Sweetness Read online

  The truth was significantly more complicated.

  Located in the heart of Marion County, Mississippi, a mere 112 miles north of New Orleans, Columbia (population: 7,500), was a town long ruled by expectations. Met expectations. If you were black, your house was situated on the north side of Church Street, in a section branded “The Quarters.” If you were white, your house was located on the south side of Church Street. If you were black, at one time or another you likely worked at the Columbia Country Club, either caddying, cleaning, or cooking. If you were white, you likely played golf at the Columbia Country Club. If you were black, you did all of your food and household shopping at Jeanette’s Grocery, a ragtag storefront on the corner of Owens Street. If you were white, you had the well-stocked, well-maintained Sunflower Food Store.

  The unstated yet universally understood rule for the town’s blacks was simple: Deal with it. Sure, there’d be the occasional “nigger” or “boy” references. And yes, the Marion County chapter of the Ku Klux Klan took a certain pleasure in lighting crosses in the nearby woods. But as long as one didn’t complain, as long as one stayed on the right side of the street and walked with his eyes to the sidewalk and entered through the rear of a restaurant and enjoyed movies from up high in the balcony of the Marion Theatre, nobody from the white areas would pay you much mind.

  So that’s what Alyne Sibley did.

  She was born on January 14, 1926, one of seven children raised on a farm in the rural outpost of Expose, Mississippi. In 1937, Marion County’s Historical Society commissioned a detailed look at the region. The 187-page document spanned Columbia’s founding in 1812 to its temporary status as the Mississippi state capital in 1821 to the rise of the Ku Klux Klan during the reconstruction period (“the best and most honorable men in the community”), and it spared few words in disparaging blacks. Wrote Maggie Byrd, a Columbia-based historian: “By nature and adaptability, the Negroes are best suited to agriculture. Negroes have done very little along the lines of industry in Marion County except in the field of lumbering. They are better suited to the weather conditions and hard labor than the White neighbor who by nature, by rearing and training is far more sensitive. As skilled workmen, even in the lumber trade Negroes have not proven satisfactory in the past.”

  Throughout her youth, Alyne was primarily responsible for helping her mother Luola pick cotton. At day’s end her fingers would be bloody and raw from the repetition. Her real strength came in the kitchen. “The first meal I ever cooked, I was nine years old,” said Alyne, whose long, thin fingers reminded people of sunflower stems. “My mother, she was sick and everybody else was in the field working. I said, ‘Momma, I can cook.’ ” With her mother watching from a nearby seat, Alyne built a fire and prepared string beans, potatoes, corn bread, and fried chicken.

  Alyne came to Columbia a decade later, and in 1947 she married Edward Charles Payton, a local laborer who, for reasons family members can’t explain, went by Peter. (“In the South,” said Eddie, his son, “everyone had a nickname. It’s a form of respect.”) The Columbia of today bears few distinctions from the hundreds of other desolate, midsize towns across America, what with a half-vacant business district and a landscape of drab gray buildings from long-ago eras. There are good parts and bad parts; corners where small plastic bags of cocaine are passed from dealer to buyer and corners where girls in pigtails and floral dresses sell lemonade for fifty cents per glass. There’s a passable library and a handful of stately houses and a long-vacant movie theatre, Cinema II, with a marquee reading WELCOME HOME TROOPS in crooked black letters. At the Round Table restaurant over on Church Street, locals sit at a large revolving table and pass around heaping plates of fried chicken and collard greens. They talk about Jesus Christ and ninety-eight-degree summer days and the upcoming high school football season. Catch one of the city’s old white residents in the right mood, and he’ll quietly moan about things not being like they used to.

  Once upon a time, Columbia was trumpeted across the state as the “City of Charm on the Pearl River.” Though hardly a bustling metropolis along the lines of Jackson (the state capital located ninety miles north), it was a location that—thanks to a cozy spot along the east bank of the river—served as an early twentieth-century Mississippi boomtown. A never-ending parade of vessels made the ninety-mile trek along the Pearl River from the Gulf of Mexico to Columbia. Upon arriving, the crews took advantage of Columbia’s restaurants, groceries, and appliance stores, then loaded their ships with lumber hauled from Mississippi’s vast spans of wilderness (and cut in one of Columbia’s handful of sawmills).

