Tent City: A Mississippi Story

By Michael Kelley

William Flair, a fourth-generation Mississippi planter, is accustomed to solving people’s problems. It comes with the inheritance. He’s not quite prepared for his latest challenge, however, which presents itself to him in the early days of the voting rights movement when black tenant farmers who have been evicted from their homes in Barksdale County for attempting to register for the vote take advantage of William’s and his sister Beatrice’s hospitality and, with assistance from a group of activists from the North who call themselves the Freedom Brigade, begin camping out in tents on the Flairs’ Twin Pines Plantation.
Not long after the protest begins tension turns to tragedy when the body of Walker Wilson, a protest leader, is discovered at Twin Pines. He has been badly beaten, his throat slashed. Three suspects are arrested after Barksdale County’s chief deputy sheriff obtains a confession from one of the three, a mentally challenged young black man who has heretofore been known for sitting outside the local hardware store, rocking back and forth and greeting customers with a toothy smile.
Barry Crossthwaite, the attorney who represents a group of planters in a civil rights case that has been brought against them because of the evictions, becomes convinced that the confession was coerced and decides to represent the murder suspects in their trial. The odds are against him in this community, where the white power structure, represented by the White Citizens Council, is entrenched and just wants to see this situation resolved so they can go back to growing cotton in peace.
William, who is also convinced of their innocence, joins forces with Jeremy Fite, another deputy sheriff who knows that the confession obtained by his colleague is bogus. With a young white female activist from the North named Summer Day, who has become involved romantically with the chief defendant, William and Jeremy hatch a plan to fake a jailbreak and spirit the defendants out of Barksdale County.
This creates a break in the trial and gives William and Jeremy time to catch the real killers, who turn out to be hired hands of a prominent local planter under whose direction they have been acting.
With the murder case solved and the White Citizens Council in retreat, residents of Tent City are emboldened. They march on the courthouse as a group and register to vote, believing that lasting change in the wind.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Michael Kelley
• Release date: Aug 7, 2016
• ISBN: 9781370784141

Michael Kelley

I am a former newspaper reporter, columnist and editorial writer now working as a freelance writer in Santa Fe, N.M. I grew up in Joplin, Mo., and spent most of my career in Memphis, Tennessee, where I also earned a masters degree in English with a concentration on linguistics. My novel, Tent City, is set in 1960 Mississippi against the backdrop of the voting rights movement. My novella, Fred and June: Journeys, is about a transgender woman and her boyhood friend. My latest piece, The Fountain, is about a middle-age couple who discover that eternal youth can have a downside.

Book preview

Tent City

A Mississippi Story

By Michael Kelley

Distributed by Smashwords

Copyright 2010 Michael Kelley

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Cover Design: Bart Kelley

Chapter 1

WILLIAM FLAIR resigned himself to the trouble that lay ahead for him and his sister Bernice and their nice quiet life in Barksdale County, Mississippi, when he caught sight of two canvas tents that had suddenly materialized at the edge of his cornfield on a warm spring day in 1960. So he dropped his shovel to the ground, told the men he had been working with to keep at it, boys and walked over there to try to get a fix on just how big a headache this was going to be.

He wiped the sweat from his forehead with a faded blue bandana, squinted into the afternoon sun and paused outside the nearest tent as Walker Wilson – I should have known, William muttered under his breath -- emerged, his jaw set for a confrontation and his forehead creased in furrows. Walker wore work boots and a John Deere ball cap and a pair of overalls that covered most of a brawny, nearly hairless chest. He wasn’t smiling. Danny said it would be okay, Mister Flair, he said, his tone verging on defiance. They’ve started the evictions, sir. We got no place else to go.

And, of course, you had to pick my place, I guess. William paused, resting his hands on his hips, straightening his back and squaring his broad shoulders. William was a good 2 inches taller than the man who stood before him now, this adult version of the brat who had grown up on Twin Pines plantation before William’s watchful eyes, later moving to what he perceived to be greener pastures on the other side of the county.

