Deer creek drive, p.1
Deer Creek Drive, page 1
also by beverly lowry
fiction
Come Back, Lolly Ray
Emma Blue
Daddy’s Girl
The Perfect Sonya
Breaking Gentle
The Track of Real Desires
nonfiction
Crossed Over: A Murder, a Memoir
Her Dream of Dreams:
The Rise and Triumph of Madam C. J. Walker
Harriet Tubman: Imagining a Life
Who Killed These Girls?
The Unsolved Murders That Rocked a Texas Town
this is a borzoi book
published by alfred a. knopf
Copyright © 2022 by Beverly Lowry
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.
www.aaknopf.com
The photographs on this page and this page appear courtesy of the Archives and Records Services Division, Mississippi Department of Archives and History.
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Lowry, Beverly, author.
Title: Deer Creek Drive : a reckoning of memory and murder in the Mississippi Delta / Beverly Lowry.
Description: First edition. | New York : Alfred A. Knopf, [2022] | Includes bibliographical references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021053204 | ISBN 9780525657231 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780525657248 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Thompson, Idella, 1879–1948. | Dickins, Ruth Thompson, 1906–1996. | Murder—Mississippi—Leland—Case studies. | Leland (Miss.)—Social conditions—20th century. | Leland (Miss.)—Race relations.
Classification: LCC HV6534.L45 L69 2022 | DDC 364.152/30976242—dc23/eng/20211227
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021053204
Ebook ISBN 9780525657248
Cover images: (pruning shears) Tragedy-of-the-Month, 1949, Triangle Publications, Inc.; (background) Special Collections, University of Mississippi Libraries
Cover design by Jenny Carrow
ep_prh_6.0_140605063_c0_r0
For Greenville friends, past and present.
In Memory: Julia Reed
Rabbit Jenkins
Leila Wynn
Charlotte Buchanan
My parents. Their dreams.
Contents
I The Crime
II Trial
III Prison
IV Changes
V The Reckoning
Acknowledgments
Notes
Deer Creek Drive is, fundamentally, a story about the attitudes, behavior, and language of Mississippi in the 1950s. This was the decade of Brown v. Board of Education, of Emmett Till, and of the beginning of the end for Jim Crow. While this material is often difficult, my aim was always to illuminate and reckon with the reality of living and growing up in that section of the state we called the Delta during this time. As such, the book uses a number of primary sources—documents, court testimony, newspaper articles—as well as a reliance on memory, much of which reflects the demeaning and problematic language that was used so freely and unsparingly at the time. It is both my story and the story of an unreconstructed South and how both of us were destined to change.
Beverly Lowry
I
The Crime
Known as State’s Exhibit No. 1, this is the architectural rendering of Idella Thompson’s home in 1948, which was presented to the jury on the first day of the trial by the district attorney, Stanny Sanders. It is the only exhibit included in the digitized transcript of the trial and as such provides a kind of map to the crime and its aftermath, showing how big the rooms were and where they were located, how close the bathroom was to the back porch, how far the front door was from the crime scene, and other crucial details. It was reprinted in newspapers and in the tabloid magazine Tragedy-of-the-Month and is the kind of site-setting evidence lawyers like to come up with before anything else.
Looking Back
You’d think by now people would have forgotten or perhaps decided simply to let go of the memory of what happened in the Mississippi Delta town of Leland in the early afternoon of November 17, 1948. But nobody has. Even people too young to remember know about it. They’ve seen clippings pasted in old scrapbooks or heard the story (which did not, by the way, end that year or the next but went on and on, one of those stories that because people love to tell it keeps starting over). Although some local residents still refuse to engage, even briefly, in a discussion of the matter, there are those who would—if you went to Leland—gladly point out the house where it happened—still standing, freshly painted perfectly white, lawn exquisitely maintained. They might even be willing to tell you exactly where in the house the sixty-eight-year-old “society matron” was attacked, first in the enclosed back porch, and then dragged on a small rug into her own bathroom, where she, or, more than likely, her body, ended up: facedown, her daughter said, in her own blood soup, the crown of her head against the tub, beside which sat an ordinary three-legged wooden stool. And between the stool and her head, the gleaming nightmare weapon washed and wiped clean of prints and gore.
That it happened was shocking enough on its own. But there? In that neighborhood?
Until that year, both of these women, the society-matron mother and the socialite daughter, had lived pretty much their whole lives on this street, which—it is important to note—was and still is the most desirable in town, the street about which locals say, “If you want to get to heaven, you have to live on Deer Creek Drive.”
Or, as some would say, simply “the Drive.”