  Columbia was a place where the camellias and azaleas were plentiful, where original colonial homes lined the streets of many of the fancier neighborhoods, where—thanks to the Gulf breezes—the summer days were mild and the nights surprisingly cool. Were one asked to predict a part of Mississippi that would thrive for years to come, he’d be hard pressed to pinpoint a better location than Columbia.

  Alyne and Peter settled into a house on Short Owens Street—a small, white, ranch-styled home with two bedrooms, a den, and a tiny kitchen with beige tiled floors. All the neighbors were black, and a large handful of those were relatives. There was Aunt Helen, who was married to a preacher. There was Uncle Oliver—everyone called him Buck. There was another uncle, B. C., and a third, Uncle Clyde, who became a Muslim and changed his last name from Sibley to X. A cousin, Amos G. Payton, worked at the nearby church. Decades later, Paytons can still be found throughout Columbia’s White Pages.

  In the summer of 1951, Alyne gave birth for the first time, to a boy named Edward Charles. She and Peter had been trying to have a baby for years, but with little luck. “Back then we didn’t have birth control,” she said. “I was ready to have a baby, but nothing was happening.” Shortly after Eddie’s arrival, the family moved to a slightly larger home at 811 Bluff Road. “It was a perfect location,” said Eddie. “It was right on the Pearl River, so you could walk outside and fish.” Thirteen months later, Eddie’s sister, Pamela, was born.

  On July 25, 1953, the final child came along. He entered the world in the same way nearly all of Columbia’s blacks joined society: on the floor of the house, pulled from his mother by a black midwife. He was named Walter—Walter Jerry Payton. But beginning in his first days, nobody called him that. He was simply “Chubby”—an ode to his robust cheeks and a belly dimensionally akin to a large loaf of sourdough bread. “There weren’t many fat kids in the South, so he immediately stood out,” said Eddie. “Walter had a chubby face and a chubby body, and you couldn’t help but notice it. As he started to thin out a little, the nickname changed. Instead of ‘Chubby,’ we nicknamed him ‘Bubba.’ That one stuck.”

  In the South of the 1950s and ’60s—and especially in the black South—children generally went by two names. Eddie wasn’t Eddie—he was Edward Charles. Yet Walter Jerry was rarely Walter Jerry. He was “Bubba,” and he was, from early on, the ultimate mama’s boy. Wherever Alyne went, Bubba followed. He cried when she left him for a few moments, and wailed for her attention when Edward Charles—the more gregarious, more confident, more mischievous child—took a smack at his head or a slap to his behind. “Walter had his mother’s personality,” said Edna Foster, a family friend. “Real quiet, real soft-spoken, would do anything you asked.”

  If one had to be poor and black and a Mississippian in the late 1950s, he could do much worse than Bluff Road. Kids were everywhere, dashing barefoot through the neighborhood, fishing gaspergou and catfish along the muddy red banks of the Pearl, planning one adventure after the next. The Payton household was bordered by the river on one side and an enormous pickle processing plant on the other. To most adults, the factory was an eyesore—a gray slab of rank dreariness. Yet for the neighborhood children, it offered a maze of wonderment. Bubba and his playmates would dash among the salt barrels, trying to elude the night watchman. “If either he or your parents caught you running around the pickle plant,” Payton once wrote, “you were
in for it.”

  When Walter and his Bluff Road pals weren’t weaving through dill stacks, they could often be found at the nearby slaughter pen, where truckloads of cattle and pigs arrived several times per day. To be a kid in Columbia at the time was to be regularly exposed to a certain brand of carnage. There was no squeamishness when it came to killing. Fathers and sons hunted and fished for meals. Mothers and daughters sliced and diced the meat. As soon as the boys heard even the faintest hint of a moo or an oink, they’d charge the pen and climb the iron-barred siding for a peek. The show was bloody, disgusting, and absolutely riveting. One by one, the cows stepped forward, and a man with a sledgehammer slammed them atop the skulls. The pigs received slightly more humane treatment—they were shot in the head with a .22 caliber rifle. Once, in an episode he would recall nearly twenty years later, an enraptured Walter saw a large Brahman bull take two sledgehammers and a .22 caliber shot to the head without falling. “I could watch them slaughter pigs and cows and bulls for hours,” he wrote. “I’m convinced that none of those animals felt anything other than fear when they saw another animal go down.”

