Can't Stop the Wind

By Davis L. Temple

Two young white boys grow up together during the Civil Rights Era in Tupelo, Mississippi and strive to get an education and become successful as crosses and churches burn around them. Tupelo considers itself a progressive town, and therein lies the rub--good is not good enough and Tupelo becomes an attractive target for civil rights activists. Robbie Smith is an intellectual boy who mostly avoids trouble, but his best friend, Dennis Taylor seems to be drawn to the worst of it, and is not immune to the attention of the Ku Klux Klan.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Feb 10, 2014
• ISBN: 9781483519265

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Chapter One

After the Smoke Cleared

Ole Miss Campus, October 1, 1962

Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime

Ernest Hemingway

It was early morning, and a pale pink glow over the eastern horizon suggested that a new dawn would come after all. There was an odd stillness about the Ole Miss campus, and the only figures moving were the tired troops that surrounded Baxter Hall, James Meredith’s nearby dormitory. The soldiers eyed me closely but left me alone with my thoughts.

From my vantage point on the hill overlooking the university, I could see and smell the reminders of the violence that had driven the final nail into the coffin of the old Confederacy. A noxious haze of smoke and tear gas still hung over the main campus where the Battle of Ole Miss had raged a just few short hours ago. Several fires still burned in the distance, but no one moved to put them out. In fact, no one moved at all. An historic university that had been a vibrant, many-celled organism a few days ago was now a smoldering corpse—a victim of dueling politicians—of promises made and promises broken.

In retrospect, it was easy enough to understand why Ole Miss had been such a prime target for those who yearned for progressive change. It was a rich, Southern party school with a great sense of pride in its history. It had been the home of the University Greys—A Company of the 11th Mississippi Infantry Regiment of the Confederate Army that were either wounded or killed in heroic action at Gettysburg while leading Pickett’s charge. Ole Miss was home to a student body that still waved the Confederate battle flag at football games, home to National Championship football teams, Miss Americas, Colonel Rebel, but not home to a single black student, until now.

But what sort of home would Ole Miss now be for James Meredith, or for me, for that matter, I wondered? That’s when I first realized that all the little bits and pieces of the Civil Rights Movement I had experienced growing up in Tupelo, Mississippi, were but dots on a greater map that led right here to this infamous day in Oxford, Mississippi. I signed on for waving Confederate flags when I should have known better. I should have seen it coming. At one time, I had been accepted by Georgia Tech, but my roots grew deep here in this sacred ground, where dead slaves moldered and the University Greys waited to rise from their graves and fight again.

William Faulkner once said, The past is never dead, it’s not even past. Well, Mr. Faulkner, never is a mighty big word .... It was not until I caught sight of one of the soldiers coming my way with a bayonet fixed on his loaded M-1 rifle that I realized I only knew two things for certain at that moment—one, that I had to get off that campus before I got killed, and two, that I had to tell my story in my own way. My name is Dennis Leroy Taylor, Jr.

Chapter Two

Awakenings

Tupelo, Mississippi, April, 1955

You have to do your own growing no matter how tall your grandfather was.

Abraham Lincoln

Dennis Taylor sat on the edge of his lumpy bed gazing out the window of his gloomy bedroom. The fine light of the April afternoon was partially obliterated by an enormous, pulsating, black cloud gathering over the school building across the street. The twittering chimney swifts slowly formed a vortex and began to funnel into the public school’s massive chimney. He wasn’t superstitious, but the image was so powerful he thought it might be a sign of something to come. But he didn’t know what that might be. Amazed by the size of the flock, he tried to count them, or at best estimate their numbers, but it was soporific, like counting sheep, and he soon dozed off.

Presently, Dennis, age 12, was awakened by laughter, and he looked out the window again. The cloud of birds was gone, presumably resting inside the chimney, but he could see what he so fervently yearned to be a part of—happy boys and girls romping on the playground across the street at Milam Junior High School. Even at that distance he could recognize several girls from his sixth grade class—girls he was much taken by, but who didn’t know a guy named Dennis Taylor existed.

Dennis took a deep breath and said out loud, "Staying alive, that’s what it’s all about, damnit, staying alive." Dennis had been a sickly kid as far back as he could remember. Some years he had missed more days of school than he had attended. He had stumped his kindly pediatrician, but his loving mother had seen him through every disease known to man and some not. To Dennis she was a Mother Teresa, complete with miracle remedies.

