From Midnight to Guntown by Hailman John

Author:Hailman, John
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
Published: 2013-03-24T16:00:00+00:00

Lanny “Junior” Cummings, Mesomorph11

Strange things used to happen in Marshall County, especially when law enforcement was involved. With the election of Sheriff Kenny Dickerson, all that has changed. But its land is rich cotton country and has a majority of black citizens, as it has since before the Civil War. Its county seat, Holly Springs, has beautiful antebellum homes, spared, unlike Oxford, from being burned because Holly Springs was less hostile to Yankee troops during the War. Ulysses S. Grant had headquarters there during the Vicksburg campaign. Later, when L. Q. C. Lamar, the only Mississippi lawyer ever to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court, struck a U.S. Marshal and put his eye out in open court at Oxford in the course of a KKK trial during Reconstruction, the federal court itself was actually moved temporarily to Holly Springs, where the Ku Klux Klan had less sway.

Racial tensions and violence continued off and on well into the 1970s, when a black boycott of white businesses nearly closed Holly Springs. Slowly, things got better. Holly Springs became one of the first cities in the state to have a black mayor. Marshall County, notorious for corruption in law enforcement ever since the reign of sheriff and classic political boss J. M. “Flick” Ash, suddenly had two black sheriffs elected in a row. It sounds ironic to say now, but when we first heard a black inmate was complaining of abuse by a black deputy sheriff, and claimed white officers would support his claim, it was almost a relief, reflecting a surprising new harmony across racial lines.

The incident began harmlessly enough. Most inmates in the jail at Holly Springs were nonviolent, locked up for being drunk or awaiting trial. The hard-core, violent types were mostly sent straight to the state pen at Parchman. The jail was full of trusties, who were often let out to help work off short sentences on public improvement projects. There was also a tradition of inmates washing and polishing police and sheriff’s patrol cars. Supervision was lax and the weather was hot, so the inmates got in the habit of going across the town square and buying beer or whiskey to cool them off. The system went along fine until one day a huge black inmate, a former athlete who weighed a good 300 pounds, had a couple of drinks too many. He was said to be a hard worker and strong as an ox and was nicknamed “Leadbelly” for his resemblance to the famous inmate blues singer Huddie Ledbetter.

One afternoon, after a particularly vigorous day of car-washing, Lead-belly decided it was too hot in the un-air-conditioned jail and refused to go back in. “I’ll just sit here in the shade. I ain’t going nowhere.” He was well liked and none of the officers or jailers wanted to take him on because of his size and appearance. When chief deputy sheriff Lanny “Junior” Cummings came on duty, however, he asked, “What is he doing out there? He looks drunk.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.