First Chapter of The Beginning

The Beginning

by Patrick D. Smith

Chapter One

“Thornton, you got to do somethin about them niggers.”

Ike Thornton pushed away the ledger and looked up into the ruddy face of Sim Hankins. “What you want me to do, Sim?” he asked. “You want me to go out and shoot several down in the streets?”

“It ain’t my job to say what to do, but you better do something,” Hankins replied harshly. “You’re the sheriff; I ain’t. It’s all over town that them niggers is havin a meetin tonight at the church, an they’re goin to come into town and take over the vote.”

Ike got up from the desk, walked over to the counter. “Who told you that the Negroes were going to take over the vote? Currey said the other day that only a few have been in to register.”

“Don’t matter how many it’s been,” Hankins snapped. “you let one of them in an then first thing you know the whole goddam courthouse will be swarmin with niggers. They’s goin to be trouble at the meetin tonight.”

“They’ve got as much right to hold a meeting as anybody,” Ike said with annoyance. “You want me to put them in jail because they’re having a meeting?”

Hankins’ eyes bulged as his face flushed. “I done told you I ain’t tellin you what to do, but if you don’t do something there’ll be somethin done anyway. You goin to stand up for the white folks or the niggers?”

“Hankins, if you’re threatening me,” Ike said angrily, “or if you start trouble in this county, so help me God I’ll see you in the state pen! I didn’t make this voting law and I didn’t put it through Congress. I’m a sheriff, not a lawmaker. And I don’t intend to let this county be ripped to pieces because a few Negroes have registered to vote.”

As Hankins started to leave he said, “Thornton, you come from a good white family, an the white folks elected you sheriff. Now you better think of somethin to do about them niggers.” He turned quickly and left.

Stonewall County lay in the rolling pine hills of south Mississippi. The county seat, Midvale, was the home of fourteen hundred white people and nine hundred Negroes. The main highway from Jackson to the Gulf Coast passed through the center of the town.

There were no grandiose antebellum mansions falling to ruins in Stonewall County, for none had ever been there. And there was no decaying aristocracy. Since the time the pine hills had been wrenched from the Choctaw Indians, the people who lived on this land survived by scratching a poor living from the hostile soil. The men who had left Stonewall County to fight in the Civil War entered the Confederate forces as privates and had limped home with the same rank when it ended. There was no statue of a famous-son Confederate general on the courthouse lawn.

The negroes of Stonewall County were not all ex-slaves of native landowners, for there had been few farmers who could afford slaves. The Negroes had drifted into the pine hills from north Mississippi and the Delta, from Alabama, Louisiana and Georgia. Some had squatted on the land and started small farms; some had come to work in the sawmills and in the town. But when too many swarmed on the land a Klan was formed; the nights were filled with fiery crosses and the screams of terrified Negroes. This was just another skirmish to the men of the rolling hills, not violence against Negroes because they were Negroes, but a survival movement aimed at retaining the land, which at the time was not even worth fighting for. It would have been the same if this invasion had been by Hopi Indians or Eskimos. Possession of the land meant survival, such as it was.

In the early days, life in Stonewall County for both whites and Negroes centered around the daily problem of feeding hungry stomachs. Both races were equally miserable. And from this life of perpetual toil there emerged two classes of society among both whites and Negroes – the haves and the have-nots, those with a bin full of corn and those without, those with two mules and those with none, those with a frame house and those with a tarpaper shack, those who ate pork and those who ate opossum, those who gradually emerged from the wilderness of ignorance and poverty and those who did not.

Some Negroes owned farms and others worked on the farms of white people. Those who moved into town worked at the mill and did manual labor; the women worked in the houses of the whites. The whites and the Negroes lived in peace with each other, a peace maintained by an invisible yet concrete wall over which the Negro could not, dared not pass. Although neither really tried to understand the other, the white and the Negro gradually established a bond between themselves, a bond of unique friendship which was unbreakable until the wall was breached by some dark shadow who ran amuck and violated the unwritten code that ruled the two worlds – a code that centered mainly around the white man’s woman. There would be a court trial and a hanging, then peace would again settle over Stonewall County.

Until recently the past two generations of white people were not conscious or concerned with Negroes as such or with race relations or civil rights. They had taken the Negro and his way of life for granted, just as the Negro had done with the white man. But now a set of new laws had been passed by Congress, laws giving the Negro the legal right to do everything the white man had always done. Months had passed and the white man and the Negro had not discussed this new thing. Both ignored it, acted as if it did not exist. But a feeling of apprehension, a slight restless movement of winds, was beginning to move over Stonewall County.

