One Night in Mississippi (2 page)

Detroit, 2008

I opened the door and entered the near-empty apartment. One brown-cushioned chair and one loveseat. One leather recliner, the arms torn and rupturing foam. A wrought-iron coffee table set between them. The same mismatched furniture that was here when I moved in three years ago. The walls were bare, smudged, and yellowing. The water-stained ceiling shed occasional paint flakes onto the loosening curls of the carpet, and when the couple in the apartment above fought or fucked, the living room took on the feel of a lightly shaken snow-globe.

These were the places I had lived in since leaving Mississippi: A wooden lodge on an abandoned lot in rural Tennessee; an attic above a flower shop down the street from my sister's house in Philadelphia; a mould-infested hostel that slept eight to a room off the campus of Loyola University.

I'd dropped out of college with one semester remaining, because graduating from college was Graden's dream and I didn't feel I should be the one to achieve it. If I'd stayed, I could have been an engineer. Instead I took work cleaning out horse stalls on a farm in Kentucky. I worked on a dock in Maine, gutting fish. I loaded railway cars. I worked in lumberyards and on road crews and in a leather tannery. Once, I apprenticed for a cabinet maker, but the work was too fine for my crippled hand. I would trace the old man's curls and grooves with my fingers, the wood sometimes still warm from the cutting, wistfully admiring the detail, but I could never match the work myself.

I drifted with no destination and no desire to stay in any one place. As a boy growing up in Mississippi, I had always planned on taking over the farm from Pa and raising my own family there. I'd never expected to leave the county, much less the state, but after Graden's death I had run so far that I had seen near half the country before I found a purpose again.

The cabinet maker kept a small television in his shop so he could watch baseball games while he worked, and it was there that I saw the news that would shape the rest of my life. Images of a soft-jowled man, close-cropped hair starting far back on his forehead, heavy glasses. I sat in a chair, broom in hand, and listened to the newsman detail the conviction of Byron De La Beckwith, twice let go on charges in the 1963 murder of NAACP activist Medgar Evers, but now convicted, thirty-one years later. They walked him down the steps of the courthouse while crowds shouted, jubilant on one side of the steps and outraged on the other.

I remembered gathering on the steps of a similar courthouse in Jackson, watching eight men walk free after the charges against them were thrown out. There hadn't even been a trial for Graden. The judge heard the charges and the evidence, dismissed them, and after months of waiting, the whole thing was over in the space of a few minutes.

The cabinet maker appeared in the doorway. I'd never told him or anyone else about my brother, but he must have seen something in my face while I sat in front of the television, because he simply nodded at me and took the broom from my hand.

“It's all right,” he said. “Go home.”

I stayed up all night, watching the news coverage. Experts debated the right and wrong of the conviction while the same footage looped through, over and over, but all I could think about was standing on those courthouse steps so many years ago, helpless.

I started to gather every piece of information I could about my brother's case. I kept a folder with articles, notes, names, and dates. I obtained a copy of the autopsy report. I never went back to the cabinet maker's shop, but I think he expected as much when he sent me home. I was restless. I was fifty-four years old when I saw De La Beckwith convicted. I had wasted so much time, and now I couldn't sit still.

At the end of each work day I would return to whatever place I had found at the time, aching and often dirty, and start carefully writing out letters to lawyers and politicians. I kept it all to myself at first, but I needed a permanent address where I could receive responses, so I called Etta, who now lived in Philadelphia. She agreed, and I made daily visits to post offices, hoping for a packet of forwarded mail from her. At first all I received were a few vague, noncommittal replies. I wrote letters to the FBI and to the Justice Department, and they responded with form letters assuring me they would look at the case, but carefully explaining how backlogged they were.

Yet they continued to pursue convictions. In 2001, Thomas E. Blanton, Jr. was sentenced for his role in the 1963 bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, a blast that had killed four young girls who were inside preparing for a sermon to be titled “The Love That Forgives.” In 2005, Edgar Ray Killen was found guilty of three counts of murder in the 1964 slaying of civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner in Mississippi. He received three consecutive twenty-year sentences. He was eighty years old.

I expanded my letter-writing campaign to include newspapers and television stations, and that's when things took off. Etta was swamped with mail, and I received new packages from her almost every day. The official agencies were still cautious in their responses, but the reaction of the media and the public was overwhelming. I began to give interviews.

My elder sister, Glenda, called from Baltimore, where she had settled to be close to the nursing home where our mother lived.

“Mama and I saw you on the news today. You know she's not well.”

“How is she?”

“She's not well, I just told you. Then she sees all this stuff about Graden on the news all over again. It's not good for her.”

“Then why are you letting her watch it?”

“Don't do that. Don't you talk to me about taking care of Mama! I'm the one that's here. Do you even care?”

Glenda raged at me for stirring things up, but I doubted that I was having the impact on our mother that she claimed. I had visited Ma a few times, and although there was the occasional spark of recognition, more often there was just a confused stare. Once, when I was standing in the doorway with the sunlight streaming in from the hallway window behind me, she smiled wistfully and called me “Graden.” I allowed her a moment of illusion, then backed out of the room and left the home. I never went back.

