12

Little Dixie

James Earl Ray was born on March 10, 1928, in a two-room basement apartment a few doors from the largest whorehouse in one of the poorest and roughest neighborhoods in the blue-collar town of Alton, Illinois.*¹ He was the first child of George and Lucille Ray, who had married two years earlier.² His father’s side of the family had a nearly one-hundred-year unbroken history of violence and run-ins with the law. Ned Ray, hanged for being part of the notorious Plummer gang, which killed over a hundred men in a series of brutal mid-1800s robberies, was likely James’s great-grandfather.^† James’s paternal grandfather was an alcoholic itinerant bootlegger and sometime bartender who barely scraped together a living for his family.3 Ray’s own father did little better.⁴ George, nicknamed “Speedy” as a joke because he spoke so slowly that people thought he had an impediment, tried and failed at a series of straight jobs ranging from mechanic to beer-joint boxer to brakeman for a regional railway.⁵ However, the easy money from crime also beckoned him, and he considered it a “right” to lie to and deceive others if it was done to support a family.⁶ He also viewed crime as an honorable profession. “Now, if there’s anything I hate it’s petty larceny,” he said. “I can’t stand the fella that will steal just this and that. Now, when a man holds up a bank, that’s a different thing. The fella that holds up a bank is trying to make good, he’s trying to make something of himself.”⁷

Speedy Ray used a dozen different surnames, usually just a variation of Ray but often with an n added—Ryan, Raines, or Raynes—as well as often using a different first name.⁸ When arrested in 1921, he gave his name as George Ray, but on his marriage certificate he was James Gerald Ray, and years later, when he was pursued for failure to deliver a certificate of title, he was Jerry Rayns.* It was one way to get a new start in the river towns to which he moved, without any reminders of the failures he left behind. As a young man, he shuffled around the country trying his hand at menial jobs and petty crimes. When he was twenty-one, he was arrested for his first felony—breaking and entering—and given a ten-year sentence in the Iowa State Penitentiary at Fort Madison.⁹ He was paroled in June 1923, two years before his marriage.^†

Speedy’s brother, Earl—for whom James was given his middle name—was the meanest of the Rays, especially when he drank. A carnival boxer, he was first brought into court at ten for stealing and “associating with immoral persons.” By eleven he was declared a delinquent and packed off to an institution. With almost a dozen arrests, Earl spent most of his adult life in prison (he was in the state penitentiary at Menard for a rape conviction when James was born), and on the few occasions he was out, he subjected his family to acts of brutality—from regular fistfights with Speedy to throwing acid into the face of one of his wives.¹⁰ “Earl was never any good for anything. You couldn’t hurt Earl,” recalled Speedy, who once feared that Earl was mad enough to burn down the Rays’ house. “He didn’t have no feeling. But I never did care enough about him to kill him.”*¹¹

James’s mother, Lucille Maher—known as Ceal—was a quiet and introverted woman from a hardworking, if somewhat troubled, family. Her father, John, a glass blower in a local factory, was a drunk who abandoned the family while Ceal was a youngster.¹² Mary, her mother, was a devout Irish Roman Catholic who worked tirelessly as a steam presser at local cleaners to care for her two children. It was Mary who rented the basement apartment in which James was born in 1928. Speedy had so little money that the family would have otherwise ended up in a single room in an even worse slum in St. Louis.

A year and a half after James’s birth, the Rays drifted to Bowling Green, Missouri, another lean blue-collar town farther up the river.¹³ For the next five years of James’s life, his father tried hard to make it in the straight world. “I never used no other names all that time, just my own right name,” he later boasted.¹⁴ But he only managed to keep the family in grinding poverty. He had a job wrecking cars for nearly a year before he was fired in 1931. Mary Maher helped support Speedy and her daughter by cashing in two small life insurance policies and working at a second job.¹⁵ But Speedy resented his reliance on Maher and frequently fought with her in front of Ceal and James. He also vented his anger at the wealthy, politicians, gangsters, and even blacks, whom he considered different and inferior—“they just lay around and fuck all the time,” he complained.¹⁶

In February 1935, Speedy was arrested in Alton for forgery. When he was free on bond, he decided to move, even though it meant pulling James out of the first grade at St. Mary’s Elementary School. Mary Maher spent nearly $1,000 for some sixty acres of infertile land on the edge of Ewing, Missouri, a little country town of 350 people. In August, Speedy, then thirty-five, and Ceal, twenty-six, moved there—“on the lam,” as James later said—with their children.¹⁷ For his life in Ewing, Speedy took a new name, Jerry Raynes. There were now four children: James Earl; Marjorie, born in 1930; John Larry, born in 1931; and Gerald William, called Jerry, born a month before the move to Ewing. Five more were to come.

