Weeks 4 and 5

Weeks 4 and 5

The Program is officially over, for most of my colleagues, as of Friday 25th. It ended with a public presentation of each Legal Fellows' preferred case at Southern University Law Center. I am staying on for a further fortnight. 

Evan Reid (Intern), Professor Margaret Burnham (Director), myself, Rufus Williams Jr. (Legal Fellow)

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And so, it turned out it wasn't attorney client confidentiality. It was a moral obligation not to freely disclose names and relations of people you have spoken to before the cases are publicised, for their own protection and for the protection of the longevity of the Program. Perfectly understandable.

The first details of one of the publicised cases I am working on can be seen here. I have completed another file on Mr. Bell's grandfather, which will be posted shortly. I'm in two minds as of yet as to which is the most crushing narrative in the cases I was assigned to look at.

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The tale of Officer C.

Officer C, as I am referring to him in an un-identifiably abbreviated way, was an officer of the law in Baton Rouge. We encountered him in  uniform, but presumably off duty, in a bar under the freeway running through the city. We had struck up a conversation with Officer C after a heated debate on certain traditional surgical practices that turned out to be far more commonplace in the United States than I previously anticipated. 

When the bar closed the patrons were ushered outside by the dimming of lights and the cleaning of surfaces. Out in the bath-temperature Southern air, Officer C offered to show me the Baton Rouge experience. He spoke of going fishing across the Mississippi river just west of Baton Rouge, with "white folks, you know, kinda hillbilly folk" who he occasionally enjoyed socialising with. The key apparently though, was to pick up some "hood rats", divided into the category of "quarter horse" and "yellowbone". A "hoot rat", as my colleagues explained afterwards, was a derogatory term for a promiscuous female from a lower-income background. 

Officer C's philosophy blossomed when two police helicopters hummed overheard in the night sky, running from slightly different trajectories towards some point eastwards. Officer C's radio crackled to life, with a static-laced female voice speaking in code. We asked him what was happening. He said it was "an armed robbery" but he "probably wasn't going to go". He explained that there was balance that had to be maintained; the criminals do their thing, the officers do theirs, and there has to be some scope for letting the cycle perpetuate. Several sirens screamed past up on the freeway next to us. With that, Officer C bid us farewell, and retired home for the night. 

I still have Officer C's number written down, but I haven't called it. 

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(the woods part 2, part II)

Harking back to last week, with my journey to the county courthouse, I learned just how small the world is. 

There are roughly 3 million people in Mississippi; 30,000 in the county my case concerned, and the Monday before last I was in the Mississippi State Archives with about ten other people. Four of these turned out the closely related to the victim in my case. I had overheard a lady from the group asking for records in same county I was interested in. I thought I would take a gamble and introduce myself and the work I was doing, and ask if she knew any older people from that area who might know something. She said I should go out to the foyer and speak with her husband and his brother, as they might know something.

Lo and behold, they were closely related to the victim through their parents' generation. One of them called their older brother...who knew everything.

To offer the jist of the case, the press at the time (Summer, 1948) reported the shooting of a black man when he was trying to enter a white lady's house. Another paper said he had made advances towards her.
 What the elder brother of the family I met told me couldn't have been much further from either account.

His first thoughts were spoken out loud, addressed to me. "White folks didn't do nothing back then, what are they going to do different now?"

It turns out that, if an African American man did an honest day's work at a white lady's house in that place at that time, and if a white man came past and said something derogatory to him, he wasn't allowed to say anything back. If he did, the man would drive off, and return with a two truckloads of armed men, all incensed by a tale of a black man trying to break into a house with defenceless occupants. 

That day, the victim's six year old son was dropped from his father's truck by the roadside for safety after word arrived about the approaching armed group. He watched as his father sped off towards his sister's house for refuge.  It was the last time he saw him alive. Three years later he was moved to Chicago and never came back.

I called him last Friday afternoon, 66 years after the incident, with the number provided to me by the above interviewee. After introducing myself and the work I was doing, my gut prevailed to make me offer my condolences: "I don't know what this means to you sir, coming from me, but I am very sorry for your loss." 

We spoke for about forty minutes. After hearing about his life, at the end of the conversation I hung up the phone, put on a pair of battered rope sandals, and went for a wander round campus to clear my head. My mind was drawn to the wooded area behind the sister's house,  now abandoned, on that "lonely road towards Cheraw" reported in the press, where the ambitions of the group had soon been realised. 

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I have been afforded the opportunity to travel to Chicago for a personal interview. I currently sit in a suite just off a rain soaked alley beside the French Quarter, New Orleans, waiting on my flight tomorrow morning. 

I still can't quite get my head round 80% of what I hear; that it all actually happened.  I can't fathom the sort of pain that has been carried around day-to-day. I would like to say it was caused by arbitrary hatred, but it wasn't. All too often I have heard, "that was just what it was like back then", and it truly hits home that almost anything can be normalised.



For now, Cajun/Vietnamese pho, followed by blues on Bourbon Street.