While Glenda shouted at me through the phone, I listened quietly, having no justification to offer her.

After a while Etta set up an email address for me, although I had no idea how to use it. She sent me printouts of the messages at first, but as they started to come in greater numbers, she insisted that I learn. And so I did. I received messages of support from blacks and whites alike, and I received messages of hatred from blacks and whites alike. I didn't find the former encouraging or the latter troubling. There were eight men's names in my folder, and one by one they were found. Six were still alive.

Daniel Olsen was the first. A television reporter from a local station tracked him to a run-down trailer park outside of Mobile, Alabama. The station paid to fly me in for the arrest. The last time I'd seen him, he'd been at the back of the group walking down the courthouse steps. His son, Earl, who'd been charged as a minor, was beside him. Daniel had his hand on the back of his son's head, and neither of them looked up. They didn't smile and wave like the others, and they weren't dressed like them either. The six men in front of them were wearing expensive suits and ties and polished shoes. The Olsens were dressed shabbily by comparison, in plain brown shoes with simple pants and starched white shirts.

I stood on Daniel's front lawn with a cluster of news cameras behind me. The driveway was cracked, and the pieces of pavement jutted up against each other like ice floes. The lawn was littered with small clay pots, some holding plants, others seemingly just filled with dirt. Grass was sparse. Neighbours opened their trailer doors to watch, standing half-in, half-out, gawking at the crowd approaching Daniel's front step, but ready in a moment to duck back into safety. I stayed back while they knocked. When Daniel answered the door, he seemed bewildered at the sight of the cameras and the officers. He was wearing pyjama bottoms and slippers, and the few strands of white hair that remained flicked above his head in the wind. I could hear the TV playing behind him, but I couldn't make out the show. An officer read the charges and handcuffed him on the front step. I heard one of the reporters say Graden's name, but instead of clarifying things, the name only seemed to confuse him further. The reporter got close enough to push a microphone towards him.

“Do you recognize this man?”

The reporter tipped his head in my direction. Daniel turned towards me, but there was no visible response, and an officer shoved the reporter away.

When they put Daniel in the back of the cruiser, he still wore the same lost look that he'd had when they knocked. He said nothing except to ask if he could go back inside to get a shirt.

“How do you feel?” Etta asked me that night on the phone.

“I don't know,” I replied, and it was the truth. I had difficulty connecting the helpless old man who had been led away to prison to the younger version of himself whom I'd last seen striding down the steps of that Mississippi courthouse.

“What about you?”

“I don't know either,” she said. “In truth, I don't feel like it changes anything. But I know that this means more to you. I know it's … something different for you.”

I let that hang on the line between us and was grateful that she didn't continue. It was true that I had hoped for more. I felt as uncertain as Daniel had looked, but I had started and I intended to keep going.

None of them were difficult to find, because none of them were hiding. Daniel's brother, Patrick Olsen, was still in Mississippi. His son, Earl Olsen, was deceased. Rob Tywater and his cousin Barry were in Georgia. Blaine Pimpton was in Seattle, Paul Poust was in South Carolina, and Marty Bavon was also deceased.

I was there for every one of the arrests. I never went to any of the trials — I couldn't stand to hear the details again, to hear the arguments of the defence, to risk having to stand on another set of courthouse steps if one of them were set free — but I was always there for the arrests. I looked at their faces and registered the stages. First shock, then disorientation, then indignant anger, turning, each one of them, to the camera to either shout or mutter some variation of “That all happened a long time ago …”

It never seemed long ago to me. Standing in the living room of my apartment in Detroit, it was still as fresh for me as it had been that summer in Mississippi.

Still wearing my coat, I walked into the kitchen to start the kettle.

I checked the cupboards. Just a few pots and pans, nothing I couldn't leave behind. I went to the bedroom, opened the closets, then the bathroom, where I had left a half-bottle of aspirin and some eye drops in the cabinet. I put them in my coat pocket, then closed the cabinet and went back to the kitchen to fix my coffee.

The call had come two weeks ago as an anonymous tip, left after I had been featured on a national news special. Someone thought that they recognized a man in the picture. Earl Olsen. Etta warned me that the caller could be a crank. We'd had plenty of bogus tipsters over the years, but I checked into every one of them, no matter how far-fetched they seemed. Earl's father had told investigators years ago that his son was dead, but after the call, I got in touch with the coroner's office and the Jackson county police department. Neither had a death certificate or any official record. The official I spoke to confessed that records older than ten years were spotty at best. The sheriff's office had moved in 1973 and several boxes were lost. Records didn't go electronic until 1997 and it wasn't until 2001 that all of the old records had been completed. I had to know.

I poured the coffee into a thermos. I dropped the aspirin and eye drops into a suitcase on the table and closed it. Everything else I owned was already in a duffel bag in the backseat of the rented Explorer that was parked outside. I left an envelope on the table with the key to the apartment and enough cash to cover two months' rent, then I picked up the suitcase and the thermos and walked out.