On the property was an abandoned house. Ravaged by harsh winters and blistering summers, it had a rusted tin roof that allowed rain to pour inside, and its sides had split wooden boards through which the wind whipped. There was no electricity or plumbing.18 But it was the Rays’ new home, and after their failures and close brushes with the law, the promise of a hard life in Ewing did not seem intolerable. “We did not have elaborate lives,” was James’s understated way of later summarizing their plight.¹⁹ “We didn’t live,” his brother Jerry recalled frankly. “We survived.”*²⁰

The new town of Ewing fit with Speedy’s disillusioned and angry temperament. James later described the area as “the riverboat country of Tom and Huck and Nigger Jim and the jumpin’ frog of Calaveras Country.”²¹ Actually, Lewis County, in which Ewing sat, was originally settled by Southerners from Kentucky, Tennessee, and Virginia. However, since the area was not good for farming, it attracted only the poorest whites, who were enticed by the almost giveaway land prices. In this barren patch of Missouri, generations of families eked out a marginal existence. Although they supported the South during the Civil War, they were too poor to own slaves, and were instead looked down upon by urban whites as poor white trash. This setting of poverty among transplanted Southerners—in a population of nearly twelve thousand in 1933, only thirty-eight people earned enough money to file income tax returns—was a perfect breeding ground for the Ku Klux Klan, which flourished in Lewis County during the 1920s and early 1930s.²² Not a single black lived in the town.^† “No nigger’s ever spent the night in Ewing,” was a frequently heard boast to new visitors.²³ And Ewing, nicknamed “Little Dixie” by a local newspaper, was as physically backward as its racial attitudes.²⁴ When the Rays arrived, there was still no sewage system, doctor, bank, library, or movie house. There were no paved streets. Only two of the town’s houses had electricity or flush toilets.²⁵ The highlight of the year was a small traveling fair that stopped by each summer.

Speedy’s timing in moving to Ewing could hardly have been worse. He had decided to try farming on his new land, but arrived on the heels of the Great Depression, at a time when even die-hard locals were abandoning agriculture. His property was quite brushy, with lots of timber, and the soil was thin and poor for planting. The following year, 1936, brought a severe drought. In 1937, the federal government loaned money to local farmers just so they could feed their livestock.²⁶ In addition to his fitful start in farming, Speedy also bought a battered 1931 Chevrolet truck for $2.50, painted his name on the door, and declared himself in the “hauling business.”27 That second business actually brought the Rays a bit of hope, for despite the poor times, people needed help in moving livestock. Although most did not have money to pay Speedy, they bartered and he ended up with extra goods, including another two decrepit trucks that sat rusting behind his house. But eventually Speedy was too lazy to make his work pay the family’s way. “He ain’t worked more than a month his whole life,” his son Jerry would later remark.²⁸ Even when he tried briefly working on a WPA rock crushing and gravel project, he could almost never get up early enough to catch the truck when it came by in the morning.²⁹

The family’s stifling poverty made Speedy increasingly bitter. He resented the breaks that he felt others received and bemoaned his own unmitigated streak of bad fortune.³⁰ His failure to provide for his family shattered any remnant of self-esteem. Within a year of settling in Ewing, he no longer made a pretense at working, but instead spent his time in Cason’s pool hall, behind the local barbershop. Even there, wearing his trademark denim coveralls and a cap, he often complained and argued with others. Each evening he would go to sleep no later than 9:00 P.M., demanding that the children remain absolutely quiet so as not to disturb him, and then he would not get up until noon.³¹ He dropped from 127 to 112 pounds (on a five-seven frame) and started suffering severe headaches.³² “I told the kids they wasn’t no use working,” he later said. “I told ’em they’d never have anything if they worked.”³³