Even though he was slowly running out of childhood maladies to suffer, his family should have seen the summer of 1952 coming—should have hidden him away on the family farm with the pigs and chickens and cows when it all started. That was the summer the polio epidemic (often called infantile paralysis then) afflicted tens of thousands and killed thousands of otherwise healthy people. Dennis was bound to contract the disease, given his track record.

The boy rubbed his neck, remembering how the awful experience had begun. It had started with a painful crick in his neck that he first felt at a Roy Rogers movie—they called them picture shows in those days. It was Son of Paleface showing at the Lyric Theatre in downtown Tupelo. He had been there with his friend, Wilton Reed, putting him at risk. Dennis could remember the exact moment when he had felt the first throbbing pain in his neck. In those days the colored folks sat in the upstairs balcony level after paying at a separate entrance. For some reason the balcony was packed with them that Saturday afternoon, and they were loud and rowdy. Several irritated white people had yelled up at them to be quiet, and that’s when the colored kids started throwing popcorn and ice on the kids down below.

Zing—Dennis felt something whizz by his face and then felt the cup of ice and Coke splatter across his leg. He jerked around rather suddenly and looked up to see who had thrown the drink, and that’s when the pain hit him. It was more like a thousand needles than a rock. The usher cleared the balcony and the two boys enjoyed the rest of the movie, but it was a very long time before Dennis was free of pain again.

Dennis thought it was just a simple injury caused by the unthinking colored kids, but when his neck didn’t improve, his mother took him to the family doctor, who made the diagnosis of poliomyelitis on the spot and rushed him to the hospital. Wilton’s mother had panicked when Dennis’ fate was evident. It was, after all, highly contagious and often crippling or deadly.

Polio had cost him a summer out of his young life, but it had not killed him. He did not live in an iron lung, and he was not paralyzed. Dennis was very weak, close at one point, but not paralyzed. Dennis smiled; he could hear his mother talking to their colored maid, Cora Belle, who was ironing shirts in the next room. His two-year-old sister, Annie, babbled and sang her favorite song. Annie was a sweet girl who would never suffer the terrible twos.

It had been his mother, after all, who had saved him from polio as she had saved him from lesser diseases. Cora Belle had been a remarkable help too—she was treated as part of the family and definitely did not use the back door like some help in the South was expected to do. She brought her brand of hard work right through the front door and didn’t apologize to anyone about anything.

None of those doctors who had poked and prodded Dennis in Tupelo and Memphis hospitals understood the disease or had any idea how to help him, but his remarkable mother did. Edwina had read someplace that heat was the only thing that would kill the damnable polio virus, and assuming his skin would grow back, she had boiled the crying boy in scalding bath water, again, and again until he seemed to be well,.

God, that was a couple of years ago, and he still dreamed about that scalding water; but his dreams had become frightening nightmares in which his mother held him under, trying to drown-scald her polio-deformed son to death while he flailed his twisted, little arms and legs to no avail.

Yes, it was about staying alive and he had survived polio and endless other afflictions. The current flu bug was nothing and would be gone soon, and he would be back out there, maybe for good this time. Dennis wondered what life could offer up that was meaner to a little kid or harder to survive than polio.

Dennis shuttered. Figuring too much thinking was bad for you, he looked away from the window and snuggled down into his feather pillow for a nap, but he was awakened by a new commotion outside. It was a city garbage truck making its appointed rounds of their neighborhood. The old truck was driven by a colored man, and three workers clung to the outside of the rusty vehicle. Periodically, they jumped off and dumped brimming garbage cans of refuse into the back of the stinking contrivance. The garbage men wore overalls with no shirt beneath and were as filthy as the truck and its contents. Dennis could hear them laughing and calling to one another, as if the awful work was fun.

Dennis soon gagged at the stench and closed the window, but not before he noted the striking contrast between the well-to-do, white kids on the school ground across the way and the colored garbage men in the foreground. What must they think of us, he wondered? And how are they able to laugh so easily?

Dennis was intrigued by what he saw and considered how the South got to this point and how much longer it would last. Didn’t the South lose the Civil War? Then he remembered that he lived in Mississippi, and in those days, that’s all you needed to know, wasn’t it? Even though Dennis was a sickly boy, he had unusual powers of observation and analytical abilities, but he knew he was allowed to take thinking just so far in Tupelo, Mississippi in 1955. Visions of white hoods and burning crosses came to mind. They were never far away in Mississippi.

