the title, “Emperor of the Free State of Jones,” and held it until war’s end.
Newt died in the 1920’s, but the disagreements over his character became more violent as the years passed. People cussed, fist-fought and shot at each other over whether Newt was a coward, a traitor or a savior of the people. And it wasn’t just academic. A lot of folks had a father or an uncle or a brother who rode with Newt. The honor of entire clans was on the line.
That’s when Tom decided he would step into the fray. After all, who had a better right to tell the story than the heir-apparent to the “Free State of Jones,” the man grew up hidden away deep in the swamps, watched over by a fierce army of renegades, deserters and Unionists who had sworn dying allegiance to his bigger-than-life father?
Mostly a self-educated man, Tom decided to settle the matter by penning his own book. In fact much of what we know today about Newt can be traced to this crude little pamphlet Tom wrote in the 1930’s glorifying his daddy--The Life and Activities of Captain Newton Knight and his Company.
This was during the Depression and Tom had already become a familiar sight on Central Avenue hawking his peanuts, the product of a small roaster provided to the destitute so they could earn a few pennies. When Tom had scraped together enough coins to get a few copies of his book printed, he sold them right along with his peanuts and chewing gum for a dollar a copy, right there on the sidewalks of Central Avenue.
Newt Knight was a bona fide hero in Tom’s book. He recounted how many a Jones Countian worshiped this Robin Hood of the Piney Woods. Newt’s army defended the war widows, fed their babies, protected their crops from merciless Confederate foragers, and saved many from destitution. In the book are all the stories Tom had heard at his father’s knee. Tom even found someone to pen a few rough drawings depicting the most thrilling scenes, like battles, hangings and daring escapes through the swamps.
But Tom wasn’t in favor of airing the entire truth in his little book. There was a sizeable portion of his father’s story that Tom would just as soon people forget. The uncomfortable truth was Newt’s rebellion didn’t end with the War. He also had some very controversial practices after the war. In addition to the white family into which Tom was born in 1860, Newt raised up a mixed-race family with Rachel, a former slave of his grandfather, and her half-white daughter, Georgia Ann. He established for eternity in Jones County three branches of the family, one known as the White Knights, another as the Black Knights, and the third as the White Black Knights, lineages which would blur Jones County bloodlines and shock genealogists right up to the present day.
Not that such mixing was unheard of in the early days of Jones County. This wasn’t the Gone With the Wind South, populated by rich planters, plantation houses and remote slave quarters. Very few Piney Woods inhabitants owned slaves, but for those who did it was understood that when there was only one field in which to work, one table from which to eat, and only one or two shacks in which to sleep, master and slave were bound to share a unique kind of intimacy. The boundaries were not as rigid as many of many of my fellow Jones Countians would still like to believe. Most folks just didn’t flaunt it.
But Newt wasn’t one to be discreet. With his bad temper, good aim and long memory, he didn’t need to be. Only a fool would go out of his way to cross Newt or his clan—black, white or mixed. There are graves filled with fools to testify to that fact.
Some claim Newt Knight went so far as to try to breed a new race of people by urging his three branches to intermarry. Others said it was a loving thing he was up to, trying to dilute the black blood of his descendents to the point where the State of Mississippi had to decree them legally white. [i]
After the war, as Confederate monuments began to crowd the landscape and freed blacks were blamed for all manner of evil, Newt’s hero status was called into question. The Myth of the Glorious Confederacy had become the unifying religion of the South and strict segregation became the law. Newt was stripped of his sainthood. By the 1930’s not only was his stand against Jefferson Davis’s Confederacy now regarded as treasonous, his open race-mixing with Rachel and her daughter became, an abomination. He was widely cursed for giving rise to a tribe of “white niggers.”
As flattering as it was, Tom’s book did little to raise Newt’s stock. He watched as the tide of public opinion turned against his father and his family. The Knight clan became pariahs in a county they had once ruled.
After the Depression, Tom drifted into anonymous oblivion, known only as “the Peanut Man.” With the unchecked growth of his white beard, teenagers on bicycles would taunt the surly old scoundrel with shouts of, “Hey, you! Santy Clause!” just to hear him bark his reply, “Go to hell you goddamn sons a bitches!” In another day, his father would have shot them between the eyes. No one seemed to remember.
As history passed him by, the identity of that withered old man disappeared into the fog of memory. If people did remember who he was, they whispered when they pointed, as if not wanting to wake up any ancient secrets that lay napping at his feet.
In 1947, when he was 88 and seemed destined to die unknown, Thomas Jefferson Knight was pitilessly thrust into the spotlight. His father’s ghost returned with a vengeance to threaten the reputations of many a Jones Countian. A distant relative of Tom’s named Davis Knight got arrested for trying to “pass” as white and marrying a white woman. When the accused told the Jones County prosecutor to just try and prove it, a bizarre miscegenation trial began that tried to untangle the most complicated and lied-about bloodline in America. The entire nation watched.
Tom was dragged into a Jones County courtroom and asked to testify under oath, in the national spotlight, not about his father’s military heroics, but about his race-mixing. By this time Mississippi had gone rabid on the issue of segregation. Tom was forced to reveal in detail to his entire community how his father had committed the worst of all sins, loving a black woman, nearly a century ago, and siring and caring for her children. Tom had to identify himself as a member of a family of race-traitors and mixed-breeds. In order for him to defend his own standing as a white man, about the only thing he had left of value in the world besides his peanut roaster, he had to vilify his father as a Negro lover and traitor to his race. It’s sadly ironic that when Tom at last got a chance to speak about his father, it was to betray him.[ii]
They say Tom never got over it as long as he lived.
Tom Knight was perhaps the last person who could tell the real story of where we come from. He’d seen up-close the absurdity of race, the insanity of violence, the shallowness of our illustrious illusions. He could have shed a harsh light on all our myths, if somebody had asked. No one did. Yet he showed up downtown daily, selling his peanuts, stubbornly pricking memories that folks would rather not have.
I imagine him silently standing watch over Laurel through his final years, when the violence of the past finally caught up to the proud city. From where he stood on Central Avenue, he could easily look up Fifth at the Courthouse, the same grandiose Classical Revival structure he saw the rich Yankees erect fifty years earlier as a brash promise of a new beginning. It was supposed to represent the taming of a clannish wilderness, a testament to a new age of enlightened governance.
It’s not hard to image that Tom was there that day in 1942 when the fault lines shifted. That was the year a mob stormed the courthouse jail in Laurel and a black prisoner by the name of Howard Wash was taken out and lynched from a nearby bridge. The sheriff and his deputies were present but did little to resist. If that had happened in any other town in Mississippi not an eyebrow would have been raised. But it was a first for Laurel, the progressive little city of such bright promise.
The lynching was only the first in a remarkable convergence of disturbing events, all occurring within a span of a few years that would focus the world’s attention on the proud city Laurel, Mississippi. There would be the bestselling book that “outs” the county’s scandalous Civil War history. The five-year ordeal of an accused rapist who becomes an international cause célèbre and ends his life in Mississippi’s ghoulish traveling electric chair. The rise of a murderous Klan Wizard. The discovery of a local black girl with an operatic voice so remarkable, she is used to draw the attention of the world away from the sins of her city.
The contradictions that had never really resolved themselves would be laid bare. And Tom lived long enough to witness them all. But if he had opinions, he took them to his grave.
I wish he had hung around longer. I would like to have asked him, “Who are we and where do we come from? Where does truth end and myth begin? What are the untold stories that shape our destinies?” But he had been dead fifty years before I ever thought to put the questions to him.
Thankfully I’ve found others still living who have bits and pieces of the story. I’ve listened now to countless tales told by White Knights, Black Knights, White Black Knights and non-Knights. By relatives and friends of Willie McGee, Howard Wash, Leontyne Price, Sam Bowers and others. These names still provoke deep passions among the citizens of Laurel. I’ve been cussed out more than once for suggesting an opinion that ran counter to what folks have been raised up with.
So, it’s with some trepidation that I am going to share with you over the course of this book a few of the rich, complex and often contradictory stories that they tell.
Since Tom is no longer around to set me straight, I can’t vouch for what is factually true or false. But like the Italians say, “All stories are true. Some even happened.”
Rachel Knight
Column 16
Gregory “Butch” Knight
There is probably no sadder task in the world than trying to get to know your father after he has died. Yet Butch Knight told me that was something he was determined to do.
I first met Butch at a gathering of the Knights who proudly trace their roots back to the ex-slave Rachel and the infamous Newt. Some of their descendants are called “black Knights”. Some are called “white black Knights”, because of their Caucasian features. Their history is complex. They are caught right in the crosshairs of our absurd national obsession with color.
For instance, Butch’s father, Hayston Knight, was the great-grandson of Newt and Rachel Knight. Butch showed me a photo of his father. There was nothing in the picture that would cause me to think this man black. His features were of a light-skinned, fine-boned white man. Butch said many of the Knights with his father’s appearance were encouraged to leave the area so they could pass for white, and raise their children as white. Of course they could never return home, lest their children discover their ancestry. The break had to be complete. Those who stayed were pressured into choosing marriage partners with their shade of pigmentation or lighter. Never darker.
“Not my father,” Butch recalled. “He said that foolishness was going to stop with him. He said he wanted to marry the blackest woman he could find. He was going to break the cycle.”
Butch said his father never denied who he was. On his first day in the army, Hayston’s sergeant ordered all the whites in one line and all the blacks in another. When Hayston placed himself with the other black soldiers, the sergeant shouted, “Didn’t you hear me? I said, only the n______’s over there!”
Hayston said defiantly, “Well, I guess I’m in the right place because I’m a n______!”
In the 1950’s Hayston got a job with a local grocery wholesaler and because of his intelligence and his white appearance was given significant responsibility in managing the operation. He was also put in charge of breaking in the new white trainees, who were inevitably promoted over Hayston. The family believed that the stress and the humiliation sent him to an early grave.
“My daddy wasn’t proud. He could have passed,” Butch says. “I wanted to write about my father. How he had to live in the black world and work in the white world.”
Butch admits being ashamed of his father while he was alive, seeing one white man after the other promoted over him. And his father never talked back.
“I admire him now,” Butch admits, with tears in his eyes. “He did it for us, his children. So he could support his family.”
“I’m starting to understand the struggle he had to go through,” Butch continued, “Not white enough to be accepted by whites. And too white to be accepted by blacks.”
I encouraged Butch to write about his father, as I’m doing with my dad after losing him last year to cancer. Sometimes it’s a lonely undertaking, with many ghosts, especially those missed moments when feelings went forever unspoken. But writing it down seems to help soothe the grief.
I didn’t need to encourage him. Butch had already begun the research. He even went so far as to sit down with Ethel Knight, the author of Echo of the Black Horn, to see what he could learn from her about his father.
“What did you think about her book?” I asked.
“Lies,” he said, referring to the way she denied the black descendants of Newt Knight in her book. “But when I went to see her, she treated me like long lost kin. It was very strange.”
I offered to work with Butch on his father’s biography. I could tell he was feeling some sense of urgency. Then he explained. Butch’s father died when he was 58. “An aneurism. Runs in family,” Butch said. “Comes from both sides.” Butch went on to say that this year, he had turned 58. “I’m shaking in my boots.” His sisters who were present that day assured Butch that wouldn’t be the case for him. Butch didn’t appear comforted. I got the sense that he thought he might have waited until it was too late to discover the truth about his father.
