A Death in Belmont (6 page)

“Look, this is serious; I'm giving it to you straight,” said Smith. “If you'll excuse me for saying this here, there's too many women out there for me to be making a proposition for somebody. Do you think I want my neck broken?”

“You didn't ask her to be extra friendly?”

“No, I'd swear on a stack of Bibles as high as a building, I swear.”

“Did you make a grab at her when she refused you?”

“I never made no passes at her.”

“Roy, that's not very reasonable, I'm telling you.”

“I didn't make no passes. That lady never made no passes at me. She was nice. She fixed me dinner [lunch] and got me a cup of tea. I sat down and ate that and got right back up like I do in everyone's house. I got right back up and started working.”

“Roy, something happened in that house, and it is quite natural that we should feel you are responsible.”

“Why me?”

“Because you were the only one who was there. Don't you understand? If there is nobody else there but you and the woman and something happens to the woman, naturally we got to think you did it. Now listen, Roy, nobody is trying to put you in the middle. If there is something bothering you and you made a grab for her, all you have to do is say so.”

“I didn't.”

“It's no big mystery, it happens every day.”

“I'm telling you, you can take a knife and take my insides out—you can take me to a hospital and let them do anything to me.”

“I'm not going to do anything—all I want to know is what happened.”

“How do I know? I went there, and I worked for that woman. She's not the only woman I worked for.”

“I believe—they tell me—you're a good worker.”

“Jesus Christ, take me to a hospital, let them do anything to me.”

“Listen Roy—at the time this happened to the woman—”

“Yes?”

“—that somebody knocked her flat—”

“I haven't knocked nobody flat.”

“I'm telling you; you listen.”

“Okay.”

“At the time somebody attacked this woman you were the only one in the house, so naturally we have to figure that you were the one who attacked her. Now, are you the one who attacked her or not?”

“Yes, someone's got to get blamed for it.”

“No, I didn't figure that. That is why we're talking to you. We don't want to put anything on you—all I want is the truth.”

“There's got to be some kind of way you all could see whether I'm lying or not.”

“That's what we're trying to figure out,” said Cahalane. “If something happened accidentally, all you have got to do is say so. If she were standing on a table or chair and fell off and you grabbed her all you got to do—”

“Do you mind if I say something?”

“I don't mind.”

One can imagine Smith drawing himself up for this. The police
have asked Smith to step into their shoes for a moment; now Smith was doing the same. “My home is in Mississippi,” Smith said. “There's no way I'd take no white woman because I love my neck, you understand?”

“But this is the North, not the South,” Cahalane answered.

“I know that too.”

“You have a lot more freedom up here.”

“I'm telling you one thing: I ain't going to take no one's woman, Jesus Christ, especially a white woman, you kidding? I've got more sense than that, Jesus Christ.”

“But still, the woman was lying on the floor, wasn't she?”

“No sir—”

“What?”

“That woman wasn't touched when I left there, no sirree. If I touched that woman do you think I'd be still messing around here? Are you kidding? I ain't touched no woman. Maybe somebody come by after I left.”

“You have something more to tell us, you're holding something back.”

“All right, then, you say I got something to tell you. Then all right. I ain't got nothing.”

“Roy, let's have it.”

“All right,” Smith says. “Go ahead, have it.”

For a black man in a police station in 1963 to speak sarcastically to his interrogators regarding the rape and murder of a white woman must have been rare indeed, even in Massachusetts. Back home in Mississippi it could have gotten him killed. “You've been lying all afternoon here, for the last half hour,” said Maguire. “Now you're smart enough to know that science is going to trip you up.”

“Not going to trip me up.”

“So why don't you start now and give us the right story and get it off your mind? It's bothering you.”

“Nothing bothering me myself because—I ain't did nothing and I'm not afraid of nothing myself. Y'all do just whatever you want but I'm telling you I ain't did nothing.”

At this point Smith asked Chief Robinson for a cigarette, who gave him one. Maguire took the opportunity to interject, “Get it off your chest, Roy, let's have it.”

“I'm not no Strangler here, are you kidding?” Smith said. “Shit.”

There must have been silence in the room. There must have been glances between the police officers. “Who said anything about being the Strangler?” Maguire finally said.