  For the boys and girls of Columbia’s Quarters, segregation and bigotry failed to crush their youthful vigor. There was an innocent joy to their lives, one that transcended prejudice. They could run through the streets and play football in the fields and experience the same glee as their white counterparts on the other side of town. James Meredith, who in 1962 became the first black to attend the University of Mississippi, explained it perfectly when he said, “I can love Mississippi because of the beauty of the countryside and the old traditions of family affection, and for such small things as flowers bursting in spring, and the way you can see for miles from a ridge in the winter. Why should a Negro be forced to leave such things? Because of fear? No.”

  The Payton family moved for a third—and final—time in 1962, when Walter was nine, building a house with green siding at 1410 Hendricks Street. Peter, Alyne, and their boys—with the help of Martin Lenoir, Jefferson High’s shop teacher—built the home themselves. “I told my children I was going to raise them the way my mother raised me,” Alyne said. “They’d say, ‘That’s old fashioned.’ I told them, ‘That’s OK, I’m going to do it anyway.’ You don’t change things because you won’t know what you’re doing.”

  The Payton house was the largest on the block. It also happened to be located directly behind John J. Jefferson High, giving the kids access to a limitless play space. Walter and Eddie were forced to share a small bedroom in the back of the house. “It was a plain room,” said Eddie. “We had a bunk bed, with Walter on top and me on the bottom. There were no posters on the wall. Pretty simple.”

  In black Columbia, neighbors watched neighbors and everyone knew everyone. The houses were modest and the businesses limited. (“We didn’t have shops on the black side of town,” said Eddie. “We had joints. Clubs, barbershops, places like that.”) The community pulled together to keep its children out of trouble and away from any of the white sections of town where potential conflict awaited. Doors were left unlocked, and friends could drop in unannounced. “Whenever I fried chicken, Walter would smell it, come on in, grab three pieces, and eat,” said Earnestine Lewis, a neighbor. “He was a very nice, very mannerly little boy. Always ‘Yes m’am, no m’am.’ ”

  Both Alyne and Peter spent Mondays through Fridays working at Pioneer Recovery Systems, a plant where military-supply parachutes were stitched together and shipped off in bulk to the U.S. government. Their workdays were split—Peter, a custodian, usually clocked in before the morning-to-early afternoon shift, then returned home and Alyne, who did assembly line work, would take the four to eleven P.M. block. When she wasn’t at the plant, Alyne held jobs in the houses of various white families, looking after their children, cleaning their laundry, mopping floors. On weekends, Peter made extra money by setting up a wood block on a corner of Owens Street and shining shoes for fifty cents a pair as blacks strolled to church. He also manned a five-acre garden on the outskirts of town, often bringing one of his sons along to operate the hand plow. (“We didn’t have a mule,” Walter once complained. “It was hard work.”) Alyne, meanwhile, spent her Saturdays cooking pancakes at the Columbia Country Club, where whites ate and blacks labored. “She made the most delicious pancakes you’ve ever tasted,” said Earnestine Lewis. “I used to tell her, ‘Miss Alyne, you could be famous if you put those on the market.’ ” In later years Walter would bemoan growing up poor, but among Columbia’s blacks the Paytons were comfortable. As the one in charge of family monies, Alyne religiously collected the weekly paychecks and deposited them in the local bank. The Paytons made few frivolous purchases, and worked as many hours as humanly possible.

  One of the results, of course, was that both parents were permanently exhausted, with the slumped shoulders and baggy eyes to prove it. “We didn’t have a babysitter,” Alyne said. “They were always with me unless I was at choir or usher rehearsal [or work]. Then [my husband] would be home with them.” Every Sunday morning, whether the children wanted to or not, Alyne dressed Edward Charles, Walter, and Pam in their most dapper outfits and walked them four blocks to the Owens Chapel Baptist Church, a nondescript redbrick building with a crucifix hanging above the entranceway. The pastor was Reverend Eli Payton, a distant cousin. Sunday school began at nine A.M., followed by services from ten thirty to one o’clock. The three children sang in the choir, and in the tradition of old-school black Southern Baptist ways, the services mixed hellfire preaching with transcendent singing. Alyne’s children stood alongside their mother, Edward Charles occasionally looking away to stomp atop his brother’s shiny brown loafers or elbow Walter’s rib cage. When services ended, the family returned home for lunch, followed by the weekly two P.M. episode of Tarzan on channel 3. “When Tarzan was over,” Walter once wrote, “the kids in the neighborhood burst from their houses, screen doors slamming, parents yelling, ‘Quit slamming that door!’ and all of us bellowing the Tarzan call.” At five P.M. they’d return for evening services, which lasted another three hours.

