The Ghosts of Mississippi Read online

  It was second-class citizenship, and it felt wrong, but there was nothing to be done about it. You just had to do your best in the world you were given. Myrlie wasn’t particularly interested in the white world. It was enough to have family and friends in a separate but spiritually rich and nurturing all-black society, a parallel world of educated, professional people, a world of books and parties and music. Myrlie felt special and talented. But she knew she had little control over the direction of her life.

  Myrlie was an excellent student and she graduated second in her high school class. She was a gifted pianist by then, and it was Mama’s and Aunt Myrlie’s dream that she would go to college and earn a fine arts degree in music. Myrlie was an obedient child, and she wanted to please the women who brought her up. Their dreams became her own. A college degree meant prestige and employment as a teacher — the highest status a Negro woman could reasonably hope to achieve.

  But there was a problem: Mississippi colleges for Negroes did not offer music majors. Their curricula were designed by the white men on the Board of Higher Learning to offer Mississippi blacks just enough education to keep the federal government off the state’s back. If a family had money, and very few did, they could send their children to private colleges to finish their education. The rest of Mississippi’s blacks were at the mercy of the state.

  The approved majors were in education, business, and agriculture, as these were the professions needed to keep the separate Negro society functioning. If a black student wanted to study medicine, law, dentistry, or other specialties, the state could grant scholarships to out-of-state universities. It was a way to keep costs to a minimum at the black colleges while discouraging the development of a highly educated class of blacks who might threaten or compete with white society.

  Myrlie wanted to go to Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. The family couldn’t afford the tuition, so Myrlie applied for a scholarship to study out of state.

  First, the presidents of the Negro colleges in Mississippi had to review her application and write a letter to the Board to Higher Learning to confirm that they did not offer the music degree she wanted. But the president of Jackson State crushed her hopes when he wrote that his college offered all the courses she needed — meaning that she didn’t need to major in music. Her scholarship was denied.

  There was no way she would apply to Jackson State. So, in the fall of 1950 she entered Alcorn College. Her major was education.

  It was the first time Myrlie could remember feeling an open rage at Mississippi’s segregated system. But she didn’t direct her anger at the white power structure. She blamed the Negro president of a Negro college who wrote the letter that killed her dreams of studying music. It wasn’t until she met Medgar Evers that she learned whom and what to blame.

  After they started dating, Medgar took Myrlie to Millsaps College, a white Methodist school in Jackson, to take part in an interracial discussion group. It was a terribly daring, even frightening thing to do. Myrlie was learning, but her politics were still unformed. She did what she did to please Medgar. This man was all business. He wanted to discuss current events; she hungrily read the newspaper every morning to have something to talk about.

  He wanted her to argue with him, challenge him. She might breezily mention, “The sky was blue; it was a beautiful day,” and he would say, “No, Myrlie, the sky was gray, and it was a terrible day.” He did it just to get her going, to make her debate him. He was already shaping her, forcing her to take a stand when she had always been taught to back off from fights, smooth the waters, go along.

  He was clear about what he wanted in a girlfriend: he liked her long hair, her looks, her manners. When they got more serious, he told her, “I want you to be the mother of my children.” He told her he wanted her to be smart but innocent. She would be pliable, like clay for him to mold.

  “How romantic,” she wanted to say sarcastically, because she had that tart side of her too. But she said nothing.

  This serious, mysterious older man was exactly what Myrlie Beasley wanted. She had imagined him when she was fourteen years old, not what he would look like, but the way he would be. The man she would marry would be an athlete, and he would be brilliant and educated and fun to be around. Her father was like that, witty and smart and charming. But most important, she wanted a man who would be responsible, who would meet his obligations to his family. In that way she wanted someone very much unlike her father. She could sense right away that Medgar would keep his word, that he would make a commitment.