“That's what ya'll are trying to put on me. I seen that guy from the paper up there, people taking all the pictures and stuff out there, putting me on TV—you go ahead on and try to prove that stuff, go ahead on—”

“We will prove it.”

“Go ahead, do anything you want,” Smith said. “You know better than that. Me, I don't go around and kill somebody.”

The interrogation of Roy Smith went on into the early hours of March 13. After twelve hours of questioning, Smith still refused to admit his guilt, and the police had no choice but to let the district attorney take over. In the meantime, an ambitious young Boston lawyer named Beryl Cohen agreed to take Smith's case pro bono. Cohen had been alerted to Smith's plight by a reporter friend of his named Gene Pell, who had staked out the Belmont police station for what was supposed to be a Boston Strangler story. As the hours dragged by, though, Pell had started to worry that Smith's legal rights were not being protected, and so he called Cohen, who in
turn tracked down Dorothy Hunt. It was Hunt who gave Cohen the go-ahead to represent Smith.

On March 21 a Middlesex County grand jury found that Roy Smith “did assault and beat Bessie Goldberg with intent to kill and murder her, and by such assault and beating did kill and murder said Bessie Goldberg.” He was not charged with any of the other Boston stranglings because he had been in prison for most of the previous year and could not have committed them. When asked by the judge how he pleaded, Smith answered in a strong, clear voice, “I plead mute.” (Pleading mute was a way for Smith to avoid admitting guilt while still keeping his options open.) Smith was remanded to Bridgewater State Prison for psychiatric observation, and a trial date was set for the following November.

L.C.
MANNING SITS
in a trash-filled pickup truck in his driveway in Oxford, Mississippi, sweating in the heavy April heat. In the late fifties he was arrested by Sheriff Boyce Bratton for public drinking and wound up in the Oxford City jail, where he got into a fight with another inmate. Not only did the other inmate lose the fight, but he was also white, for which Manning spent a year's forced labor at Parchman Farm. He was there about a decade after Roy, though things hadn't changed much. Manning has big wide hands that sit obediently on his lap when he talks, and powerful shoulders that must have served him well when he was young. They must have served him well in prison. Manning is old enough to remember when Roy got arrested for stealing cotton. Manning is old enough to remember Oxford's last lynching. Manning is old enough to remember getting flogged by a white man. Parchman was bad, he says but so was everything else. It didn't begin and end at the prison gate.

“Oh, man, you don't know shit,” he says, shaking his head.
Manning lives in a patched-together house on the outskirts of Oxford. There is a toolshed in Manning's backyard made entirely of discarded wooden doors. “It were hell down there, that's why I don't take no shit now. If I go again I want to go for something I actually
did
. But with the help of Jesus and God I seen 'em
all
go down below. I ain't jokin'—Bratton, Old Judge McElroy, all of 'em, and thank Jesus I still here. Three people you put your trust in: Jesus, the Lord, and yourself. Trust no man.”

Parchman occupies forty-six square miles of snake-infested bayous and flatlands in the Yazoo Delta, which stretches along the Mississippi River from Vicksburg to Memphis and east to the Chickasaw Ridge. Parts of the farm were blessed with rich alluvial soil known as “buckshot” that ran up to fifty feet deep, and other parts were so swampy and tangled that they had turned back Union troops toward the end of the Civil War. The prison had no fence around it because it was too big and no central cell blocks because the inmates were distributed around the plantation in work camps. Every morning at four thirty, the inmates were woken up by a bell and marched out to the fields, where they worked from sunup until sundown. The plowing was done by mule, and the picking was done by hand. At dark the men marched back to the work camp and ate a dinner prepared by other inmates. Every work camp had a vegetable garden and livestock pen, and the inmates subsisted almost entirely off what they could grow and raise. After dinner the lights were turned out and the men went to sleep, and at four thirty the next morning it started all over again. There were men who passed their entire lives that way.

Flogging was the primary method of enforcing discipline at Parchman and was not officially banned until 1971. A leather strap known as Black Annie was used liberally on anyone who would not
work, anyone who disobeyed a direct order, anyone who displayed anything approaching impudence. An escape attempt merited something called a “whipping without limits,” which—since there was virtually no medical care at Parchman in the early days—was effectively a death sentence. Inmates also died in knife fights, died in their bunk beds of malaria and pneumonia and tuberculosis, and sometimes just dropped dead of heatstroke in the fields. It was the closest thing to slavery that the South had seen since the Civil War.