All of this took a toll on Ray’s mother. Although the Rays’ house was within walking distance of the town, Ceal seldom went there, and nobody visited her at the farm. In the eight years the Rays lived in Ewing, Ceal never once set foot in a neighbor’s house.³⁴ On the few occasions when she ventured into town, people noticed that she looked destitute and unkempt, with her children in rags, clinging to her, and an air of utter despair about her.³⁵ She was ashamed of the circumstances in which the Rays now found themselves.³⁶ “Ceal hated the farm,” admitted Speedy.³⁷ She tried to run off once, but Speedy chased after her and pleaded with her on the dirt road leading away from their farm. She returned. “Where would Ceal go if she did want to leave Ewing,” her youngest son, John, later asked in a letter. “Those days persons did not run to Judges to get there problems solved. Especial for our family. The Law always hound, persecute the Ray’s for over a century, and they still haven’t let up.”*

All of the unpleasantness also had a profound effect on the children, especially the oldest, James. When his parents argued, he often stopped it by flying into his own rage. That anger, and the grudges he held, set him apart from his siblings.*³⁸ His parents did not try to control his rage but rather viewed it admiringly as a sign of masculinity and courage. They were convinced that James was smarter than either of them and the brightest of all the children (he later tested with an average 108 IQ), and that he was “always different.”³⁹ However, by the age of seven, James had developed no close friends beyond his family. He spent much time with his father, proudly wearing one of his father’s tattered jackets, which flapped around his knees, and was often seen riding in the truck to town, where he spent entire days with Speedy at the pool hall.⁴⁰ “He was quiet, not like any boy I ever saw before,” recounted one of the other men who played pool there. “He made so little rumpus, I thought he must have a complex or something. He just sat there watching.”⁴¹ “He was just a man when he was a kid,” concluded Speedy.⁴²

The start of school in the fall of 1935 held the promise to expand this quiet youngster’s world, but it actually had the opposite effect. The school, Ewing Consolidated, one of the few brick buildings in town, consisted of three basement classrooms. All students from the first through third grades were in Room 1, those from the fourth through sixth grades were in Room 2, and the students in the seventh and eighth grades were in Room 3.⁴³ This meant that a student would have the same teacher for three years. When James entered the school, under the name Jimmy Rayns, he was one of only three students in the first grade and his teacher was Miss Madeline “Tots” McGhee, a strict disciplinarian and spinster from one of Ewing’s “prominent” families.⁴⁴ She took an almost instant dislike to the painfully shy youngster. She later remembered that when he reported for school his hair was uncombed and he wore torn pants, a dirty shirt, and a man’s suit jacket spotted with grease.⁴⁵ He was barefoot and sometimes smelled of urine.⁴⁶ He had picked up his father’s habits with strangers, looking warily at anyone who came near him, and looking away, or casting his eyes to the floor, if someone tried hard to make eye contact. Quiet, he occasionally smiled, but never seemed comfortable.⁴⁷ Although many of the nearly fifty children in the school were from poor families, Tots considered James to be at the very bottom. He found no warmth in her to replace the affection missing at home, no help in his studies, no advice that there were possibilities in the straight world with which to rise above poverty.

The Ewing school system not only failed to help James Earl Ray, but it set him back. The other students ridiculed the way he dressed, and at recess he was often in fights.48 “He fought as if he would never stop,” recalled one, “flailing away at whoever was around him, tears streaming down his cheeks.”⁴⁹ “He was constantly being picked on by the older fellows in the school,” recalled another student, Robert Brown. “Jimmy was sort of weak and they picked on him to see him get mad. He was also mistreated by his teachers. We would all do mean things and get by with them. Jimmy, though, always seemed to get caught.”⁵⁰

The Ewing school also reinforced some of the negative lessons he was receiving from Speedy about race. Racial segregation was taught and enforced. When the basketball team from nearby Quincy came to play, it was warned to leave its black players at home—and it did.*⁵¹

