In 1976, a few weeks prior to Christmas, I loaded my Volkswagen Beetle with all of my possessions and drove away from snowy North Adams, Massachusetts, where I had been an investigative newspaper reporter, the object of a mayoral effort to silence me (violently or otherwise), and an unsuccessful novelist who tried to write about what had happened and how frightening it had been. I understood that I did not know enough to write the book I imagined, but a couple of years later, I managed to salvage a short story from the disjointed manuscript I still possess. A small literary magazine published it.
My final destination on that road trip was unknown. I was hoping to walk into a newsroom with my portfolio of feature stories from The (Weekly) Germantown Courier in Philadelphia, where I had worked shortly after my first post-college job cleaning windows in a car wash opposite the front gate of my college. The portfolio also included a series of stories about the mayor of North Adams and the city’s childhood lead paint poisoning epidemic, for which he was partly responsible, and which had formed the basis of The (North Adams) Transcript’s nomination for a Pulitzer Prize. I imagined that the result of my trip would be an on-the-spot hiring and the resumption of my career in journalism.
So, I headed to the South, mostly because I was afraid of the region and knew that my fear was at least partly rooted in ignorance of it, as some exiled southern friends in North Adams had told me. I arrived, ignorant and unannounced, in successive newsrooms in Louisville, Nashville and then Charlotte, where the managing editor of The Observer was kind enough to test my skills by asking me to write a story, on deadline, about a robbery. I failed miserably and—after listening to me trying to conduct a phone interview—the editor advised me to find another career path. This was not the first time I had received such advice: I had made similar trips, looking for a newspaper job, through the North and Mid-West, just after graduating from college.
These journeys produced no positive results—which is why I ended up in a car wash—but a kind editor in Racine, Wisconsin, used my job-seeking travails as the basis for one of his columns. He thought my odyssey was pretty funny, but I was crushed. That The Transcript eventually hired me after having failed my first audition there seemed like a blessing. It was, but in the end, it came with the price of a near-death experience and a depressive isolation from friends and colleagues. Years later, I came to believe that The Transcript and its good-willed, patrician publishers were constrained by the shortage of civic courage that has regulated most of the mainstream press since the late 19th Century.
Moving to Greenville, Meeting ‘Big’
After the debacle in Charlotte, and on the advice of my exiled friends from the South, I headed to Greenville, in the Mississippi Delta. My southern friends up north had told me about Greenville’s newspaper, The Delta Democrat-Times, which enjoyed a reputation for heroic stands against the Klan, the White Citizens Councils and the racist clouds that continue to define a good deal of the white South.
Before the DTT acquired this reputation, “Big” Hodding Carter and his wife Betty Carter long stood against the progress his paper would later come to herald. Big’s eventual “enlightenment” about race, as The New York Times once framed it, had come slowly, and he had remained cautious. As a young man, he was a committed white supremist who refused to live in a Bowdoin College dormitory because it housed the lone Black student in residence at the school. Into his later years, “Big” argued against a federal anti-lynching law and the desegregation of public schools.
His eldest son, Hodding Carter III, who passed away in 2023, possessed a bolder voice and vision. He helped lead the insurgency of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party along with its most visible and arguably most militant member, Fannie Lou Hamer, against Lyndon Johnson’s 1964 decision to back the all-white, “regular” Mississippi Democrats.
Hodding had no idea who I was when I knocked on his office door and told him I was hoping to find a job with the DDT. But he looked through my dossier, and then somehow the conversation turned to James Agee’s and Walker Evans’ study of tenant farming in Alabama, “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.” As best I recall, I told Hodding that what I liked best about the book, over and above Evans’ photographs, was Agee’s self-reflective sense that doing journalism typically, and necessarily, converted one into a “spy,” an intruder into the life of others.
And there was a quotation, which I had memorized, from one of Agee’s film reviews published just as WWII was ending: “There can be no bestiality so discouraging to contemplate as that of the man of good-will when he is misusing his heart and his mind; and there can be no trusting him merely because, in the long run, he customarily comes part way to, and resumes his campaign for, what he likes to call human dignity.”
