The Song and the Silence Page 8

“Yes, Vera, yes. They say that what he said on the news changed Greenwood.” I realized I was shouting into the phone. I paused to give her a chance to process it all. She was quiet for an agonizingly long time.

  Then she said, “Okay, Vette, well, let me know how it goes. Alright.” She was using her good-bye voice. We exchanged I love yous and ended our call.

  In spite of her lackluster response, I was determined to cling to my joy. In the days that followed, I sat in front of my computer each night while my young sons slept upstairs, trying to find something, anything more about Booker. I searched civil rights archives, books about Greenwood, but I couldn’t find anything else about his accomplishments, if there were any.

  One night, it occurred to me to search through the online archives of SNCC, SCLC, and the NAACP to see if there was any mention of my grandfather. Excitement pulsed through me as I dug through the Internet, looking at their lists of veterans of the movement. After several hours, I still couldn’t find my grandfather’s name mentioned in association with these historic civil rights organizations. It seemed that if Booker Wright had been an activist at all, he’d been an accidental one.

  I did find one thing. In those disappointing midnight hours of searching, I stumbled upon a reference to someone in my family. It was in a book about the movement called Weary Feet, Rested Souls. “The first black sheriff’s deputy in Leflore County, Charles Cooley, was hired in 1971, and he went on to a twenty-five-year career in law enforcement.”

  Charles Cooley was my mother’s uncle. He’d helped take care of my grandma Doris and her children. During my childhood, I’d always assumed my mother’s father had died when she was young because, while she almost never spoke of Booker, she did mention Uncle Charlie more than a few times. My grandmother passed away in 2002, and a few weeks after her funeral, Uncle Charlie was sitting in his house watching television with his wife and children when he got up, walked into the bathroom, and shot himself in the head.

  That night, when I saw my uncle’s name in that book, I felt almost duped. I’d been searching for evidence of my grandfather’s involvement in the movement, but all I found was more evidence about how my family was broken.

  I began to fear that if I looked any deeper into my grandfather’s story, I’d disturb the towering legend I was determined to build in my mind. I was beginning to contemplate giving up when I stumbled upon a description of a roundtable discussion that had taken place at a conference on Southern cuisine, in which a Mississippi State senator had led a discussion about Booker Wright, who he described as being a “catalyst for the movement.”

  A catalyst for the movement.

  I read that line over and over again, fireworks going off inside of me. By “movement” he had to mean the civil rights movement. Was this really happening?

  I felt as though I was standing on the precipice of a brand-new tomorrow for myself and for my children. I called a friend to share my joy with her. I was talking too fast, stuttering, and trying not to cry. Finally, a flood of tears overtook me, and in a rush of emotion I blurted out, “I always thought I came from nothing, but maybe not. Maybe, maybe I come from something.”

  Part Four

  Some Sort of Charm

  There had been a kind of innocence in everything about the old years that gave some sort of charm even to the worst of it. In a way, of course, the innocence had survived everything too. But it seemed a kind of innocence, now, that has no business being so innocent.

  James Agee

  “1928 Story”

  A Place for the Planter Class

  Not long after John T. Edge moved to Oxford, Mississippi, in the 1990s to attend graduate school at Ole Miss, he began taking a particular weekend trip over and over again. He would drive first west and then south, leaving behind the lights and hustle of his college town. The farther south he drove, the deeper he went into the flat, damp, ever-blooming Mississippi Delta, where jade-colored trees and grasslands consumed the landscape. After about ninety minutes, he would pass a wide-open field where a brown, weatherworn sign proclaimed, “Welcome to Greenwood, Cotton Capital of the World.” The welcome message was embraced on either side by two just-ripe cotton bolls, painted in feminine curves.

  After another fifteen minutes of driving, John T. would reach his destination. On Carrollton Avenue, nestled between a Black Baptist church and the offices for a local cemetery, was Lusco’s, a restaurant with an unassuming exterior of aging redbrick walls and large windows that revealed little beyond its foyer.

  When John T. parked his car and passed through the double doors leading into the restaurant, he was rarely alone. Oftentimes, he had sweet-talked dates and friends into accompanying him on these dining excursions by describing the restaurant’s tantalizing tempura-battered onion rings or the deceptively escalating heat of the buttery Lusco’s shrimp sauce. He used these sensual descriptions to lure his companions to the restaurant, but in reality, it wasn’t the shrimp sauce that drew John T. there. It wasn’t the oysters on the half-shell, the mouthwatering crabmeat, or even the restaurant’s reputation as one of the oldest and most well-known establishments in the Mississippi Delta. It was something else altogether that compelled John T. to make that drive again and again.

  Lusco’s seduced him. It gently pulled him into its “anything goes” atmosphere, where one could create secrets, then leave them behind. Lusco’s was a place where the drinking of illegal whiskey was once commonplace and questionable behavior still passed without question.

