A Death in Belmont (3 page)

 

IT HAS BEEN
forty years since her mother's murder, and Leah Goldberg—now older than her mother was when she died—still cannot talk about it without getting angry. She is a small, intense woman who speaks her mind sharply and unapologetically, her voice occasionally diving into an outraged whisper that even the person she is speaking to cannot understand. She was living in Cambridge and teaching fifth graders at the Roberts School at the time of the murder; she first heard something was wrong when the operator broke into a phone conversation and said that she had an emergency call for a Leah Goldberg. It was her father. He told her that her mother was sick and to come home as quickly as possible.

Leah could tell from her father's voice that the news was really far worse. She dropped the phone, and she and one of her roommates dashed out to her car and drove down Concord Avenue to Belmont Center and then turned up Pleasant Street to her old neighborhood. There was a police cruiser and an ambulance in front of her house, and neighborhood children watching from the street. Leah ran up to the front door and caught a glimpse of her father through the living room window. He saw her as well and just raised his arms in grief.

Leah's memories of the next few hours are jumbled. She answered a lot of questions from the police but was in such a state of shock that the exchanges were utterly calm. The police sent her to a neighbor's house to recover, but later she could not remember whether her father had come with her or not. She had trouble mak
ing sense of the fact that she had seen her mother just the previous evening; everything that followed seemed like an insane dream that inevitably had to end. It was not a dream, and it was not going to end. Not only had her mother's life been truncated, but in some ways her father's life had as well. He was sixty-eight years old and had been married to Bessie for almost half of that. He was the one who had discovered the body. He was the one who had rushed over to help his wife and then realized that she was dead. Every morning for the rest of his life he would have to greet that image in his mind and then fence it out and somehow keep it out of his thoughts for the rest of the day until it was time to go to sleep again. He would have to do that for another twenty-six years. It was worse than any sentence Smith could get from a judge.

The unsavory details about Smith helped make sense of the crime but also raised other agonizing issues. Mrs. Martin at the Division of Employment Security thought she might have smelled alcohol on his breath. So why did she send him on the job? It was known that Smith had an extensive criminal record. How could Mrs. Martin have failed to warn Leah's mother that an ex-con was coming to clean her house? Police investigators also thought that Smith might be a drug addict or have an extremely low IQ. Is that why he would commit a murder that he was virtually certain to get caught for? The aspects of Smith's personality that could explain his impulsive murder inevitably made the crime seem senseless and avoidable.

It was possible, Leah Goldberg realized, that her mother had died simply because Roy Smith had wanted to get high. It seemed hard to believe, but why else would someone kill another person for the fifteen dollars on their nightstand?

R
OY 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 from people's backyards and selling them in town. Lerone was in trouble with the law so continually that he would take off running at the sight of a policeman whether he'd done anything wrong or not. There were times when Lerone had to sleep under other peoples' houses to avoid being arrested. When Lerone was older he got a shack out in the country where he bootlegged, raised hogs, worked on old tractors, and had parties. The place was a half hour drive down a dirt road from the nearest highway, and people would show up at all hours to drink, gamble, and carry on in ways that they couldn't in town.

It was with Lerone, of course, that Roy had his first very serious encounter with Sheriff Boyce Bratton.

 

THE LAFAYETTE COUNTY
Courthouse dominates Oxford from the center of the town square. It is a whitewashed two-story building with high arched windows and four fluted columns on a second-floor veranda that looks out over huge, graceful water oaks. A four-faced clock on the roof peak theoretically gave the time to every person in town, though it was often broken. A granite statue
of a Confederate soldier on the south side of the building commemorates the young men who “gave their lives in a just and holy cause.” It is worth noting that one out of three men in Mississippi's armed forces died for that cause, and that one-fifth of the state budget went to fitting the survivors with artificial limbs. In Oxford war fever ran so high that virtually the entire student body of the University of Mississippi enlisted en masse, closing the school. Their regiment, called the University Grays, suffered a 100 percent casualty rate during the infamous Pickett's charge at the battle of Gettysburg; every single man in the regiment was either killed, wounded, or captured before they reached the top of Seminary Ridge. Inside the double oak doors of the courthouse, through the clerk's office on the right, in a small windowless room in the back, rows of leatherbound docket books lean haphazardly on shelves.

The books are two feet high and broken down at the spine and embossed with gold lettering. In the volume that includes 1949, on page 312, under the date March 17, Roy Smith's name is entered with the charge of burglary and a bail of one thousand dollars. It had been hardly a month since Roy's last encounter with the law, and this time he was with Lerone and his half brother, Tommy Hudson. Tommy and Lerone supposedly didn't get along very well, but they got along well enough to get arrested together.

Lerone and Tommy were arrested first, and Roy was picked up the following day. They were arrested by Sheriff Bratton, who may have simply gone to Andy Smith's place on South Sixteenth and told him that he wanted the boys to turn themselves in. Bratton stood only five feet eight but was so feared that he didn't even bother to wear a gun. When he had to arrest someone, he simply showed up at their home and told them they were coming downtown; invariably they complied. The jail was a two-story brick building on the
east side of the square, with a kitchen on the first floor where the jailer's wife cooked for the inmates, and a single cell on the second floor where the inmates slept. The cell was secured by a massive door hewed from a single slab of oak that was hung on iron hinges and locked by an iron bar padlocked through two iron hasps. It still had bullet holes in it from an earlier lynching. A single window, crudely barred, gave the inmates a view of the streets in which they had just committed their crimes. “The dark limber hands would lie in the grimed interstices,” William Faulkner wrote in 1948 about the Oxford jailhouse window, “while the mellow untroubled repentless voices would shout down to the women in the aprons of cooks or nurses and the girls in their flash cheap clothes from the mail order houses or the other young men who had not been caught yet or had been caught and freed yesterday, gathered along the street.”

Roy and Tommy and Lerone had committed the sin of stealing cotton. Tommy owned an old Packard, and the three brothers had driven it out to a farm owned by a big planter named Guy McCarty and sent Roy into the “cotton house,” where the raw cotton was stored, to drag out four or five bags. Cotton was going for fifty or sixty cents a pound back then—the war had caused cotton prices to skyrocket—and a trunk full of cotton would have been worth hundreds of dollars. It would have been an enormous amount of money for them, even split three ways—but it also put them way over the fifty-dollar limit for grand larceny. They apparently made it off the McCarty place without getting caught but immediately ran into problems back in town. Roy's old boss, Ross Brown, had a cotton gin behind the post office, and Lerone and Tommy drove the cotton there to try to sell it. They must have been asked where the cotton came from almost as soon as they drove onto the scales.

“They probably tried to pass themselves off as sharecroppers,”
says John Bounds, an Oxford insurance agent who knew the Smith family very well. “Sharecroppers could bring cotton in, but most of the time it would be the farmer. They would have gotten all kinds of questions. ‘Where is your land?' ‘Which place do you share on?' If you don't have a cotton allotment from the government you can't sell cotton, you can't grow cotton. And the buyer would know every farmer in the county. It wouldn't have taken long for them to ask someone whether Tommy and Lerone were sharecropping for them that year.”