  Mama and Aunt Myrlie did not see this side of Medgar Evers. All they saw was a sophisticated veteran out to plunder their precious girl. Myrlie’s upbringing had been almost Victorian. Aunt Myrlie went along on her eighth-grade prom date. She’d had a formal “coming out” party when she was sixteen, and Mama carefully screened her suitors. They forbade her to see Medgar Evers. He was too old and too experienced, and he would make her quit school.

  Naturally the couple became engaged. It was the summer before her sophomore year.

  Myrlie and Medgar headed north to Chicago — separately — to earn money over the summer of 1951. Myrlie was closely chaperoned by the relatives she was staying with. But sometimes she and Medgar would slip away for a ride along Lake Shore Drive. Medgar cruised down the wide, peaceful, tree-lined streets in the rich white neighborhoods, and he talked about his dreams.

  He showed her one special place, a neat suburban house with a landscaped lawn.

  What he wanted, he told her, was to live in a house like this some day.

  Myrlie broke the news of their engagement to her distraught grandmother at the end of the summer. They were married on Christmas Eve.

  It was a hapless, almost comical wedding night, where everything seemed to go wrong. Medgar dropped the ring under the stairs and had to break into the house because the key was locked inside; Myrlie erupted in a painful rash; Mama would barely speak to them.

  Charles Evers, who should have been Medgar’s best man, did not attend the wedding. The Korean War had begun, and Charles had been called back to his Army Reserve unit. But he would have sulked at the ceremony, even if he could have been there. To Charles, this wedding was a betrayal. He just couldn’t understand why Medgar would go and do something as foolish as get married. Why did he need to? He could have any girl he wanted. What about Brazil? Charles ripped and tore at Medgar over this “mistake.” But Medgar loved Myrlie, and he wouldn’t be talked out of the marriage. Charles never forgave Myrlie for marrying his brother and ruining all his plans for them.

  The formal portrait of the bride and groom on their wedding night belies the turmoil backstage. The photograph shows a handsome, beaming couple posed before a display of ferns and candles. Medgar wears a dark, wide-lapeled tuxedo and a white boutonniere. Myrlie wears a simple, ankle-length white tulle gown. Her illusion veil is swept back from her face. The newlyweds lean together, smiling, but clutch each other’s arms as if to keep from falling.

  All Myrlie wanted was an ordinary life, the kind that would fit into Medgar’s suburban dream house. She wanted a decent income and kids and her husband working nine to five and coming home to her in the evenings. She wanted to get out of Mississippi, maybe move to Chicago, where she could finish school.

  But the more Medgar was away from Mississippi, the more he wanted to come home. There was no other place for him. And the safe middle-class life would never satisfy him.

  Myrlie and Medgar finished the school year at Alcorn. Medgar graduated that July. He was recruited to work for the Magnolia Mutual Life Insurance Company, an enterprise owned and operated by a black man. Dr. Theodore Roosevelt Mason “T. R. M.” Howard of Mound Bayou, Mississippi.

  To most travelers, Mound Bayou was just an eye-blink traffic stop on Highway 61, just north of Cleveland in the heart of the Delta. But Mound Bayou had a unique distinction in Mississippi. It was the only place where blacks founded, settled, and still governed their own town. It was where Medgar and
Myrlie Evers made their first home together in the sweltering summer of 1952.

  Mound Bayou was founded in 1887 in a lowland wilderness swamp as an experimental all-black community.

  In 1940, when a newspaperman named Hodding Carter, Jr., visited Mound Bayou while researching a book about the lower Mississippi, there were about one thousand residents. The town was a shabby collection of buildings with twenty-four stores, three groceries, five churches, a high school and grammar school, and precisely enough professionals to keep the town self-sufficient: a doctor, a lawyer, a dentist, and a pharmacist. At the north end of town a forty-bed hospital was being built with funds donated by a black philanthropical organization called The Knights and Daughters of Tabor.

  By 1952, there were about thirteen hundred people within the town limits. Mound Bayou was a safe haven for Mississippi blacks. Crime was low, and there was little white harassment at the time. But it was a dull town, self-conscious and staid.

