I LAUGHED AT MYSELF, then pulled on the latch. The window slid down easily. “I guess strength doesn’t help,” I said, “if you don’t have some brains to go along with it.”
My fellow traveler was middle-aged, paunchy, seemingly well-to-do, with a florid complexion and a gold watch fob of unmistakable value. He put out his hand.
“Henley McNeill,” he said. “Grain trader. I’m from Jackson.”
“I’m Benjamin Corbett. Attorney at law. From Washington.”
“Miss’ippi?” he said.
“No, sir. Washington, D.C.”
“Well, you are one very tall attorney, Mr. Corbett. I would bet those Pullman berths play havoc with the sleep of a man your size.”
I smiled. “I’ve spent my whole life in beds that are too short and bumping into ceilings that are too low.”
He laughed and put away the book he’d been reading.
“Are you a journalist, too?” Henley McNeill asked.
“No.”
“Well, I only ask on account of I saw you reading all those newspapers.”
I decided to see where the truth might take me. “I was doing a little research… on the history of lynching.”
He blinked, but otherwise betrayed no reaction. “Lynching,” he said. “In that case, newspapers might not be your best source of information.”
“How do you figure?”
“Well, sir, in my view, the newspapers don’t always tell the truth.
“Let me give you a point of observation,” McNeill continued. “Now, this is just the opinion of one man. But I’m a man who’s spent his whole life right here in Mississippi. And my daddy fought for the Confederacy alongside Braxton Bragg at Stones River.”
Henley McNeill seemed like a sensible fellow. This was the very type of man Roosevelt had in mind when he sent me down here to speak with the locals.
“The white man doesn’t hate the colored man,” he said. “The white man is just afraid of the colored man.”
“Afraid?”
“Not afraid in the way you think. He’s not afraid the colored man’s going to rape his wife or his daughter. Although, let’s be honest, if you turned a colored man loose on white women with no laws against it, there’s no telling what might happen.”
He leaned forward in his seat, speaking intensely. “What genuinely scares the white man is that the colored is going to suck up all the jobs from the whites. You just got out of Memphis, you saw how it is. It’s the same in all the big cities—Nashville, New Orleans, Atlanta. You got thousands and thousands of Negroes running around looking for jobs. And every one of ’em willing to work cheaper than the white man, be they a field hand, a factory hand, or what have you.”
I told McNeill that I understood what he was saying. In fact, it was not the first time I’d heard that theory.
“Yes, sir,” he went on. “The black man has got to figure out a way to get along peaceable with the white man, without taking his job away from him.”
He paused a moment, then leaned in to tap the side of my valise with an insistent finger. A smile spread over his face.
“And if the black man don’t come to understand this,” he said, “why, I reckon we’ll just have to wipe him out.”