William lifted his wide brimmed cowboy hat and ran his fingers through a thick head of reddish brown hair that had just started to turn gray at the temples. You know, y’all could have stayed right where you were if you had been patient; that would have been a lot less trouble, and I’m pretty damn sure you’d eventually get what you want, William said, making a mental note to talk to his foreman later. Danny should have checked with him first before getting involved in anything like this, but Danny had never shown a lot of foresight, and he tended to take his boss for granted.

With all due respect, sir, no, I couldn’t, Walker said. We know our rights, and we been waiting too long already. We’re citizens, too. But we don’t want to cause you no trouble, no sir. We’ll move right on out of here if that’s what you want. But I tell you what: You’ll be on the wrong side of history.

Where the hell did you get that? William scoffed. Things had not started well between William and Walker, but the young man had matured a great deal over the years, established an aura of respectability in the eyes of the plantation owner and the community, had even become something of a leader among tenant farmers throughout the county.

Whoever was in on this thing with him would not likely create trouble either, William figured, which is not to say that trouble wouldn’t follow them onto Twin Pines or that more tents would not blossom at the edge of the field like mushrooms after a spring shower, given the audacity of the temporary settlement.

He wasn’t at all sure he wanted to get involved in this business. Things were dusting up to an uncomfortable degree between William’s fellow planters in Barksdale County and the black tenant farmers who worked the land. There was always the chance that things could get rough. But he was, grudgingly, somewhat sympathetic to their cause. All they wanted was the right to vote. Who could argue with that?

JUST OFF THE town square in Chicory, a dim light filtered through partly drawn drapes in the conference room at Bailey, Bailey, and Crossthwaite, where a meeting was being held in semi-darkness to keep things as cool – figuratively as well as literally -- as Barry Crossthwaite could manage.

Three visitors sat around a conference table where they had met briefly on a couple of other occasions, somewhat wary of what their attorney who was known around Barksdale County as the best of the best in civil as well as criminal matters, was about to say.

Barry C., as the locals called him, having given up trying to pronounce his last name, which too often came out sounding like a lisp, was lean and angular and slightly stoop shouldered. Deep lines creased a face that had seen the sun in the prairies of the West, where he traveled regularly to shoot pheasant and grouse and quail. Strands of white hair fell from each side of his forehead, framing deep-set blue eyes and a snub nose. His head bobbed slightly as he walked to the head of the table and stood facing his clients with his weight on his left leg, his hands resting lightly on the back of a chair. He was backlit from one of the high arched windows in a way that made his face hard to read, which was his intention.

Indirectly, he had prepared his clients for the news he was about to deliver, hinting in a previous meeting at the risk involved but promising to look into the matter further. But the time had come to speak seriously about what chance they had to prevail against this new threat.

Let’s begin with where the plaintiffs in this matter stand, he said. "They would be standing on quicksand if you had simply taken action, individually, to remove these tenants from your property for whatever reason you wanted, whether it was letting these outsiders into their midst or registering to vote. Hell, you could have evicted them for missing Sunday school if you wanted to.

"But you got together – they have your own admissions to this; y’all have said so publicly – and said, ‘Fellas, what are we going to do about this? How can we make this problem go away?’ And you decided collectively, in what the government says was a conspiracy, to evict them from your land as a strategy to prevent them from registering to vote, or consorting with agitators, or converting to communism, or for whatever reason you had. And you got the businessmen on your side. No food for their families. No gasoline for their tractors. No bank loans for their seeds and fertilizer and equipment. If they lined up at the courthouse to register, with that one little lady down there making people wait to put their name on a piece of paper, they got nothing. Gentlemen, the effect of your actions has led the government to develop the theory that the evictions were all about these folks trying to register to vote, and the vote is the issue here. You might not agree, but that’s their case.

