For Us, the Living

I

Somewhere in Mississippi lives the man who murdered my husband. Sometimes at night when my new house in Claremont, California, is quiet and the children are in bed I think about him and wonder how he feels. I have never seriously admitted the possibility that he has forgotten what I can never forget, though I suppose that hours and even days may go by without his thinking of it. Still, it must be there, the memory of it, like a giant stain in one part of his mind, ready to spring to life whenever he sees a Negro, whenever his hate rises like a bitterness in the throat. He cannot escape it completely.

And when that memory returns to him, I wonder if he is proud of what he did. Or if, sometimes, he feels at least a part of the enormous guilt he bears. For it is not just that he murdered a man. He murdered a very special man—special to him, special to many others, not just special to me as any man is to his wife. And he killed him in a special way. He is not just a murderer. He is an assassin.

He lived in a different world from the one Medgar and I shared for eleven and a half years, though all three of us must have spent most of our lives within a few miles of each other. And those different worlds we inhabited had been there, side by side in Mississippi, all along. When they collided, finally, my husband lay dying outside the door of our home, his key clutched tightly in his hand, a trail of his blood bearing witness to his struggle to reach safety inside. And as his life’s blood poured out of him, his assassin dropped his weapon and slunk away through the underbrush of a vacant lot, hidden by the darkness of night. What were his feelings then? Joy? Fear? Triumph?

What are his feelings now?

I wonder if he has told others of his act that night, if, perhaps, he brags about it. And if he does, I wonder how those awful boasts are received. Do the other white men who hear his confession congratulate him? Do they laugh and slap him on the shoulder as though to share in his deed? Or do some, at least, stir uneasily at his tale? Do they, perhaps, even turn their backs on him, blotting him out, unwilling or unable to be a part of his murder even after it is done?

Much of the recent history of Mississippi could be told in the lives of these two men, my husband and his killer, the murdered and the murderer—one dead but free, the other alive and at large but never really free: imprisoned by the hate and fear that imprison so many white Mississippians and make so many Negro Mississippians still their slaves. Medgar and his assassin shared not only a state but a time; they grew up and lived in the same years, subject to the same influences. They breathed the same air, may have even brushed shoulders on the street or in a store.

Surely they heard the same speeches about the question that was central to both of their lives and yet moved them in such profoundly different directions. And that, too, is a Strange thought: that there were times when both men sat by radios or television sets hearing the same news, the same words spoken about the racial crisis in Mississippi. But, oh, what different thoughts they must have had!

Medgar used to astonish Northern reporters who asked why he stayed in Mississippi by answering simply that he loved Mississippi. He did. He loved it as a man loves his home, as a farmer loves the soil. It was part of him. He loved to hunt and fish, to roam the fields and woods. He loved the feeling that here there was space for him and his family to grow and breathe. He had visited many other places. He had served in the Army in England and France; he had worked summers in Chicago during his college years; but always he came back to Mississippi as a man coming home.

Chicago held no appeal for him; he called life there a rat race, and he was puzzled and a little resentful that all the Negroes from his part of Mississippi seemed to live in the same area of Chicago’s South Side—the same block, almost; often the same buildings. He would say with disgust that Negroes who left his home town of Decatur, Mississippi, for the North all ended in the same neighborhoods of either Chicago or Flint, Michigan. He didn’t like the dependence that implied, and he didn’t like the Negro ghettos either. Both offended his sense of freedom. Chicago to him was a place to work, a place where you could earn better wages. Mississippi, with all its faults, was a place to live.

Medgar, of all people, was not blind to Mississippi’s flaws, but he seemed convinced they could be corrected. He loved his state with hope and only rarely with despair. It was his hope that sustained him. It never left him. Despair came infrequently, and a day of hunting or fishing dispelled it. The love remained.

I suppose the man who killed Medgar loved Mississippi, too, in his twisted, tortured way. He must have loved the Mississippi that divides whites from Negroes, that by definition made him better than any Negro simply because he was white. In a way, I suppose, he was a jealous suitor, seeking by his murder to eliminate a rival, for he loved the Mississippi Medgar sought to change. What Medgar loved with hope, his assassin loved with fear. And he killed, I suspect, largely out of that fear.

