Death in the Delta: Uncovering a Mississippi Family Secret

CHAPTER THREE: The Scion

13 TheScion Before the heat under a pot of water reaches 212 degrees, the liquid becomes vexed, and it roils around the edges while bubbles rise off the bottom and gain momentum. Mississippi and other southern states began to simmer under new pressures that arose between World War II and Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. Even before this pre–civil rights period, the efforts of “rugged individualism” had created a neoplantation system in which each unit was self-contained and ruled at the whim of the owner. In Anguilla, my family at one time owned twenty-five hundred acres and was one of a dozen or so major owners of plantations that size or larger. Productivity was dependent on the labor of blacks who were often descendents of slaves, many of whom moved west from states like Georgia and Alabama. Because blacks who lived on the plantations were either indentured servants or tenant farmers whose living conditions fell far short of the lifestyles of the owners, the two groups had, in effect, parallel lives, only communicating with each other in the confines of the roles they played. The heat in the Mississippi Delta began to rise when conscripted blacks returned after service in the war. They had experiences unlike anything they could imagine and which did not square up with their established role in Dixie. Some had seen Negro officers who, in rare cases, might have had authority over white soldiers. At the very least, some would have acquired organizational and leadership skills. They had all been issued uniforms and guns and this created a sense of the potential for equal treatment. Upon returning home with new pride, some of these chapter three the scion 14 men held their heads a bit higher, dared to be assertive, resisted the domination of their white bosses. They had to have known that parades for returning white soldiers were taking place in cities like Greenville, but there was no such homecoming for them. It didn’t take long before the back room at the Pan Am Gas Station in downtown Anguilla began to fill up with African American men, young and old, in pursuit of bootleg alcohol. My grandmother, widowed at the age of thirty-four in 1935, would have found a headstrong servant to be especially troublesome as she attempted to carry out the responsibilities of financing crops, keeping the cotton gin running, and selling high-quality cotton. Her business acumen had its own learning curve, and she had to have felt pressure knowing that her product had been the leading American export since the early nineteenth century. All of that changed two years after her husband died. Cotton lost its position in the export business and was in oversupply. The Great Depression had driven down the price, and the mechanical cotton picker would soon make weeding and picking cotton a whole new enterprise. These concerns and others made for high anxiety on the plantation. March 31, 2006 When I thought about Sis’s story, I sensed that she was soft-pedaling the events of December 12, 1946. She didn’t want me to pursue it, and she expected me to be satisfied that Dad had acted in self-defense. I couldn’t fully trust her memory, just like I couldn’t fully trust my mother’s. Anger and pride, I realized, have a way of subverting the truth, and I would soon learn that each person’s story was “a” truth, never “the” truth. I called my brother, Jay, right away. We were both puzzled and confused. Jay thought it best to approach Sis again himself. He wrote her a lengthy letter and posed some of the questions we shared. He never got an answer. In the weeks that followed, the sixty-year-old family secret continued to trouble and fascinate me. I was developing an the scion 15 understanding and appreciation for the many facets of Dad’s personality , both the good and the dark, but I could not view him as a cold-hearted murderer. At first, I tried to get into his state of mind. I knew his bold, overly responsible, and yet capricious sides. I could see him pulling the trigger without a pause—to defend his brothers and himself. The life he had known from growing up in Mississippi, built on the backs of black men and...