Butch and I agreed to meet the next time I was in Mississippi and continue our discussion about his dad. I put together a list of questions for Butch and was excited about dedicating a chapter in my upcoming book about his search for his father. When I called from Minnesota to arrange a meeting, his sister answered the phone.
“Butch died last month,” she said. “He collapsed while he was out mowing his yard.”
I wasn’t sure why that hit me so hard. In a way, it was like losing my father all over again. Perhaps I had hoped that by helping Butch discover his dad, in the process, I could also become closer to mine.
But that’s not to be. Perhaps, in the end, that is something a person can do only for himself. And maybe, looking for our fathers is like looking for our reflection in a mirror that has gone dim. We can never get close enough to make it out.
I’ll miss my friend, and I hope that where he is now, the reflection he gazes upon is bright and true, and he has found what he was searching for.
Column 17
Rachel’s Children
I can’t help but think of the Old Testament Abraham when I hear stories about Newt Knight. Both men sired children by a wife and a slave. In Newt’s case it was Serena and Rachel. With Abraham, Sara and Hagar. According to religious texts, one of these women went on to become the matriarch of God’s chosen people. Exactly which one, depends on what you happen to be reading, your Bible or your Koran. Jews and Christians claim the wife Sarah and Muslims claim the handmaiden Hagar. Several Crusades were launched trying to settle that matter.
In Jones County, there’s always been a fierce crusade of competing stories about Rachel, the white account versus the black account. Like most stories, the white interpretation gets written down and called history, while the black story gets handed down by word-of-mouth and called folklore.
Growing up as a white boy, I swore by Ethel Knight’s written-down version. According to her, Rachel was a light-skinned temptress with blue-green eyes and flowing chestnut hair. But evil as the day is long. Ethel alternately calls her a vixen, a witch, a conjure woman, a murderer and a strumpet.
Serena, Newt’s white wife, is but an innocent captive, forced a gunpoint to live in this den of iniquity, and like Newt, powerless as Rachel’s sorcery wrecked and degraded their family.
As a child of Jim Crow, this narrative satisfied my budding sensibilities about race. In my white-bubble world, there could never be any possibility of true love or affection between a white man and a black woman. Nor would any white man sire children by a black woman and then choose to live amongst his mixed-race offspring. Unless of course, the black woman had either seduced him unmercifully or mysteriously conjured him, or both. It just wasn’t possible that he actually loved her, or her children.
Imagine my surprise when I heard, as they say, “the rest of the story.” It was as shocking as sitting down in church and listening to the preacher get up and declare from the pulpit that Abraham’s birthright went to Hagar’s kid Ishmael, instead of Sarah’s son, Isaac, and it was we Christians who were the infidels! Boy would that turn some peoples world upside down!
I felt something akin to this when I listened to a gathering of Rachel’s descendents tell me their side of things. First of all Rachel wasn’t some immoral viper. To Pat and Flo and Peggy, Rachel was a role model—a strong black woman with no legitimate authority in a racist society, doing what needed to be done for her children, regardless of the cost to herself. Somebody you would like your daughter to grow up like.
“Was she the green-eyed slave with long flowing hair like Ethel said?” I asked.
“She was what we called a Guinea Negro,” answered Yvonne, another of Rachael’s great-grandchildren. “That means she was dark, not light-skinned like Ethel writes. She had course hair and she was short. Similar to Australian aborigines. She was mixed, but not white-looking.”
It was beginning to sound like a white conspiracy against Rachel, but then Yvonne let me in on a little secret. Whites weren’t the only ones who liked the story of Rachel appearing white. “That’s the way some of my cousins who pass for white want her to be depicted. They deny that they had any black in them so they don’t want Rachel to be black, either.”
“That was partially Newt’s fault,” Yvonne continued. “My mother said that Newt was trying to cleanse the black out of Rachel’s children. Because of the one-drop rule, he wanted to get rid of that drop of black blood. That’s why he married his white children to each other black children.” Yvonne grins at her relatives around the table. “As for me, I proudly claim my one drop!”
There is a burst of laughter. All these women agree on that point.
“And how about the part about being Rachel being a vixen and a witch?” I asked.
“It was always assumed that the slave was to blame for the husband’s indiscretions,” Yvonne explained. “She had to have some special power over him. It couldn’t be that he cared for her.”
Yvonne was right. That’s what I was always told. Slave owners were mostly noble men and succumbed only when mightily tempted. Why else would Newt isolate himself from his community and willingly be labeled as a deviate if he weren’t bewitched?
“In my family we believe that Newt really loved Rachel,” Pat said.
“It was not a casual relationship,” Yvonne added. “And he loved all of his children. My understanding is that they were all raised up on the same land. They all lived together, played together, ate together. My grandmother was Newt’s granddaughter, said she didn’t know she had a drop of black blood until she was all raised up.”
“I guess you can’t believe everything you read,” I said. “How do the black Knights feel about Ethel’s book?”
“My grandfather was Warren Smith,” Yvonne said, “He was Rachel’s grandson and he said that Ethel’s book was a pack of lies. Said she was smart enough to create an entertaining account of Newt and Rachel’s relationship. But unfortunately,” Yvonne concluded, “white people tend to believe every word.”
Yvonne was right. I sure did. But now I’m not sure what to think. Rachel’s people have got me thoroughly confused. That’s what happens when folks start messing with the stories you were raised on.
So it comes down to that old, nagging question once more—which story is true? The truth is…I don’t know. I think they all might be. The way a story shapes a person is the truest thing there is.
The Italians say it better: All stories are true. Some even happened.
White Negro Communities
Column 27
Piney Woods Relations
Yvonne Bivins had to make a choice very few Americans have forced upon them. She could live as a black woman or a white woman.
Yvonne’s ancestry is enmeshed with the Knights of Jones County. She was born into one of the so-called “White Negro” communities that sprang up after the Civil War all over through the Piney Woods. These communities grew up around Piney Woods plantations, actually no bigger than farms. There’s Six Town and Soso in Jones County and Kelly Settlement and Sheeplow in Forrest County. Her community is called Kelly Settlement and located about seven miles outside of Hattiesburg.
Hold on to your hats and I’ll tell you how Kelly Settlement came into existence. John Kelly, an early petitioner in Mississippi Territory, purchased 640 acres on the Leaf River. His son, Green Kelly had a liaison with a slave named Sarah. Sarah had children by her white master, by a white neighbor and by another slave on the farm. That made three sets of children, a total of eleven.
This may surprise you. It sure did me. But according to Yvonne, it was not an uncommon practice for Piney Woods slave owners, perhaps because of the intimacy created by these modest estates that demanded close-quarters living, to provide for all their offspring, regardless of color. We just don’t hear about it. Newt Knight was vilified not because he sired darker offspring, but because he refused to deny them.
Green Kelly was more discreet. When he died he left a parcels of land for the children of each set. The children Kelly personally sired were bequeathed land on the Monroe Road. The ones sired by the white neighbor received land on the Eatonville Road. The ones sired by the slave got land over on the River Road. Kelly Settlement was, and still is to a great degree, populated by Kelly’s bi-racial lineage.
In Soso, only a road divides the black descendants of the major slave owner of that time from his white descendants. Yet, it is two separate worlds.
Through the years, most of these settlements have isolated themselves from the population at large. Many of the children were sent away to “pass,” heading off to the West or North to blend into the white world. Sometimes they were so successful, their children and grandchildren were unaware of their heritage. I’ve heard tales of proud white people rifling through courthouse records to trace their family tree, probably trying to discover a Confederate colonel or two, and screaming out in alarm when they find a “B” (black) or an “M” (mulatto) by an ancestor’s name.
Yvonne says that passing locally was out of the question, as whites kept tabs on you. And sometimes blacks would call you out in public, either by referring to you by your first name, instead of “Mr.” or “Miss.” Or perhaps asking you about some common relation known to be black while a white person was listening.
Some light-skinned blacks moved no farther than Hattiesburg to pass. A great aunt of Yvonne’s was a brilliant seamstress. Her customers were mostly from the wealthy Jewish community of Hattiesburg and they encouraged her to pass as white. She bought a house on the end of 4th Street, next to the tracks, right on the border between the white section an the black section.
When the census taker came around, she told him they were Indian. Darker relatives were not received at the front door and were asked to go around to the back. Things were turning out fine until Tap Roots was published, outing many of the black Knights who were passing. One of the great aunt’s boys tried to enter the white section in the Saenger Theater downtown and he was kicked out because now the family was suspect. Unwilling to revert to living as black, Yvonne’s great aunt bought a boxcar and packed up her home and moved to Memphis. As a side note, Yvonne says that when she died, her aunt was buried in the white cemetery in Memphis shared by Elvis’s mother. So maybe she finally got what she wanted.
Next week Yvonne’s tale continues with the story of those light-skinned blacks like her grandparents who opted to stay in the Piney Woods, where they were seen by most as too white to black, and too black to be white.
Piney Woods Relations
Part 2
I interviewed Yvonne Bevins last summer on her mother’s front porch. Yvonne’s grandfather built the house in 1925 in the Kelly Settlement, one of several White Negro Communities that sprung up in the Piney Woods after the Civil War, populated by what people called back then mulattoes. These light-skinned blacks were known to be offspring of the local plantation owner and one or more of his slaves. As Yvonne discussed last week, it was common for children to be sent out of Mississippi to pass as white. But what happened to the ones who chose to stay put, like her own family, in a land where many considered them too white to be black and too black to be white?
Yvonne told me that those who remained in the community had a time of it, too. They were encouraged to marry other light-skinned blacks. Yvonne said that often the “paper bag” rule was enforced when it came to picking a spouse. In other words, don’t marry anyone darker than a paper bag. Or as Yvonne’s grandfather warned, “Keep to your own kind.”
Yvonne’s grandmother, who could have passed for white, stayed and proudly claimed her “one-drop.” When whites asked her why she chose to live as a black, she told them, “Because if I were white, I’d be a poor white and would rather be a dog. And if I were Indian I would be on some reservation. No thank-you, I’d rather be a N_____!”
Being light-skinned attracted other kinds of unwelcome attention. Yvonne remembers when she was teenager, a stranger came to her mother’s house, took one look at her and her light-skinned sister and commented to her mother, “You’re sitting on a gold mine here,” referring to the price some men would pay to be with a girl with that shade of skin.
Yvonne also told me the story of a white man named Knight, stalking through her neighborhood, looking for sex. “He got upset when I told him we were probably kin.”
An interesting dilemma developed among those who remained. To find eligible marriage partners who were suitably light-skinned, families had to make excursions to other White Negro communities to seek out husbands and wives for their children. “That’s how my ancestors got involved with the Knights,” Yvonne says. “My kin went over to Soso from Smith County to find people who were as white-skinned as they were. I wondered how the White Negro Community in Soso interacted with the local black population. “They didn’t associate with dark-skinned blacks socially. They couldn’t go to school with whites and wouldn’t go to school with blacks. Many chose to be educated in the school Anna Knight began in Jones County at Gitano.”
Anna was the daughter of Newt Knight and Rachel’s daughter George Anne, a racially mixed woman. Yvonne said, “The Seventh Day Adventists will tell you she opened the school for religious reasons which is true, however the school was built for her light-skinned relatives who didn’t want to attend school with blacks.” Even today, darker skinned Knights and lighter-skinned Knights descendants have separate family reunions.