Agee aimed this criticism at the Allies and their underlying search for vengeance against the Germans after the war. This did not win him many friends: The moral universe he inhabited, and from which he fell—most notably, perhaps, with Evans’s wife—was too complex, and too Christian for a lot of us sinners to understand. But Hodding certainly did, and he hired me on the spot, just as I had fantasized. I was to become the city editor, and Hodding told me that my job was to teach the newspaper’s reporters “how to write.”
I took this instruction to heart, way too much to heart. Calling upon memories of the dismissive and unabashedly public newsroom criticisms of my editors in Philadelphia and North Adams—“Krause, how can you write this crap?”—I proceeded to install a new regime of good writing in the newsroom.
‘Oh, How He Hated Black People’
Hodding left Greenville to become the spokesperson for the State Department, and the new chief editors were his brother, Philip Carter, and David Ethridge, whose father, Mark, also a journalist, had pushed back against racism with more vigor and consistency than “Big” Hodding himself.
Phil and David tried to moderate my inclination to publicly embarrass authors for what I considered contemptible prose and reporting, but I would not listen. That the “N-word” rolled out of the mouths of the inhabitants of the newsroom—some of them Jewish and others from the north—with such nonchalance and ease only hardened my resolve to install a new regime. And I found it sickening that the reporters assigned to cover politics fulfilled their daily quotas of prose by allowing the operatives of the Democratic Party to talk to themselves in the pages of the DDT.
I assigned one reporter whose work and behavior I found particularly galling to write a story on the meaning of Passover to Jews in the Mississippi Delta. She declined, and I demanded a staff meeting at which, the managing editor assured me, I would receive her rousing, vocal endorsement that my instructions must be followed. This did not happen: The meeting turned into a full-scale assault on me and my methods. Phil Carter tried to console me, but I opted for a bottle of Rebel Yell, “The Whiskey Especially for The Deep South,” and—at Carter’s suggestion—a late night drive to Little Rock, Arkansas.
I knew my days in Greenville must soon end, so I began the search for a new job. A couple of months later I found one in Raleigh. My new boss had known “Big” Hodding and had written about him in The New York Times.
Prior to leaving Greenville, I spent more and more time in the composing room of the DDT, distancing myself from the newsroom reporters and what I had thought was meant to be my job, and I found solace and friendship in the women who worked in the composing room under what seemed to be the draconian hand of the chief compositor. Oh, how he hated Black people. One night, once again calling upon the putative magic of Rebel Yell, I ended up with one of the few white persons who worked in the composing room: In the morning, she asked me why I loved Black folk so much? In my gutlessness, I muted my hungover self.
‘What Are You? What Are You?’
Not long afterward, as I was beginning to understand my adolescent, defensive egotism, I met someone who pointed the way further out of myself and taught me that the world does not need more critics. But in the end, I could not hear all of what she told me and tried to teach me. Hearts broke, and the loss continues to haunt after her recent death almost 50 years later.
One day as the two of us walked through a dilapidated park and playground in Greenville, we stumbled on some old gravestones planted by the massive Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1878 that killed thousands as it spread upriver from New Orleans to Memphis. The names on the stones were Jewish, carved in Hebrew and English, abandoned by decades of neglect, and I remembered a Russian prose fragment I had studied in college, in my pre-car wash career: “The Cemetery in Kozin,” by the great writer, Isaac Babel.
This was an evocation of a graveyard in Volhynia that speaks to centuries of sufferings: “O death, O covetous mercenary, O greedy thief, why could you not spare us, if only this once?”
Three kids, African American, were playing tag as I said these lines to myself. One approached me and ran his unbelieving hands over and through my woolly hair and then across my cheeks. The other kids did the same. One of them asked, “What are you? You ain’t white? You Black? What are you? What are you?” In ways I could not fathom at the time, that kid was trying to show me that race is something we perceive and construe—something that I have been trying to write a book about for decades. Maybe I should just leave it with the wisdom of that kid.
But there was another issue to which the gravestones pointed, and that was, despite all of its tensions and ambiguities, the parallel though not entirely shared histories and origins of so many persons of African and Jewish ancestry. The kid in the park probably had never heard, or used, a favorite appellation—Kike—of so many of my northern school mates and acquaintances and of so many white folks in my tenure in the South who invariably called me David and/or Jewboy and refused to believe that I came from any place other than New York City, the home of the Jews, or that I might have possessed any name other than David or, if these folks were really inventive, Saul.
