Murder Theories Abound

As if I wasn't already chasing a multitude of leads, last night someone gave me something else to think about. First let me say that a lot of people believe that Lloyd Cork was hired to do what he did.  Primarily because Booker was notorious for kicking people out of his club if they were acting up or simply didn't have the money to buy anything.  This simple fact was common knowledge.  The idea that he would go in there, act up, and get kicked out smells fishy to a lot of Greenwood locals.

I've been told a few ideas about who may have hired Cork to do it and why.  I've also been given another idea about why would Cork himself would be motivated to commit murder and maybe he thought that getting thrown out (Booker hit him with the butt of his gun) would provide him with some sort of defense.

Last night I was presented with another idea.  A few days (either two or three) before Booker was shot, something terrible happened in a small town not too far from Greenwood.  Booker's half brother committed  a triple homicide.  He killed a prominent business owner, his daughter and his his sister.  Booker's half brother was on the run when Booker was shot.  Last night, someone who lived in Greenwood then and continues to live there now, someone who was very, very close to Booker - told me that they always thought that Cork was hired to murder Booker as revenge for the triple homicide committed by Booker's half-brother.

I guess I have one more question to ask Cork when I sit across from him in a week and a half.

A Killing at the Grill

There's a restaurant in Greenwood (NOT Lusco's) that, for many blacks, was the primary symbol of segregation during the movement.  It's still open today and is one of only a handful of sit down restaurants that even offers lunch in Greenwood. Nevertheless, most Greenwood blacks have never eaten there.

During the making of Booker's Place: A Mississippi Story, Raymond De Felitta and I interviewed a woman named Marie Tribitt, a childhood friend of Booker's.  Marie told us the story of a man who was most likely mentally disabled.  He had a job cleaning floors at this whites' only establishment in Greenwood decades ago. According to Marie, one day the man was mopping the floor and he accidentally touched a white woman's foot with his mop.  The woman became very angry. Later that day, the man was shot dead.

Many of my white friends from Greenwood have been angered by this story and the fact that it was included in the film at all.  They've never heard it and don't believe that something like that could ever have happened in their town.  I was on the fence about it until Thursday night.

I just got back from Greenwood where I screened Booker's Place: A Mississippi Story, at MVSU, the local state university there.  A black man stood up and recalled the challenges he'd faced while living in Greenwood when segregation was upheld by the police.  He told a story of something that happened when he was nine years old.  A black man was in this same restaurant and he was mopping the floor.  He spilled a little water on the foot of a white woman, who then became irate. Someone tried to calm her down, tell her that it was an accident, that he meant no harm, and that it was just a little water.  She could not be soothed.  Later that night the man with the mop was murdered.

Sometimes I think there are two Mississippis.  Otherwise, half the people talking to me must be liars.  I'm not a god, I have no magic, I cannot discern a lie from the truth when the story is older than I am.  Sometimes people argue that if there is no record, then there was no crime.  However, the Greenwood library is filled with white history and almost completely void of black history.  Finding public photos of Greenwood blacks from the 1950s and earlier doing anything other than hanging from a tree is almost impossible.  If there is no record of them, then were there no blacks in Greenwood at all?

Sadly, the police rarely investigated the murders of poor black men in Greenwood unless pressured to do so by outside forces.  The idea that this man lost his life in such a way, for such a simple mistake seems absurd to many whites in Greenwood and completely plausible to many blacks.

What does that tell us?  Beyond this story, what does that say?  Blacks remember, with a clarity that cannot be compromised, that there was a time when their lives were worthless to the white people in their community.  Whites remember their parents feeling trapped and not knowing how to navigate in the segregated society that a strong few wanted to keep in place.  Whose version of Mississippi shall prevail?  Whose truth is the Truth?

I tend to think that both are true, depending on which side of the river you grew up on.  If I say this murder didn't happen because I cannot prove it, then that means that countless black murders that were never investigated also didn't happen.  If I say I believe it because two sources recall it, then I am following fanatics who want to exacerbate the problems of the past to justify the troubles of today.

I am not a judge.  I am a woman in search of the stories that shaped the world my grandfather lived in.  If blacks believed that stories like this were true, whether or not they were true, can we use that to help us understand how and why they lived in constant fear?  Can we move the ball forward by admitting that even if it's hard to believe this one story, that surely, somewhere in Mississippi there are true stories like this that never made it out of the grave?

I am caught between whites and blacks in the town of my ancestors.  Both hold me up as a spokesperson for their side.  I am not a referee who will determine whose story is true.  I'm more interested in why people believe in and want to tell their stories at all.  I am a collector of memories.