  Most nights, John T. didn’t eat in Lusco’s main dining room or at its bar. John T. and his companions were usually led down a central hallway, off of which were Lusco’s curtained booths. These were small, numbered rooms, or cubicles, each separated from the main hallway by colorfully patterned curtains. The cubicles or booths, as they were called, each had a freestanding table, chairs, and a button that would ring in the kitchen as an indicator to the waitstaff that service was needed. The curtained booths provided a sense of seclusion, while the Lusco’s staff delivered an unspoken promise of silence. More than once, John T. explored the boundaries of that promise, like the time when he ate dinner at Lusco’s with his pants down.

  On that particular night, he and his three companions—two male and one female—were seated in a booth. The men consumed their food, leaning over plates to filet pompano and slice into a T-bone, while their trousers rested around their ankles. John T.’s lady friend kept her skirt on, but removed her black bra and placed it on a lamp in the center of the table. At one point, John T. pressed the button to call for the waiter, who brought them ice and asked if they were enjoying their meal. In regards to their attire, the waiter didn’t even raise an eyebrow.

  On another occasion, John T. was with a friend who had way too much to drink and ended up falling over in his chair. The staff was so swift and quiet when they came and swept him away that John T. didn’t even notice his friend’s departure. John T.’s experience at Lusco’s wasn’t unique. For decades, the Lusco’s brand was greatly influenced by two things: the quality of its food and the experiences created by its waitstaff.

  John T. was fascinated with the restaurant. In spite of Lusco’s upscale clientele and amazing food, it was located south of the river in a neighborhood that was becoming more and more depressed economically. Decades before, the land south of the river but north of the train tracks was where many White Greenwood residents made their homes and managed their fortunes in business offices throughout the area. During those years, the train tracks served as a dividing line between the races, and Lusco’s was just north of them.

  In the 1970s, Blacks began buying houses in the neighborhoods north of the tracks but south of the river. As they moved in, more and more White residents sold their homes and moved into North Greenwood, on the other side of the river. Lusco’s never moved from Carrollton Avenue, even though crime and abandoned buildings were becoming the norm for the historic street.

  Many Whites maintained business offices in South
Greenwood, but by nightfall, the streets, stores, and neighborhoods on that side of town were almost completely void of White faces. Nevertheless, Andy and Karen Pinkston could still count on their regular customers—the Greenwood gentry, remnants of the planter class—to keep the restaurant going. Night after night, Greenwood Whites would leave the north side of town, with its towering oak trees, perfectly trimmed lawns, and private schools, to travel down into Baptist Town to eat at Lusco’s.

  It seemed to John T. that for some people Lusco’s was more than a restaurant; it was “a kind of redoubt, a last bastion for the planter class.” He decided to make Lusco’s the research topic for a graduate seminar class. His trips to Greenwood continued, but now he began conducting interviews with people who’d been regulars at Lusco’s for years, some for close to half a century.

  Once his research began, it wasn’t long before John T. began to notice something familiar. Again and again, he encountered people who wanted to reminisce about one person in particular. Almost as if on cue, his interviews would begin to veer into a land of sweet remembrances, and John T. would be entertained with stories about Lusco’s most famous and dearly loved waiter.

  Even though almost thirty years had passed since Booker Wright had waited on his last customer at Lusco’s Restaurant, the regulars remembered him with both joy and an irritation about something they couldn’t seem to reconcile. In a town where stories of the olden days were told again and again, each one treated like a cherished strand in a never-ending tapestry, there was one strand that stood out, twisted, unyielding. Booker’s importance in, and then apparent dismissal of, the Greenwood planter class was still as vexing for Lusco’s regulars in the ’90s as it was on that infamous night when Booker appeared on national TV.

  When he started working at Lusco’s around 1940, the restaurant didn’t have printed menus. If they had provided customers with printed menus, then Booker may have never even met the man who interviewed him. The night when Frank De Felitta met Booker, he’d been dragged to Lusco’s by a friend who wanted him to hear Booker sing the menu.

  There are a variety of theories about why Lusco’s didn’t offer printed menus. Some believe it was to ensure that the only people who came in were those who could afford the food regardless of how much the restaurant charged. Others think it was a way to maintain segregation. Without having to say that only Whites were welcome, the restaurant could send the same message by charging a Black person twenty dollars for a cup of coffee.

  A few members of the Lusco’s clan have floated the idea that since the restaurant started out as a place that just served a few dishes to locals, there wasn’t a need for menus. But some people who worked there believe there just wasn’t any sense in printing menus, since no one on their all-Black waitstaff could read or write anyway.

  This last theory may be the closest to the truth. When Booker started working at Lusco’s in the early 1940s, illiteracy in the Black community was common. Most Blacks working in Greenwood at the time were the children of sharecroppers, and in the Delta, “the school calendar was built around the cotton season, which meant that most black youngsters were in school only when they weren’t needed in the fields.” Some estimates indicate this applied to children as young as five years of age.

  Sharecropping families who refused to keep their children out of school could be fired, which would mean, in addition to being unemployed, they would become homeless. With this double threat hanging over their heads, most sharecropping families complied when farm managers insisted their children stay on the farm to work instead of attending school.

  It’s also true that in the early days, the menu at Lusco’s was just a few signature dishes. However, the menu eventually grew into an extensive list of offerings. Some of the waitstaff developed their own style of note taking to help them remember their customers’ orders, but not Booker. The customers were amazed by his ability to recall every order, including special changes, regardless of how large the party was.