Yvonne admits that there are deep-rooted cultural differences that kept the light-skinned and the dark-skinned apart. “The white Negroes grew up closer to white plantation owners, around music and reading, china, crystal and fine linen. So there was definitely a class barrier. It’s the difference between the house slave and the field slave. That’s why these communities would isolate themselves. In fact, when one of Yvonne’s Knight kin actually married a dark skinned man, they had to move to Washington D. C. because her family didn’t want her around.”
And there were reasons for darker skinned blacks to feel resentful. Light-skinned blacks seemed to get preferential treatment from whites. For instance, according the Yvonne and her cousins, white employers favored hiring them as light-skinned blacks. They would put them “up front” in banks, department stores and other places where services were provided to white people. They figured our lighter skin would be accepted more easily by white customers.” For example, as the first step in integrating schools in Hattiesburg the administration decided to integrate the staff. It was decided to send light-skinned blacks to the white schools. When the faculty met in a general assembly for the first time, blacks looked around in disbelief. All the blacks had the same shade of skin—they were all light.
Yvonne acknowledges the insanity of this obsession with color and believes the time for shame about the past is over. The way to do it is to make sure the truth gets told about this perplexing, but little understood facet of Southern culture.
What motivates her?
Yvonne, who identifies as black, went to historically black colleges, worked for civil rights and married a black man, has one burning desire.
“All roads lead back to Rachel Knight,” she says. “Her story is our story. She’s been put away in the closet. Because of the rough treatment by people like Ethel Knight in her book, Echo of the Black Horn, Rachel’s descendants have denied her blood. According to Ethel and those like her, Rachel is where the evil came in and infected the white race. My own family wouldn’t defend her name because they were made to feel so ashamed. Until recently, we didn’t even know the names of Rachel’s children.”
“But now,” Yvonne says firmly, “Rachel needs to be heard without prejudice.”
She may be right. If we can understand Rachel’s story, perhaps we can understand the quagmire of race itself.
Willie McGee
Column 2
The Legends of Willie McGee
No place in the world has more legends than Jones County, other than maybe Ancient Greece. I’ve talked to folks who still look for Newt Knight’s buried treasure in riverbanks and in secret caves. Then there’s that stuff about Jones County seceding from the Confederacy when Mississippi seceded from the Union. One of my favorites is the legend of Rachael Knight, a slave woman who lived deep in the Piney Woods and whose supernatural powers helped shape the history of Jones County.
Even an event that happened as recently as 1951 has already taken on the proportions of legend. I’m referring to the Story of Willie McGee.
This was one of the most extensively covered cases of its day. In my office here, I have piled on my desk feature stories from Life Magazine, Time Magazine, The New York Times, Christian Century, The Commonweal, the Nation, and Newsweek. That doesn’t even include the international press the case attracted. I can flip through the yellowing pages and see the black and white photos of McGee being escorted back and forth between the jails in Jackson and Laurel, dazed and in chains with a phalanx of state guards summoned to prevent threatened mob action. Of Willie McGee sitting glum, slumped over in his cell, a cigarette burning between his fingers. Of his sheeted body being carted out of the Jones County Courthouse into the care of Pete Christian, a local black funeral home owner in Laurel.
Willie McGee was everywhere. And then almost the very next day he vanished. With all the national attention, and out of respect to the victims, much of Laurel just wanted the whole thing done with. But the story didn’t die. There were those predictable conversations between friends and neighbors, whispered in hush tones. One person says, “How could such a thing be?” and the other surmises an answer, “The way I hear it was...” and thus a legend is born. The facts become more and more illusive.
But there are some things we do know for sure. Willie McGee, 32 and a father of four, was a black man who in November of 1945was arrested for raping a young Laurel housewife, the mother of three little girls, in her home. He was tried in Laurel and found guilty by an all white jury of rape and sentenced to die in the electric chair. Those last two facts are significant.
The make-up of the jury would factor in the case being overturned twice by the State Supreme Court and cause the ordeal to drag on for over five years.
The fact that McGee, a black man, was condemned to die for a crime Mississippi had never executed a white man for, gave fuel to those around the world who wanted to put the South’s race relations on trial.
Also put on trial was the character of the rape victim, herself, even as her husband continued to work at the post office downtown and her daughters tried to have normal childhoods in the Laurel public schools.
Finally, we can be sure that Willie McGee, prosecuted by City D.A. Polly Swartzfager, was found guilty by a jury a third and last time. And, for the third time and last time, Judge F. Burkitt Collins imposed the death sentence. This one to be carried out in Laurel.
On May 8, 1951, at 12:05 a.m., it was. The body of Willie McGee is buried in Pachuta.
We can agree on those facts. But that’s about where consensus ends. If you ask a white person of a certain age what they remember about the case, they will talk about the “execution.” But if you happen upon a black Laurel citizen, he will more than often use the word, “lynched.”
It’s typical of that great Black/White divide we see in opinion surveys from Rodney King, to O.J. Simpson, to Katrina to what happened in Jena, Louisiana. In a way, you could say we are separated by our stories.
Over the next few weeks, I’m going to share the stories that I have been told. We’ll look at Willie himself and hear from those who remember him. We’ll learn about his wife, who spoke on his behalf to packed houses up North. We’ll get to know the family of the victim, though, I will not print her name, upon request of those who remember the family fondly and suffered with them through the ordeal.
I will share stories of how the event dramatically shaped the lives of Laurel’s children of the time, both black and white. We’ll talk about the major players of the day, who had to handle this political hot potato, people whose names we know today only because we drive on a street named after them.
You’ll hear about some sinister forces at work in Laurel at the time. Like the two opposing factions of thugs who used lies, intimidation and death threats to ensure that the verdict went their way. Though they wanted different outcomes, they were equal in their viciousness.
Why bring it up now? Why not let it lie? These are questions I’ve been asked.
For one thing, it’s a fascinating subject and most folks enjoy a good story.
Secondly, if stories shape who we are, then they also shape people who are different from us. By listening to their stories, we just might understand them better.
And thirdly, get ready, because not one but two major books are coming out over the next couple of years about the Willie McGee case. My guess is we are about to be in the national spotlight again. Laurel and Willie McGee could get the same notoriety as Emmitt Till and Bryant’s Grocery, and Birmingham Church and its Sunday morning bombers, and Neshoba County and the three civil rights workers, Beckwith and Medger Evers. Seen through the lens of 1950’s Jim Crow, Laurel could be cast as the latest site where there is evidence of a disgraceful perversion of justice.
So when they come looking for us, CNN and MSNBC as well as the sightseers and curiosity seekers, snapping pictures of the Confederate Monument and the Courthouse, asking, “Is this where they lynched Willie?” as they surely will, we better get our stories straight.
Column 3
The Faces in the Crowd
I’ve looked at those newspaper photos taken on the eve of Willie McGee’s execution hundreds of times. The grainy shots of the crowd. I couldn’t make out the faces, but I often wondered if they really were the bloodthirsty mob described by the international press. And there was that odd picture of the boy up in the tree looking into the courtroom where the traveling electric chair had been set up. Who was he? Why was he there? What did he see through the window that night? I had to find out, so I began looking for clues.
I first listened to what Sam Bowers said about that day. He remembered that he was servicing his pinball machines at a store across from Masonite. Still over a decade away from being the Imperial Wizard of the KKK, he had only been in Laurel for three years. He said that afternoon he witnessed a group of men spontaneously get up a lynch mob. He said they weren’t loud. There was no speech making. They fully expected for the courts to step in as they had two times before on Willie’s proscribed death day and save him in the nick of time. This group of citizens was going to make sure that Willie McGee didn’t cheat death again. Sam said he watched as one of the men calmly walked over to his desk in the store, pull a pistol from a drawer, and tuck it under his shirt. With growing admiration, Bowers watched as the men departed the store and headed for the courthouse. He didn’t join them, but Bowers said they left him inspired with a new sense of purpose.
When they got to the courthouse that afternoon, the men found that a crowd of over 200 had already gathered. But there was no Willie McGee. With the entire world watching their every move, Governor Wright and Mayor Gartin were not going to risk a lynching. They had conspired to keep McGee in Rankin County’s “lynchproof” jail until the last minute when they would whisk Willie into Laurel accompanied by a well-armed state guard. The lynchers would have to wait like everybody else.
Roy Hammond told me that at about 5:30 that day he got off work from Laurel News Stand, hopped on his bike and headed straight for the courthouse to see the going’s on. Only 14 at the time, he said he was awed at what he saw. The crowd had swollen to almost a thousand by that time. “They weren’t yelling or screaming,” he said. “Some remember a frantic mob. But the way I remember it, they were somber, almost reverent.”
Jean Holifield was 19 and told me she had been working late at her church, the Kingston Assembly of God. Her minister, Reverend Yates, a man she admired greatly, was a real Christian and a voice of the community. She said Brother Yates loaded them all up in the car to go to the courthouse. “He was just that kind of person. He wanted to see if there was anything he could do to help.”
Mrs. Holifield remembers waiting in the car while Rev. Yates made his way through the multitude, all the way up the steps and through the door of the courthouse where the execution was going to take place. It was dark now and the car became engulfed by a surge of people, spilling from the lawn and sidewalks and crowding into the streets.
Carolyn Horne said she got there later that night. Only a child she remembers gripping tightly to someone’s hand, perhaps her mother’s. The crowd was close, and she recalls looking up and noticing how the lights from the courthouse shown through the trees. She told me she didn’t realize exactly what was going on, but knew it wasn’t good. She was frightened. The crowd was not loud, but somber. People talked low and serious to the persons next to them.
Anne Sanders remembers that night well. It was nice, spring weather, cool enough for a sweater, she said. But once you got in the crowd, you warmed up quick. Mrs. Sanders was already a seasoned reporter for the Laurel Leader Call, and had covered each of McGee’s three trials. But her interest was also personal. She told me that she lived across the street from where the rape occurred. She was acquainted with the victim and her family, and had gone to extra lengths to dispute the stories the international press was reporting, dragging the reputation of her neighbor through the mud.
Mrs. Sanders had been invited by the paper’s editor to join the victim’s family, along with members of the international press, to witness the execution. She declined. Mrs. Sanders took her post outside with the crowd, under the courthouse balcony where the bailiff would eventually appear, either to announce another reprieve, or the fact that Willie McGee was dead and the nearly six year ordeal had finally come to an end.
Rev. Raymond L. Horne was a cub reporter for the Leader Call at the time. He was also in the crowd that night, standing close to the front door of the courthouse. He didn’t even have a press card, but he was a curious young man and already a dedicated reporter. Even though there was no chance of getting into the courthouse, he felt he needed to be there nonetheless. He knew it was history in the making.
Above the rumble of the crowd and the roar of the generators, Rev. Horne thought he heard someone call out his name. He looked up and saw a man in uniform. It was his friend, Paul Craven, who had the job that night of guarding the door to the courthouse.
“Raymond!” his friend called out, “You belong in here!” He swung the door open for Rev. Horne.
That’s how Raymond Horne got to be a firsthand witness to history.
Jim Clark was still a boy, living in Myric with his mother. His uncle operated a streetcar and used to bring back all the talk out of Laurel. He said that when his uncle told him about the electrocution, they all got in the truck and headed off to Laurel.
“Why did you go?” I asked Mr. Clark.
“I was a kid and ain’t heard of nothing like it before. It was big news.” Then he dropped the bombshell. “I shimmied up that water oak and took me a peek through that second story window.”
