to own a car and not know how fast it’ll go.
And whatever I am, I ain’t no fool.
BIGHEARTED
Thelma De La Beckwith speaks to Myrlie Evers
You are wrong to think my man a monster
or a lowly coward ’cause he grins at you
from across the courtroom. Your shallow
Faith won’t let you see his generosity
or his compassion. Don’t you see the courtesy
he extended to you by opening up a hole
in that boy’s black back and not his face,
allowing you and your children the dignity
of an open casket, a vision of perfect sleep
instead of a bloody stump, where his head rests now?
ANATOMY OF HATE
Byron De La Beckwith
I have no problem with colored who know
their place, but it’s easy to hate troublemakers
an’ integrationists, uppity monkeys in suits’n ties,
little more than pet dogs for northern scum
pissing on our proud Heritage. Yeah, I shot that boy
in the back. But not ’cause I hated his color.
I hated how clean he kept his car. I hated
his always-pressed clothes and shiny shoes. I hated
that he parked in front of his own house. I hated
the sound of the north and schools and books
every time he opened his nigger lips.
The prosecution said he was only speaking
on equality and freedom, but what I heard
when he flapped his black gums was
“poor white trash, lick our union boots
and watch us do to your wives and daughters
what the slavers done to ours.”
… everybody knows about
Mississippi Goddam.
—NINA SIMONE
WHAT THEY CALL IRONY
Byron De La Beckwith
There was a time
when being a white man
on trial in Mississippi
was like swapping lies
in the barbershop or at a church picnic.
Looking across at the Judases
that helped find me guilty
the third time
was like looking at a souvenir postcard
of a lynching
only it’s me playing jump rope
with the tree
and the Christmas morning faces
in the crowd
is all carpetbaggers and Jews.
ON MOVING TO CALIFORNIA
Myrlie Evers
Dying can’t compare with living
with death and loss grief and anger.
Standing up for truth and justice
is much harder than marrying silence.
Climbing out from under the heaviness
of hate is the hardest thing I’ve ever done.
Surviving a husband is something I prepared for.
I practiced and practiced being strong enough.
Surviving Mississippi took Fannie Lou Hamer
strength, something I didn’t ever think I had.
PART V
Bitter Fruit
ONE MISSISSIPPI, TWO MISSISSIPPIS
after Thomas Sayers Ellis
You got old plantations
We got shotgun houses
You got sprawling verandas
We got a piece a front porch
You got beautiful gardens
We got cotton fields
You got Ole Miss Law School
We got Parchman Prison
You got Gulf Shore beaches
We got river banks
We got juke joints
You got bridge parties
We got dominoes and spades
You got mint juleps
We got homemade hooch
You got your grandmother’s china
We got paper plates
You see a proud history
We see a racist past
You don’t remember lynchings
We can’t forget
You got blacks
We got the blues
A FINAL ACCOUNTING
You can own the land a woman calls home
but not the warmth in it or the stars above it.
You can own the food she feeds her family
but not the love that prepares it.
You can own the well from which she pulls
her water but not the thirst it quenches
You can fill all the libraries with your version
of facts, call it history, and still not own the truth.
NOW ONE WANTS TO BE PRESIDENT
Thelma De La Beckwith
After that first harvest,
they took to the streets
and chanted “after” him
there’d be no more fear
but it took them forty-five years
to grow back their spines
after their so-called civil rights lions
were slaughtered like lambs
I look at this new one standing here
shameless and shiny, faking humility
and confidence, an educated mongrel
peddling false hope
But even though he won, the victory is ours,
because it took them forty-five years
to rebuild their backbones
all those years to unshackle their fear
forty-five years to raise another boy
man enough to send home in a box
Plenty of rich folks wants to fight.
Give them the guns.
—WOODY GUTHRIE
EPIPHANY
Willie De La Beckwith
I never understood colored folks.
They ain’t got no more than we got.
Hell, most of them got less than nothing
but every time I see one, they are smiling
I don’t hate them as much as I hate
those big ass grins on their face.