The result of this relentless brutality was that Parchman was almost completely self-sufficient—and extremely profitable. In addition to growing food to eat and cotton to sell, the inmates also maintained a brickworks, a sawmill, a cotton gin, a sewing shop, a slaughterhouse, a shoe shop, a machine shop, and a thirty-man carpentry crew on the farm. During Roy's time Parchman was turning a profit of around a million dollars a year, mostly from cotton sales. In the interest of high production, conjugal visits were allowed for the black inmates, and every Sunday wives and prostitutes were brought out to the work camps. As one camp sergeant explained to an investigator in 1963, “If you let a nigger have some on Sunday, he will really go out and do some work for you on Monday.” The wives arrived by train on weekends, and the prostitutes lived in one of the administrative buildings. The inmates met their women in a rough shack they called the “Red House” or the “Tonk,” and were limited to forty-five minutes at a time. If they went over forty-five minutes they lost their conjugal privileges for two weeks.

Regular inmates like Roy were called “gunmen” because they worked under the eye of mounted guards who carried .30-30 Winchester rifles across their knees. The guards were called “trusty-shooters” and were chosen from the prison population; they were usually the most violent inmates who had life sentences
and nothing to lose. They wore wide-striped uniforms with the stripes running vertically, and the rest of the inmates wore uniforms with the stripes running horizontally. They were called “up-and-downs” and “ring-rounds,” respectively. In the odd logic of the prison world, the same act that put a shooter in prison in the first place—murder—could also win his release. When the gunmen walked out into the fields to begin work, the shooters drew a “gun line” in the dirt and sat up on their horses and waited. If a man set foot over the gun line, the shooter shouted a warning and then shot to kill. The same was true if the convict got closer than twenty feet to a shooter or failed to wait for permission to cross the gun line in order to relieve himself. A shooter who killed an escaping convict was often rewarded with a pardon from the governor and released from prison. In a state that had no parole laws until 1944, it wasn't a bad deal.

The violence in Parchman was so extreme—and the inmate population so disproportionately black—that it is hard not to see the entire Mississippi penal system simply as revenge against blacks for the South's defeat in the Civil War. Three years before Roy was locked up, two fourteen-year-old black boys were executed by the state of Mississippi for murdering a white man; the boys had been indicted, tried, and convicted all in less than twenty-four hours. And as Roy was chopping cotton in Parchman's dusty fields, another terrible scandal was unfolding. In 1945 a black man named Willie McGee had been arrested for raping a white woman named Willametta Hawkins in the small town of Laurel. McGee, an extremely handsome man who had a wife and four young children, was arrested for the crime and held incommunicado for a month before being tried and sentenced to death. The jury had deliberated two and a half minutes to decide his fate.

In the end McGee would almost have been better off if he actually
had
raped Willametta Hawkins. For the tormented white psyche of that era, the only thing worse than a black man forcing himself on a white woman was a black man
not
forcing himself on a white woman, and that was apparently what had happened. McGee's good looks had caught the attention of Willametta Hawkins several years earlier, despite the fact that she was married and had a newborn child. She offered him a job that he quickly accepted, and once he was working for her, Willametta maneuvered him into having an affair by threatening to claim rape if he ever turned her down. After three years of furtive sex McGee finally managed to end the affair, and, true to her word, Willametta told her husband and then went to the police. It didn't take them long to track down Willie McGee.

Roy was out of prison eight months when the state of Mississippi executed McGee. The U.S. Supreme Court had stayed McGee's execution three times to no avail. After the streetlights dimmed in Laurel, Mississippi, every black man in the state must have seen every white woman he knew as a potential threat to his freedom, if not his life, and decided that the safest strategy was to avoid them at all costs. When Roy Smith said to Lieutenant Cahalane in the basement of the Belmont police station, “My home is in Mississippi—there's no way I'd take no white woman,” he was very possibly thinking of Willie McGee. That same year a black sharecropper in North Carolina was charged with attempted rape for merely
looking
at a white woman. He was acquitted by a hung jury, but the message to black men in America was clear: If you even
think
about it, you're dead.