"Once you became members of a conspiracy to not only get rid of your tenants but to collaborate with others in doing so, it put you at odds with the Civil Rights Act, which is three years old now, so you ought to be more familiar with it, as much as you despise it. And in a few days it’s going to get worse for you. The president is eventually going to sign a new version of that law, a version that has penalties – this is very serious – for obstructing any citizen’s right to vote. And I’m quite aware that you deny that, but these boys in the Justice Department are all fired up over this. They want to set a precedent, and this is as good a place to do it as any.

"And the people out there in those tents? They’re fired up to vote in the fall. They think Senator Kennedy is going to make it all comfy for them, somehow, some way. They think he’s going to get himself elected president and this is going to change their lives.

This voters’ league they’ve put together out there? You might laugh now, but this is just the tip of a big black iceberg, gentlemen. They want representation. They want their own people on the county court. On the bench. In the state legislature. They want politicians to come asking them for favors. And before it’s over they’re going to have the newspapers and the northern church people and the NAACP all working to make that possible.

So what course of action are you recommending, counselor? said Daniel Becker, who had been quiet up to this point but whom the others had looked to as the leader of the group. What is it you would have us do to put a stop to all this? Are you recommending a settlement?

It doesn’t have to look like a capitulation, the attorney replied. Look, this is a political fight you boys are in, and I want you to think of it that way. Goddamn, you’ve all been in your share of ’em. You know as well as I do that if you let someone save face, even just a little, you can eventually get out of a situation without too much damage. Give them a chance to go back to their people and say, ‘Hey, just look what WE did.’ Give them something they can use as political capital out there in those tents. That voters’ league is leading this thing, with a lot of help from these northern agitators. They’re influential. They riled things up. They can quiet things down.

A gloomy silence fell over the room again. The men sneaked looks at each other. Conspiracy? Who were they to challenge the notion? They had hired the best of the best. He might be accurate about everything he was saying. But they had hired him to bring order and peace back into their lives, to get things back the way they were. And the way things were could be defined without any more uncertainty than they had to deal with already, given the instability of the cotton market and taxes and changes that they had discovered in their daily readings of the national newspapers and magazines they reluctantly subscribed to and winced at as they read.

Let me know what you think, gentlemen, Crossthwaite said. I can negotiate this thing or we can go to court. But I just have to be honest with you. Your chances in court are slim.

A FEW BLOCKS away a Greyhound bus rolled to a stop, and Summer Day, who had been sitting in the front of the bus picking the driver’s institutional knowledge of the place to get some idea of what she might be in for, stepped out into the bright sunshine. She was somewhat dazed but making an effort to look perfectly composed to any observers who might have been glancing her way. She wore a green checked skirt and white blouse. Her skin was pale from the long winter she had spent in classrooms and library cubicles. She wore her light brown hair in long bangs that swept down and across her forehead from the left to right. Sides cut short, tucked behind her ears, curling slightly up on the ends.

Summer had been an excellent student. She knew the real meaning of Good fences make good neighbors. And could correctly define irony. And never misused the phrase beg the question. She knew her history. What she really wanted was to make a difference in the world, to help make amends for what gone so horribly wrong.

Summer wasn’t sure what she was looking for in Mississippi. She wasn’t even sure she had made the right connections, that she knew where to go, whom to ask for, or that there would be something useful for her to do at the end of the bus ride, or that she would be welcome at all, this shy, slim, naïve white girl from Ohio. She just knew that she wanted to be part of something that mattered, something that was larger than herself. She wanted to confront the monster, to be part of the solution because the only other alternative she could see would make her part of the proverbial problem. She hated the word zealot and tried hard to assure herself that she was not one, but neither could she allow herself to do nothing, which was unacceptable to her hyper-responsible sense of self.

As she made her way south, she wasn’t afraid. Or elated. Or anxious. She wasn’t sure what she felt. She had expected a flood of emotions, but all she had were questions. Where this journey would take her she couldn’t be sure. From Midwestern Athens, Ohio, to rural Chicory, Mississippi -- yes. Away from school and home and her friends, who were all looking at her as if she was making a decision that was guaranteed to go wrong -- yes. Against her indulgent parents’ better judgment but in sync with their values and ethical considerations – yes, yes, and hell yes. Beyond all that she couldn’t be sure.