When I see one of them grinning, it’s like
they are laughing at us for being white
and still poor, for believing we had something
in common with the real bosses.
We stood by while the rich used blacks
like they were little more than dirt floors
to walk on, but we were too dumb to know
we were just their rugs.
LAST MEAL HAIKU
Myrlie Evers
imagine byron
sitting down to eat, using
his cotton shirt sleeves
as substitutes for
napkins, clutching a steak knife
—no unleavened bread
enjoying blood that
drips from every single bite
of his final meal
imagine before
he lays down to sleep, ready
to meet his maker
he gets on his knees
and confesses all his sins
in time to be saved,
at God’s burnt brass face he thinks
he has gone to hell
WHITE KNIGHTS
Myrlie Evers
For every ten Beckwiths
defending the right to wave
the Confederate flag
there’s at least one Kennedy.
For every racist governor
and flaming cross
there’s a white Catholic priest
dodging bricks, wiping off spit,
bleeding from the temple
in the thick of a march.
For every hundred southerners
teeming with hatred
there’s a set of kind blue eyes
full of hope, there’s a young heart
unafraid of change and a reason
not to fear or pity them all.
EVERS FAMILY SECRET RECIPE
Myrlie Evers
prepare closed minds
with patience. peel ripe
distrust with smiles.
stir in generous portions
of kindness and willingness
to do the work.
add commitment and determination.
massage out doubt and fear.
blend in a drop of daddy’s blood
and two of mamma’s tears.
season with hope and change.
let sit for a generation.
distill as a salve. rub deeply into
your children’s hands, feet and hearts.
now vote.
THE ASSURANCE MAN
Charles Evers
If you knew him after Alcorn and the war,
before history books, before that bullet,
before becoming the field secretary,
back when he was just an insurance man,
you would’ve known how bullheaded he could be.
He knew Mississippi polished and perfected ugly
but also that she had something beautiful to offer
her sons our freedom.
He didn’t sell us a waiting game like a preacher
and only promise our rewards in the hereafter.
We shall all be free. We shall all
be free.
We shall all be free some day.
—GUY AND CANDY CARAWAN
GIFT OF TIME
Myrlie Evers
When I was able to see beauty in a world
littered with scars
when I discovered stores of memories
that a bullet couldn’t quit
when I watched a son grow into his father’s face,
his laugh, his walk
I saw how faith could be restored.
And was finally able to imagine
that before he fell in love with guns
before he lost his mother
and his childhood
before he needed a reason to hate
to feel threatened
to push back against imaginary walls
collapsing in on him
like August heat and no fan
I imagine before all that, little Byron was good.
He was clean. He was innocent.
And I finally understood
that trouble don’t last always.
HEAVY WAIT
If Mississippi is to love her elephant self
she needs a memory as sharp as her ivory tusks
with as many wrinkles as her thick thick past.
If she forgets, she need only reach back,
caress her keloid skin, and run her fingers across
the Braille history raised on her spine
or the bruised couplets around her supple neck.
For Mississippi to love her elephant self,
she need only open her blue/gray eyes and move.
Move, as if she carries the entire weight of history
and southern guilt on her massive head.
Move, in any direction, as long as it is forward.
For Mississippi to love her elephant self,
she must ask for, extend, and receive
forgiveness.
But she must never ever ever forget.
Time Line
1954
The Supreme Court rules on Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka Kansas, unanimously agreeing that segregation in public schools is unconstitutional, paving the way for large-scale desegregation.
1955
Fourteen-year-old Chicagoan Emmett Till, visiting family in Mississippi, is kidnapped, brutally beaten, shot, and dumped in the Tallahatchie River for allegedly whistling at a white woman. The two white men acquitted by an all-white jury later brag about committing the murder in Look magazine.
1955
NAACP member Rosa Parks refuses to give up her seat at the front of the “colored section” bus to a white passenger. In response to her arrest, the Montgomery, Alabama, black community launches a successful bus boycott, which will last for more than a year.
1957
Federal troops are sent in to facilitate the integration of formerly all-white Little Rock, Arkansas, Central High School by “the Little Rock Nine.”