 

Ike Thornton looked out the window and down the main street of Midvale. From the courthouse, he could see the entire business section of the town, which consisted of three blocks of stores running from the courthouse to the highway. On both the south and north edges of Midvale there were sawmills, and a string of filling stations lined the highway. South of the highway, along Town Creek, were the Negro quarters.

Ike Thornton was a product of Midvale, a product of its society, its mores. He had been born there, raised there, spent his life there except for four years at the state university and two years in the army. He had been born Isaac Delmar Thornton, son of Benjamin Horatio Thornton, Midvale’s leading lawyer of the Depression era. His father had been a kind yet stern man, one who could have gone far in county and state politics except for his trait of being a bit too uptight and a bit too concerned with helping others rather than looking out for his own welfare.

Everyone in Midvale was poor in those days, yet no one was in danger of starvation. For entertainment the boys roamed the woods, hunting, camping, exploring, swimming in the creeks and rivers, smoking rabbit tobacco when told not to, attending prayer meeting on Wednesday night, Sunday School and church on Sunday, revival meeting in the spring and Bible School in the summer. The Baptist church was the center of community life, and the preacher of that time filled the people with visions of hellfire, damnation and brimstone. Religion was the dominating influence in Midvale life.

Ike’s mother had died when he was eight, and he had been brought up by their Negro cook, Doshie, who had continued to live with them after his mother’s death. His father had built a small cottage for Doshie behind their house, and she had always been present, feeding him, loving him, doing the washing and ironing, house cleaning, serving as mother, teacher and companion. Many times when he was bad she had whipped him, saying, “Ike, whut fo you acks lak a nigger boy? You a white chile, so you ack lak one.” Then she always gave him a slice of cake to make up for the whipping.

Doshie died during Ike’s junior year in college. He had come home for the funeral, sat there in the Negro church, crying, had helped carry the casket to the grave. Later, after his graduation, he placed a granite stone on her grave, with the inscription: Doshie, Loved by All, Missed Forever and Forever, God Grant Her Peace.

Ike had played with Negro boys all his early life, swam with them, fished with them, played basketball with them, fought with them. White and Negro boys of Midvale were companions during the daytime, never saw each other after darkness. Somehow they were afraid of each other at night. There had been tales of how Negroes turned into devils in the dead of night, did strange tribal dances, pierced each other with knives, lusted after white ma’s blood. And Negro boys had passed-down visions of bonfires and burning crosses. No white boy would dare venture into the Negro quarters after dark, just as no Negro boy would cross the railroad tracks at night.

Ike’s father had once been elected county attorney, and his first case as a prosecutor had been the trial of a Negro for rape. The man was accused of raping a farm girl in beat four; lynch fever ran high over the county. The case would have been won had his father not even opened his mouth, but it was his first case, and he wanted to make a good showing.

Ike had slipped into the gallery of the courtroom to watch the conclusion of the trial, although his father had given him stern orders to stay away. He peered through the iron grill-work and listened as his father told the jury that the buck nigger had grabbed the little white girl, ripped off her clothes, thrown her naked to the ground, put that black thing in her as she screamed for mercy; and the little white girl had lain there with the buck nigger on top of her like a savage animal, and she screamed and pleaded until she finally fainted. When a woman in the courtroom fainted and fell into the aisle, the judge ordered the room cleared of women before the trial could be continued. By the time his father had finished, the faces of the jurors were flushed red, their mouths snarled; even the Negro had turned as pale as a quarter-moon. A group of spectators had then grabbed the frightened Negro, rushed him out and hanged him from the courthouse balcony. That night when his father came home he didn’t eat his supper. Later, Ike heard him on the back porch, vomiting into the yard; then a few days later he resigned as county attorney. For years afterward Ike had recurring nightmares, seeing hundreds of buck niggers lurking in the shadows, leaping out and raping thousands of white girls, but more than anything else, seeing the frightened Negro hanging on the courthouse balcony.