I couldn’t believe my luck! Had I actually found the boy in the tree? The boy that Jimmy Ward of the Clarion Ledger had caught with his camera almost 60 years ago? Indeed, Mr. Clark said he was that same boy. Over half a century later, both the water oak and the boy remain firmly rooted in Jones County. Mr. Clark, who still resides in the Myric Community, said he was only up in the tree for five minutes. He looked in and saw the back of the electric chair, but then they got frightened and went home, afraid of what the black community would do once McGee had been executed.
The thing that all these people above have in common is that they are all white. The only African-Americans that were on the scene were Willie McGee and his preacher. But that doesn’t mean black Laurel citizens do not have a story to tell about that night. They certainly do. They were also witnesses. It’s just that their story has not been told... yet.
Column 4
Raymond Horne: Witness to an Execution
Part I
His speech is gentle, but undergirded with a quiet authority. You can tell he must have been a good preacher. But that wasn’t always Raymond Horne’s ambition. His father, who later began Horne’s Nursery on his farm north of Laurel, was a Depression era minister, and as a youngster Raymond’s silent prayer was, “Oh Lord, anything but that!”
For a while it looked like he would have a career in the newspaper business. He studied journalism at Anderson College in Indiana and edited the school paper. In 1951 he got a job with Laurel Leader Call as the farm editor at 35 dollars a week. Plus he got to write the obits.
Rev. Horne said he believed he could have made it in the newspaper business, if the Lord hadn’t had other plans for him. He seems to be blessed with that journalistic urge to know “the rest of the story.”
Horne wasn’t even supposed to be covering the Willie McGee case. That was reserved for seasoned reporters, like Odell McRae and Anne Sanders, but he couldn’t stay away. His instincts told him he needed to be there the night of the execution. This was history.
His lifelong friend, the late Paul Craven, must have thought so, too. Deputy Sheriff in 1951, Craven was guarding the courthouse door that night, and as soon as he spotted his buddy in the crowd of over 1500 people, he called out, “Raymond, you belong in here.”
At 11:00, an hour before the scheduled execution, Raymond entered the courthouse, climbed the marble steps and stepped into the chancery courtroom. The electric chair had already been set up. The forbidding contraption faced the courtroom with its back against the judge’s bench. He was one of 60 men, most of whom were standing around, talking in small groups. Reporters from all the nationals were there.
“I was only a young pup,” he said, and he was feeling privileged to be in the room at all. He wasted no time in claiming a seat before somebody “found him out”. He chose a chair in the jury box, front row, center, only a few paces from the waiting electric chair. He sat there for an hour, silently observing.
At midnight everyone turned to see two guards escorting a dazed looking black man into the courtroom. This was the first time Horne had laid eyes on Willie McGee. The condemned was wearing a light blue shirt with sleeves cut at the elbow and a pair of dark blue trousers. He had on loud yellow socks under bedroom slippers that whispered quietly as he shuffled his feet across the courtroom floor. Horne saw that McGee’s head had already been shaved.
Horne said that one thing he would never forget was how one of the guards had hooked his finger in McGee’s belt and appeared to be lifting him up and pulling him forward, guiding him toward the chair. Willie didn’t resist, meekly following the guard’s lead. In fact, Horne said, McGee had no reaction at all. He had the appearance of a man drugged.
Horne watched as McGee voluntarily sat down in chair, and as leather straps were fastened around his abdomen, wrists and ankles. The slippers were carefully placed a few feet away by the bench.
Willie McGee made no statement. The only words he uttered were, “Is the Rev. Patterson here?” At that, a black preacher showed himself and took his place by McGee’s side, Bible in hand. McGee never looked up at the preacher.
Next the executioner put the metal skull-shaped electrode on McGee’s head and a wide leather band across his face, covering his eyes.
So far, everything had been done at the height of efficiency. It had taken them only three minutes from the time McGee entered the courtroom to the time the executioner threw the switch.
Horne said he heard a loud, “Walloom!” and he saw McGee lift up in the chair. And then a few seconds later, there was another jolt, but this time, the body offered no response.
Dr. S.F. Carr, the county health officer put a stethoscope up to Willie’s chest. His smooth, dark skin was now covered with prominent goose pimples.
That was when people begin to get up and leave. But not Horne. He had picked up on something he found curious and naturally he was determined to check it out. Dr. Carr was standing over the body, but apparently not doing much of anything. Horne walked over to the doctor and asked him straight out, “What are you waiting for?” Doctor Carr explained that there is still brain activity after electrocution, and he was waiting for that to cease.
When Horne looked down at Willie McGee, he could see that the body still trembled. Soon, even that sign of life died away.
With no questions left to ask, nothing left to record for posterity, Raymond Horne descended the stairs and exited through the front door of the courthouse. He stepped into the crowd to make his way home, speaking to no one.
Next Week the interview with Raymond Horne will continue, beginning with his visit to the funeral home where McGee’s body lay.
Column 5
Raymond Horne: Witness to an Execution
Part II
As Raymond Horne exited the courthouse, the grim memory of what he had just witnessed weighed heavily upon him. The crowd was still there, anxious for any news at all, but as he headed down the courthouse steps and winded his way through the throng, no one bothered to stop him. Here was a man who had been an eyewitness to one of the grimmest episodes in the annals of Mississippi justice, and no one even asked him about it.
Laughing, Rev. Horne told me he probably looked too young to know what was going on.
But even after all that, Horne couldn’t let go of the story. He had an obit to write. Instead of calling, which was the usual practice, he showed up in person at Christian’s Funeral Home, where they had taken the body.
“I will never forget,” he said, “I walked in, and I saw the casket. It was dead quiet. There was not another soul to be seen. ” It just Horne and the body of Willie McGee.
Horne peered into the casket. “I remember two things,” he said. “First, how nicely they had dressed Willie. And second I saw the wide blister around his head from where they had electrocuted him.”
The day of the execution, The Laurel Leader Call published an editorial entitled “A Clean Sheet,” in which the paper congratulated the citizenry on how well they handled the McGee ordeal and to call upon the town to turn the page on the past and start fresh.
Horne was surprised at how fast that page was turned. He said as soon as he was executed, all mention of Willie McGee disappeared. It was if it never happened.
But Horne knew that it had. He had seen it with his own eyes.
A few years after the McGee execution, the Lord called Horne to the ministry. He says flatly that he has no regrets. But from talking with him that spring morning, I’m willing to wager that two things come close, and they both have to do with Willie McGee.
Horne read in all the papers what had happened after he left the courthouse that night. When they brought the body of McGee out under the sheet, the crowd had let out an earsplitting cheer. He said that wasn’t called for. The occasion was a somber one, not one for celebration. It wasn’t worthy of Laurel to be remembered that way.
And the second regret might be this: the account he wrote detailing what he witnessed that historic night never saw the light of day.
In 1982, Rev. Horne was asked to contribute his memories to a book recognizing Laurel’s centennial commemorative. Ever the newspaperman, he recalled in journalistic fashion the significant events he had witnessed since he came to Laurel as a three-year old in 1930. He detailed the history of the 4H Club, the development of hospitals in Jones county hospital, the beginnings of the broiler business, and of course his most dramatic memory, began with, “I remember the Willie McGee Case...”
When he scanned the book on publication, he was surprised to see that they had omitted his recollections of the execution. He called the editor only to be informed that the editorial board wanted to “keep that story buried.” It seemed “The Clean Sheet Policy” asked for by the Laurel Leader Call was still in effect.
His recollections have remained unread, until today.
When I asked him how he felt about his remembrances from 60 years ago finally being published, he said flatly, “I believe in history. It needs to be told like it happened. You shouldn’t leave things out because somebody might not like it.”
Things have come full circle now for Rev. Horne. He lives on the land he plowed as a boy during the Depression. And he’s returned to an old love. He has just completed a book on the history of camp meetings and has begun research on his seventh family history. In addition he has self published a half dozen church histories. Always eager to know “the rest of the story,” his journalistic gifts are still paying off.
Column 7
Harvey Warren: Willie McGee was a Warning
Many folks know Harvey Warren from his impassioned editorials. He’s had several printed in the Laurel Leader Call and the Clarion Ledger and the Jackson Advocate. Harvey is a man of strong opinions. When my mother heard that I was going to meet with him, she was in awe. “He must be brilliant!” she said. Others have asked me to find out if he was crazy or not. So, I didn’t know exactly what to expect when I went to interview Mr. Warren.
What I found was a well-educated, soft-spoken, extensively traveled man with an insatiable appetite for history and justice, and some carefully considered views about race in America. He wasn’t the ranting lunatic some told me to expect.
Besides his degrees from California State at Sacramento, Harvey Warren has had first hand experience with matters of race. His father was a plumber who claimed Sam Bowers as one of his clients. Young Harvey tagged along on jobs to several of Sam’s business’s on the black side of the tracks and remembers a reserved, well-mannered man whose trademarks were a freshly ironed shirt and kakis with careful creases, and he always drove a car the same shade of light blue. Harvey said he looked up to Bowers because he carried himself like a civilian soldier.
Later, Harvey had friends who worked at John’s Restaurant and often spotted Bowers there having intense conversations with other white men. But everybody stayed on their side of the race line and paid the white men no mind. Harvey has since wondered while his friends were pouring Bower’s coffee, if these men weren’t openly planning the bombing of a church or a synagogue or someone’s home, never giving a thought that a black employee might overhear.
But the thing that struck me most about Harvey’s story was his recollections of the Willie McGee trial. Harvey said he was only six at the time of the execution. McGee’s relatives lived on Harvey’s street and for most of his young life, rumors of McGee’s daily beatings and torture hung heavy over the neighborhood, filling folks with fear and dread. When it was finally over, the overall feeling in the black community was one of sad relief. People thought that perhaps, after over five years of incarceration in white jails, Willie McGee was better off dead.
After the execution, Harvey said that many black fathers forced their sons to go to Christian’s Funeral Home where the McGee’s body lay. “But it wasn’t for the viewing,” Harvey said, “It was for the message.”
When he resisted looking at McGee’s body, his father lifted young Harvey up and held him above the casket. Then his father pronounced to the six year old, “This is what happens with you mess with white women.” But Harvey can’t remember what he saw. He blocked it out.
He may not remember the sight of McGee’s body, but he never forgot that experience. Nor did he forget when, four years later, soon after the Emmitt Till lynching, his father became furious with his son when he heard Harvey come whistling down the street. It shocked Harvey. His whistling had always been a source of pride. In fact several people I interviewed remember Harvey as a boy who sure knew how to whistle a tune. They even called him “The Whistler.”
But after word got back to Laurel that a boy not much older than Harvey had been beaten, shot, tied to a gin fan and thrown into the Sunflower River, all for whistling at a white woman, Harvey’s father warned his son he’d better never catch the boy whistling again. Something so innocent as whistling your favorite love song had become a matter of life and death to an eleven-year old boy.
As I talk with folks, black and white, who lived through this time, I often wonder what impact these early impressions could make on a young child’s life.
Harvey shared with me a story that helped me better understand. When he was in California working on his masters degree in government, there was a girl whom he really liked. He can remember her name to this day, forty years later. She was white. Even though she was in his study group, he could never bring himself to initiate a friendship with her. Every time he tried, it all came back. The memory of being held above the casket of a dead man. A father’s warning, ”This is what happens when you mess with a white woman.” Any words of friendship were choked off by fear. “It becomes part of your DNA,” Harvey explained. “The fear and the caution never leave you.”
