Although I am well aware of the limited reach of an account such as this, I was chary of naming people outright. To begin with, I took the usual writerly liberties to make a go of it. Furthermore, my notes were less than perfect. Weighing heavily on the heart of my reckoning, the town yet seems to tremble. It may tremble in part because of the New Madrid Seismic Zone that underlies the terrain, but in sight of a few casual conversations, it became apparent that emotions reignite in that locale, concerning those days, with a destructive and nearly centrifugal force. Even so, I must thank the individuals who shared their clippings, yearbooks, and letters, and most especially, the memories summoned and branded into their histories.
This is meant as a tribute to Margaret Kaelin McHugh. Our gaggle of unsolicited student acolytes began to call her “V” when she was reading Pynchon while our heads were still rooting among the novels she swallowed whole as a solitary child. Everyone should be favored to know one person of courage [at a critical moment] and genius [of accident and design], though that person arrives with all the flaws and fiends that vex the rest of us, sometimes in disproportionate abundance.
I would like to dedicate this to Mary Pat, her oldest child, for whom V bought a perpetual lottery ticket using the dates of MP’s birth, the anticipated winnings from which have long been earmarked by MP to buy a certain Victorian hotel in Coronado, Colorado.
And to the Man Imported from Memphis, Lance Watson, aka Sweet Willie Wine, aka Suhkara Yahweh, a miscreant turned lifelong activist in the wake of the assassination of MLK. Raised by an uncle and aunt. Suhkara’s aunt worked as a domestic for Judge Bailey Brown, who less than an hour before King’s “sojourn on earth went blank” [Taylor Branch], lifted the restraining order against the scheduled march of the sanitation workers. Suhkara’s great-grandfather was Benjamin F. Booth, who practiced law in Memphis for 50-plus years and in 1905 challenged Tennessee’s law authorizing the segregation of blacks and whites on streetcars. [Ever forward, never backwards, Suhkara.]
I would also like to thank V’s other children: Hoagie, Freddie, Jessie, Sam, Katie, and Robert David, who bore the stigma of being the offspring of one unflinchingly unappeasable woman.
And Stephen.
Also:
Jane Pfeiffer and Beverly Craddock, friends of V’s from St. Francis of Assisi primary school through the Sacred Heart years, who vividly recalled: V smoking in the playhouse, writing anonymous letters [with gloves on] to the principal, and V always taking the fall for any mischief they committed together. How she was always at the library, always on the list for books she shouldn’t have. One friend recalled how thrilled V was when her German grandfather took her to see The Picture of Dorian Gray. Both women spoke of the emotional coldness and strictness of the family home in which the answer to most petitions and desires was a foregone N-O. BC said, ask her to go anywhere, and the answer was, No, I can’t I have to listen to the opera today. No, I have to memorize poetry. She would give you the shirt off her back, BC said of her friend. So brilliant that her friends often claimed she educated them.
Her ex-husband, Joe, who though a nonparticipant in its conflicts, suffered the cruel will of his adopted Delta town. He too endured the bind of their incongruous marriage. He remained dispiritingly marked by the compromising challenge of his wife’s actions.
Marilyn Hohmann, their mothers being sisters, their fathers being brothers, making them, bilateral parallel cousins? [Something like that.] Who expressed her deep love and admiration for her cousin. Among her many memories, she and V would be sitting on the stairs, making too much noise, her father would call her up whereupon her punishment would be to read Elizabeth Barrett Browning to him.
The late Wordan Miller, the McHugh family hired hand, who lived with them on the farm, kept a pet alligator in a cement pool he built for it. V’s closest [in truth, her sole] companion on the farm.
Freddie Lou McDaniel, a neighbor and beloved friend of V’s for many years, the years when they laughed like people were meant to laugh, and with whom she played bridge when they were too pregnant to reach the table. Monica Mitchell, also hugely pregnant at the bridge table [though I was never able to make contact with her].
My friends, former residents and, in varying degrees, natural-born aliens of their town: Cecelia Grobmyer, a neighbor child during those years, who said of V, “She was my show-and-tell,” the inimitable Nan Montgomery Signorelli, and the irrepressible Barbara Barg, who said so movingly of our much-missed friend, “She taught me how to live; now she has taught me how to die.”
Chris Thomas Ellis, of Memphis [until California finally cast him in parts that exposed only a scintilla of his burning mind], whose head cracked along the exact same lines as hers. Exactly along the same lines.
MLN, whom I did not meet, but according to V’s former husband—she put out the word to State Trooper Dwight Galloway assigned to the March Against Fear that he had better not let any harm come to a hair on V’s head. This was sticking-up-for-behind-the-scenes of which there was precious little to be had from any other white citizens and absolutely sum zero to be tallied on the scene.
Ruthie Mae Cochran West, among the kids never allowed to go near the pool until transported there under arrest; who was told by Sheriff Clarence Montgomery they were to be taken to the woods and killed. Who had no idea where they were being taken; whose parents did not know where they were held. Ms. West’s brothers Theo, Leo, Frank Jr., George, and Curtis, who jumped from the long-torn-down overpass from which there were once lynchings [five officially confirmed in the town]. And her father, Frank Cochran Sr., who lost an eye to a beating by some seventy men he knew by name; then was he fired from his longtime job by dint of that same knowledge. Honor due also to Tarlee Babbs, grandmother of RMCW, who brought dignity and stability to everyone in her charge.
Pat Flanagan, who knows the town cold, its best fishing holes and hunting grounds, its public housing and fine homes, its corrupt officials, its anonymous night riders.
Willie Hicks, who works the night shift; who with his wife takes care of his 94-year-old father; who was there, who knows.
Edna Lockhart, who was there, but was too weary, too busy, and possibly too leery to have the conversation; who was reported to have been taken to Mississippi in the dogcatcher’s wagon to be put in detention.