But knowing this, thinking about it, wondering at it in the stillness of the night these many months after that act of horror cannot change the emptiness of life without my husband. There are times when I pause in a busy day and realize with surprise that I survive, that I am continuing, that my life goes on. For a long time after that shot rang out in the darkness and put an end to my life with Medgar, it seemed impossible to go on. And yet I do; the children eat and sleep and go to school, their lives almost complete; day follows night; and emptiness is, if not filled, at least ignored a little more each day than the day before.

But there are moments when it all comes back, when the warmth of those years with Medgar floods in on me, when I live again those shattering moments after the crack of the rifle. And then I wonder about the man who saw my husband’s back in the sights of a high-powered rifle and coldly squeezed the trigger. What kind of man could that be? What kind of life brought him to that clump of bushes where he hid and waited? What can he be thinking now that the act is committed and he has escaped its legal consequences?

They are all questions I cannot answer in any sure or final sense. I can only speculate out of an intuitive knowledge of what hate can do to the human soul. For I, too, have been tempted to hate. It has been difficult, living in Mississippi, not to. Hate is one of the rare commodities whites and Negroes are permitted to share equally in that state. It is one of the few things in more than adequate supply for all.

But if I cannot know what brought my husband’s murderer to that awful, final moment, I can at least hope to understand what brought my husband there. It may even be that the answer to both questions is the same, for Medgar, too, grew up in Mississippi, the same Mississippi that produced enough hate in one man to bring him to kill in the night. Medgar, too, was subject to the same forces that drove his assassin toward that desperate, fanatical moment. They affected Medgar differently, of course, for he lived at the other end of those forces, even as he died at the other end of that rifle.

But surely there must be in Medgar’s life and mine at least a mirrored reflection of the life that produced his killer. Surely what Mississippi made of us should provide a clue to what it made of him. It is not so strange, when you think of it, to hope to learn something about a killer by an examination of his carefully chosen victim. And of one thing I am sure: Medgar was carefully chosen. No other victim would have served at that moment in time. Medgar was killed specifically because of what he represented, of what he had become, of the hope that his presence gave to Mississippi Negroes and the fear it aroused in Mississippi whites.

In many ways, the act of murder that deprived me of a husband was an official act, for Medgar’s energies were all directed against the official state of things in Mississippi: against official positions of the state, official proclamations, official regulations relegating Negroes to an official status of inferiority. It is almost as though the assassin had been appointed by the state to carry out the execution of an enemy of the state, an execution that the state could not, in all good public relations, openly carry out itself.

And yet, as time goes by, I think that official view will change. There will, I believe, be a day when Medgar Evers will be remembered, in Mississippi as elsewhere, as a true friend of his state. Surely the day must come when his assassin and people like him will be remembered in Mississippi as the state’s real enemies.

II

I was seventeen and had never been away from home when I went off from Vicksburg to Alcorn A & M College in Lorman, Mississippi. It was just a forty-six mile drive in a friend’s car, but I saw it as the beginning of a new life. Squeezed in the back seat between my grandmother and Aunt Myrlie, the two people who had raised me and surrounded my childhood with adoration, protection, and towering hopes, I tried hard to conceal the pride, the nervousness, the joy and the fear that fought for possession of me.

My pride was of two sorts; first, in the certainty that by going off to college I was fulfilling ambitions both of these strong and loving women had held for me almost since I was born. Both, being teachers, were strong believers in higher education, and both had sacrificed to achieve at least part of a college education for themselves. In a way, I suppose, I represented their hopes and ambitions for themselves, and in any case I was carrying on an important tradition.

But there was a more personal kind of pride as well, and I confess to a certain vanity in the picture I had of myself that day: grown up, mature, a college coed dressed in a bright, new cotton print and my first pair of really high heels. A snapshot reveals today what an exaggeration this was, and I can see what others must have seen: a tall, very thin young Negro girl, wide-eyed and innocent-looking, with long hair worn page-boy style. But though I wobbled awkwardly on my new high heels, my uncertain steps were that day transformed in my mind into stately strides, and I remember seeing myself as an arresting figure that soon would be strolling under giant oaks along the campus paths that led from one exciting class to the next.

