But every now and then Carolyn chafed against the quieter tempo of her aunt’s house. One summer afternoon when she was ten or eleven and Barnes was fourteen or fifteen, just the age of Emmett Till when he ran afoul of Mississippi’s customs, she was sitting alone on the porch when Barnes rode his bicycle past the house and waved. “Hey, Barnes,” Carolyn yelled. “Where you going?”
“I’m going to the store to get something for my mama,” he replied.
“I asked, ‘Can I go with you?’?” Carolyn told me. “He said, ‘Yeah, sure. Jump on the back.’ He had this little rack on the back like old-timey bicycles. . . . I darted off the screened porch, slamming the door behind me as usual. And I jumped on the back of his bike.”
Almost instantly, before Barnes had a chance to push off and begin their ride, Aunt Mabel rolled out of the house onto the porch, pushed open the screened door, and screeched at the top of her lungs, “Get off that bike and get in this house, right now!”
“I was startled to hear her scream, as she had never raised her voice at me before. Immediately I did as I was told, but I was puzzled, as she seemed to be mad at me.” When Carolyn asked why she was upset, her aunt replied, “Because you don’t need to be riding with boys on your bike, because people will talk about you.”
“It didn’t dawn on me at the time,” Carolyn wrote many years later, “but the real reason she was upset and yelled at me was because Barnes was a black boy. . . . This was Mississippi. At that time it was okay [for small children] to play with black friends at your home [but] it was completely unacceptable for me to be with Barnes and go off to the store on the back of his bike.”7 She told me, “I don’t remember being around him much after that. So maybe he and I both got corrected, you know.”
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Carolyn was fifteen in 1949, in high school near Cruger, and had just won the school’s beauty contest when her father suffered a series of strokes. The first two weakened him greatly and kept him from working. The final stroke, at age sixty-three, killed him as he sat in their living room. She was bereft, as was her mother, who was only forty-six years old.
Carolyn’s mother began training as a nurse, and the plantation’s owners were kind enough to let the family remain in the house until she earned her nursing degree. Then the family moved to the nearby small town of Indianola, the seat of Sunflower County. There her mother worked long hours at the hospital while they lived in a small apartment across the road. Carolyn was barely over five feet tall, weighed less than a hundred pounds, and had lovely brunette hair and full lips. Her new classmates seemed to agree that she was movie-star material, for she soon won her second high school beauty contest. To help make ends meet she worked behind the sales counter at the Morgan & Lindsay Variety Store and babysat for a number of local families. When her mother worked late Carolyn took care of her younger siblings.8
Their distance from what Carolyn saw as the paradise of the plantation Delta seemed to be echoed in her memories of race. Indianola, where the Citizens’ Council would one day be founded, was firmly and vehemently segregated. “There were no black children in school with us—this was no different from the Delta, of course—and no black families in our neighborhood. In fact, the only contact I had with any black people was when I was waiting on them at the Morgan and Lindsay.”
In town Carolyn learned the rigid folkways of race. Black people were expected to say “Yes, ma’am” and “Yes, sir” when talking with white people, even whites younger than themselves. Blacks were “actin’ up” or “weren’t ‘in their place’?” if “they didn’t step aside when someone white passed them on the sidewalk. They better not look any white person in the eye, either. That’d get them punched.” Carolyn maintained that in that respect Indianola “was certainly different from the plantation I grew up on,” but it may simply have been that her awareness of racial arrangements grew as she got older.
Of course racial separation went deeper than public social arrangements. The idyll of Barnes and the Cruger of her youth was over. “We could no longer have black friends when we lived in Indianola,” she wrote. “It was something that was never spoken directly to us but something we understood as the way things were.”9 At least in memory the change from the more intimate racial paternalism that represented one kind of life in the rural Delta seemed to Carolyn tied to her family’s loss of a father and their fall from a certain kind of grace.
But for a pretty white girl Indianola had its charms. At her new high school Carolyn soon had a boyfriend with a car. One day he drove her out in the country and offered to show her “the hanging tree.” He explained that “a long time ago” white men had hanged black men “when they were actin’ up and weren’t in their place.” Carolyn knew how trivial an offense could constitute a violation of racial mores. “I’m not sure how long ago ‘a long time ago’ was,” she said as she told the story. “But I told him, ‘Sure, I want to see the tree.’?” On a deserted side road he stopped the car in front of a huge old tree. Up in the thick lower limbs Carolyn detected an ancient length of rope snagged in the trunk, leaving only a foot or so of frayed rope hanging free, tied in a noose.
Carolyn’s childhood stories are a narrative of class decline. They establish the understanding that she and her family were a rung or two above the family into which she married because they were capable of a paternalistic generosity toward black people in a way her in-laws were not. There are grains of truth here, to be sure, but it is also a self-exculpating story: if she hadn’t gotten mixed up with the Milam-Bryant clan, the stories suggest, this ugly Till lynching and its aftermath would never have happened. That is almost certainly true. There was, she declared, a greater degree of gentility to her upbringing, and indeed her character, than the Milams and Bryants possessed. She described herself as an innocent wandering into a place she didn’t quite belong.
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The matriarch of a headstrong clan, born Eula Lee Morgan, gave birth to eight sons and three daughters by two different men. Five boys carried the Milam family name: Edward, the oldest; Spencer Lamar, whom they called Bud or Buddy; followed by John William (J.W.), Dan, and Leslie. Their father had been killed in a road construction accident when a gravel pit caved in on him and three other members of the crew.10 Eula Lee then married a cousin of her late husband, Henry Ezra Bryant, whom everybody called “Big Boy,” and had six more children: Mary Louise, who married Melvin Campbell; two twin boys, Raymond and Roy; then Aileen, James, and finally Doris, born with severe mental disabilities.