Technically McGee's death was not a lynching, it was an execution. In the decades following the Civil War, more than four thou
sand black men were lynched in the former Confederate states, but by Roy Smith's time, public lynchings had mostly given way to quasi-legal death sentences. (One notable exception happened in Oxford in 1935, when a mob broke into the city jail and lynched a black man named Elwood Higginbotham. He was killed while a jury was still debating his case in the courthouse across the street.) Between 1930 and 1964, 455 men were executed for rape in the United States. Most of them were black, and most of them were accused of raping white women. A black man accused of rape was a stand-in for his entire race, and he was lynched—or executed by the state—because a gradual mingling of the races had started to occur that racist whites were powerless to stop. Ultimately the purpose of lynching was not to dispense justice but to control the black population. Since lynching was primarily an instrument of terror, it mattered little whether the accused were guilty or not—in some ways killing an innocent man made even more of an impression than killing a guilty one—and the more gruesome the killing, the more terror it spread. As white power in the South gradually waned after the Civil War, lynchings inevitably attained a savagery that may have shocked even some of the perpetrators.

In an 1899 case that became infamous throughout the South, a young black man named Sam Hose was burned alive in front of several thousand people, many of them Christians who had left their church services early to enjoy the spectacle. The ringleaders chained Hose to a tree, cut off his ears, poured kerosene on him, and then lit a match. When he finally stopped writhing, the crowd rushed forward and cut pieces from his smoldering body. When that was gone, they chopped up the tree he was chained to, and when that was gone, they attacked the chain itself. Later that day, spectators were spotted walking through town waving pieces of bone and charred flesh. Hose's knuckles turned up at a local grocery store.

Hose's murder and many others like it warped the minds of an entire generation of blacks. So many blacks fled the South because of the threat of mob justice that farm owners began to have trouble finding workers for their fields. The South's relationship with public torture culminated in 1937, when two black men were accused of murdering a white store owner in the town of Duck Hill, Mississippi. Duck Hill is about seventy-five miles from Oxford. The men were abducted by a mob on the courthouse steps and taken to some woods outside town where a crowd of several hundred men, women, and children had gathered. The accused would not confess to the crime—there was absolutely no evidence they'd had anything to do with it—so they were whipped with chains and then tortured with a blowtorch. Unable to withstand the pain, one of the men finally admitted to the killing and was quickly rewarded by being shot to death. His companion held out until his eyes were gouged out with a pickax and then he, too, confessed. He was finally doused with gasoline and burned alive.

Roy Smith was nine years old when Duck Hill happened. It was one of the last public lynchings in America, but it clearly demonstrated that the white race was still a kind of third rail, and that if you were black and happened to touch it when it was on, you were dead. The deadly voltage of race continued to kill—more covertly—throughout the thirties and forties, but things were slowly changing. In 1951 the Civil Rights Congress, headed by a black man named William Patterson, submitted to the United Nations a document titled
We Charge Genocide,
which described the treatment of blacks in America in terms drawn straight from the Nuremberg trials of World War II. The word “genocide” was newly minted then, and extremely potent. Patterson made an eloquent case that extra-judicial violence, police and prosecutorial misconduct, and eco
nomic injustice against blacks amounted to an attempt to “destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” The group they referred to was the fifteen million Americans with African blood in their veins, and the attempt to destroy that group violated the same international laws, Patterson claimed, that had been used to prosecute Nazi war criminals several years earlier.

Patterson accused the United States of violating the 1948 Genocide Convention, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the United Nations Charter, and the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution. He delivered his petition simultaneously to the Fifth Session of the UN General Assembly in Paris and to the office of the secretary general in New York. Any doubt of complicity by the federal government was erased in 1949, when Congress abandoned a bill that would have made lynching a federal crime. Heavily pressured by the United States, the UN never responded to Patterson's charges. Roy Smith undoubtedly did not know that such an eloquent document was arguing for his rights in far-off cities, but it probably wouldn't have mattered much to him anyway. Soon after getting out of Parchman, Roy Smith voted, as they say, with his feet. He joined the hundreds of thousands of young blacks who streamed out of the former Confederate states, heading north.