My sense of nervousness was that of any girl going off to college for the first time, but it was magnified in my case by a childhood well laced with often-expressed fears of what the outside world might do to me once I left the shelter of my aunt’s and grandmother’s protectiveness. I had always rejected these fears of theirs, mostly in annoyance at the restrictions they placed on me; yet now, suddenly, so near to being on my own, I began to doubt my complacency. I had been warned all my life about the dangers particular to whatever I was doing, and going off to college was no exception. This time, I had been told, the major menace was involvement with an older, wise and worldly veteran, for the year was 1950, and Alcorn was coeducational, and it was known that there were young men returned from the debauching experiences of the Army stalking the campus in search of innocent young girls from Vicksburg.

I don’t know what I expected, but as mile followed mile and we finally reached the point at which we turned off the main highway to drive the last seven miles through piny woods and scattered cotton fields, I scanned each turn of the road for the sight that would tell me I had arrived at the place where I would be tested. In the end, there was sheer joy, for Alcorn was beautiful, set back in the woods with enormous old trees studding the sprawling campus. The outstanding building was the chapel, built entirely without nails by slaves more than a hundred years earlier. For Alcorn, like virtually everything else in Mississippi that had been set aside for Negroes, was a hand-me-down. It had been built originally as a white military school.

Parting with my aunt and grandmother an hour later heightened both my fears and my excitement, but it was quickly done with appropriately renewed warnings of the dangers of the big new world of the college campus. Then they were gone, and I was on my own. Two hours later, gathered in front of the college president’s house with a group of other freshman girls, I met the older, wise and worldly veteran my aunt and grandmother had warned me about. His name was Medgar Wiley Evers.

Looking back now, I can see that it was indeed the beginning of a new life. What I saw then was a well-built, self-assured young man, a junior, an athlete back on the college campus early for football practice. We met—the football team and the freshman girls—in what seemed a casual way. I am sure now that it was carefully planned by both groups. We spent most of that first afternoon looking each other over, fencing, probing, pairing off and then regrouping. I was intrigued by what I saw. Although for a week I thought his name was Edgar Evans, there was to me something special about Medgar almost immediately. It was not until later that I learned he was, indeed, a veteran, that he was a football star, the president of the junior class, a campus leader. AU I really knew at the time was that he was different from the boys I had known. There was something in the way he spoke, the way he carried himself, in his politeness, that made him stand out even from the others I met that day.

Though I had mistaken his name, he remembered mine, and he spoke each time we met. The more I saw of him, the more interested I became. He had a certain refinement, the air of a gentleman, and I learned that unlike many of the younger men he neither smoked nor drank. He was known on the campus as a hard worker, not only in his studies and athletics but in the many part-time jobs he held. He had a reputation for being stingy with money for dates and, paradoxically, for being something of a Don Juan. I was told by girls who knew him that he never went out with the same girl for more than a month.

The other college men knew him as an intellectual because he read a good deal and was serious about his studies. They said he never let his hair down, rarely clowned, and yet it was obvious just from knowing him slightly that he had a quiet sense of humor. The more I heard, the more fascinated I became. The more I saw him, the more I wanted to know him better.

I was accustomed to boys my own age, a happy-go-lucky crowd interested mostly in having fun, and the freshman boys at Alcorn were much like those I had known in high school in Vicksburg. Medgar, being a veteran, was older than most of the juniors, but it was maturity more than age, his air of having a goal and knowing precisely how to reach it that made him stand out. It was well known that he had refused to join a fraternity because he thought them somewhat childish, and this did not make him popular with some of the more typically carefree college men; yet even they respected him for his leadership in college activities.

I saw Medgar several times in those first few days at college. I used to go with a group of freshman girls to watch the football team practice, and my eyes were always drawn to him. As the rest of the student body arrived and classes began, I saw him around the campus, and we always spoke in passing. For a while, that was all.

