When Essex returned to Emporia, it was soon clear to everyone who knew him that the gay, carefree “Jimmy” of old was gone forever. He was moody, silent, virtually a loner, nothing at all like the smiling youth who had enlisted in the Navy two years earlier. Essex avoided old friends and at the infrequent parties he attended he would usually sit alone in a corner, rarely joining the dancing or conversation, his face frozen in a scowl. He seldom mentioned New York.
Essex found it increasingly difficult to take orders, especially from the whites who hired him sometimes as a carpenter, sometimes as a clean-up man. He went through a succession of jobs, losing most after only a few weeks. He lasted six months as a factory handyman, a record, quitting abruptly after he received two warning notices for tardiness. (He walked off the job and later told his supervisor that he had “some personal family problems” about which he refused to elaborate.) He also worked briefly at the slaughterhouse where his father was employed.
At home, Essex’s affection for his family was undiminished, and when his young nephews were in town, visiting, he would often take them to the park, where he would sit watching as they played in the grass. The demon within him pushed to the surface only when the conversation turned to questions of race. On these occasions Essex’s rage was instantaneous and sharp. He would cite example after example of the injustices heaped upon him in the Navy, and others, often worse, that had been the lot of his friends. Then, after vowing that he would no longer accept excuses for “second-class treatment,” he would lapse into gloomy silence.
Increasingly worried about their son, the parents, as they had done a few months earlier when he had gone AWOL, asked the Reverend Mr. Chambers to intervene. The minister readily agreed and dropped by the Essex home one evening for dinner. He waited until Mrs. Essex served coffee before he gently suggested to Mark that his attitude toward whites might eventually lead to trouble and unhappiness. Essex listened politely, but when he finally spoke, his hatred and bitterness overwhelmed the minister. It was clear that further effort was useless; the lash of Essex’s tongue cracked too sharply, and when Mr. Chambers put on his hat and prepared to leave, he turned to Mrs. Essex and shook his head sadly. “There’s nothing I can do,” he said. “The boy just hates white people. I’m sorry.”
Despite the encounter, Essex later agreed to help the minister build a new church for his congregation. It was a small one-floor structure of fiberglass and plywood. Working on weekends and at night, Essex helped to put up the wood frame and to lay the foundation. He seemed happy working with a hammer and carrying lumber, and from time to time his old smile reappeared.
As he had done in the Navy, Essex continued to read books by and about black people, and it’s likely he bought a copy of Eldridge Cleaver’s biting Soul on Ice, a best seller readily available on drugstore bookshelves. In one of the chapters, Cleaver concluded an eloquent discussion of black manhood with the warning that, “We shall have our manhood. We shall have it or the earth will be leveled by our attempts to gain it.”6 Manhood — Essex had long since begun using the word with the endless repetition of a zealot.
The book, however, that made the greatest impact was a thin volume written by two psychiatrists at the University of California Medical Center in San Francisco, William H. Grier and Price M. Cobbs — Black Rage. (Police would discover the dog-eared paperback in Essex’s last apartment in New Orleans.) The book sounded a grim prediction for the white race — eliminate the causes of the black man’s swelling rage or face a cataclysm. “They have had all they can stand. They will be harried no more. Turning from their tormentors, they are filled with rage;” or “Aggression leaps from wounds inflicted and ambitions spiked;” or “If blacks are often frightened, consider what frightens them and consider what happens when they feel cornered, when there is no further lie one can believe, when one finally sees that he is permanently cast as the victim, and when finally the sleeping giant wakes and turns upon his tormentors.” “Observe that the amount of rage the oppressed turns on his tormentor is a direct function of the depth of his grief, and consider the intensity of black man’s grief. . . . As a sapling bent low stores energy for a violent backswing, blacks bent double by oppression have stored energy which will be released in the form of rage — black rage, apocalyptic and final. . . . The time seems near, however, for the full range of the black masses to put down the broom and buckle on the sword. And it grows nearer, day by day. Now we see skirmishes, sputtering erratically, evidence if you will that the young men are in a warlike mood.” The book ended with the authors wondering aloud what “grotesque atrocity” it would take to galvanize the black masses into battle.7
In September, five months after Essex returned to Emporia, thirty-seven men — twenty-eight prisoners, mostly black, and nine hostages — were killed when some one thousand state troopers and prison guards ended the rebellion at the Attica Correctional Facility in New York.
The following April, Essex purchased a .44-caliber-magnum Ruger Deerslayer carbine. For its price, the weapon was one of the best buys on the market. Light, accurate up to two hundred yards, easy to handle, it fired magnum bullets, the brass jackets an inch long with enough power to propel a 240grain slug so heavy that at impact it flattened to the size of a man’s thumbnail. Essex ordered the carbine at Emporia’s Montgomery Ward outlet. The salesman, Ronald Lewis, was a friend. (Seven months earlier, Lewis had sold a .12 gauge shotgun to Mrs. Essex.) Essex filled out an Intra-State Over-theCounter Firearms Transaction Record. He wrote “Negro” for race. And to the eight questions asking whether he was a felon, dope user, or fugitive from justice he answered “No.”
After Essex received the weapon several weeks later, he began disappearing into the open countryside around Emporia, where presumably he spent long hours practicing. It took time to get used to the carbine’s jolting recoil, which after only several rounds could turn a man’s shoulder black and blue. Then there was the noise, unbelievably loud, a sharp bass boom that still rang in his ears as he lay in bed. Eventually, he learned how to fire quickly and accurately, squeezing lightly with only the ball of his index finger on the trigger. In time he became a superb shot.
Late that summer, Essex took another fateful step. Telephoning his old Navy friend Rodney Frank, he told him that he planned to move to New Orleans.