Death in the Delta: Uncovering a Mississippi Family Secret

CHAPTER SEVEN: Big

61 Big May 2006 Before venturing back to Mississippi, I vacillated between thinking about Dad the writer and Dad the gunslinger. One thing was for certain: he was bigger than life. In fact, my mother quietly gave Dad the nickname “Big,” and used it when he was out of earshot . I doubt she knew that Dad weighed eleven pounds when he was born or that he was allowed to breast feed until he was four. Before she died, Mamaw told me that he was walking and talking when he quit. I still shudder at that thought. As a younger man, he developed a larger vision of life and its possibilities, I think, as a result of his education at Davidson College , his experiences in the war, his avid consumption of good books and his contemplative nature. After all, he’d spent the idle hours of his boyhood reading Boy’s Life, American Boy, and his favorite newspaper, the Sunday New York Times, which his father subscribed to and which arrived with five- day-old news. I thought about the time he gave me a signed copy of Eudora Welty’s “Music from Spain.” It was copy number 164 of the 775 that were printed. He was so inspired by it that he went home and wrote an editorial about the Levee Press. He saw it as a significant cultural event that Hodding Carter and Ben Wasson, literary agent and critic, had aspired to capture and elevate the status of Mississippi writers by opening the press. Dad wrote, “More distressing is the fact that southern literary works are graded on a basis of will-it-be-interesting—in New chapter seven big 62 England, by editors and publishers with eastern and northern tastes and standards. “In developing the South industrially, agriculturally, and economically , we must not fail to see that cultural developments go hand in hand with the more material gains. “The Levee Press, and efforts of its nature, is helping to keep the balance.” ��� In 1948, two years after the shootings, the Deer Creek Pilot was awarded Best Weekly of the Year for papers under twenty-five hundred circulation by the Mississippi Press Association. One issue I read covered a wide spectrum of news: “This Week in Washington,” the war with Russia, proceedings of the board of supervisors, the school board, an editorial promoting the Red Cross—“Farmers deserve help,” legal notices, personals, garden club news, Dale Carnegie, John Deere and Coke ads, classified, and an ad for the Joy Theatre in Rolling Fork, showing Betty Grable in Mother Wore Tights. One of Dad’s articles wound up in the Seattle Post Intelligencer. He had made a good decision to follow his heart into newspaper work. But other questions were coming to me. How did he walk about in public with his head held high after killing two men without consequence? In a later conversation with my mother, she told me that Dad never mentioned the incident after he came home from being incarcerated. He didn’t appear to be fearful. She didn’t know what he thought about it. At this early stage in my discovery process, I found this hard to imagine . For Dad to walk away and feel nothing was unconscionable to me, but like my mother, I just “didn’t understand it.” ��� In the late 1940s, before Dad decided to leave the Delta, he was offered a job at another newspaper. Somehow he caught the big 63 attention of the person doing the hiring at the New York Times. Because Dad had a resume that included such diverse roles at the Deer Creek Pilot as publisher, editor, advertising manager, pressman, printer, linotype machine operator, and reporter, it was thought that he would bring a unique perspective to a writing position on the staff. According to my brother, “I would have to believe that the offer would have been largely based on samples of his writing which, of course, were excellent.” When we asked Dad why he decided not to accept the job, he always said that it would have been too hard to move his young family to New York. My mother says she doesn’t remember this. Since she herself lived in New York during the war years, she would have had valuable input into the decision. After Uncle Joe died in India in the war, Mom drove...