I was having lunch with my cousin at the Reserve the other day, and I related Harvey Warren’s story. A look of surprised recognition passed over my cousin’s face. “Oh, that’s what they meant!”
“That’s what who meant?” I asked.
She said that when she was a teenager in the ‘60’s she had a job at Pasquale’s Pizza. My cousin has always been the adventurous type and she decided she wanted to become friends with the two black girls who also worked there. Nobody she knew had black friends. They all decided they would go to the drive-in to see a movie.
Her new friends went home with my cousin so she could change out of her work clothes. While my cousin was dressing she called out to the girls to come join her in the bedroom. They adamantly refused to do so.
“Don’t be silly,” my cousin said. “I don’t mind.”
One finally explained, dead serious, “We can’t. It’s bad luck to see a white woman without any clothes on!”
My cousin thought it a silly superstition at the time, only to learn, over forty years later, the grave significance of that custom, handed down by generations of black mothers and fathers, in an effort to keep their children alive.
Column 20
Healing Stories
After sitting down with dozens of Jones Countians and listening to their memories of Willie McGee—his arrest for raping a white woman, his three trials and finally his execution in the traveling electric chair at the Laurel courthouse—I had hit a dead end. The next logical step would be to interview the surviving family members of both McGee and the rape victim, but where were they? The world seemed to have swallowed them up.
I was about to give up on the story when a couple of chance occurrences put me on a new track.
While sitting in the Forrest County courthouse, poring over transcripts from the second of McGee’s trials, I turned the page and there it was. Someone had slipped a scrap of paper between the pages with a name, address and phone number. It took a moment to understand what I had found. It appeared to be the contact information for the victims’ eldest daughter! Just to make sure, I asked the County Clerk, and she said, yes, one the victim’s children had been there within the last year searching for information about her mother’s case.
I held onto the paper for weeks, wondering if I should call or not. People who remembered her had told me how she had never gotten over the trauma of the trial and its aftermath. I didn’t want to cause her additional pain.
Finally I dialed the number. It’s funny. I was half expecting to hear the youthful voice of the pretty majorette her fellow classmates had described to me. An older woman picked up, then it occurred to me that she must be in her seventies by now. But behind her words, I still detected the shy girl who had stirred the awkward sympathy of her classmates. Several had told me they hadn’t known what to say to a girl whose mother had been raped by a black man in 1940’s Mississippi. Especially, they said, after the McGee’s defense team began to suggest that it was not rape, but an affair. This had to have made her feel isolated and alone, no matter how well intentioned her friends.
We had a long, intense conversation. There were tears as well as flashes of anger. The wounds were still fresh, the memories sharp and clear. We talked of many things, but she asked me to respect her privacy and not make the content of our conversation public. I agreed. But it was clear that the tragedy that befell her family over sixty years ago still haunts her today, and is still shaping her life.
A few days later, a second twist of fate occurred. I got an email from the family of Willie McGee. They now live in Nevada. McGee’s granddaughter said that a relative in Laurel sent her Aunt Della, Willie McGee’s eldest daughter, a copy of a column I had written about her father. They said they wanted to meet with me and tell their story. Of course I said “yes.” I’ll be flying out to meet with them at the end of January.
Fate has brought me in contact with the eldest daughter from each family, two children whose lives have been shaped by heartbreak. According to my math, they were both nine years old when McGee was arrested for the crime, and neither was ever the same again. Both were forced by fear and shame to leave their homes. Both were innocent of any wrongdoing, yet each had to carry a profound burden of guilt and disgrace. It began to occur to me that what these two women have in common is far greater than what separates them.
But this tale of shared stories doesn’t end there. Let me tell you of another incident that came to my attention a few weeks ago. In 1974, Albert Atkins, a 19 year-old black man, was shot and killed in Laurel by a white man named Ronald Hannah, 22, the son of a Jones County pastor. Jessie Atkins, the victim’s older brother, told me that this incident, which sparked demonstrations and a riot, eventually destroyed his family. Not only did it take away his best friend, his brother Al, but the loss also led to his grandmother’s succumbing to the overwhelming grief of losing her favorite grandchild. Because the killer was never charged with a crime, his father was unable to get over the injustice. He began stockpiling guns, filling the house with dozens of them, even obtaining a .357 Magnum, identical to the weapon that took his son’s life. He was never the same again. His health rapidly deteriorated and he died a young man. Today, Jessie’s mother still mourns silently, unable to speak of her loss.
Jessie told me that he was determined to avenge his younger brother’s death. He remembers the night he went to the home of the only Hannah he could find in the phone book. He drove by the house for 3 or 4 hours with a loaded gun in his lap, waiting for someone to show himself. He wasn’t even sure it was the right house. The next day his brother, struggling for his life in his room at the Community Hospital, looked up a Jessie from his bed and said, “Brother, let it go.”
Soon after his brother’s death, Jessie, who had served his country in the military, was sent to Parchman for drug possession and distribution. He roamed around aimless from job to job, bitter about his loss, blaming Ronald Hannah for destroying his family. Jessie resented the fact that the white boy would go on to graduate from college, get married and have a chance at a normal, happy life.
Today Jessie has finally got his own life together. He has tried to do as his brother had asked thirty years earlier, to “let it go.” He’s a hard worker and now owns several properties in Atlanta. He has found Christ and is an ordained minister. He is in a good marriage.
But even today, when he speaks of his brother, he breaks into tears. There is only one thing that he wants. He would like to sit down with his brother’s killer and listen to his side of the story.
“Maybe,” Jessie said, “Ronald will say something that will make me understand. Maybe he would even say he regrets it happening. That would help me and my mother so much.”
The thing I’m learning about stories is that they are never done. A story lives forever, never ceasing to reshape itself, and in the process, it reshapes us. In many stories, if you listen carefully, you can hear a profound ache, a plea for healing and resolution. And because stories don’t die, they give us a second chance at redemption.
I hope the time is near for the two daughters, now both 72, to sit in the same room and tell their stories to one another. I wish the same for Jessie and his brother’s killer. I would like to think it possible for them to talk with each other across race, across time, across guilt and blame and shame. I can’t help but believe they know each other better than they think. And I believe they need each other more than they know. I even believe their stories can redeem each other’s pain.
Someone once said, “In relationship we are wounded and in relationship we are healed.” And sometimes, it is the person who has been a part of the wounding, who holds the secret to our healing. Only they can tell the story that makes us well.
Column 22
Mrs. Maycie Gore: The Defiant One
When you go around asking complete strangers to reveal their memories about past events—like Willie McGee, the Knights, Leontyne Price, Sam Bowers and the KKK—you get a lot less and a lot more than you bargained for.
I secretly hope that this person will be the one who finally solves the mystery and fills in the blanks. To that degree, I am always a little let down. Each person holds only his piece to the puzzle.
But then again, I end up getting more that I could have hoped, because many people, along with that bit of information, offer something even more valuable. A glimpse into their own history. They give me the gift of their life.
I’m thinking now of Mrs. Maycie Gore. Indeed she has memories of Willie McGee. She was 18 and working at Snow White Cleaners across from the jail and says she can still see Willie gazing forlornly out the window of his cell. The word in the black community was that he was there for a crime he didn’t commit. Maycie and the other black workers would pool their nickels and pennies and carry the fistful of change over the jailer, telling him it was for Willie, to buy cigarettes.
That was her total memory of Willie McGee. Maybe it doesn’t say much about Willie, but it says volumes about Mrs. Gore. That act of generosity was also an act of defiance. She is not the kind of person who allows the hopelessness of a situation to rob her of the ability to act, even if the act is only symbolic. She will not surrender without a stand. She told me, “You have to find a way to defend yourself, to satisfy you conscience.”
She said, “I guess I got it from my daddy. Nobody called him nigger and walked away.”
That seems to be the theme of her life. As a child she could do nothing about being forced to sit in the back of the bus on a wood plank “reserved” for black people, while the white kids got to ride up front. But that didn’t stop her from pulling those same kids out of the tree and beating them up when they threw rocks at her brothers.
She tells me another story. When she was a young teen she got a job with her sisters in the kitchen at the downtown Walgreens. Blacks were hired to cook the food that only white folks were allowed to eat. One day while they were fixing a sandwich for a white boy, the girls noticed him laughing at them, and mouthing the word, “nigger.”
The sisters couldn’t change the segregationist practice at Walgreen’s lunch counter, but they knew they had to do something to “defend their conscience.” One of the sisters spat onto the boy’s sandwich before she placed the bread on top. While the boy ate his sandwich, the girls stared at him and giggled. He had no idea what was so funny.
“Now it was our turn to laugh,” Mrs. Gore chuckles. She winks at me. “Always be good to your waitress.”
In 1964, when she let a white freedom worker from Michigan stay in her home, the Klan threatened to dynamite her house. “I remember plenty of nights, hunkering down in the hallway with my family, waiting to be blown up.” But she let the boy remain with her all summer.
Later in the 1960’s she ventured out to an organizing meeting for the Freedom Democratic Party being held at the old Providence Church. Only 10 people had the courage to show. Mrs. Gore was elected secretary.
The next day the white press printed her full name and address in the paper, placing her and her husband’s lives and jobs at risk. One of her jobs was watching the children of a white preacher in Laurel who was rumored to be in with the Klan. Several times before, he had tried to pump Maycie for information about what “the colored were up to.” This was just before Chaney, Schwerner and Goodman’s bodies were found up in Neshoba County. When she went to work the next day, the preacher was sitting at the breakfast table with the paper in his hand.
“If you are going work for me, Maycie, you’re going to have to curtail your activities.” She was silent. She simply walked over the refrigerator, reached on top to get her purse, and left the preacher sitting there.
The incident only strengthened her conviction to be a community organizer. Later she worked setting up Head Start schools driving all over Jones and Wayne Counties, recruiting parents.
“Of course what we were really doing was registering people to vote, and the Klan knew that.” Again there were threats on her and her family’s life. Unmarked cars full of white men were always tailing her.
At 78 Maycie Gore hasn’t slowed down. She’s still a fighter, whether it is going up against City Hall to keep the beer joints out of her neighborhood or protecting Laurel’s trees.
The day I visited her she was still riled up about a comment Sarah Palin had made about Obama, putting him down because he was a “only” a community organizer.
But she found a way to fight back and satisfy her conscience. John McCain sent her a fundraising letter admonishing her “not to sit idly by” and let Obama win. Mrs. Gore said she took a pencil and underlined that part of the letter and then wrote, “Senator McCain, don’t worry. I will not be sitting idly by, because I am a COMMUNITY ORGANIZER and will be out there organizing to make sure you don’t win!”
And of course that’s what she did.
By the way, when I left her house that day, she was still considering whether or not to mail that letter—without a stamp—forcing McCain/Palin to pay the postage. Like with Willie’s cigarettes, it may be only small change, but the value to her conscience is priceless.
Leontyne Price
Column 25 Touched by Greatness Part 1
I couldn’t write a book about Laurel without mentioning Leontyne Price, the local African American girl who grew up to become the most renowned opera singer in the world. Yet I wanted to say something that hadn’t been repeated a million times before.