1962
James Meredith becomes the first black student to enroll at the University of Mississippi. Violence and riots surrounding his enrollment cause President John F. Kennedy to send five thousand federal troops to restore and maintain order.
1963
Byron De La Beckwith shoots Medgar Evers. He is tried twice in 1964 for murder. Both trials result in hung juries. Beckwith goes free.
March on Washington draws over 200,000 people. Martin Luther King, Jr., delivers famous “I Have a Dream” speech.
Four young girls (Denise McNair, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, and Addie Mae Collins) are killed when a bomb explodes at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama.
President John F. Kennedy assassinated. Warren Commission concludes Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone, committed the crime.
1964
President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits discrimination of all kinds based on race, color, religion, or national origin.
The bodies of three civil rights workers (James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, & Michael Schwerner)–two white, one black-are found in an earthen dam six weeks after being murdered by the Ku Klux Klan.
1965
Malcolm X is assassinated in the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem.
Blacks begin a march to Montgomery from Selma, Alabama, but are stopped by police at the Pettus Bridge. Fifty marchers are hospitalized after police use tear gas, whips, and clubs against them, earning the incident the name “Bloody Sunday.”
Voting Rights Act of 1965 makes it easier for southern blacks to register to vote by outlawing literacy tests, poll taxes, and other such requirements that were instituted to restrict blacks from voting.
Routine traffic stop ignites six-day race riot in Los Angeles, California.
1968
Martin Luther King, Jr., is shot in Memphis, Tennessee, sparking riots in over sixty cities. James Earl Ray is convicted of his murder.
Robert F. Kennedy is assassinated in Los Angeles, California, by Sirhan Sirhan.
1969
Black Panther Party deputy chairman, Fred Hampton, is assassinated as he lies in bed by Chicago Police, FBI, and a tactical unit of the Illinois state attorney’s office.
1992
Race riots erupt in south-central Los Angeles after a jury acquits four police officers for the videotaped beating of Rodney King.
1994
Thirty years after assassinating Medgar Evers, Byron De La Beckwith is convicted for murder at a third trial.
1998
James Byrd, Jr., is murdered by three white supremacists in Jasper, Texas, who drag him behind a pickup truck.
2001
Racial tensions ignited by fifteenth shooting death of a young black man by police in six years results in riots in Cincinnati, Ohio.
2005
Edgar Ray Killen is convicted of manslaughter forty-one years after the deaths of civil rights workers Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner.
2007
Six black students at Jena High School in Central Louisiana are arrested and charged with attempted murder after the beating of a white classmate.
2008
Barack Obama becomes first African American elected as president of the United States.
2011
White teenagers brutally beat, run over, and kill James Anderson in Jackson, Mississippi.
2012
Neighborhood watch volunteer shoots and kills unarmed teenager Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida.
Bibliography
The epigraph in “Humor Me” is taken from the poem “The Social Order,” by Andrew Hudgins, in The Glass Hammer.
Carson, Clayborne. Civil Rights Chronicle: The African-American Struggle for Free
dom. Lincolnwood, Ill.: Legacy, 2003.
Delaughter, Bobby. Never Too Late: A Prosecutor’s Story of Justice in the Medgar Evers Case. Scribner: New York, 2001.
Evers, Myrlie. For Us, the Living. Jackson, Miss.: Banner Books, 1967.
Gwin, Minrose. Remembering Medgar Evers: Writing the Long Civil Rights Movement. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2013.
Hampton, Henry and Steve Fayer. Voices of Freedom: Oral History of the Civil Rights Movement from the 1950s through the 1980s. New York: Bantam Books, 1990.
Hudgins, Andrew. The Glass Hammer. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1994.
Massengill, Reed. Portrait of a Racist: The Real Life of Byron De La Beckwith. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1994.
Mills, Kay. This Little Light of Mine: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2007.
Nossiter, Adam. Of Long Memory: Mississippi and the Murder of Medgar Evers. Cambridge, Mass.: Da Capo Press, 1994.
Sims, Patsy. The Klan, 2nd ed. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1996.