During Ike’s senior year in college, his father had died of a sudden heart attack, and Ike had dropped his goal of studying law. He had taken the bachelor’s degree and volunteered for two years of military service. After that, he came back Midvale, married Peggy Jo Dale, his childhood sweetheart, and accepted a job teaching history and coaching football at Midvale High School. He had been a good but not great football player in college, and even at thirty-five he still had the trim build of an athlete. Ike was six feet tall, weighed a hundred and seventy-five pounds. His eyes were deep brown and always seemed to have the expression of a hurt little boy. His hair was black, had not started to recede, and was always curled around his ears when he needed a haircut. He looked nearer twenty-five than his actual age.

Ike had never given up an early political ambition, although he remembered vividly what had happened to his father at the very start of his career as an elected official. Two years before, Ike had decided to run for sheriff and had won in his first effort for public office; and after only two years in office, there was talk of his being the next state senator from Stonewall County.

Ike had followed the civil rights movement closely. He knew that its effects would sooner or later come to Stonewall County, that it would come either peacefully or violently, that it could be voluntary or forced. He had read in the newspapers and seen on television what had happened in other parts of Mississippi and in other Southern states, what had happened at the state university when the federal government had sent in marshals and army troops to enroll a Negro. He wanted to keep violence and federal force out of Stonewall County. He thought that he could since he had friends among the Negroes and friends among the whites. It was a problem that could be reasoned out peacefully among all the citizens of the county. There would be no need for force or violence to settle a thing which had really already been settle without the counsel, consent or advice of anyone in Stonewall County. Whether they liked it or not, it was only a matter of time.

Hankins parked the old Ford in front of his small dingy grocery store and walked inside. His wife, Bessie, was sitting behind the counter. She was a lean, stringy woman of fifty, with coarse hair and a complexion yellow as tallow. She got up when he entered.

“Bessie, you mind the store for a while more,” he said, not really looking at her. “I’m goin out to Big Springs to see Jud Miller.” He went into a back storeroom and returned with a gallon jug of moonshine whiskey.

“You ought to stay away from such as Jud Miller,” she said, blinking her eyes like an owl. “Jud Miller don’t mean nothin but trouble.”

“You mind your goddam business” he snapped as he walked out the door. He got into the car and headed away on the gravel road that led to the Big Springs community.

 

Sim Hankins was sixty years old, slim and rawboned at six-foot-three, red-complexioned with little splotches of brown, like freckles yet not freckles, on his skin. He had bushy red eyebrows, red hair streaked with gray, huge hands gnarled by arthritis. He looked like a gangling human scarecrow in need of a good meal.

He had been born in a cotton house on a plantation in Georgia. His father was a migrant farm worker. In a small Georgia town, his father had taken up with a town whore who stayed with him as wife without marriage, had brought Sim into the world legally a bastard. As a child, he lived on so many farms and in so many tenant shacks Sim could not remember or name any one particular town or county in which he had lived. But he could remember going into the fields when he was barely able to walk, with a hoe in his hand, working in the hot blistering sun until his head ached, his eyes swelled, then at noon going into the woods, digging roots to chew for his lunch; and sometimes the bitter roots made him sick; he would vomit, wash his face in the creek, go back into the long hot endless parched blistering hellish fields, then at night eat his piece of hard corn pone, eat his chunk of salty sow belly, lie on the floor with his bastard brothers, listening to his father mount the slut, then listening to his father snore until dawn when it was time for him to eat another piece of corn pone and sow belly, go back into the fields – endless days of work, endless nights, then move on to another farm, be turned away because a nigger family also wanted the job and would work cheaper. The niggers would always have more kids, always twice as many nigger children. The white man would hire the niggers because it would mean more hands in the fields, more work for less money. The Hankins clan would be turned away, and his stomach would ache. They would ramble along in the creaky wagon, move into another county, find a job the niggers with their snot-nosed kids didn’t want; then back to the fields, at night listen to his father mount the slut; then at Christmas the town ladies from the Missionary Circle would drive out into the country, past the shack where the white trash lived; and he would watch them, watch them go past the shack where the white trash lived, go to the nigger house, give the niggers croaker sacks of grits, ham hocks, rock candy, meal and flour, bags of apples and oranges; then they would drive back past where the white trash lived, not stopping, turning their heads away, not looking. Soon the nigger kids would walk by, grinning and sucking on oranges, spitting the seed with their teeth, sucking and grinning; and he would run under the shack and cry, beat his fists into the rank earth until his father would come out and whip him with a strop because he hadn’t slopped the white man’s hogs; and when the white people had clothes they no longer needed, they would give them to the niggers, and he would watch; they would give him nothing, then the niggers would wear the clothes to church on Sunday, because the niggers always had a church – there was no church anywhere anyplace for white trach; and he would sit on the porch of the shack, watching, watching the niggers come by in their coats either too large or tool small, their loud ties, white shirts with frayed collars and mismatched buttons, on their way to the nigger church; they would grin and laugh, and he would run under the house and cry, beat his fists in the rank earth; and sometimes he would go into town on a Saturday night, stand on the street; the niggers would stand on the same street, and a white man would come along and give the niggers a nickle to buy a popsicle; they would come out of the store sucking on the popsicle, grinning and sucking, and he would watch; there would be no popsicle for the white trash; then he would strike one of the niggers in the face, and they would gang around him, kick him in the stomach, beat him when he doubled up in pain, throw the white trash in an alley; and later he would go along the railroad track, because he knew the niggers sat on the railroad track on Saturday night, sat on the railroad track and stared into darkness; and he would walk until he found one alone, then take a stick and hit him on the head, kick him in the stomach, then run all the way home; and when his mother died they buried her in a cardboard packing box the white man gave them; then one night he came home from town and found his father drunk, in bed with a nigger woman, kissing her, kissing a nigger, and he had run from the shack, run and run and run, never looking back, drifting down through Georgia and Alabama, to countless farms, countless jobs, dreaming at night of unending legions of niggers sucking on oranges, spitting the seed through their teeth, walking and grinning with their coats either too large or too small, loud ties, white shirts with frayed collars and mismatched buttons, grinning and sucking, his father kissing the nigger, ladies from the Missionary Circle passing by, not stopping for the white trash; then wandering into Stonewall County, living on peckerwoods and jaybirds and opossum, saving a nickel here and a dime there, finally buying a small farm for fifty cents an acre during the Depression; then hiring a nigger family to work for him, and at Christmas walking past the nigger shack, sucking an orange and spitting the seed through his teeth.