Here’s what I believed I knew for sure: Mary Violet Leontyne Price was discovered while doing chores in the mansion of a wealthy white woman. The Laurel banker’s wife, a very cultured and open-hearted lady was astonished when she overheard Leontyne singing and promptly took the young girl under her wing. Paid for her schooling. Got her into Julliard. Opened the doors to high society. And before you know it, Leontyne Price is the star of the Metropolitan Opera, touring Europe, entertaining presidents, premiers and crowned heads. This was one of my favorite stories as a child. I wanted it to be true.
It sounded just like the Cinderella fairytale: a poor girl, a scullery maid perhaps, chafing her fingers raw, scrubbing the pots of rich folks, is one day magically transformed by a kindly fairy godmother into a beautiful princess.
It is a story that made me swell up with pride as a white Mississippian. It offset the hateful criticism that is often leveled against our State where race is concerned. In fact, after moving to Minneapolis, I’ve recited that story to skeptical Northerners more than once as evidence of white Mississippi’s benevolence toward blacks. It was a great defense against Sam Bowers and the KKK.
However, in the process of speaking with Laurel’s African Americans about Leontyne, my fairytale account was not much appreciated. I think what caused the most discomfort was my asking, “Do you remember when Mrs. Chisholm discovered Leontyne?”
When all else fails, listen. So I began asking for their accounts of how the opera diva got her start. And is often the case when I begin collecting stories across the color line, the telling of this familiar story changed. Many of the details were the same, but the center of gravity shifted. Mrs. Chisholm and her kind generosity is mentioned, but more as an afterthought. It was not the focal point of the story.
I learned from blacks who knew her, Leontyne’s greatness was seen as inevitable. Finding someone like Mrs. Chisholm to open up doors for her was destined. It was not charity. Leontyne was already “discovered.” If anything, her greatness discovered Mrs. Chisholm, not the other way around.
That is not the first time I’ve run into this predicament with African Americans. I assume that we are speaking the same language and then suddenly find we are reading off different scripts entirely.
The first time centered around the movie, To Kill A Mockingbird. You know the story. The one in which the brave and honorable Atticus Finch takes up the cause of a hopeless black man, falsely accused of raping a white woman. I tear-up every time I see the movie. I want to be as pure as Atticus Finch. In fact, year after year, in the American Film Institute’s poll, he is voted the number 1 greatest movie hero of all time. I mean, who doesn’t love that story?
You’d be surprised.
I was discussing the movie with Don, a black friend of mine in Minneapolis, and he flat out said he wouldn’t let his kids see the movie or read the book.
I was dumbfounded. “Why not? It makes us feel so good about each other.”
“That movie makes white people feel good about themselves. But it makes black folks sick to their stomachs.”
Don explained that to him the story reinforces the lesson that blacks are helpless victims and they have to find a white man to save them. “It’s flattering to you as a white man. It’s humiliating to me as a black man. I want my kids to have more self-respect. I don’t need anyone else telling them that they are victims.”
That was a real eye-opener. Same movie, different morals. Who was right? It sounded a lot like the arguments I’ve gotten into over O.J!
Blacks who remember the Price family don’t deny the importance and the generosity of Mrs. Elizabeth Chisholm. They love her for what she did. But they believe that Leontyne was touched by greatness long before this benevolent lady came along. Yes, Mrs. Chisholm is still an important piece of the story, but she is not the story.
In fact, there are two other women, both black, who replace Mrs. Chisholm in the starring role. One is Leontyne’s musical mentor Mrs. Hattie V.J. McInnis, a teacher not only at Oak Park Vocational High School, but a life-long educator to the entire community. The other was Laurel midwife Mrs. Kate Price, not only Leontyne’s mother, but a mother all her people could claim.
What I discovered was a long-ago, almost forgotten, web of community. It was an invisible village, a conspiracy that operated under the radar of Jim Crow. To a large degree it was led by proud, strong-willed black women, unwilling to let segregation and discrimination deprive their children of a splendid future. The goal was to ensure that found greatness was not an accident. That children did not have to depend upon luck or charity to achieve their dreams. Their conspiracy launched surgeons, lawyers, political scientists, college professors, star athletes, Army generals, concert pianists, and yes, operatic superstars. Each summer throngs of alumni still find their way back to the shrine of Oak Park to pay homage to those who have gone before, who nurtured them and protected them from the disease of self-hate and despair.
Mrs. McInnis and Mrs. Price are gone now, as are many in that conspiracy. I’ll be writing more about them. There are only a few folks left to tell their story, and to grieve their loss.
It is indeed a new day, filled with great promise and hope for equality. But many of the remaining elders in the black community look at the current state of the village and wonder, who will re-weave the web that discovers greatness in each child?
Perhaps there is still much we can learn from them while their voices are still with us. Perhaps we should ask.
In future columns, you’ll be hearing from the elders. I’m interviewing people like Mrs. Elner Andrews, Rev. Catherine Arrington, Mrs. Gladys Austin, Mrs. Mrs. Rose Donaldson, Mrs. Macie Gore, Mrs. Bertha Crowell, and Mrs. Rose Thompkins. I’ll ask these gracious ladies to share lessons, memories and counsel on how to weave a web of community greatness. If there are others whom you think should be heard from, please let me know.
Column 26 Leontyne Price: Touched by Greatness Part 2
“There was complete stillness in the sanctuary. The great diva stood in majestic pose. The hands had come to rest in an angelic, prayerful attitude. The shoulders lower almost imperceptibly. She was in complete control of the moment. Then she began to sing. ‘Oh, Holy Night,’ rose up in a voice that was so much fuller than I had ever heard. She made the room feel larger, more spacious than the 400-seat sanctuary. She was using the entire room as her instrument. And then when she got to the soaring verse, ‘Fall on your knees, oh hear the angel’s voices,’ someone in the balcony screamed a great scream of emotion. It was a powerful moment.”
Those are the words of Jerry Donaldson, describing to me his cherished memory from Christmas, 1962. Only a junior at Oak Park High School, he had been chosen to accompany the legendary Leontyne Price for the special Christmas Service at Laurel’s St. Paul’s Methodist Church. That moment, Jerry told me in our phone conversation, was life-changing. He was inspired to become a successful musician himself. On that day, Jerry was no doubt touched by greatness. But how did that moment come to be? How did a 16 year old boy find his way into such an auspicious position?
It was by no accident. I’ve learned that during Jim Crow there were two indicators of greatness for children in the black community. One was to graduate from Oak Park and the other was to be birthed by Miss Kate Price, Leontyne’s mother, the community midwife. If you had one of those things in your favor, you had a good chance.
Jerry Donaldson had both. Miss Kate attended his mother at his birth in 1945 and he graduated Oak Park in 1963. And he has gone far. He’s an accomplished concert pianist who lives now in Berkley, California.
“Oak Park was a point of pride,” Jerry says. “It attracted dedicated professionals who had experiences to expand our dreams. And because of Masonite, you had a strong middleclass. With a middleclass you can attract and pay teachers. We got teachers who had a lot of world experience. We could have been very closed and provincial people. But instead we were involved in the world.”
That’s the way Oak Park was in those days. Cleveland Payne, a Laurel historian, writes beautifully of Oak Park Vocational High School and its role in shaping life and culture in the black community from 1928 until its doors closed in 1970.
At Oak Park, Jerry Donaldson’s music teacher was Mrs. Hattie V.J. McInnis, Leontyne Price’s former mentor.
“In music room at school,” he recalls, “Mrs. McInnis hung pictures over the blackboard of Leontyne Price and Roland Hayes, and Natalie Hendaris, all accomplished black musicians. She would put these images in front of us and groom us. She gave us something to aspire to.”
And just as Mrs. McInnis had groomed Leontyne years earlier, her duty was now to champion Jerry. It was customary for Mrs. McInnis to accompany Leontyne at her Laurel performances. But this time, Mrs. McInnis claimed she was getting too old and requested that Jerry stand in for her. Jerry believes it was Mrs. McInnis’s way of saying, “You’re time has come.” It was to be a rite of passage.
When he showed up at the Price house to meet Leontyne for the very first time, Jerry soon got the feeling that everybody was in on the plan except for the great diva.
He rang the bell. “I was in great anticipation. Foolish enough not to be nervous,” Jerry remembers. Then from somewhere in the house heard Miss Kate call out, “Oh, Leontyne, there’s a young man to see you!”
What followed was a not too encouraging exchange of words between mother and daughter. It was clear that this was not Lenotyne’s idea. After a long, nervous wait, Miss Kate appeared as if nothing at all was amiss and lead Jerry back to meet her daughter.
“I walked into her room and there she was, her regal head wrapped in a turban and looking very world-weary from her travels. She pronounces dryly, ‘Mother says, you are going to play for me tomorrow at church.’”
“’I say, ‘Yes.’”
“’I have some songs that are not going to be too hard,” she said, studying him warily. ‘Perhaps we should go over to the church and practice.’”
And that began a twenty-year relationship. He went to hear her perform every chance he got, beginning with those packed and famously “integrated” Oak Park recitals in segregated Laurel.
“A few whites always reserved their seats together,” he recalls. “They got the first four rows. The ladies were heavily furred and gentlemen were sheepish, having been hauled out for the cultural event.”
When she toured a city near where he was studying or working, she always put Jerry on her guest list for visitations backstage after the shows. She displayed a keen interest in his future, offering phone numbers of contacts who could advance his career.
Once she asked what his plans were, and he told her he was saving to buy a Steinway grand piano. Much to the consternation of her manager who was in the dressing room with them, she pulled out her checkbook and wrote him a $400 check for the down payment. The last time he saw her was in San Jose. She was in her eighties.
Jerry has no doubt that he owes a great deal to Leontyne Price. But he reserves his highest praise for that conspiracy of women who recognized his greatness and who decided that his time had come.
Laurel, Mississippi: Athens in a Bubble
(Columns 18. 19, 21. 24)
FAULT LINES
Twenty-six years after the Civil War ended, the Yankees took over Laurel, Mississippi. There were no shots exchanged, only money. Not that Jones County had never seen Yankees before, but until that point in time, we had successfully avoided being occupied by them. After all, Jones County got its name from John Paul Jones whose famous line was “I have not yet begun to fight!” That pretty much summed up Jones County. They’d fight anybody, anytime, anywhere, for the right to be left alone to their own ways.
The county got the nickname of “The Free State of Jones” for more that one reason. Before the Civil War, it was hard to get anybody to stay, much less hold any kind of public office. When you were in Jones County, things always looked better some place else. Nothing but endless pine forests and poor farming land. So for a large part of the County’s history, those who remained were free from any form of government and learned to work things out for themselves, every man the master of his own world, regardless how meager. This even extended to family rearing. If the few men who owned slaves wanted to procreate with one and raise up two families side-by-side, it was nobody’s business but theirs.[i]
When the Civil War commenced, this attitude of fierce independence, combined with the relative scarcity of slavery dampened enthusiasm for seceding from the Union, and Jones County became a refuge for Confederate deserters, Union sympathizers, and those who believed that just because Mississippi seceded from the Union, they didn’t have to. That’s when “The Free State of Jones” got its second meaning. Jones County fancied itself an independent republic. The message was loud and clear, “just let us be!” The heroes of Jones County were not grey-clad soldiers, but backwoods men and women employing any means, fair or foul, to stay alive, feed their families, guard their farms, and steer clear of what they called, “a poor man’s fight and a rich man’s war.”
Respect for authority gained little headway after the Civil War, either. Families made do on small plots of land cut from the seemingly endless forests of pine. Family clans were the only widely accepted form of government. For many years following the War, nobody was much interested in this forlorn swampy stretch of wilderness, and we were left happily to our own devices.