Then, late in the fall, two months after I had first met him, Medgar took to walking past the music studio when I was practicing piano. At first I would notice him passing by, stopping, looking in at me, and I would nod and go on playing. Then, more and more, he would stop by the open window and wait, and we would exchange a few words when I had finished. Once he explained that he enjoyed hearing me play, and it was only much later when I learned that he really didn’t think much of classical music that I realized this had simply been an excuse to explain his presence. More and more, I found myself bumping into him, and eventually I knew he was searching me out deliberately.

We began having lunch together, and sometimes we’d see each other after dinner. Several nights a week he would walk me back to the dormitory after our choir practice, where I played the piano to earn money for school expenses. We talked mostly about school, though he seemed amazingly up-to-date on current events, and I found myself reading newspapers more carefully in order to keep up with him. Eventually he asked me for a date. We went to the Saturday-night movie. I didn’t tell him I had seen it a year before in Vicksburg.

But even after we began to have dates, Medgar remained slightly aloof. I knew that he liked me, though he was never one for saying so. He didn’t go in for holding hands or other demonstrations of affection; he didn’t even try to kiss me until we had been out together a number of times. He was friendly, but he kept his distance, and after all the talk of his being a Romeo, I was puzzled. Eventually I asked if he really liked me at all, and his reply was typical. He said he thought his actions ought to tell me, that I shouldn’t have to ask. I was hurt, though I tried not to show it. I couldn’t understand how anyone could be so businesslike about his emotions.

Toward the end of the year, it was generally assumed on campus that Medgar and I were getting serious about each other. I guess he and I assumed it, too, though it could hardly have been proved by anything he had said to me. He had still not said he loved me, though he had told me he would never say that to anyone unless he really meant it. Somehow, that both disturbed and reassured me. And, meanwhile, we had developed a crazy pattern of arguments that threatened to put an end to everything once each week.

Medgar liked to argue with me anyhow. He was forever telling me I was too timid, that I’d been too sheltered, that I should stand up and fight for what I believed. I knew in my heart it was true, but I conceded nothing. We were usually friendly all week, and then on Friday night we would almost always find something to disagree about. Saturday night would come, and with it the weekly campus movie, the only social event of the college. Medgar would either go alone or take another girl. I would accept a date with another boy and then try to make sure Medgar saw us together. Then, on Sunday afternoons, we always managed to find each other and make up. That, at least, was great fun.

I had been warned by a number of upperclassmen to watch my step with Medgar because he was known to change girls frequently. People said I should beware of falling in love with him because he always dropped the girls that did. I knew by this time that I had certain advantages over at least some of these former girl friends. Medgar liked girls with long hair, and I wore mine long. He used to say he liked girls who could do something more than just grin up in his face, and I had managed to make the honor roll at every grading period. I had even achieved a modest celebrity on the campus by winning second place in a state-wide oratorical contest sponsored by the Negro Masons, the prize a scholarship of $650 toward my college expenses.

He had clear-cut ideas about the girls he took out, and he made no secret of them. Even before our first date, he had told me he expected his girl friend not to go out with other boys. Since he made no such rule for himself, I thought it quite unfair and said so. And after we started dating, I made it a point to continue going out with other boys whenever he took out another girl. I think he both resented and respected it.

He had a sharp picture of the girl he wanted to marry, and he spoke about it openly. She must be well educated, friendly, neat and clean, he said, and she must love children. He hoped to have four. And the woman who would someday become Mrs. Medgar Evers, he said, would be completely devoted to him. There could be no question about that.

At the end of my first year at Alcorn* Medgar finally told me he loved me. It was a glorious moment, though we were both still hiding how deeply we felt about each other. There was still something tentative, something indefinite, something withheld. I wonder now how I managed to do so well in my studies when my emotions were in so constant a state of turmoil. Medgar was so intelligent and kind, so irritating and confusing and lovable all at the same time, that I think back on those first months of knowing him today with some of the same jumbled emotions I felt then.

In a way, I think we were attracted to each other largely because of our differences. He was right in saying I had been sheltered. And he had been raised with a certain independence. He was eight years older, had served with the Army in England and France during the war. I had never been anywhere. He came from a large family, with brothers and sisters. I was an only child, raised by a grandmother and an aunt. He grew up in the country on a farm. I was a city girl.