 

Hankins stopped the car when he reached a bluff overlooking the small farm he had once owned, parked by the side of the road and sat under a tree. He looked out over the valley, seeing the unpainted frame house still standing, the bare yard, the hog pen to one side, the privy in the rear. He remembered back to the day he had purchased the land, his hands trembling so badly he could hardly make his mark on the deed. He had thought at the time that here was the tool with which he could remove the brand that had been placed on him at birth, here was his avenue of escape. He would be a landowner, a farmer, a man in his own right. But it did not work out that way. He was still branded, still isolated, still shunned by the Negroes and ignored by the white man. He was neither white nor black but trapped between the two, an unwanted untouchable unchangeable human nonentity.

But he had not given up. He worked hard, plowing the land, planting the seed, reaping what the poor soil would offer, saving, doing without, seeing that each of his children graduated from high school so they could leave Stonewall County, get jobs in Memphis or St. Louis or Chicago where they were not known, each sending back a five- or ten-dollar bill when they could, an atonement for their never coming back, never allowing their new-found friends to see and to know. And then he was struck down with arthritis in his hands, stopping him from plowing the fields, milking the cow, shucking the corn. He sold the farm, bought a small store in Midvale and moved to town. In Midvale, he partly achieved his goal. He was allowed to join the Baptist Church, to vote, to attend town meetings, speak up if he wished, at least be heard. But he was still held at arm’s length socially, still kept waiting just outside the white man’s magic circle.

Hankins got back in the car and drove down the road, across Wildcat Creek; then he turned onto a dirt lane that led to a shack perched on the side of a hill. The front yard was bare clay partially covered by pine straw. Two hounds ran from under the unpainted weathered shack and bayed halfheartedly. Sitting off to one side of the house was a rotted cotton wagon, a rusted hay rake; on the other, a 1940 Ford with the wheels missing. The front porch was cluttered with old plow points, well buckets, car batteries, bicycle wheels and assorted junk. A tin washtub hung on one wall, a mirror on the other. Croaker-sack curtains flapped in the breeze. The hot June sun was making him sweat, so he pulled a red bandana from his back pocket and wiped his brow. When a tall bearded man came around the corner of the house, Hankins reached to the back seat of the car and brought out the jug of whiskey.

“Howdy, Jud,” he said, wiping this brow again. “Thought I’d come out and visit for a spell.” They didn’t shake hands, just looked at each other.