Then the North ran out of trees.
Mississippi’s dense forests of yellow pine attracted wealthy Northerners. They sent their land buyers down to the Piney Woods to gobble up vast acreages, clear-cutting everything within reach of a railroad track and hauling it away to more civilized locations, leaving behind a plague of abandoned shantytowns. Every time they laid a mile of tract, a shantytown spouted up. It was said you could throw a stone from sawmill to sawmill all the way to the Gulf of Mexico. Like an enormous hoard of locusts, the teams would deplete the land, then move on to the next stop, leaving behind abandoned mills, rotting shanties, and ravaged wasteland. It wasn’t pretty, but it was standard business practice. 2
In 1891 Laurel was in line to become the next abandoned shantytown. That’s when Our Marvelous Yankees rode in from Iowa to the rescue. The Gardiner brothers traveled south by train and within the first few moments of setting foot in Mississippi were slick-talked by a Jones County sawmill owner into buying him out of his failing operation, lock, stock, and barrel. For a generous $64,000 they got the ramshackle operation that had already cleared every tree that could be ox-carted to the depot and 16,000 acres of timberland that nobody could get at. The bare, stump-strewn community was such a blemish on God’s earth that the former owner had even refused to name it after himself, not wanting to sully his reputation by having his memory forever associated with that hovel of a settlement. Instead, he called it Laurel, after a flowering bush that grew locally. Unfortunately, the plant was toxic to livestock and had to be eradicated.
We were quick to discover these weren’t your regular run of Northerner. You could say we found them peculiar. This was the age of robber barons—Rockefellers, Vanderbilts, Carnegies—the “Captains of Industry” who were known for amassing great fortunes while keeping their employees impoverished. These were men who operated as absentee landlords, extracting all the wealth from an area and then spending their plunder in more affluent surroundings.
There is an old Laurel saying that underscores this uniquely Gardiner eccentricity. “While others came to rape, pillage and leave, Our Yankees raped, pillage and stayed.”
The two Gardiners brothers, along with their kin the Eastmans, promptly announced they were going to pack up their socialite wives and their privileged children, vacate them from their fine Iowa mansions and elite schools and transplant them to the bleakest, most isolated settlement in Mississippi, which by the way, had to be the most Yankee-averse State in the Nation.
The Gardiners and the Eastmans believed they could raise up a civilized paradise by starting from scratch right there in the Piney Woods. But the question remained, if you were going to civilize anybody in the whole wide world, why would you start out with folks as obstinate and primitive as the backwoods people of Jones County, where the only thing in abundance was acres of yellow pine, too far removed from the railroads to be much good to anybody except outlaws in hiding and razor back hogs?
I can imagine the day Catherine Marshall Gardiner, the Grande dame of our Yankee clan, disembarked at the stump-stubbled depot, and looked around at what her husband had got her into. There she was in her satins and silks, a woman of wealth, breeding and class, on a first-name basis with the nation’s moneyed elite, standing on a rough-plank loading platform, surveying her new home. Goats and pigs roamed among shacks that had never seen a pane of glass or a real cook stove.
She wrote to a friend soon after, “Although things are a bit crude, the people are real neighborly.” Spoken like the most devoted of foreign missionaries. While the men created wealth, she threw all her energy into as civilizing this rough-edged populace with a religious zeal that fueled her ambitions until her the day she died.
Her early reports back home encouraged the other branches of the family. They all followed, the Gardiners and the Eastmans, Our Marvelous Yankees, as rootless and oblivious as clouds, scouting out prime locations for their heavenly palaces in the Piney Woods.
The men worked with a vengeance, tearing down the old sawmill and investing a fortune to bring in an engineering genius from Milwaukee to design a state-of-the-art milling operation. They hired local workers and paid better than market wages.
To everyone’s surprise, this included Black laborers.
Perhaps they hadn’t read the papers.
The year before the founders arrived, Mississippi ratified the notorious Constitution of 1890 that put the Negro back in his place, by eliminating his right to vote, sanctioning segregation, and ensuring he would never be a political or economic threat to a White Mississippi man again.
But in the Eastman-Gardiner never-never-land, Black laborers worked side-by-side with Whites, both in the camps and in the mill. They even promoted some Black workers to foremen. Our Yankees were indeed treading dangerous waters.3
There were those who thought that the Panic of 1893 was the lumber barons just desserts for flouting social conventions. Construction across the nation halted and demand for lumber dried up. Laurel’s marvel of a mill, the one that cost Our Yankees the last of their capital, sat idle. They could not afford to pay their laborers, White or Black.
This is when folks were sure the Iowans would show their true colors. Any other lumber baron would tell their workers to get lost, every man for himself, and when business picked up, start over with a fresh crew. After all, it wasn’t like Our Yankees owed these backwoods laborers their loyalty.
Besides the newspapers, Our Yankees hadn’t read the management books of the day either. Hard-nosed businessmen of the day, like Andrew Carnegie, all agreed you couldn’t be sentimental and make it through these rough times. In those days laborers were locked out, starved, beaten and shot just to show who the boss was.
The Eastman-Gardiners saw things differently. They told their workers if they agreed to accept a drastic cut in pay, that when times improved the company would give them a raise and reimburse them for any back pay lost during the crisis. Management and labor made a mutually beneficial deal that most 21st Century companies couldn’t pull off. After seven months of living hand-to-mouth, better times returned, and the owners not only kept their promise but also donated the entire first year’s profits, $600, toward the building of a school for the workers’ children. Eastman Gardiner Lumber did better than survive.
In 1901, President Theodore Roosevelt outraged White Mississippians when he invited Booker T. Washington to the White House for lunch. James K. Vardaman rode that outrage all the way to the Mississippi Governor’s Mansion. He promised if elected he would close all schools for Blacks. “An educated nigger,” he espoused, “is the waste of a good field hand.” He was overwhelmingly elected.3
Our Yankees must have missed his inauguration speech. They went about constructing schools for their White and Black workers alike, dangerously pushing the limits of Jim Crow. These Yankees were building their empire in a bubble, shielding it from the prevalent racist and monopolistic practices of the day. They figured their money and shrewd business-savvy would keep safe from the menace building around them.
They were right. Under Vardaman’s administration, Laurel got the credit for a lumber boom that dramatically boosted the State’s chronically ill economy. By the end of Vardaman’s term of office in 1908, Mississippi ranked 3rd in the country for lumber production. Laurel alone would soon turn out 1,000,000 board feet of lumber—a day.
Word was getting out about this miracle in the Piney Woods. The locals called it “The Magic City”. Northerners doubted the rumor of “enlightened labor practices” in of all places, Mississippi. And in a lumber camp to boot, sites notorious for drunken brawls, knifings and every other kind of unsavory practice that lonely, demoralized men could devise.4
No, the Northerners figured, it had to be a hoax.
In 1912, the Atlantic Monthly decided exposed the lies and dispatched a reporter to Laurel. And to make the story even more dramatic, they sent a woman. She admitted to coming with very low expectations, probably just hoping to get out alive. She wasn’t much comforted when, on the way down, a fellow passenger assured her that all the talk about hookworm in the South was just a conspiracy to keep Northern capital away. Nor was she thrilled when she arrived in Laurel and saw the “fields of blackened and ragged stumps,” or when a yellow cow ambled down the sidewalk toward her searching for something to chew on.
Of course she was rightly impressed with the modernity of the equipment, able to cut deeper into the forest than ever before. But what really caught her eye was on the monstrous steam-powered loaders, whose primary purpose was to lift immense logs and set them onto the waiting train cars.
Yet that’s not what sent her estimation of Laurel soaring. She noticed that not only were the giant machines conveying logs; they were also being used to lift and remove prefabricated housing units. Our Yankees had devised a way for the usual crew of four hundred workers to take their homes with them every time they changed camp. And since they could have homes, they could have families. Our Yankees had done the impossible. They had transformed vicious, depressing, uncivilized logging-camps into pleasant moveable villages, complete with wives and children and schools and churches. No more endless track littered with dead shantytowns.
And education? At that time Mississippi was spending an average of $6.17 per White pupil. Laurel spent $20. Laurel schools, in 1912, were already acknowledged as best in the State.
To top it all, the woman reporter discovered that founders’ benevolence extended to Negroes. They too were provided with schools and churches, houses and health care, just as were the Whites. This was unheard of anywhere else in the nation, much less the South. While Mississippi spent next to nothing on the few existing Negro schools, and seemed set on burning those down, Laurel was not only constructing them but also liberally funding them. That reporter could see right off Our Yankees had a knack for pushing the prevailing system of segregation as far as they could get away with legally.5
Word spread. Men looking for fair pay, descent employment and a little respect found their way to Laurel. The school system attracted families from all over and new businesses sprang up, included three more sawmills. First-generation free Blacks, whose only option had been to place themselves back into bondage under the sharecropping system, came for the chance of being treated like human beings and they gave rise to the first Negro middle class in Mississippi, some say in the South. Front Street grew into an unbroken string of Black-owned businesses and professionals. They exhibited a sense of upward mobility found nowhere else in the South. According to a Northern paper, “By the 1920s Laurel’s black population evoked a confidence and culture that paralleled the socioeconomic ascension and development of many northeastern black communities.”7
SPLENDOR IN THE SWAMP
Catherine Gardiner had been busy as well. She hit upon an idea that would put as deep an imprint upon Laurel as her husband’s business practices. A well-traveled woman, she was aware of the revolutionary thinking taking hold in cities like Chicago, Detroit and Washington D.C. called the “City Beautiful Movement.” This progressive urban philosophy espoused that the character of the citizenry could be enhanced and civic virtue inspired through beautification and monumental grandeur. This spoke to Catherine’s prophetic spirit. Until now only major cities had embraced the concept. Laurel was a speck on the map with just 8400 people. But that didn’t dampen Mrs. Gardiner’s grandiose visions. She got busy and began advocating.
Tiny Laurel with its pig trails and rutted tracks, sitting on the edge of the Tallahala Swamp, almost overnight became a city of broad boulevards, lined with oak saplings. They were planted as if to show Mrs. Gardiner’s faith in the majesty of her vision.
And just as they had worked within the segregation laws of the day, City Beautiful conformed to certain class distinctions that were respectfully observed in the layout of the city grid. Each level of society was assigned its own street. Just as New York’s Fifth Avenue was a symbol of wealth, Laurel was to have its own majestic Fifth Avenue where the lumber barons erected stately mansions. Fourth Avenue was reserved for managers, third for foremen. Second and First were for workers and their families. Merchants got 6th and 7th. Class and industry were in perfect balance.
Between 1903 and 192O magnificent buildings appeared like Imperial Faberge eggs, each one outdoing the previous in elegance and uniqueness. There were the splendid Georgian, Jeffersonian Revival, and Classical Revival mansions built by the barons. The merchants erected Queen Annes, Colonial Revivals, and Mediterranean style homes. The Episcopal Church on 5th Avenue was Romanesque Revival, while a Presbyterian Church was designed in Neo-Gothic style and erected across the street. There was a Beaux Arts Courthouse and a Prairie-Craftsman Style City Hall inspired by Louis Sullivan. All of this was within a four-block area!
The lumber company’s headquarters was now an opulent Italianate mansion copied from a Roman villa built in the 1540s. Three hundred and fifty buildings, private, commercial and public, went up in bold classical revival styles. The town never had a population much over 20,000 people yet boasted the finest collection of late 19th and early 20th century revival architecture in the South.