But the greatest difference between us, I think, was in our attitudes toward life itself. I was an accepting person, willing to deal with problems within the framework of the small world I knew, never really questioning that framework. Medgar was a rebel, ready to put his beliefs to any test. He saw a much larger world than the one that, for the moment, confined him. And he saw a place in that larger world for himself.

There was nothing on the surface in Medgar’s childhood and family to account for the sort of man he was when I met him. But the explanations were there, and slowly, over the years, I found them. His father, James Evers, did not seem an unusual man. Quiet, stern, hardworking, he was a Baptist, a deacon of his church, a man who believed in work almost as an end in itself.

The family lived in a frame house on the edge of town in a Negro section of Decatur, Mississippi. They had enough land to farm, and James Evers kept cows, pigs, chickens, and a pair of mules for plowing. He grew vegetables for the table and cotton for cash. But, like most Mississippi Negroes, he could not survive on what he made from one job. He worked at times in a sawmill and at others for the railroad. Over the years he built two small houses on his property to rent out. Even before that, his wife, Jessie, rented a room in the main house to teachers to bring in additional income.

Jessie Evers did not share her husband’s Baptist religion. She was a member of the Church of God in Christ. But she shared with him a belief in hard work, and besides running the house and caring for her children, she did housework for a white family and took in ironing. The children, from the time they were old enough, worked around the house and farm. As the girls reached an appropriate age, they too worked out in white homes. The boys did odd jobs for white families in town.

They were a poor family in spite of all the work, but they were never destitute, and they managed to take care of themselves without help from anyone. They took pride in that and in the respect in which they were held by the community generally, both white and Negro. Jessie Evers was a deeply religious woman, a leader of her church, a woman who kept an almost fanatically neat house and raised her children to be well mannered and clean.

She was proud of her mixed heritage. One grandmother had been an Indian; her father had been half-white. But it was the Negro half of her father’s ancestry that she spoke of with fire and flashing eyes. As a mulatto, he had spent most of his adult life getting into and out of scrapes having to do with race. Once he had shot two white men and left town in the dead of night. It was a story that was told in later years to explain that the Evers fighting spirit had origins on her side of the family as well as her husband’s. For there was never any question about James.

James Evers was paid on Saturdays, and with his money he did the week’s shopping for staples in Decatur on Saturday night. It was a ritual on these trips for him to buy a big, round peppermint stick to be broken up at home and divided among the children. Medgar loved these trips to town with his father, but the candy was only a secondary reason. It was the obvious respect of the townspeople for his father and the way his father accepted this respect as his due that made those weekly trips really memorable. It was more than a custom, it was unwritten law that Negroes leave the side walks of Decatur for approaching whites. James Evers was one of the few Negroes that refused to do it. On the contrary, he behaved as though he had never heard of such a custom. He stood up and was a man, was the way Medgar put it years later.

There was a frightening incident of his father’s refusal to bow before the white man and his customs, and on one of those trips to town Medgar and his older brother, Charles, were witnesses to it. The arrangement with the stores was for credit all week with a final cash settlement on Saturday. One Saturday there was a dispute in a store. The argument over James Evers’ account led to insults, and Medgar heard his father called nigger by two white men. When they advanced on him with the obvious intent of beating him, James Evers picked up a bottle, smashed the end of it over the counter, and held it in front of him as a weapon.

He told the boys to leave, to go home without him, and at their hesdtation he made it an order. As they scampered out of the store, their last sight of their father was of a calm, grim man retreating slowly toward the door, holding the advancing white men at bay with the jagged glass of the broken bottle. He arrived home soon after the boys, unhurt, the bottle still in his hand.

But there were limits to what any Negro could do and get away with. It hurt Medgar to hear his father called boy by white men, and as he grew older, he began himself to experience racial incidents. For years he went with his mother on occasional days to the home of the white family where she worked. He played with white children both there and on the white fringes of the neighborhood where he lived. As he grew older, the white boys played less and less with him, and in the end there was a day of racial insults and the rupture of all friendly childhood relationships.

Race was a constant fact of Medgar’s life; it was not something he had to ask his parents about. The only things to learn were the boundaries within which your race restricted you, and you learned these early and well from watching those around you.