James, not surprisingly, hated school and flunked the first grade.⁵² Absenteeism was high among many of the students, especially during the harsh winters. James, who walked a mile and a quarter through beanfields, the town’s backstreets, and the local cemetery to reach school, stayed at home when the rough winters arrived. He sometimes rode with his father on deliveries or stayed with him at the pool hall, and his education suffered. “The old man also wanted to keep us out of school to do work around the house,” recalled Jerry.⁵³ James missed 48 of the 190 school days his first year, and though he missed 47 days the following year, he managed to pass. In third grade, his fourth and last year with Tots, he was again absent a third of the time. Her disgust for him was quite open by then. In a section of his report card where the teacher jotted remarks about the student, Tots’s feelings about James were evident. Under “Attitude toward regulations,” she wrote, “Violates all of them”; “Was the child honest?” prompted her to write, “Needs watching”; “Was he courteous?” brought, “Seldom, if ever polite”; and for “Appearance,” she wrote, “Repulsive.”⁵⁴ The tension at the school was unsettling for James. By the time he finished the third grade, he was suffering from recurring nightmares, including one in which he was losing his eyesight. He had other problems, including bed-wetting, stuttering, and at times such fitful sleep, with jerking and twitching, that a local doctor decided he had had an epileptic seizure.^†55

James’s difficulty at school, however, paled in comparison to a personal tragedy the family suffered. In the spring of 1937, Speedy arrived home late one afternoon and placed a bag of groceries on the rear porch. Marjorie, then six, found a box of matches in the bag. A moment later the family heard piercing screams and saw Marjorie run into the house, her dress in flames, the fire enveloping her head. She was dead by the next morning. The child’s death momentarily fostered a streak of kindness toward the Rays. School was let out and the students marched the short distance to the cemetery for her burial.56 The town’s one Catholic priest performed the service, although the Rays, “nominal Catholics” as James described them, had never been to mass.*⁵⁷

Marjorie’s death pushed Ceal into a depression. The relatively quick birth of two more daughters—Melba in 1938 and Carol in 1941—did not alleviate her melancholy; the added burden actually greatly accelerated her drinking, which she started in earnest shortly after Marjorie’s death.⁵⁸

The death of his sister pushed James even closer to his brothers, a bond evident even to outsiders.⁵⁹ James’s sister Carol was convinced that except for his two brothers, he did not care about the rest of the family.⁶⁰ Speedy later recalled that “it seemed like he always wanted to look out for them [Jerry and John], like he was their father or something like that. He always told Jerry … he’d take care of him.”⁶¹ But slowly, over the next few years, he also started forming his first acquaintances outside the family. In 1939, when James was eleven, he was often seen with three other boys, Robey and Charlie Peacock, poor kids who lived on an adjacent farm, and Gerald Hobbs, who lived with the Peacocks after his mother died. They entertained themselves with everything from playing marbles to fishing, billiards, and shooting squirrels and rabbits with a BB gun.⁶²

There are reports that these youngsters were tough and mean.⁶³ Some described them as bullies.⁶⁴ Life magazine classified James as “an unmanageable bully” and “uneducated school bully.”† However, while he undoubtedly did have his share of fights, and once stole the class lunch money, it seems as though he was not one of the town’s meanest kids.*⁶⁵ Speedy admitted that James “had a little mischief in him, that’s all,” but he also showed kindness to some—for example, when a friend came down with polio, it was James who carried his books.⁶⁶ “If Jimmy was by himself, he was OK,” recalled one student. “He didn’t have the push.”⁶⁷

James may have struck up the new acquaintances in the hope that other students would stop picking on him. If so, it largely worked, as others began leaving young Ray alone. But it was still difficult for him to form any close friendships. “Jimmy wasn’t the kind to be telling his troubles to anybody, especially outside the family,” recalled his brother Jerry. “Anyway, he was much closer to us at home than he was to those boys.”⁶⁸ John commented years later that no one in the family had “many friends. But we don’t want none, having friends is the quickest way winding up on the end of a rope.”⁶⁹

If James was close to any of the three, it was Charlie Peacock. The two spent afternoons playing together, usually around the Peacock house. Charlie was a Boy Scout and James became interested in joining. He did show up at a couple of Scout meetings but could not afford the fifty cents for the manual. “He wasn’t the kind of boy to be forward,” remembered Jerry Ball, the local scoutmaster. “He was kind of withdrawn. He stayed in the back row.”⁷⁰ The budding friendship with Charlie Peacock faltered.