The images passing by her window as the bus rolled south provided nothing but monotony for her the first 600 miles. Each farm, each town, each corn field, each grain silo and barn looked pretty much the same. Gradually, the scenery and what it represented changed. The gap between the prosperous and the poor began to become more pronounced. The stop signs, the utility poles, the billboards. The cornpone puns.

My job is/Keeping faces clean/And nobody knows/De stubble/I’ve seen/Burma shave.

The bus was taking her to a place she had never seen before, and certainly had never felt.

Now she was feeling it in her bones, more anxious than she had ever been before as the bus rolled on, south and west and south again. Summer practiced what she would say to the organizers from the Freedom Brigade when she finally got to Barksdale County and made her way, she wasn’t sure how, to their headquarters, bracing for the look she would get when she would say Hello. I’m Summer Day. So predictable. She knew she would have to pause then, and reassure them, Yes. My parents have always called me Summer Day. I thought about changing my first name to Every, but I would have explain that, too. And then there would be the pause that occurs when a poor joke is poorly, awkwardly delivered, and she would say, I’m here to do anything I can to help. Just give me a job to do. I’m a hard worker. And I can take care of myself. … Yes, my parents have given me permission to come down here. Yes, I’ve saved my own money for this. I can pay for my room and board. I just want to help. She practiced her lines quietly in her head over and over. She had never been so unsure of her inner voice.

When she finally walked out into the sunshine of a late May morning just off the square in Chicory, none of that was necessary. Summer? The voice of a young man at the edge of the bus station crowd. Summer Day? Was that a local accent? So maybe they were better organized than she imagined. A sense of relief swept over her. The Freedom Brigade had gotten the word, and her arrival had been expected. She couldn’t stop herself from thinking -- despite her sincere efforts not to have thoughts like that come to her mind; a man was just a man in her ever aspiring-to-be-colorblind world -- as the owner of the voice stepped out of the crowd that that was the best looking man – she had to correct herself from thinking the best looking black man -- she had ever seen.

WILLIAM FELT boxed in. Apprehension interrupted his routines and even his sleep on some nights that spring and summer as the population of what became known as Tent City grew. Carload by carload they arrived, with sacks of clothing and cooking utensils and cots. Supplies flowed in fits and starts through the Freedom Brigade, whose source had become the stuff of rumor and innuendo – most likely commie-inspired seemed to be the most popular analysis, damn Yankee liberals the most generous -- throughout Chicory and the surrounding countryside. Families at Twin Pines settled in to prepare for what was expected to be a long standoff with their former landlords. Some volunteered to help around William’s farm to repay his hospitality. A few quickly gave up and moved north to try to find a better life in Memphis or Chicago or Detroit.

The planter’s deepest fear was realized when on a humid morning in late July he was awakened by the sound of shouting and excited chatter nearby. Walker Wilson’s body had been discovered behind an incubator house William’s mother Elise had erected not 100 yards from where William lay sleeping. Walker’s throat had been slashed with a dull cutting instrument of an unknown kind. His body was on his back in the mud, hands tied behind him with thick cords, coins placed over his eyes, a sign left by the killer or killers indicating that the man had lost his life over an unpaid debt or a monetary dispute of some other kind. There were unmistakable signs of a beating -- huge, swollen, black and yellow bruises about the face, arms and neck. There was little blood, the body having obviously been moved to the spot from wherever the murder had occurred.

As word of the atrocity spread, families came out of their tents and their shacks and a couple of trailers that had been towed onto the site. Bystanders covered their mouths and glanced sideways at the newly discovered carnage, not quite able to look directly at the gruesome sight. Someone went to fetch William to find out what they should do. A great sob resonated through the crowd. A woman screamed