It may have been the example their father set that led Medgar and his brother, Charles, constantly to test these boundaries, to push against them, to attempt to widen them, for there is evidence that they both did. There was the time that Mississippi Senator Theodore Bilbo, perhaps the most vicious racist of modern times to serve in the United States Senate, spoke in Decatur. Medgar and Charles went to hear him. The speech was given in the town square, and the two boys, sitting on the grass at one side, were the only Negroes in sight.

In the course of his usual racist speech, Bilbo warned the local whites of the dangers of educating Negroes, of associating with them, of letting down even slightly the bars of complete segregation. As he warmed to his theme, he pointed to Medgar and Charles at the edge of the crowd. If we fail to hold high the wall of separation between the races, he shouted, we will live to see the day when those two nigger boys right there will be asking for everything that is ours by right. The crowd turned to stare at Medgar and Charles. The two boys stared right back. They remained at the edge of the crowd until the end of the speech.

But the rules of racism were not just learned from speeches. Medgar must have been about twelve when a Negro man, accused of leering at a white woman, was snatched by a mob and dragged through town and out the road that led past the Evers’ house. In a near-by field he was tied to a tree and shot dead. It was an event that Medgar recalled with horror, but his special revulsion was reserved for the Negro men who slunk from the sight of the mob without lifting a hand. The sickness he felt returned again and again in the months that followed, for when the lynching was over, the white mob stripped the Negro and left his bloody clothes at the foot of the tree. Medgar would pass the spot while hunting, drawn against his will to see the rotting clothes with their blood stains turning slowly to rust.

Within the larger world dominated by an obsession with race, though, was the smaller world of Medgar’s family, and here was a world of warmth and closeness, of discipline and family pride. Jessie Evers had been married once before, and her older children, two sons and a daughter, were part of Medgar’s family. The oldest, a son, died, but there was a daughter, Eva Lee, and a second son, Gene. Medgar was the third of James and Jessie Evers’ four children. The oldest, Charles, was three years Medgar’s senior. Then came Elizabeth, a year older than Medgar. Medgar was born on July 2, 1925. Two years later, the fourth child, Mary Ruth was born.

In a family that large, with both mother and father often working out of the home, there was inevitable delegation of authority to the older children. Medgar writhed under the demands of his older sisters, frequently setting out deliberately to irritate them. The arguments that followed were invariably reported to their mother. Punishment for serious breaches of the rules consisted of a number of strokes across the legs and thighs with a peach tree switch administered by his mother, and no one who has not felt the sting of a supple peach tree switch can guess at the effectiveness of such a penalty. Once Medgar’s mother started after him with one of these switches, and he ran under the house. His father took over, pulling him from his sanctuary and spanking him with a leather belt. It was a spanking he never forgot, and it was the last time he ever ran from his mother.

Jessie Evers often entertained. She was an active church worker and her door was open to anyone that came by. It was a tradition for ministers to take their Sunday meals with members of their churches, and there were always church meetings that required the feeding of guests. People were constantly dropping in, and it was nothing for Jessie to get up in the middle of the night—or anytime, really—and prepare a meal. Jessie Evers’ meals were famous, not only with her family but throughout the Negro community of Decatur. She was a marvelous cook, and the taste she left with Medgar for large and excellent meals was to make the early years of our marriage something of a trial for both of us. The only food that was a rarity in the Evers house was candy. Candy had to be bought for cash.

If the Everses ate well, they all worked hard enough to account for their appetites. Three times a year, a truckload of wood was delivered at the house, and Medgar and Charles had the job of cutting it into sticks of a size for the wood stove on which their mother cooked her magnificent meals. From an early age, it was Medgar’s job to bring in firewood for the fireplaces and start fires before the rest of the family arose in the cold mornings. He mended fences, milked the cows and drove them home from the pasture at night. And in the fall it became a specialty of his to range the neighborhood killing pigs at hog-killing time. It was a thing he had to force himself to learn, for at first it had seemed a cruel and bloody occupation, and Medgar shrank from cruelty. But he learned the necessity for hog-killing in his family’s smoke house, where he helped smoke hams and bacon, and at the table, where he helped to eat them.

Medgar and