If by happenstance you did find yourself in Leland standing before the murder house, you might then want to check out the house where the dead woman’s daughter lived with her cotton broker husband and two young daughters: a mere three houses away down the Drive, north toward Stoneville. You could walk there in minutes, noting as you went, thanks in great measure to the Leland Garden Club, the beauty of the surroundings: the meandering creek to your left and on its high, sloping banks the oak and sycamore trees, the occasional surviving sweet gum, the crepe myrtle and pecan, the azalea and rosebushes, the park benches, the well-fed families of proprietary ducks.
That the two women’s homes were situated on what some Leland families consider the “wrong” side of the creek should also be noted. It is, of course, a measure of small-town snobbery that there exists, to some, a bad side of the best street in town, but the distinction is also significant in terms of current property values. Houses on South Deer Creek Drive, according to a longtime realtor and lifelong resident, command a higher price. Asked why this was, she answered with a sigh, as if the reason should have been obvious. Because, she said, “Black people live on the south side.”
Close to? Or on?
These days? Both.
It was 2018. I’d returned to the Delta to participate in the annual Hot Tamale Festival, which took place in downtown Greenville. The realtor was driving me around Leland, pointing out places of historical interest, including a museum devoted to Kermit the Frog and his creator, the puppeteer Jim Henson, surely Leland’s best-known resident, more famous even than the bluesmen James “Son” Thomas and Johnny Winter. She’d promised to get me into the murder house, which she’d personally sold five times since the killing, but when we drove there and she went inside to ask, the current residents told her no way.
Without a doubt, anybody who knows how and where, on the very day she’d been released from a weeklong stay in the hospital, Idella Stovall Long Thompson was murdered—anybody, that is, willing to remember and say so—could also let you in on the most important part of the story: the identity of the person who was eventually arrested, tried on a first-degree murder charge, convicted, and sent to Parchman, Mississippi’s infamous state prison, for life. This particular detail is why a lot of Leland people want to keep the story under wraps. And while some of those who refuse to talk are relatives of the two women or members of the same social class, not all are. A furniture salesman told a friend of mine that if I was hoping to hear what people had to say about that, I “might as well go on back home.” Because, he said, “we’re not going to talk about it,” with no indication who he specifically meant by “we.” Leland’s small enough—its population barely five thousand in 1948, less than that now—to come together like that, to automatically clam up, close ranks, do the zipper thing, running pinched thumb and index finger across their lips as if to lock the information inside.
I know the story, they’re saying, but I’m not telling. Especially not to an outsider like you.
Greenville, where I grew up, is only nine miles away, but I’d left years before and had never lived in Leland, and so there were lifelong residents who felt justified, if not obliged, to tell me to go on back to Texas and leave this thing alone. And then shut the door in my face.
* * *
….
At the time of the murder, however, the news spread fast. Leland was practically a suburb of Greenville, and telephone service still depended on the “Number, please” request of the switchboard operators, the working women whose job was to put calls through and who, as a consequence, often heard important new
One “Number, please” led to the next. And so we all found out one way or another, if not that afternoon then certainly by the next morning when the November 18 issue of the Greenville Delta Democrat-Times arrived, bearing what, in retrospect, seems an oddly worded banner headline: “Search Continues in Leland Slaying.” As if the murder itself had become old news. And in some ways it had because we already knew about it, including who the victim was, who’d been at the crime scene, and who the eyewitness said had done it. Which meant the real up-to-the-minute news had moved from the event itself to its follow-up. The search.
Beneath the headline was a more straightforward subhead: “Mrs. J. W. Thompson Killed with Shears. Rites to Be Friday.” The slain woman was described as the widow of the prominent Delta planter and former Mississippi Levee Board chairman J. W. Thompson, whose daughter the forty-two-year-old Ruth Dickins had reportedly surprised the killer, a man she described as a young, slightly built, dark-skinned Negro she didn’t know. She was coming, she said, into her mother’s home and didn’t see the man right away, and before she knew it, he had slammed into her out of, it seemed, nowhere. They tussled and she wasn’t sure how, but she managed to wrestle the weapon from him. After that he fled. Out the back door, she assumed.
“Ruth,” a family relative told me. Nobody called her Mrs. Dickins, except maybe servants and children, many of whom addressed her in the southern manner as Miss Ruth. And she wasn’t a “socialite” as the papers said. She was, her second or so cousin swore, as plain as an old shoe.
As if that mattered. As if social status in the Mississippi Delta came not from ancestry but personality and character.
* * *
….
I was a big reader, but doubt I personally read the paper that next morning. But certainly my parents did. And unquestionably they would have talked about what was splashed all over the front page because it was a story not about strangers living in a whole other part of the country but about known people, members of a top-tier family. Being a listening, watching, imagining kind of girl, I would have paid attention, the same as, in all likelihood, every other girl my age, ten going on eleven being an age when female children are beginning to scarf up whatever information adults have been keeping from them, especially details of the most lurid, the worst things that have happened or still might.