  Over time, Booker transitioned from simply telling his customers the menu to singing it for them. He developed a jovial-sounding, lighthearted, rhyming song that he’d perform whenever someone needed to know what dishes the restaurant served. Even the regulars, who knew what they were going to order before they even entered the restaurant, would often ask Booker to perform the menu. His song became an added value for Lusco’s, part of the experience enjoyed by only the wealthiest members of Greenwood’s planter class. Booker Wright was woven into the very fabric of their way of life. He was a familiar comfort. They came to expect and look forward to the waiter’s humor and his song. It wasn’t so much that Booker was one of them. Really it seemed that, in a way, he belonged to them.

  A Magical Town

  When Booker began working at Lusco’s, he was about fourteen years old and had already lived a long life. When he was eight years old, Annie decided she’d had enough of Willie Wright, Booker’s father, an angry drunk and a gambler. She took Booker and the two of them left Willie and the tense, unstable, and violent household he’d created. They moved away to a small town near Greenwood. The only problem was that Annie was ill. She may have thought she’d recover when she and Booker moved away from Willie. Later, Booker speculated among friends that Annie was likely suffering from cancer.

  Since Annie was so sick, securing food for the two of them was left to Booker. He never mentioned all that he had to do to survive, though years later on the national news, he’d describe how “Night after night I lay down and I dream about what I had to go through with. I don’t want my children to have to go through with that.” Booker was fourteen when Annie died.

  He ended up in Greenwood. In some ways, Greenwood was the perfect place for someone like Booker, and in other ways it was the worst.

  The idea of a mid-twentieth-century, mostly White, all-American suburban small town where problems are simple, communities are inviting, and a solid moral fiber is valued above all else is considered by most to be just an overdone cliché popularized by television shows like Leave It to Beaver and then later mocked by the The Stepford Wives. But if there was ever a town like that—not the comical, stifled, repressed version portrayed in Hollywood—but a real town in a real place where a collection of strangers came together to build a community in which almost everything was centered around family—that town was Greenwood in the early 1900s.

  One of the town’s most memorable citizens was a woman named Sara Criss, who was fond of saying that her life began in Greenwood, Mississippi, on April Fool’s Day. Born in 1921, Criss would go on to work for thirty years as the Greenwood Bureau Chief for the Memphis-based Commercial Appeal newspaper. In the 1990s, she penned her memoir, leaving explicit instructions that it was intended for family and no one else. Having not only lived through the tumultuous civil rights years but having covered them for her newspaper as well, Sara understood more than most the potential for her writing to open old but still festering wounds.

  It wasn’t until after Sara passed away in 2009 that her daughter, Mary Carol Miller, began to read through her mother’s written memories. Realizing their historical significance, Mary Carol made the difficult decision to go against her mother’s request and to post Sara’s writings online on a website called Daughter of the Delta.

  In the introduction, Mary Carol describes her mother’s love for Greenwood by explaining, “Had you asked her if there was ever a more enchanting town in which to be born or a more comforting and adventurous street on which to grow up . . . she would have given you that ‘Why in the world would you ask me that?’ gaze and shaken her head, ‘No, of course not.’ It was the best of times in her mind, with the best people.”

  Sara wasn’t alone in her sweet sentiment for Greenwood. A good number of people who called Greenwood home developed a covetous love and a feeling of belonging to their town that ran so deep they became defined by it. They knew Greenwood when it was little more than damp earth, and it was on that earth where they’d constructed a city out
of hope and dreams. There is nothing clichéd about the devotion those early residents felt for their town; their commitment to Greenwood was authentic and lasting.

  The residents weren’t only committed to Greenwood, they were committed to one another as well. It’s almost impossible to overstate just how much they loved being together. After her mother died, Mary Carol and a few of her friends decided to make a series of picture books about Greenwood. The three volumes they published are packed with images of the town when it was still in its infancy. About the photographs taken at the turn of the century, Mary Carol writes that they “generally illustrate an almost exhausting vitality in Greenwood. Parades with lavishly decorated cars and marching children winding through town, pageants with elaborate tableaux and commemorative trinkets, football teams and festivals and church socials and patriotic fervor.”

  The exhausting vitality Mary Carol describes didn’t dissipate with time. Decades later, during her own childhood, the townsfolk would gather for almost anything, including “the apex, the ultimate: Friday afternoons when Greenwood High School’s band took over Howard Street, complete with cheerleaders, floats, and pep rallies.”

  The infatuation Greenwood residents felt for their town was directly proportional to how hard they’d worked to build it.

  Initially, the town wasn’t a destination in and of itself.

  Even though Greenwood is in the eastern section of the Delta, almost an hour from the Great Mississippi, it’s still a town of waters because it is surrounded by rivers. Greenwood’s northernmost border is the Tallahatchie River, which meets with the Yalobusha on the northeast corner of town to create the Yazoo, which flows south and then makes a sharp turn west, cutting through the heart of the city to separate the communities of North and South Greenwood. North Greenwood, where most of the White residents live, is almost completely encapsulated by the horseshoe-shaped river system created by the three bodies of water.