Adichie says that "Stories matter. Many stories matter.  Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign, but stories can also be used to empower and to humanize.  Stories can break the dignity of a people, but stories can also repair that broken dignity."

My only hope is that people will keep talking, keep remembering, keep listening, and that they will keep moving the ball forward.  

Photographs

In the last year or so I’ve collected all the photos of Booker Wright that I could get my hands on.  I made numerous calls, visited people, and had relatives send pictures from their homes around the country.  All of that work produced a total of six photos of my late grandfather. 

Today I saw eight more.  They were all taken at the same time.  In them, my grandfather is lying on a table without a shirt on.  His stomach has eight lines in it that look like wounds that have been stapled shut.  Each one is about three inches wide and there is about an inch separating them.  They are all in a row from his chest down past his navel.  It’s hard to describe these stapled wounds because there is something in front of them, blocking my view.  It looks like an organ or maybe two. 

Someone who saw these photos briefly a few months ago said that it was intestines.  Seeing them for myself today, I know it’s not his intestines.  Someone else thought it may be his liver.  I can’t look at the photos long enough to make a guess.  I’ll show them to a doctor when I get back home. 

His side is riddled with pellets from the shotgun blast.  His eyes are closed.  I can’t tell whether or not he is dead or alive.

There is a tube and bottles of things around him.  It looks like he is in a closet or a makeshift morgue, but the Chief of Police insists that’s what hospital rooms looked like in the sixties here in Greenwood.  I need to take these photos to an expert.  

I broke down when I saw these photos.  Part of my mind is screaming.  Part of my mind is numb.  I needed to see these to get to the bottom of things, I think.  I don’t know.  Does uncovering every stone get me further to the truth or just more exposed to the horrific reality of loss?  I have tears and I don’t know why.  I can’t pinpoint the feeling.  It has no name. 

My mother can never see these photos. 

Home Away from Home

I'm in Greenwood and I just got back to my hotel room after the Mississippi premiere of Booker's Place: A Mississippi Story at Mississippi Valley State University.  That's a lot of Mississippi's.  

This afternoon I walked from my hotel through the neighborhoods surrounding Howard Street.  My Greenwood was quiet today.  Eventually, I walked over to the Delta Bistro and ordered a Fried Green Tomato Sandwich.  All I could say after eating it was, "Where have you been all my life?"

I'm going out to dinner tomorrow at the Delta Bistro and may order the exact same thing!

We're Going

I just got a call from the East Mississippi Correctional Facility.  Lloyd "Blackie" Cork has added my name to his visitor list.

This post is called "We're Going" because I was too afraid to go alone.  I have a good friend, Sherry Rankins-Robertson, who has actually spent a lot of time in prisons working with inmates on creative writing.  Sometime in October she and I will go to this prison for the mentally ill and we will sit across a table from the man who murdered my grandfather.

The visiting room is one in which physical touch is allowed.  I'll be able to shake his hand, if I want to.

A Prison for the Insane

Freaking out just a little bit, okay A LOT!  I was talking to a friend of mine and he mentioned that Cork is in a hospital for the mentally ill.  I checked on wikipedia and it turns out that the East Mississippi Corrections Facility, where Cork is housed, is the place where all of the prisoners in their system are sent when they have a mental illness.

I called the woman who runs Cork's floor and I said, "So, is your facility a prison for the criminally insane?"

She said, "Basically.  Especially on this floor, we have the worst cases here.  Many of them are patients," I guess she meant as opposed to prisoners.  She may be referring to people who are legally labeled as criminally insane.  Her floor, Cork's floor, is the worst one.  He lives on the floor that houses the most severe, most dangerous prisoners.

I am physically ill.  I want to face him and I will not back down, but I am really nervous.  Flashbacks of the movie Shutter Island keep racing through my mind.

I figured that he'd be a little off, simply because he's been incarcerated for so long. I was trying to prepare for that.  But this, this new revelation, I don't know how to prepare for it.  Is he schizophrenic?  Does he have multiple personalities?  Is he violent?

I find myself wondering whether or not he can tell me anything useful.  What if he just sits there in a puddle of his own drool?  Is the Cork of 1973 who killed my grandfather even inside of the Cork of 2012?  I picture myself sitting across from him, using words, body language, and facial expressions to try to delve deeper into his mind, to try to get to the truth.  Will he be able to help me or will I just get lost in there?

Sometimes I wonder whether or not he has Internet access and, if so, if he has read this blog.  Does he know what I wrote about him here?  Does he know that I'm afraid?