The Gardiners engaged the firm of Frederick Law Olmsted to landscape a city parkway system for tiny Laurel. Olmstead, known as the "father of American Architecture,” designed the country’s first public spaces including New York City's Central Park and the grounds surrounding the U. S. Capitol. The National Recreation Association declared Laurel as having the best park system of any small town in America.
And naturally in those days when you thought of golf courses, you immediately Scotland came to mind. So, Seymour Dunn the famous Scottish golfer and noted designer was dispatched to lay out the local golf course. Professional golfers of the day swore it was the best 18-hole course in the nation.6
The local school system became so renown, the prestigious University of Chicago declared that it would accept any Laurel High School graduate without an entrance exam.
The family even transformed their person grief into the city’s glory. The tragic death of the sole male heir to the baron’s empire in 1921, at 23, provided Catherine and her relations with the opportunity to shape the character of Laurel schoolchildren generations to come. As a memorial to the young man, the family built a Georgian Rival mansion to house a public art gallery, the first in the State. The founding families contributed from their own extensive collections, donating important 19th and 20th-century paintings by such noteworthy American artists as Winslow Homer, Albert Bierstadt, George Inness, John Frederick Kensett and Ralph Albert Blakelock. Works by John H. Twachtman and John Singer Sargent were acquired soon thereafter.
When the average person thought of Mississippi, a world-class art museum was not the first thing that naturally came to mind. Take a barefoot boy growing up on a hard-scrabble Jones County farm, set him down on the marble floors of the Lauren Rogers Museum of Art, and just see what happens. I have. One hour in that magnificent temple, located in the poorest State in the nation, lifts a child forever above his Piney Woods horizon, irrevocably altering how he perceives the world and his place in it.8
I can only imagine what Catherine Gardiner and her kin told these internationally renowned designers, architects, engineers and artists to get them to come to Laurel, Mississippi at the turn of the century. What were they thinking as their trains pushed deeper and deeper into backwoods America, past dirt-road depots, shantytowns and falling down tenement shacks, hollow-eyed children doomed to ignorance, hookworm and pellagra, void of any sign of culture and grace, only to be met at the Laurel station by starry-eyed Yankees with open checkbooks and grandiose visions of Athens in a bubble?
Of course there were plenty of times Our Yankees put aside their noble illusions and bowed to popular sentiment. Like in 1911 when the town to erect a Confederate memorial to dispel once and for all, any lingering doubts about Jones County’s loyalty to the late glorious cause. George S. Gardiner was asked to fund the grand marble and granite monument. He contributed $1,200 and the following quip: “You see there a handsome monument erected with Yankee money to the Confederate dead of the Free State of Jones which seceded from the Confederacy after the Confederacy seceded from the Union.”
No doubt he was beginning to understand the fault lines on which he had built his city.
More surprising though, was how little Our Yankees were challenged for their racial tolerant practices. Across the rest of Mississippi, things had only gotten worse for Blacks since the Vardaman administration. Jim Crow was the rule, and most Blacks were shackled to a tenet farm system called sharecropping which seemed to be designed to put them deeper into debt each year.
In 1916 Theodore G. Bilbo was elected governor and proposed a solution to the “race problem.” “I’m the best friend the nigger’s got in the state of Mississippi,” Bilbo declared. “I’m trying to do something for ‘em. I want to send ‘em back to Africa where they belong.”
That period was tragic for Blacks all over the country. It seemed that in every city that African Americans could compete in the workforce and create a viable middle-class, Whites instigated a riot to level the community. From 1917 to 1923, twenty-six race riots erupted. Over a thousand Black citizens were slaughtered by White mobs, their homes and businesses burned.
Then why not Laurel, with its conspicuous Black middle class located in the most racially explosive state in the nation?
An Eastern reporter in 1912 explained the good relations between Blacks and Whites this way. “In general, race troubles seem to arise where the poor Whites are ignorant and inefficient, and so have some reason to fear competition.” But the writer went on to say Laurel Whites were “absolutely opposite…responding to any opportunity for education and self-help.” Mr. and Mrs. Gardiner’s plans to build character into the nature of the work as well into the fabric of city life seemed to be paying off handsomely.9
It allowed Catherine Gardiner to push the envelope even further. When she read an article in the New York Sun about the state of Negro education, she openly questioned Laurel’s commitment to Black education. After learning that black school children received one quarter of the funding appropriated to White education, she spearheaded the building of new schools for blacks, contributing $10,000 and challenging both the city and the Black community to match it. They did, creating a unified effort, ingeniously bridging cultural, class and racial divisions.
In 1928, Oak Park opened its doors, becoming the center of a conspiracy that operated under the radar of Jim Crow. In order not to upset the White supremacists, the school was officially termed a vocational school, which implied teaching only basic life skills and useful trades. Yet Catherine Gardiner and the Black community heroically set about creating an institution that attracted and paid for the best Black teaching talent from around the country. Oak Park launched surgeons, lawyers, political scientists, college professors, star athletes, Army generals, concert pianists, and operatic superstars.10
CRACKING OF THE BUBBLE
Laurel reached its zenith in the 1920s. The founders had ceaselessly advocated civic responsibility, cultural development, and industrial growth, infusing the community with art, traveling theaters, Chautauqua lectures, books, and jobs. Laurel claimed more millionaires per capita than any city in the nation. A host of Black chauffeurs drove their mistresses to the Piggly Wiggly to shop on Fridays. Upstairs maids, downstairs maids, cooks and butlers often lived in their own quarters on the alleys behind the mansions, flaunting small town segregation codes. Things were good, and they looked like they could stay this way forever.
If only the trees hadn’t given out.
By this time there were four milling operations in Laurel, and the lands were depleted. And of course, there was the Great Depression. Even the city in the bubble wasn’t immune from that.
For half a century, the barons had ingeniously used every tool at their disposal to keep their City Beautiful from succumbing to its violent past. Yet the fissures of class and race had always run beneath the town’s foundations. As the Eastman-Gardiner dynasty became less of a force economically, their social and cultural clout to hold together those disparate elements waned as well. The fault lines on which they built their dreams were shifting.
But even as their influence waned, they were able to bequeath new life for their child. With the forests played out, one thing they had was plenty of sawdust. The families sent off to for Thomas Alva Edison’s chief engineer, (again, why not the best?) and charged the young man with coming up with a use for the mountains of waste. By a combination of science and accident he hit upon a revolutionary invention—artificial wood. His name was William Horatio Mason, and he named the product after himself: Masonite. The company grew into an industrial behemoth that would carry the city forward, long after the barons were gone.
By the 1940s, Our Marvelous Yankees, who had come in like clouds, were in retreat. The children no longer graduated from local schools. Their women traveled in the glamorous circles of big city life. They kept 12 room apartments on Manhattan’s Upper East Side and townhouses in Georgetown. The men took jobs on Wall Street. They golfed with Presidents and became involved in international intrigues. A grandson of Catherine’s began what was to become the CIA. They say he was the one who dubbed it “The Mighty Wurlitzer.” They were citizens of the world now.11
Even the Grande Dame Catherine Gardiner, now widowed, seemed to lose her relevance in the face of the encroaching world. She spent much of her time traveling from continent to continent, collecting baskets and exotic artifacts. It was not uncommon to find this type of bizarre item in the local paper.
Mrs. George Gardiner, recently returned from another tour of the world, has made a gift of 24 new baskets, two grass skirts from New Zealand, a poi that a new Zealand girl would wear on her head and few other strange in interesting bits she has picked up, here and there, in her sojourn in the Malay Archipelago. Laurel Leader Call, September 5, 1935.
The temples still stood. Mrs. Gardiner’s seedlings grew into majestic oaks. Each year fourth graders trooped through the art museum to see the second smallest basket in the world and the medieval suit of armor and the Samurai swords. They were told the story about the poor rich boy who died young in 1921 and had his honeymoon mansion rebuilt into this glorious institution. The founding families had taken on the aura of an ancient race of giants.
Their names were still on the streets and etched into the stone lentils of the buildings, but they themselves dime in the memory of its citizens. William Horatio Mason moved into his mansion, not on 5th Avenue with the benevolent barons, but on 6th with the merchants. He was a scientist and entrepreneur, not a molder of character and community. Besides, Laurel was now too industrially diverse and too much a part of the global market to be shaped by one family’s dream, no matter how noble. The “real world” had finally arrived.
As one pragmatic White Laurelite of the time put it, “We’re suffering a terrific hangover from benevolent paternalism. There’s a death struggle to keep up public institutions which were endowed privately, now that the endowments are no longer adequate. We’re used to having poppa foot the bill.”12
What the founding families saw as necessities for shaping the kind of character and civic virtue that could hold a community together across culture, class and race was now as viewed as an unwelcome tax burden.
It is said that every success sows the seeds of its own destruction. It’s possible that the community built upon those old fault lines was always destined to shake apart, as the tectonic plates of history shifted. Laurelites were soon to discover that they couldn’t keep their past waiting in the wings forever.
Notes:
[i] Victoria Bynum, “White Negroes in Segregated Mississippi: Miscegenation, Racial Identity, and the Law,” Journal of Southern History LXIV (May 1998).
2 Noel Polk, A Human Perspective: Mississippi’s Piney Woods, (The University Press of Mississippi 1986), 21-24. Polk, a Mississippi State professor is also the author of Outside the Southern Myth (University Press of Mississippi, 1997) which contrasts the Piney Woods folks of Mississippi with their better known, cotton-rich “…julep-sipping, plantation owning…” cousins in the Delta.
3 Sally Vardaman Johnson, interview with author. Johnson is the great-granddaughter of Mississippi’s notorious governor, James K. Vardaman, known as the “Great White Chief.” Besides advocating the burning of African American schoolhouses, he publicly promoted lynching as a way to enforce White supremacy.
4 Southern Lumberman 28(1 July 1895).
5 Ethel Puffer Howes, “The Aesthetic Value of Efficiency,” The Atlantic Monthly CX (July 1912), 81-91.
6 Lavish Laurel, The New Orleans Times-Picayune, 23 August, 1996.
7Albany Evening Journal, 24 June, 1922.
8 A local tradition that dates well before integration calls for schools to provide fourth-grade students from all the schools in the area, Black and White, a guided tour of the museum. Many older Laurelites, including myself, recall this day being a seminal experience in their emergent worldviews.
9 Ethel Puffer Howes, 88.
10 Cleveland Payne, interview with the author. Payne is a 1957 graduate of Oak Park, a retired college professor and local historian for Laurel’s African American community. He is the author several books including, The Oak Park Story: A Cultural History (National Oak Park High School Alumni Association, 1988)
11 Alexander Chisholm Lindsey, interview with author. Lindsey’s great-uncle was Frank Gardiner Wisner, raised in Laurel, and chosen by Dean Acheson in 1947 to create CIA covert operations. His life of international intrigue and his tragic death are the subjects of several books on the CIA. Lindsey’s grandmother, Elizabeth Wisner Chisholm and granddaughter to the original lumber baron, once overheard her housekeeper, a teen-aged Leontyne Price, singing while she worked. Mrs. Chisholm sent the girl to Julliard and served as her accompanist, filling local venues with black admirers as well as with Laurel’s White elite, effectively integrating Mississippi audiences years before the Civil Rights movement.
12 Laurel Leader Call, 30 April, 1941.