In 1940, when James was twelve, the Rays began slowly cannibalizing their decrepit house, pulling it apart plank by plank in order to use it as firewood. It gradually disintegrated until they needed a new home.⁷¹ Speedy’s solution was to truck in a one-room shack. Ceal hung a sheet from the ceiling to partition it, and the two adults and five children lived there without any privacy. John and Jerry slept in the same bed, while James slept on the floor.⁷²

Yet those difficult years in Ewing evidently strengthened the special bond among the Rays. They had shared the same mean existence and were proud of surviving it without owing anything to outsiders. They trusted and relied only on one another. Even much later, after jail had kept them apart for years, there was a unique attachment. “We are closer than we seem,” said Jerry. “It’s just the way you’re raised. If you’ve been brought up kind of rough, you appreciate it.”⁷³

But the years in Ewing had also left scars, and it showed in the children’s sometimes erratic behavior. One night Jerry, the family joker, became so infuriated at his father’s incessant teasing that he burned the privy to the ground.74 John, quieter than Jerry, suffered from a speech impediment that made it sound as if he swallowed his words. And one day in the school lunchroom, Jimmy stuck a knife into John’s ear over a fight for a piece of meat.⁷⁵ Speedy and Ceal were either oblivious or indifferent to these signs of trouble. There was no guidance in the Ray household, no family member to whom any of the children could look for inspiration, no encouragement to do well at school or to make friends, and no role model who showed it was possible to work honestly and diligently to pull oneself out of poverty.

In the first week of school in 1942, James played in a game of scrub football. He was evidently so eager to excel that he broke his leg while trying to bust the ball through a line of much larger boys. Virgil Graves, the eighth-grade teacher, took him to the hospital in nearby Quincy and noticed that no matter how much pain the boy had, he lay still without saying a word.⁷⁶ But after the cast was set and James started healing, a strange thing happened—the boy known for mostly keeping to himself began visiting Graves. A small and energetic man, who was also a part-time minister, Graves thought James was a “somewhat disturbed child” who was going through some undefined personal crisis.⁷⁷ He was puzzled by the contrast between his “rebellion against authority” and the “sensitive” side he discovered.⁷⁸ “I can’t remember a single incident,” Graves later recalled, “in where [sic] Jimmy showed a malicious or wanton heart.”⁷⁹

Everyone knew that James Earl Ray was one of a handful of children at the school who could not afford even the five cents that hot lunches cost. Every week, he apologetically approached Graves, explaining he did not have any money and asking if he could still eat at the cafeteria (even those without money were always let in). Self-conscious about his tattered appearance, he once asked, “Are you ashamed of me?”⁸⁰ And Graves found that the youngster he taught in eighth grade showed great interest in history and current affairs. Under Graves’s influence, when other students left at recess James often remained indoors listening to news over the school’s only radio. It was apparently here that he developed an interest in politics, and he showed it by defiantly arguing with the rest of his family. “Jimmy was about the only Republican in Ewing,” his brother John recalled. “The Old Man and Ceal was strong for FDR, just like everybody else was in Ewing. Jimmy used to argue them up and down. He was very strong for Wilkie. But mostly he was against Roosevelt. Jimmy said Roosevelt wasn’t doing anything but throwing off propaganda on Hitler. He kept saying all that stuff Roosevelt was saying about Hitler wasn’t true at all.”81 “Jimmy was always interested in politics,” said Jerry.⁸²

Whatever interest James had in politics, it was not in evidence on his trips to Quincy, where Speedy’s parents lived and where Uncle Earl stayed whenever he was out of jail.⁸³ He had hitchhiked the twenty miles on weekends and during the summer for several years, but in 1943, he began to visit more often.⁸⁴ A town of 45,000, split largely into Irish and German immigrants, Quincy had been Illinois’s second-largest city in the mid-1800s, a bustling river port. By the time Ray visited, however, it had long since lost its river trade to competing railways and was economically and socially stagnant, marked by a suicide rate twice the national average.⁸⁵ It was a politically conservative town with a small, segregated black community, a place where blacks could not go to a downtown movie until 1964.⁸⁶ James’s grandparents lived in the northern section of the city among the so-called river people, Quincy’s lowest social class. James said that the “biggest industries [there] were whoring and gambling.”⁸⁷ Sometimes he accompanied his uncle Frank Fuller on his rounds of collecting cash from mob-run gambling dens.⁸⁸ But most of the time, James ran with Uncle Earl, who took him on nightly barroom excursions that mixed heavy drinking with mean-spirited brawling. By early morning, they often wound up at a whorehouse run by a madam called Big Marie.⁸⁹ It was there that Earl bought James his first girl.⁹⁰ James used to run errands for Big Marie while Earl stayed with one of the girls. Once James hid near one of the open windows on the first floor and tried to steal wallets from Johns who were busy with the prostitutes. His first attempt ended with the John chasing but failing to catch him. Ray dropped the wallet along the way. Big Marie suspected he was the thief and banned him.

