Death in the Delta: Uncovering a Mississippi Family Secret

CHAPTER ONE: Out of the Blue

3 OutoftheBlue March 2006 The phone rang. It was my brother, Jay, calling from the road, driving from our uncle Tom’s funeral in the Florida Panhandle home to Asheville. He had something startling to tell me. It could have been anything, if it had to do with our family—some oddity, strangeness, eccentricity. “Hey. How was the funeral? Who did you see?” He bypassed the usual “catch me up on the family” details and plunged headfirst into the thing that was on his mind. “Molly, you’re not gonna believe what I heard about Dad.” “What?” The mere mention of my father sent the muscles in my stomach into spasm even though six years had passed since we buried him. Jay began by telling me that Uncle Tom’s son, our cousin, drew him aside and asked if he knew about the “shootout ” in Anguilla (Mississippi, our ancestral home). “Tommy told me Uncle Tom had a scar on his shoulder. He’d always assumed that it was from a battle wound he’d suffered during combat in the Pacific Theatre. But before he died, Unc told him it came from a shoot-out in the Delta. Seems Dad and Tom went lookin’ for a black field hand who stole a car—either from the plantation or the gin. They followed him to a honky-tonk and a fight broke out. The man pulled a gun. Dad shot him, and Tom was injured somehow.” Tommy also said that they had followed this worker who drove off in a brand-new company vehicle to pick up a piece of machinery. He didn’t return the car but went, instead, to the dive to get drunk. When Dad or Tom found him chapter one out of the blue 4 and asked for the keys to the car, he refused and pulled a gun that he fired at Uncle Tom. Then Dad reached for his own gun and shot the man dead. “Dad . . . shot a man?” “Yeah . . . killed him.” Immediately I started pacing back and forth between the den and kitchen, rubbing my forehead as if to clear my mind so that this news could come in. Jay picked up the conversation, sharing other family news that was more mundane in nature. But I wasn’t listening to him. I couldn’t believe what he had told me. It rattled around in my brain for the next couple of days, challenging long-held beliefs that I had tried to tell myself about my father. I felt deeply confused , didn’t sleep, couldn’t think about anything else. Though I trusted Uncle Tom to get things right, I wasn’t sure I could believe this story. Why was Dad there? Who did he shoot? What provoked it? I caught myself standing still, shaking my head. This dreadful event had to have happened in the mid-’40s when Mom and Dad were newly married and living near my grandmother Fields on the family plantation in the Mississippi Delta. At just about any other time in my life, I would have filed this story away, so caught up was I in getting an education, raising a family of my own, starting careers, but my life had taken on a new rhythm, timbre, and set of lyrics. Marching in place for the first time in many years, I was open to discovery, to taking in stories and inhabiting them. How did I get to this place? A major change in my marital status had occurred five years before Jay’s phone call. Fall 2001, Asheville, North Carolina One week before the September 11 attack on New York City, I moved to Asheville. I sat on the floor of my bungalow, surrounded by boxes, and watched the planes fly into the towers. That morning , the fresh start I was making with my life seemed even more precarious, though I had my family all around me in those boxes. Photographs, genealogy charts, letters, my father’s baby book, out of the blue 5 my mother’s wedding portrait, taped conversations with relatives about family history. The comfort of perpetuity was just about all I had. Why did I choose Asheville? Even though it had been two years since the split along the fault line in my thirty-year marriage , the terrain I had traversed every day in my hometown of Bristol, Virginia, had become...