On ordinary mornings Eula Lee would fix breakfast while Big Boy opened their store, which was next door. Later in the morning Big Boy would come back and eat his breakfast while his wife took care of the store. Then they would both work in the store all day. One morning Eula Lee had eaten her eggs and sausage and waited for her husband, but he did not come home. When she walked over to the store to find him, she found instead an empty cash register, and one of their cars was missing.
“So she called the bank to see about the bank account,” Carolyn told me, “and it’s been closed down, and he’s gone off with another woman.” Big Boy and the woman fled to Arkansas, where they lived for seven years, a separation period after which Mississippi law at the time granted an automatic divorce. After he married the woman, they moved back to Mississippi and ran a store in the small community of Curtis Station, forty miles northeast of Eula Lee. Occasionally Roy, who was sixteen or seventeen when his father deserted the family, would drive up there with Carolyn to see him but he was careful to keep these trips a secret, especially from his mother. She swore that if she ever saw “Big Boy” again she would kill him, which was one reason that she carried a .38-caliber revolver everywhere she went. Mrs. Bryant would frequently say, “If I ever see him again,” and shake her head, reaffirming her homicidal vow. “The pistol was in her purse,” said Carolyn. “Always.”
Carolyn first met Roy Bryant at a party when she was fourteen and visiting her oldest sister and her family in Tutwiler. “He was about seventeen and so handsome,” she recalled. A few days later Roy dropped by her sister’s house and asked her to accompany him and some friends to another party. Carolyn’s sister said no, but Carolyn’s eyes said yes, which he noted.
She didn’t see Roy again until after her father died. “Roy’s family had moved to Indianola about the same time that we moved there,” she told me with a glimmer of excitement still flickering sixty-five years later. “I was walking home from school one day, and Roy Bryant rolled up beside me in his Forty-nine Chevrolet.” He smiled and offered her a ride. “I didn’t hesitate one second.” Thereafter Roy appeared quite regularly to give her a ride and sometimes take her for a hamburger and a Coke on the way. “I did slip away with him a few times, but I knew I had to get home to babysit.”
At eighteen Roy joined the 82nd Airborne and was stationed at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Juggling school, her job, and her work about the house, Carolyn waited eagerly for his furloughs. “We seemed to grow closer and closer, and I looked forward to his visits when he received leave from the service. I just knew I was in love.” One beautiful day in the spring of 1951, Roy proposed. “We decided to elope the next day,” she said, because she was only sixteen and hadn’t finished high school. “Mama would never sign for me to get married.” The next day Carolyn pretended she was going to school but instead met her beau at the post office in Indianola. They picked up a license at city hall, drove to the parsonage at the Second Baptist Church in Greenwood, and were married in the living room, with Roy’s cousin and the preacher’s wife as witnesses. Then they drove straight to a motel to consummate the marriage.
“We left the motel late that afternoon,” recalled Carolyn. On the road they passed her sister and brother-in-law going in the opposite direction. Both cars pulled over to the side of the road, and Carolyn told her sister the news. “My sister hugged us, wished us all the best, and hurried off to tell Mama.” The happy couple jumped back in the car and drove on to Itta Bena, where Roy’s family had gathered to celebrate the union; the decision to elope had been no secret among the Bryants and Milams. They enjoyed a huge supper and a festive evening, but Roy had to catch a bus back to Fort Bragg that night. “Here we were, married only a few hours, and he was going to leave me,” she wrote later. “I was devastated.”11
Carolyn found it bizarre that her mother-in-law, Eula Lee, drank whiskey for breakfast and carried a pistol in her purse at all times. Short, plump, and bossy, Eula Lee “could embarrass a sailor, cursing. . . . And could put away the booze. That’s the first thing she did in the morning was fix herself a hot toddy. Bourbon.” Her brother-in-law Melvin Campbell likewise poured down the whiskey. “All the time, from the very time he woke up in the morning until he passed out.” Melvin in particular “could flare up in a minute. He had a real hair-trigger temper.” Roy’s brothers drank heavily, too, and were also quick to fly into a rage. “Well, it was like that with all of ’em. Roy was like that. That’s the way every one of them was like.”
Along with drinking hard, carrying a gun, and having a bad temper, overt expressions of white supremacy were simply part of the Milam-Bryant family’s way of carrying themselves in the world. “They were racist, the whole family,” confided Carolyn, implicitly exempting herself. “For one thing, it was the ‘N-word’ all the time. ‘I’ve got this N working over here doing this, I’m gonna have to go get my money from that N over there because he’s not paying me.’?” History had stacked the social world of Jim Crow Mississippi like pancakes, with African Americans distinctly on the bottom. Pro-slavery ideologues of the late 1850s would have called black Mississippians the “mudsill,” a foundational class to perform the necessary labors of life so that the higher classes could pursue the loftier aims essential to civilization.12 One problem with this social structure was that middle-and lower-class whites tugged and scraped to find a satisfactory place for themselves. Their one undeniable accomplishment, which afforded a social status that could not be denied them, was to be born white. White sharecroppers, the lowest of whom even African Americans quietly dismissed as “poor white trash,” occupied the rungs just above blacks. Laborers and small-time merchants like the Milams and Bryants, who made their living from selling cigarettes and snuff, illegal whiskey, and various snacks and staples, were only marginally higher; their betters derided them as “peckerwoods.”