According to Speedy, this was the period when James was “always hustling, trying to make money.”⁹¹ His first “arrest” was at fourteen when he was with his brother John, who was eleven. “We was going down the street,” John later wrote in a letter to author George McMillan, “and we pick up a stack of newspapers that a truck had toss off. The Alton cops arrest us, him on one corner me on the other Selling these paper. I was scared of the police, and Jimmy was getting tough with them, I’m trying to shut him up. They took us over and Lock up in Jail. I got scared and Started hollering for Mom. Mom Jump on the police For having us Lock in a cell.” The boys were released with a warning.⁹²

This was also when James met Walter Rife, a contemporary who lived in the small Illinois town of Kellerville but often visited his brother in Quincy.⁹³ Rife came from a large, poverty-stricken family, and the two quickly formed a young thieves’ friendship.⁹⁴ According to Rife, the two never planned any thefts, but “we would just be walking around the streets and one of us would say, ‘Let’s go in there.’”95 Although Rife said it was only “boy stuff,” he admitted that Ray broke into houses and stole goods that Uncle Earl helped him fence.⁹⁶ He also frequently robbed drunks and “would obtain money any way that a thief could.”⁹⁷ Sometimes fifteen-year-old Ray used his extra cash at local whorehouses. “He’d just take any prostitute, didn’t care whether he ever saw that same girl again,” recalled Rife. “When he talked about women it was in the most contemptuous way. ‘All those fucking whores,’ he would say.”⁹⁸ Rife never saw him with a girlfriend. “We’d meet girls,” recalled Rife. “He just couldn’t talk to them. He was shy. I’d get him a date and we’d go on an excursion boat and his girl would be gone off with another guy before the boat got halfway on the trip.”⁹⁹

To James, the flophouses and all-night bars packed with prostitutes and pimps, illicit gambling, bar fighting, and low-level hoodlums, seemed normal. “The vices in Quincy were considered commercial rather than abnormal,” he would write years later.¹⁰⁰

In late 1943, however, James’s wild run suddenly ended. “I lost my guide to the Quincy underworld when Earl was jailed for assault,” he later lamented.¹⁰¹ Earl’s imprisonment greatly upset James. “Jimmy worshipped Earl,” recalled Walter Rife.¹⁰²

Shortly before Earl was imprisoned, he had visited Ewing. At a carnival, a strongman welcomed all comers to several rounds of boxing. Earl, quite drunk, was still standing at the end of three rounds. Then the barker challenged Speedy to enter the ring, and he did take his shirt off as if he were going to fight. His three sons—James, John, and Jerry—were there. As John later recalled, Speedy had often told the boys that he “could hit harder than Gene Tunney … drive his fist through a concrete wall.… He had so much power in his arm he scared he break his wrist if he hit at his maximum.”¹⁰³ The boys were crushed when Speedy finally refused to enter the ring. While Earl had the courage James admired, his father’s backing out of the carnival fight was a last straw in a long series of events that led James to lose respect for him both as a father and as a man. From that point, for the rest of his life, when asked if he had a father—whether by employees, the Army, the police, or prison authorities—James said he was dead.*

In May 1944, sixteen-year-old James Earl Ray, filled with his immature but absolutist view of world politics, quit the eighth grade and returned to his birthplace, Alton. There he moved in with his maternal grandmother, Mary Maher. Shortly after James moved, his father decided to leave Ewing for nearby Galesburg. The Rays, who had a seventh child born a few months earlier—Franklin Dennis Ray—moved out quietly, leaving only one unpaid bill: a twelve-dollar balance on Marjorie’s funeral. Her grave was abandoned as an unmarked mound, overgrown with weeds, in a corner of the Queen of Peace cemetery.