The two men squatted on their haunches, facing each other. Jud took the jug and drank deeply, then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. He handed the jug to Hankins, who also drank deeply.

“You want to go huntin?” Jud asked. “We seed deer tracks over by the crick this morning.”

“Naw,” Hankins replied lazily. “Let’s just sit a spell.”

“I’ll call in the boys.” Jud put his thumbs in his mouth and let out a shrill whistle.

 

Jud Miller was fifty-five, tall, slim, black-bearded, with coarse hair that swirled down and covered the back of his neck. He wore a wide-brimmed black felt hat, with sweat stains around the band. His eyes were narrow and deep-set, his mouth thin, almost bloodless. He had on a black denim shirt and faded blue overalls.

Jud Miller lived in the woods with his three sons, Bester, Berl and Coney. Bester, thirty, the oldest, was an exact replica of his father; Berl and Coney were identical to the other two except that each was two inches shorter on a graduated scale, each one a year younger than the next. All wore beards, overalls and wide-brimmed black felt hats.

The woman had died giving birth to the youngest, Coney. They had buried her in a box made of pine slabs, beneath a hickory tree on a hill, without prayer, without tears, the grave unmarked.

Jud had walked into Stonewall County in 1935, leading a mule, the woman riding and moaning, pregnant, ready to give birth to Bester under a pine tree, unaided. He had come down out of the mountains of Tennessee, leaving a trail of slaughtered hogs, chicken feathers, pulled-up turnips, anything he could steal. He had left the mountains from necessity, having killed a man in a fight over a coonhound.

His father had come on a schooner from Liverpool to Boston, where he worked on the docks, drank and fought in the taverns at night, killed a whore with a whiskey bottle and moved south just ahead of the law. In Charlotte, he had married his woman, the daughter of a blacksmith, stolen a wagon and mule, then headed for the Tennessee mountains. He built a shack beside a creek, planted just enough corn to make whiskey, and lived off game and what he could steal from neighbors. He sired seven sons, all wild, unloved, taught to respect nothing and take everything, doomed from the beginning, stunted in morals and mentality to the level of animals.

Jud had not bought his land, just squatted, took possession; after one visit by the sheriff had ended in near-disaster, no one tried to move him. He was left alone to go his own ways. At first, he tried farming the Stonewall County land, but after three years he had given up and then lived off the woods, killing game, taking what he wanted from neighbors who dared not protest. At one time he had been called “Pig” because so many of his neighbor’s hogs had disappeared, all in the direction of his land and shack. When he made his occasional trip into Midvale, walking, the three bearded boys in line behind him, he was given a wide berth by both white and Negro. No sheriff had ever tried to collect taxes from him, few people visited him, and many in Stonewall County didn’t even know he existed. The five men had been squatting in a circle all afternoon, saying nothing, drinking whiskey and spitting into the dust. Hankins finally looked at Jud and said, “Jud, we got to do somethin about the niggers.”

“Whut they done now?” Jud asked.

“The government done passed some new laws,” Hankins said, looking disgusted, “an they aim to give the whole dern county to the niggers.”

“They’s six of ’em buried up in the pine woods,” Bester said. “We caught the last one ’bout five years ago, stealin a hawg. Ain’t no nigger goin to steal a hawg from us and live to tell about it.”

“Best you don’t talk like that except around here,” Hankins said. “Seems like Sheriff Thornton done turned to a nigger lover. I went to see him this mornin, told him the niggers were havin a meetin tonight, and he said they have a right to have a meetin, said he’d see me in the state pen if I started trouble.”

“Whut you want us to do?” Jud asked. “You want us to shoot up a few niggers?”

“Not yet,” Hankins said, taking another drink from the jug. “We’ll wait a mite an see what the sheriff’s going to do. Looks like it’s goin to be left up to me and you and Con Ashley and a few others to keep the niggers in their place. Back in the old days them niggers wouldn’t be havin no meetin. Not for long they wouldn’t.”

“That’s the God’s truth,” Jud said.

“Shore is,” Berl said.

Sim got up and stretched, then he wiped sweat from his eyes with the red bandana. “I got to go now,” he said, starting toward the car. “You fellows keep the rest of the whiskey.”

The four Millers followed Hankins to the car. “You come back anytime, Sim,” Jud said, “an let us know whut you want us to do about them niggers.”

Hankins got in the car and headed back to Midvale.

——————-

End of Chapter 1 of The Beginning, by Patrick D. Smith

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