A Death in Belmont - Sebastian Junger

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      ROY SMITH WAS born in Oxford, Mississippi, on the Fourth of July in either 1927 or 1928; court documents list one year or the other, and the murder indictment lists both, followed by a question mark. Presumably even Smith himself wasn’t sure. Smith stood five feet eleven, was rail thin and had a two-inch scar over his left eye and another deep scar on his left hand from a broken milk bottle. He told police that he never regained full use of the hand. A booking photo taken after his arrest shows a thin, resigned-looking man gazing carefully down from the camera, as if he wanted to avoid anything that might be mistaken for defiance. His brows angled inward and downward in a strange permanent frown. His eyes were bloodshot and his nose looked broken toward the right, as if someone had punched him that way, and he had a fine, narrow face that women must have noticed.

      Both of Smith’s parents worked at the University of Mississippi in Oxford, known as Ole Miss. His father, Andrew, was a janitor and an itinerant minister, and his mother, Mollie, was a cafeteria worker at the gymnasium. Mollie worked under a legendary baseball coach named Tad Smith, a man of such local stature that people were given to naming their children after him. Southerners of that generation, both black and white, occasionally named their children after people or causes they admired; first names like “State’s Rights” or “Ex-Senator Webb” were not unheard of in Mississippi when Roy was growing up. Mollie and Andrew named Roy’s younger brother “Coach,” after Tad Smith. They pronounced it Co-ach, though, with two syllables and both vowels enunciated.

      Coach was three or four years younger than Roy. In addition Roy had an older brother named Lerone, an older half brother named Tommy Hudson—born to fourteen-year-old Mollie by another man—two younger brothers, and three sisters. Most of the family was described in court papers as “loyal,” which possibly meant that they believed Roy was innocent. A written report by a Mississippi probation officer, requested by the Massachusetts courts, stated that “The Smiths all have a good reputation in and around Oxford, this was attested to by Sheriff Joe Ford. It seems this is the first trouble any of the Smith children have been into.”

      The family lived on South Sixteenth street, in a wood-frame house that they owned. The area was farmland back then—before the highway truncated South Sixteenth, before an urban renewal project converted sharecropper shacks to brick ranch-styles, before the city limits expanded and prohibited the keeping of livestock and poultry. Back then many people in Oxford—even successful business owners—kept chickens and a milk cow and tended a vegetable garden. As late as the 1960s, black farmers sold vegetables off mule carts on the town square and took their cotton to the gin in lumbering, overloaded wagons. Andrew, the father, preached on weekends at the invitation of local ministers, at the New Hope Baptist Church and the Second Baptist Church and the Clear Creek Church. He grew up illiterate but learned to read the Bible with the help of his wife. He was known for his devotion to his wife and to God and hard work, and he was also known for his fondness for women. Weeknights he would sit in an armchair and watch television while reading the Bible, and weekends he would preach and chew tobacco and chat up the women in the congregation.

      The family property was adjacent to a large tract called Brown’s Farm, and Roy grew up picking cotton for Mr. Ross Brown. Picking cotton for someone else was an excellent way to die young, exhausted, and poor. When Roy’s parents were growing up in Oxford, 80 percent of the local black population had fallen into sharecropping, and things hadn’t improved much by the time Roy was old enough to start working. Under the sharecropping system the landowner provided the land and tools and tenant farmers did the work; profits were split down the middle. Poor whites fell into sharecropping as well as blacks. In theory the sharecropping arrangement should have made the landowner and sharecropper equal partners in the enterprise of growing crops; in reality the system couldn’t have been better designed to encourage exploitation.

      Because the landowners were in charge of selling the crops, they could report almost any profit they wanted. They could also deduct the cost of tools, seed, and household items off the top, all of which the sharecroppers had bought from the landowner at inflated prices and obscene interest rates. At the end of the year many sharecroppers discovered that their profits barely covered their debts, and they got nothing for all their work. The sharecropping system was so good at keeping cash out of the hands of tenant farmers that as late as the 1950s in Mississippi, there were people who had never seen a dollar bill.

      The Smith family had not been sucked into the sharecropping trap, but the work that Roy did at Ross Brown’s was nevertheless a backbreaking business. “The Mississippi Delta will kill a dog in five years, a mule in ten, and a man in twenty,” the saying went. The hardest work was in September, when the cotton bolls burst open and turned the land as white as if it had snowed. Jails were emptied, schools were closed, and most of the black population of Oxford took to the fields with six-foot picking bags over their shoulders. A ragged line of pickers moving across a field looked like hunchbacks in a slow-motion race. A full sack weighed between 100 and 150 pounds, depending on its size, and a man could fill three bags in a day if he worked hard. The job required both an infuriating dexterity to pick the cotton lint out of the razor-sharp bolls, and a bullish strength to drag the bag across the fields. As a result of this odd pairing of skills, the strongest people were not necessarily the fastest; men picked cotton, women picked cotton, children as young as ten picked cotton, and occasionally a woman came along who could outpick the men.

      Because they lived in town, Andrew and Mollie’s children had options that farm kids did not. Roy’s brother Coach got a job working at Belk Motors in Oxford; his brother Lerone made his living installing air conditioners in Memphis; and James became a carpenter. Roy was the only brother who didn’t finish high school, quitting at age fourteen to start working at a chain grocery store called the Jitney Jungle. The Jitney, on the north side of the square, was an Oxford institution that eventually moved a couple of blocks to North Lamar before fading out completely. The store sold canned pork brain and hog testicles and ears and jowls, and packages simply labeled “meat.” People got rides out of town in front of the Jitney and picked up day work in front of the Jitney and met their girlfriends in front of the Jitney. Much of Oxford life happened in front of the Jitney, and Roy, as a teenager, would have been exposed to the best and worst of it.

      Facing a life in Ross Brown’s fields or the in aisles of the Jitney, Roy decided in July 1945 to join the U.S. Marine Corps. The military was a popular option for black men in the Deep South in the 1940s; in addition to a regular paycheck and technical training, they were also able to escape the oppressive racism of their hometowns. The military, if not entirely color blind, was at least crudely egalitarian. Roy served two years in the South Pacific and was honorably discharged in Pensacola, Florida, in August 1947. He probably drifted west with whatever was left of his service pay, maybe visiting relatives in Memphis or Chicago. Many black servicemen found returning home an agonizing prospect. Whereas in the military, black units had served side by side with white units and had been judged more or less on their own merits, these men were now returning to the segregated lunch counters and humiliating work conditions of the Deep South. When Roy Smith was growing up, black men were still getting beaten up for not stepping off the sidewalk and tipping their hats when a white lady passed. For a young black man who had fought—and maybe had even been wounded—in World War II, returning to an environment like that must have been psychologically devastating.

      Roy Smith first entered the legal system on February 8, 1949, when he was arrested with his older brother, Lerone, and another man, named Butch Roberson, for public drinking. The two Smith brothers pleaded guilty to being drunk and “using profane language in the presence of two or more persons” and were fined twenty dollars and released. Roberson, who owned a whiskey still and had undoubtedly supplied the booze that night, was fined a hundred dollars and also released. The fine was recorded to have been paid by a man named “JWT Falkner,” a well-known lawyer in Oxford who was also an uncle of the famous writer William Faulkner. (William had already taken to spelling his family name differently.) John Wesley Thompson Falkner II often represented indigent black men in court—not out of any kind of idealism but because there was steady work in it. This was not the last time he would have to deal with the Smith family.

      Of all the Smith sons, Lerone was the one with the wild streak, with the knack for inviting the attention of the law. Lerone grew up stealing chickens

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