* Most who conclude that Ray was a patsy fail to study him in order to discover whether he was capable of such a crime. For instance, Harold Weisberg completely omits Ray’s biography in his 530-page book; theorist Mark Lane, who was one of Ray’s attorneys in the 1970s, does not even mention Ray in the first half of his book; Ray’s latest attorney, William Pepper, also wrote a book, but in over five hundred pages he devoted less than a page and a quarter to Ray’s background.

^† Poor rural families like the Rays do not normally keep family trees, diaries, letters, or written records, but Ray’s father was the keeper of the family’s oral history. He told author George McMillan that Ned Ray was “probably” his grandfather, that the history of Ned Ray “sounds right, just like what my old man used to tell me about his father.”

* Jerry Ray, James’s younger brother, was given so many different names by his father that he later told the FBI, “I was about twenty years old before I knew my name.”

^† James Earl Ray is often not the best source of information about his own family. In his book Who Killed Martin Luther King, Jr.?, he writes that his father was sentenced to prison in 1925, four years after it actually happened, and then says he escaped from prison, when in fact he was paroled.

* Speedy and Earl also had a younger sister, Mabel, who married a Quincy man, Frank Fuller. James Earl Ray later described Frank as making “a living in the rackets, collecting cash from slot machines owned by the local mob.”

* James is extremely sensitive to his family’s early conditions and its image of having come from a “Tobacco Road” background, and often tries hard to downplay the depth of their poverty.

^† Even as of 1970 the town had not had a black resident. “The only time we ever saw a nigger,” recalled one old-timer, “was when they was building the highway. But they kept them in a special camp.”

* John made those comments in a 1973 letter written to author George McMillan from the federal penitentiary at Marion, Illinois, where he was serving eighteen years for driving the getaway car in a bank robbery. The writings of all the Ray children are filled with misspellings and grammatical errors. In this book, they are cited verbatim, complete with the original errors.

* “We all took after Ceal by not holding a grudge,” wrote John. “Jimmy and the old man was different. They would hold a grudge the rest of there lives.”

* One student a few years ahead of James, Merle Wenneker, later commented about the school’s and town’s racial biases, “I suppose we had them but did not know it. As no Negros [sic] attended the school we were not acquainted with the problem. We referred to black people as nigger but not in a derrogatory [sic] way.… As a matter of fact I believe if we had any prejudices it was maybe toward the Jewish people—because we had a Jewish family.”

^† The nightmares were evidently so powerful that he remembered them for thirty years, because that is when he told a prison psychiatrist about them. They were probably the cause of Ray’s sleep disturbances. The diagnosis of epilepsy was almost certainly wrong, since Ray never showed any further symptoms.

* Ray has never exhibited much sentiment or emotion. For instance, in his own books, he spends many pages on some of his favorite topics, such as how thoroughly he enjoyed the challenge of trying to escape from prison. As for things more personal, such as his sister’s death, he covers it in a single perfunctory sentence (and gets her age wrong as well): “Marjorie was killed at age eight when her clothing caught fire as she was playing with matches.”

^† Jerry Ray was evidently eager to cash in on his brother’s notoriety immediately after the assassination. He seemed more concerned about his fee than what the coverage of his brother would be, something other family members resented. For instance, Life drew one of the harshest portraits ever published of James, but Jerry was willing to cooperate fully so long as they paid him $150, which the magazine did.

* In an interesting prelude to his way of dealing with many of his future problems with the law, young James adamantly denied being responsible for the theft. This despite the fact that a teacher saw him leave an empty classroom, and thinking something amiss by the look on his face, checked to find the lunch money gone. She then pursued James, who took off running, leading her on a chase to the pool hall, where he got away. But his mother, Ceal, discovered the canister and most of the money—$1.50—buried under their farmhouse. Ashamed, she returned it and made James admit his responsibility.

* James’s brothers did the same. For instance, when the FBI interviewed Jerry Ray after the King assassination, in his first interview he said his father had died in 1951. The next day, the FBI located his father, but Jerry still denied that his father was alive, swearing instead that the man found by the FBI was only his stepfather.