John Henry Watson, who joined a Canadian football league after graduating in 1963, no such opportunities available to him in his native land.
Effie Y. Clay, director of a funeral home, who came by her backbone honestly, daughter of Florence Katherine Clay, who gave sanctuary to the civil rights meetings in the home when she was its proprietor, and posted bond for the Man Imported from Memphis.
Charlene Sykes, retired teacher and social worker, who stood all night holding to the bars after an unprovoked arrest by a widely loathed sheriff. She was younger then she said, and could stand long hours, which she chose over sitting on a jailhouse cot.
Her daughter, Shirley S. Ingram, whom Mrs. Sykes roused from a peaceful summer sleep to talk to me on another line. Who grew up with the Klan. “Everyone knew who was Klan, who was not Klan.”
The late Odessa Bradley, a teacher who stood tall by her kids, and lived just long enough to see the 1969 [Arkansas] March Against Fear observed with pride. This march, led by Sweet Willie Wine, stepped off in West Memphis and plodded the hot two-lane highway to Little Rock [not to be confused with its predecessor, the March Against Fear begun June 5, 1966, by James Meredith, which stepped off from the Peabody Hotel in Memphis and ended some 15,000 strong in Jackson, June 26, despite Meredith having been wounded almost at the outset].
Donnie Bell, who was a magnet and foil in those days for the wild side of V, and who claimed his family, “all country club people,” condemned him to death for being her friend.
I also recall quoting or paraphrasing Sir Isaac Newton, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Francis Ford Coppola, Liam Clancy, Harry Mattison, Allen Ginsberg, Walt Whitman, and who else, William Butler Yeats, of course, V’s first true love.
Shirley Harvell, a force unto herself, who spearheaded a commemoration of the 1969 March Against Fear twenty-five years later and provided me with the sole audio recording of my late friend, made from a telephone interview in preparation for that event.
Patricia Spears Jones, poet of New York, who goes home to see family and is hauntingly struck by the emptiness of the vast fields that were populous with pickers young and old when she was coming up. Who testified to her family’s “ordinary courage” in The Weather That Kills. She wrote that I was going to have a very difficult time there. It is a town with as many secrets as Los Angeles, and many of the major players are now in their graves. Her sister Gwendolyn F. Jones, who was in sixth grade when the high school erupted; whose mother was on the spot to get her baby girl out of harm’s way. Her brother, Sheriff William C. Spears of Memphis, who stuck to his drums in high school just as his sister stuck to her studies.
Dolores F. Morelon, who provided me with the names and numbers of individuals put in the swimming pool; who lived behind the antenna place, as she described the appliance sales and repair business owned by V’s former husband.
James Johnson, Vietnam veteran, who came back with a purple heart to find his town in a racist tempest—a white mob ready and willing to spit on a returning black soldier. Whose kids were “all military.” Whose oldest son was shot and killed by a Memphis police officer, also African American. People are people, he said. He came back, he said, to Jesus, the only way.
M. Lowe, known as Tex, the SNCC worker [who escaped eastern Arkansas by the hair of his chinny chin chin].
Tom Rountree, veterinarian, whose father, a postman and minister of gentle disposition, took his son to the movies the night the town erupted; the first spool was no sooner reeling than it was brought to a smoky halt.
Rosie Stewart, owner of the Blue Flame, who fed and sheltered the group that dubbed themselves the Invaders, but who held no illusions about their personal conduct.
Evans Seawood, retired police captain, who could identify the man in the photo who found himself in possession of damning audiotapes of interrogations that did not make their way to the county museum as promised.
Harvey Hanna, who ran the county museum with the voluntary assistance of his wife, Carolyn, preserving as much of the town’s history as it seemed collectively willing to contribute to the record.
H. Ford Hunt, whom I happened to meet in front of Oscar’s; who was arrested and put in the pool; whose mother told her not to get in that line, not to even think about getting in that line, that she would not come see her in jail, though later HFH learned that her mother had in fact tried to see her.
Story L. Matkin-Rawn, whose doctoral thesis historicizes the recent struggle for human rights in the Arkansas Delta.
James T. Easter, who lives on the bank of the river. Who watched the river he had fished all his life turn from a place to haul mussels to a dredging site for big tires; and spoke so kindly of his late wife who could skin snakes and tend flowers with equal ease.
Joe Williams, retired welding teacher, who met me at Colonel Sanders for syrupy soft drinks and ranging conversation. Who was in the second wave of marchers who were put in the drained pool; who on the eve of military induction, with his friends James Nesbitt and Robert Smith, known as Toad, determined to integrate the bowling alley. Soon after, it burned. Who moved to integrate the drugstore. Soon after, the booths and stools were yanked out. His boss at T-C who stood up for him once when a white customer started abusing him while his broom stirred up a little dust.
L.C. Poole [brother of Joe Williams] of Las Vegas; to whom a great injustice was done.
Sue Saunders or Sanders, whom I was never able to locate, the redheaded Gazette stringer whispered to have been a federal agent.
Charlene Warren, retired teacher, who lent her scarce-as-hen’s-teeth 1967 LHS yearbook to the town museum.
Arlisa Price and Carolyn Sanders, of the public library, helpful in the patient, hands-on practice of librarians.
John Greeley and Marcos Rivero, who put up a plaque in V’s memory on the barren pear outside her apartment in Hell’s Kitchen.
Deborah Luster, who drove and flew up several times from New Orleans to meet me in the Arkansas Delta to provide me with the evidentiary image, at a time when her own life was much distressed.
The late Reverend Vernon Johns, rousing pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, Montgomery, Alabama, prior to MLK, from whom I cribbed the title of one of his famous sermons, “Segregation After Death.”