  Myrlie Evers hated it. During the day she worked as a secretary in the Magnolia Mutual office. Medgar usually came home late from work, and there was little entertainment in town. The picture show was a joke, there was nothing new to read. There was no television.

  Medgar Evers didn’t notice it was boring in Mound Bayou. He was completely absorbed in this new world.

  Dr. Howard became Medgar’s mentor. Howard was rich by anyone’s standards. He owned hundreds of acres of rich Delta land. He lived in a nice brick house outside of town. Howard was portly, light-skinned, bespectacled and outspoken. He had flashy, almost effete tastes. He rode around in a red Buick convertible and had a fondness for skeet shooting and gentlemanly blood sports such as quail hunting. Medgar, who was an avid hunter, fit right into Howard’s social arena.

  Howard was ahead of his time in many ways. He founded the Delta-based Regional Council of Negro Leadership with a handful of other prominent businessmen. It was a homegrown lobby group, a sort of grassroots NAACP. Howard recognized the native xenophobia of white Mississippians, and he decided that they would be more likely to bargain with their “own Negroes,” than with a foreign, New York outfit. The group spearheaded the first known black economic boycott in the Delta, aimed at service stations with toilets for whites only. The campaign was simple and specific, summarized in the bumper sticker the group distributed: “Don’t Buy Gas Where You Can’t Use the Restroom.”

  There was also a Mound Bayou chapter of the NAACP, and Medgar joined it. Through the NAACP and the Regional Council, Medgar met a group of veterans and hard-core activists who would be his allies for the rest of his life, including Aaron Henry, a pharmacist in Clarksdale and local NAACP chapter president, and Amzie Moore, a fearless businessman from Cleveland, Mississippi.

  Medgar started out selling insurance policies in the town of Clarksdale. Later his beat included the rural areas, the plantations where few sharecroppers even knew what insurance was.

  One of his closest colleagues was Thomas Moore, a tall, handsome young veteran and Mound Bayou native. Evers and Moore would often ride together to the big plantations to try to crack the insurance market out there. They also had another mission. They were recruiting for the NAACP, urging people to register to vote, and setting up new chapters across the Delta. Every working day in the summer of 1953 Moore and Evers dressed up in blue jeans and casual shirts and climbed into Medgar’s Mercury to head out into the cotton fields.

  The roads in the Delta don’t seem to bend. They slice through the swamp flats like a child’s exercise drawing in perspective, where the shimmering pinpoint of infinity is the Mississippi River, unseen but felt in the distance. In the summer months the river spreads its hot, fetid air over the breezeless floodplain, engulfing everything with its smell and its presence. The sun pounds down on the fat black topsoil, the best in the world for growing cotton, built up with layers of silt from millennia of wild spring floods.

  It was here, in the Delta, that Mississippi found its wealth while it perfected a system of slavery in a nominally free country. The system was called sharecropping.

  Medgar Evers thought he knew what poverty was until he started working the plantations. But every time he went out into the Delta, he was astonished by the squalid, leaky shacks, barely big enough for chicken coops, where families of twelve might live.

  Thomas Moore remembers the children wore handmade clothes and no shoes. They were dirty, and you could tell they were hungry. They didn’t talk much, just sat in the corner picking at their daily ration of hoecakes and greens, while the college-educated salesmen tried to sell their daddies insurance.

  Evers and Moore had to be careful out there. They had to get permission to be out on the plantation, or they might get beaten up by some foreman. They talked their way onto the big spreads, like the huge King and Anderson plantation up near Clarksdale, by convincing the farm manager that it would be in his best interest for the sharecroppers to buy their own insurance. Then the planter wouldn’t have to bury them or pay their medical bills. It would be taken care of. This tactic usually worked. You had to outfox the man, use psychology against him. Evers taught Moore that you can’t sell anybody anything unless you convince him he needs it, that there’s something in it for him.