But I can’t honestly say I remember much from that particular day. Things had to spin out a little further. A little more time had to pass. More news reported, discussed, wondered at before imagination could take hold and sink deeply enough in to make forgetting out of the question.
Once the AP had wired the story all over the country, other newspapers covered it that same day, including the Chicago Tribune (“Widow of Planter Killed by Intruder”), the Austin American-Statesman (“Planter’s Widow Hacked to Death”), The Montgomery Advertiser (“Prominent White Woman Slain”), the Greenwood, Mississippi, Commonwealth (“Leland Woman Is Killed by Negro”). And others, all emphasizing race, class, and shock value.
While splashy, unlikely murders tend to encourage long memories, this one was like no other, and in our part of Mississippi—that egg-shaped patch of ridiculously rich alluvial soil we called the Delta—nobody talked about anything else that whole fall and especially the next spring and summer when the trial provided the grisly details.
* * *
….
My memory of Greenville attaches itself to houses: where we lived when certain things happened, how old I was each time we had to move from one address to another, whether it was the time I broke my arm playing Crack the Whip the first day I went roller-skating in Strange Park and didn’t know enough to avoid taking the end position, or the day my brother David blasted his face open by tearing spent firecrackers apart and lighting them, not knowing one of them was live, or the time when the panel truck from Tatum Music Company came to take away my mother’s beloved Baldwin Acrosonic piano for nonpayment. We mark time mostly, I think, by events. I order my and my family’s Greenville life according to which house we were living in at the time. In our fourteen-year residency, there were seven, only one of which—the bungalow at the corner of Cedar and Manilla—we left by choice.
When my first novel, Come Back, Lolly Ray, was published in 1977, I hadn’t lived in Greenville for more than twenty years. I’d gone back maybe twice during that time, brief overnight stays ending in a quick getaway before I ran into somebody who might remember the deepening financial and legal troubles that encouraged my family, the Feys, to skip town and not come back.
I never planned or even wanted to set a book in Mississippi. There was the burden of the state’s literary past—Faulkner and the rest—plus I’d moved, I thought, for good. I wanted the past to stay where it was and believed that whatever I wrote would reflect the person I’d become, living in Manhattan, learning how to eat an artichoke, combing my hair across my forehead in a dramatic slant, like Delphine Seyrig in Last Year at Marienbad. But the past can be a nag. And sometimes a book knows what it is before the writer has a clue, including who’s going to be in it and where it’ll take place.
I renamed my fictional town Eunola and never said what state it was in or even which river dead-ended the main street of town. But Greenville knew. The opening line was like a secret whispered into their hometown ears: “The sun and river were to the west, back over their shoulders on the other side of the levee. The main street of town—along which they waited, impatiently—dead-ended there, at the foot of the levee.”
Who among locals didn’t nail it down? They knew I’d grown up there and that what I was describing was, absolutely and without a doubt, downtown Greenville, Mississippi. Within another page or so they’d have figured out other details.
Friday. Autumn. Late afternoon. The courthouse. Washington Avenue just over the railroad tracks where the street makes a sharp jag to the left toward the levee. Majorettes, marching band, drum major, special twirlers, cheerleaders. What else but the parade preceding the high point of our week: that night’s high school football game?
That book wasn’t about my life, and neither is this one. But both emerge from me. And here I am at this stage of my life, these seventy years later, remembering things that took hold of me then and still refuse to let go.
The story of Ruth Dickins, the murder of her mother, and what happened afterward.
The story of a girl who could not stop wanting what she couldn’t have.
And the hot tamale region that birthed us both.
November 17, 1948
The first police officers to arrive on the scene were the Leland chief of police, Frank P. Aldridge, and Phillip P. “Pink” Gorman, one of only three regulars on the Leland police force. Aldridge wasn’t feeling well, having been released from the hospital after surgery only the day before, in addition to which, barely four months earlier, he’d undergone three separate surgical procedures in one day. Although barely able to get around, he nonetheless managed to pull himself together and get to work. He was downtown on a Third Street sidewalk not far from the police telephone box when, middle of the afternoon, it rang.
Leland was one of those quiet, small towns news reporters like to call “sleepy.” Because nothing much of a criminal nature happened there beyond the usual petty crimes and traffic violations, that phone didn’t ring too often. With no idea how his life was about to be jiggered, Aldridge answered and, once he’d heard the message, told Gorman to go get the police car—there was only one—Mrs. Thompson had been murdered.