  Though she held no elected position or official post, Alyne was a central figure in Columbia’s black community. She dispensed pearls of wisdom (“Never give your kids soda.” “Rise early, sleep early, work hard.”), advised her friends, helped whenever help was needed. When Archie Johnson, Walter’s pal, describes Alyne as “remarkable,” he echoes a sentiment shared by many. “Everyone loved Walter’s mama,” said Johnson. “One thing I remember is that she was really into making her home look nice. During the fall she’d drive out to the country, to a rural area called Hawthorne where some of her family lived. We’d ride up with her, and on the way she’d inevitably want to stop and get us to pick the cattails for her.

  “Nothing about her life was haphazard. Everything was organized. She had a plan.”

  Alyne served as a church usher and was the leader, nurturer, and moral guide of the family. Peter, in turn, was the disciplinarian. Though only five foot five and maybe 140 pounds, with dark skin and unusually long fingers, Peter demanded respect from his children, both with his scowl and his belt. Docile in his day-to-day demeanor, Peter seemed to derive his greatest pleasure from meeting up with his closest friend, a neighbor named Brady Lewis, for a couple of hours in the backyard. There the two would lounge on a pair of lawn chairs, telling stories and polishing off a couple of dollar-fifty glass bottles of grape-flavored Mad Dog 20/20 until they were drunk. Because Columbia was a dry town, the two tried keeping their ritual a secret. But everyone knew. “Walter’s dad was real quiet and agreeable,” said Robert Virgil, who grew up with Walter and Eddie. “I remember his dad used to come to my house, and he’d help us kill a chicken or a hog. Then he’d drink his Mad Dog.” Peter wasn’t merely known by his first name. With the exception of his wife and kids, he was “Peter Payton” to everyone, in all circumstances. “Peter Payton didn’t do no harm, and he wasn’t a bad man, but we called him the town drunk, because he seemed to be d
rinking his Mad Dog all the time,” said Earnestine Lewis. “No one ever bothered him because he never bothered nobody, but it was always the same thing—Peter Payton being drunk, Peter Payton stumbling around. Sometimes Miss Alyne would holler at him, make him come inside the house. He’d yell back, ‘Oh, Alyne! Let me be!’ But then he would always obey her. She wore the pants.”

  If Peter Payton’s drinking created major problems, none of his kids seemed aware of it. If anything, the booze made him even more taciturn. Upon arriving home from wherever he might have been, Peter—voice as gentle as a pillow, if not a tad slurred—would review the day’s events with his wife. They would share a bite to eat, watch some television. Then, if the two agreed that someone had behaved in an untoward manner, he calmly approached the offending child—rarely Pam, sometimes Walter, often Eddie—and said, simply, “Go out in the yard and get a switch.” The soon-to-be victim would return with a thick stick (thin branches were unacceptable), then bend over, pants pulled down around the ankles.

  When Peter Payton rolled up his shirtsleeves and grabbed the switch, it was all business. In the best-case scenario, a session lasted only four or five swings. Occasionally the stick snapped. “Then he’d go and get the belt,” Eddie said. “It was leather, and it didn’t break.

  “Daddy was slick,” Eddie continued. “We’d go to bed, and we’d think maybe a punishment wasn’t coming. Then it’d be about eleven o’clock at night and you’d feel the blanket snatched from over you. You’d be in bed, curled up against a wall with nowhere to go.”

  It was an understood form of behavioral control at a time when black parents feared white reaction to unruliness among their offspring. Columbia’s white population was, by Mississippi standards, mostly cordial toward the town’s blacks. In August 1955, a fourteen-year-old boy named Emmett Till had been murdered in Money, Mississippi, for reportedly whistling at a white woman. In 1964, three political activists—one black, two Jewish—were lynched during a drive to Longdale, Mississippi. In Columbia, there was certainly intimidation and modest violence, but little more. If you were black, and you followed the societal script, you were largely left alone.