  Evers also taught Moore some tricks for selling insurance. The sharecroppers were terribly superstitious; many of them believed in spirits. The young salesmen would use that knowledge. For instance, they would pick their mark and ask the neighbors all about him. That way when they came to his shack, they knew him by name, knew his children’s names, and knew other things about him. It got his attention. It was a way to make the sale, maybe $1.50 or $2.00 a week for the minimal health, life, and burial insurance. Burial insurance was the most important. While a person may have nothing in life, he would have himself a funeral, and it would be paid for. Evers and Moore figured they were selling dignity. And if they didn’t do it, some white insurance agent would be out there selling policies. Besides, they gave something back.

  If the white man wasn’t watching, Evers and Moore would call together meetings in those dark little shacks and start teaching the sharecroppers something about their history. It was a program they devised on their own, with the local NAACP chapter. Most of the sharecroppers couldn’t read, didn’t pay attention to the radio, and were almost cut off from the rest of the world. So Medgar Evers would pull a George Washington Carver commemorative silver half-dollar from his pocket and show the folks: “This is a colored man.” They could relate to that. He would tell them about Marcus Garvey, Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, Marian Anderson. People, heroes, whose names they never learned in school, if they ever went to school at all.

  On the long rides down those Delta back roads, Evers and Moore would talk about their lives. Medgar was always offering good advice to his younger friend, trying to make peace between Moore and his wife, who were having problems. The two men would talk about their dreams and their frustrations.

  Once Medgar swept his hand across the fiat horizon beyond the windshield and said, “This is like a virgin country, man. If everything got straight here, this would be the best place in the world to live.”

  Sometimes he would be angry, pumped up, frustrated over the beaten-down, hopeless sharecroppers out on the plantations. “We’ve got to get these people to do something,” he would say, bouncing his fist on the dashboard.

  For the past year, Medgar Evers had been toying with a wild plan to strike back at the white man in Mississippi. He was thinking about fighting fire with fire. Guerrilla warfare in the Delta. Black night riders, the Negro answer to the Klan, give the man a taste of his own fear, slip in and take out the bad guys in their sleep. The Mississippi Mau Mau.

  Evers, Moore, and every other informed black person in America were aware that something was happening on the other side of the world. Africans were starting to shake off their colonial masters.

  In Kenya a Kikuyu leader named Jomo Kenyatta was leading his people to fight British rule. He was in jail, but h
is followers were waging a campaign of terror in the African highlands. They called themselves Mau Mau. Dozens of white farmers were killed (the newspaper reports overlooked the thousands of Africans who died in the conflict).

  Kenyatta was Medgar Evers’s hero. His name, in Kikuyu, meant “Burning Spear.” He was an intellectual who had written books outlining the plight of his nation and the need for an end to colonialism. Apparently by any means necessary.

  Charles Evers had by then settled in Philadelphia, Mississippi. He and Medgar got to talking about it, and actually started making plans for a Mississippi Mau Mau. It was more than just a fantasy. They had guns and knew how to get more. They could have started the war anytime. But Medgar had a change of heart.

  Myrlie remembers that it was a close reading of the Bible and his mother’s influence that turned Medgar away from violence.

  Medgar was always a cautious, deliberate person. He thought it over and read and talked about it, and finally he came to the conclusion that a vigilante campaign would never work. It would only bring more violence, more misery. Instead, Medgar devoted himself to the work of the largest, and, at the time, most radical nonviolent organization available to him, the NAACP.

  In June of 1953 Myrlie gave birth to a boy, the Everses’ first child. Medgar was so happy and nervous he backed his car into a ditch on the way to the hospital. He already had a name picked out for his son. He would call him Kenyatta.

  Myrlie was mortified. When it came time to fill out the birth certificate, she quietly altered the child’s name to Darrell Kenyatta Evers. Medgar didn’t complain, but he still sometimes called his son Kenyatta.