In the days after the graveyard encounter, my friend and I drove out of Greenville to listen to music, to dance and drink, and to mournfully celebrate my good fortune in finding a job with The Raleigh Times. We went to what surely once must have been a hotel or a brothel, converted in the 1970s to a dance hall, with deep balconies overlooking the stage and floor and enormous windows that opened onto the streets outside. The band played what I still think is the most evocative and beautiful—and evasive—modern song about the Magnolia State, and I still listen to it. It was written by Jesse Winchester, who left the USA for Canada in the late 1960s to register his opposition to the war in Southeast Asia:
“Mississippi, You’re on My Mind”
“I think I see a wagon rutted roadWith the weeds growing tall between the tracksAnd along one side runs a rusty barbed wire fenceAnd beyond that sits an old tar paper shack.Mississippi, you’re on my mindMississippi, you’re on my mindOh, Mississippi, you’re on my mind.I think I hear a noisy old John DeereIn a field specked with dirty cotton lintAnd below the field runs a little shady creekAnd there you’ll find the cool green leaves of mint.I think I smell the honeysuckle vineThe heavy sweetness like to make me sickAnd the dogs, my God, they’re hungry all the timeAnd the snakes are sleeping where the weeds are thick.I think I feel an angry oven heatThe southern sun just blazes in the skyIn the dusty weeds a fat grasshopper jumpsI want to make it to that creek before I fry.”
In the Mississippi presented in this song, there is no race. Like the late Phil Carter’s web-based collection of poems, “South by North,” the elision is noteworthy, though Carter managed to insert a few lines about Jews he had known. In reading his work, I was reminded of my final social encounters in Greenville and what I thought I had learned from them.
‘Giving Voice to the Contempt’
The first was the wedding of the son of Phalange Ward, the long-time cook and maid for “Big” Hodding and the Carter family. It was in Feliciana, the Carter’s former house and urban estate in Greenville that the city’s leading Republican and its McDonald’s franchise owner had recently bought. Not long after, Gene Lyons, a wonderful writer, published a piece in The Times about the Carters and the transitions in Greenville signalled by the wedding and the new owner’s purchase of Feliciana, along with the new world of the South that was about to begin.
Lyons omitted the story I had heard from several wedding guests that seemed amusing to them: One night, long after his Pulitzer Prize, “Big” got all drunked up, found his pistols, and ran into the courtyard, shooting in the air and shouting that he was going to kill a Black person. I have no way of knowing if this story was apocryphal, but it did not seem out of keeping with “Big” Hodding’s youthful racial allegiances or his appreciation for “Rebel Yell” or its equivalent.
And then there was a dinner at Doe’s Eat Place, Greenville’s famous steak house. The guest of honor was a young history professor from Harvard in town to visit a former student who happened to be the reporter for the DDT who had refused to complete my assignment of writing a Passover story. “Rebel Yell” was flowing pretty well that night, and I asked the professor what he could possibly know about the Delta, or Greenville, or race in the South or anywhere else, giving voice to the contempt with which many journalists bring to their encounters with academics.
The professor had the good, kind sense to ignore me. But he did not forget me: A few years later, when I entered history graduate school at Duke, he was the convenor of the core seminar that all grad students had to take. He remained more than kind to me, and my debts to him also remain—all of them large—and most of them are not academic.
As recently as two years, in Mississippi, six Rankin County “law-enforcement officers” tortured and horribly abused two African American men, adding to a long list of persons of color who have met similar fates, or worse, all across the United States. This is only one of the latest reasons why Mississippi, of all places in my native land, is still on my mind.
The state’s history is hardly confined to the images and scents and sounds summoned by Jesse Winchester’s beautiful song. Listen to Billie Holiday, Mavis Staples, Paul Robeson, Odetta and a number of others who tell stories of the Magnolia State through their music, tales that should be on the minds of all of us.
This MFP Voices opinion essay reflects the personal opinion of its author(s). The column does not necessarily represent the views of the Mississippi Free Press, its staff or board members. To submit an opinion for the MFP Voices section, send up to 1,200 words and sources fact-checking the included information to voices@mississippifreepress.org. We welcome a wide variety of viewpoints.