Though she liked to have a good time, Eula Lee was blunt. “If you [didn’t] want to know the truth, [you didn’t] ask her,” her daughter-in-law chuckled. “The only thing I ever heard her say, actually, about [the Till murder] was that it was a shame I’d left the pistol in the car, I could have saved them all that trouble.” Though tough as rough-hewn timber, Eula Lee pulled her children close to her and taught them to work hard and stick together. She organized an unflagging stream of family gatherings, often at her little grocery store in Swan Lake or the one after that in Sharkey, to eat big meals and drink a lot of whiskey. Somebody would bring fried chicken or pork chops. “It seemed like almost every weekend we were going to somebody’s house or somebody was coming to our house,” Carolyn recalled. “And we’d have just lots of regular old food, beans and peas and corn and potatoes, and all of it.” There were few if any secrets. “Everything you did or got, whatever,” Carolyn told me, “was everybody’s business. And they were all in on it.”13
The Milam-Bryant brothers were especially close, working together and regularly playing cards and drinking together. “You could never tell they were [only] half-brothers,” said their mother, “unless they told you.” Each of them carried a pistol. Seven of the eight of them had served in the military.14 And most of them eventually ran small grocery stores throughout Leflore, Tallahatchie, and Sunflower Counties, in Swan Lake, Glendora, Minter City, Itta Bena, Ruleville, and Money. According to local law enforcement records, the stores sold whiskey in violation of the state’s Prohibition laws.15
Eula Lee’s sons practiced a raw style of masculine camaraderie that revolved around guns, hunting, fishing, poker, and drinking. Boys would be boys and women would stay out of it. Carolyn said, “They did such crazy things all the time anyway, you didn’t really question what they were doing. ‘Well, you wanna go see if we can find a deer?’—you know, at two o’clock in the morning—or ‘Let’s go get so-and-so and play some cards.’?” They shocked young Carolyn with their loud arguments over practically anything. “They did have some of the worst arguments, cuss-fights, you ever heard, with their poker games. You would think they were gonna get up and fight, yeah.” Eula Lee tried to reassure her daughter-in-law. “I would say ‘Oh, my goodness’ when I first got in the family, you know, and I thought, ‘Ooh, what’s going on, they’re getting ready to fight in there.’ And Mrs. Bryant would say, ‘Oh, don’t pay any attention to them, they’re not gon’ fight.’?” Carolyn believed her, up to a point. “You just never knew what was coming—those kind of people. But they were hard.”
The Milams and Bryants believed “that they could do anything they wanted to do and get away with it because they had a lot of clout”; that’s how Carolyn put it years later. This confidence owed something to their association with the newly elected sheriff of Tallahatchie County, Henry Clarence Strider, known as “H.C.” The sheriff was a 270-pound former football player who owned 1,500 acres of prime Delta cotton land and held sway over dozens of black sharecropping families. Carolyn described Strider as “sort of like the Godfather in Mississippi at that time. Whatever he said was what you did.” Presumably because of their political support, the Milams and Bryants enjoyed his protection from the law and from everyone else. “One reason they were so much the way they were was that they thought they were in tight with him.” Though Strider would prove to be a lordly ally, his vassals remained peniless peckerwoods.
As soon as Roy and Carolyn could scrape together the bus fare, she dropped out of high school and moved to North Carolina to be with him. She’d never left Mississippi before. Five months later she was pregnant and took the long bus ride back to her mother’s house; the kindly driver pulled over time and time again to let his queasy young passenger throw up. In a few months she headed back to North Carolina with a three-month-old baby boy and got pregnant again almost immediately.16
When Roy was discharged from the army there was no question as to where the couple wanted to raise their growing family. They rented a little house in Glendora, where J.W. and his wife, Juanita, lived. It had front and rear screened porches like Aunt Mabel’s house in Cruger. It helped to have someplace cooler to sit that first summer, when she was so hot and so pregnant. “I was pregnant with Lamar, and Juanita was pregnant with Harley [and] she would come over almost every day to help me with Roy Jr.” Carolyn enjoyed and appreciated her sister-in-law, a quiet, soft-spoken woman whom photographers at the Till trial found quite fetching; “downright sexy” was how Carolyn remembered her. “When I had to go to the doctor, she would take me, or she’d bring her car and I’d drop her off and I’d go. I could depend on her.” When Carolyn went into labor, Roy borrowed J.W.’s car to go to the hospital, where she gave birth to their second son.
Roy aspired to have his own trucking business, like J.W., so the young parents invested his army separation pay and her small savings to buy a dump truck. Roy began to haul gravel and make a little money. He soon hired and began to train another driver, but the trainee crashed the truck; both men escaped the flames, but the truck was a total loss. Worse, Roy learned that the insurance company he used had gone bankrupt just prior to the accident. Without funds to replace the truck, his dream was over, and he went to work for J.W.
One day in late 1953 Roy walked into their house and told Carolyn that they would be moving. With the help of J.W. he had bought a store in Money. Though he had rented the building, he had bought everything inside. Whether or not this was a good idea she did not know. “Roy never let me in on the planning of his business ventures with his family,” she wrote. “I just accepted the fact that he was the breadwinner in our family, and [that] I needed to do as he asked me.” Because of the store they would have most daily necessities close at hand, but otherwise they were still poor, unable to afford a car or a television set.17
Bryant’s Grocery and Meat Market was on the first floor in front in a two-story brick building. The store became the local trading post for staples, tobacco, beer, snacks, and cold drinks, a place where people came to pass the time of day.18 The post office, the filling station, and the store made up the business section of Money. The Bryants lived on the first floor behind the store.19 The majority of their customers were black. Out front, under the awning, Roy and Carolyn had “made things fairly comfortable for the Negroes who patronize[d] their store,” one journalist wrote, while whites chatted indoors. Several wooden benches and two or three checkerboards with bottle-cap checkers saw consistent use on the porch.20
Roy and Carolyn stocked the shelves with snuff, cigarettes, and cigars and the drink box with Cokes and grape sodas and R.C. Colas. In the glass-covered counter they put candy bars: Mounds, Baby Ruths, Kits, Paydays, Almond Joys, Butternuts, Hershey’s bars, Butterfingers, and Milky Ways. There was penny candy, too—fireballs and Mary Janes, Milk Duds and peppermint sticks, Dum-Dums and Slow Pokes—and Juicy Fruit, Doublemint, Dentyne, and Double-Bubble gum. The cookie selections included Stage Planks, Jack’s, Moon Pies, and all kinds of “Nabs,” as they called Nabisco cookies and crackers and anything like them. On the counter sat a tall glass jar of pickled pigs’ feet, another of big dill pickles, and a third of pickled eggs, with squares of wax paper to pick them up. They sold sardines, pork ’n’ beans, milk, Wonder Bread, eggs, flour, lard, fatback, butter, bananas, cinnamon buns, Spic ’n’ Span cleanser, and small household items of all kinds. The meat counter was in the back.21