Everyone in Tupelo knew the Grand Wizard of the Knights of the Great Forrest (named after General Nathan Bedford Forrest, a revered Confederate cavalry leader) who ran the local gun shop. Dalton Slater made no bones about it. Dalton sold guns and Dalton sold hate, and the former was useful to accomplish the latter. Some white people in Tupelo saw Dalton and the Ku Klux Klan as a necessary countermeasure to protect what remained of Southern culture. There were some who disagreed, but Dennis wasn’t sure what he thought.

Dalton was born in 1912 the third child of seven born to Alta May and Horace Slater, a ne’er-do-well sharecropper, sometimes preacher, and generally drunk father. The Slaters resided on a 50-acre plot of red clay land in rural Itawamba County not far from Fulton, Mississippi. Unlike most country rednecks, Horace was smart but uneducated and unfocused, which allowed him to fail at many things. Alta May was as dumb as a post, and Dalton’s six siblings had received an overdose of her broken genes. Horace had met Alta May while selling Bibles and whiskey in the mountains and hollows of Tennessee. Her slack-jawed father hadn’t even known when she left.

When Dalton was seven-years-old, his father was killed with a sling blade wielded by an irate black farm hand who caught Horace abusing his twelve-year-old daughter. Alta May committed suicide after her Primitive Baptist preacher forced himself on her while providing comfort. After that, the Slater brood was dispersed to the wind, and Dalton wound up with an uncle in Marion County, Alabama.

Dennis put thoughts about the Klan aside and continued to think about the big town’s colored people. Even though you didn’t see all that many of them—just the maids and garbage men and workmen that had reason to venture into white territory during daylight hours—there were a lot of coloreds that lived in Tupelo, Mississippi. They lived in the same place that colored folks did in all Mississippi towns—Nigger Town. Only in Tupelo, it was really two places with their own special names, Shake Rag and Park Hill.

Shake Rag was an area of dilapidated shacks known for bootlegging and all sorts of crime, whereas Park Hill occupied a rolling hillside that had once overlooked a large, swampy lake known as Gum Pond, named for the tupelo gum trees that once thrived there. The lake had provided a nice view and plenty of catfish for the locals, but that ended with the tornado of 1936, which destroyed Tupelo, killing over 250 white people and many more, uncounted colored folks whose homes were swept into Gum Pond. But Tupelo had survived as a town and had been rebuilt to become one of the more vibrant and progressive small cities in segregated Mississippi. Gum Pond was never restored, but the shacks had reappeared on that ill-fated hillside over the years. Where else were the colored people to go?

Dennis’ mother knocked politely before entering his bedroom. She gently placed her hand on his forehead and said, Good, that fever is just about gone. You feeling better, Son?

Yes, Ma’am, I’m just about well. I want to get out of this bed and stay out of it more than anything.

The astute woman noted her son’s fixation with the garbage collection going on outside. What do you find so interesting out there?

He laughed and focused his attention back on his mother. Mother, did you ever wonder what you’d find in colored people’s garbage?

No, but I suspect that everyone’s garbage is pretty much the same. Why? she asked.

Oh, I was just watching those men collect our garbage and I wondered what it would be like for a white person to collect garbage in a colored neighborhood.

Brother! Dennis, if you don’t get well and stay well and study harder, you just very well may find out the answer to that question.

And Dennis did get better and did not miss any more of his sixth grade classes, but he remained sensitive to issues regarding Tupelo’s colored people—up to a point. He knew very well that most Mississippians were still fighting the Civil War—most just called it The War—and manifestations of that upside down view of history played out in hateful feelings that went well beyond the colored people. Dennis’ social studies teacher was fixated on the War-ah Between the States and dwelled endlessly on how the evil Yankees needlessly burned the homes, crops, and livestock of unfortunate Southerners in their path. She hated Sherman most of all, claiming he hadn’t even spared the slaves, claiming they were too burdensome to take care of.

These lessons ignored the fact that new industry was being recruited from up north and families were moving to Tupelo with these new plants. In fact, several of those evil Yankee children sat in that classroom and listened to her drivel every day. They seemed to tolerate it remarkably well. They, unlike the Mississippi kids were too far removed from such events to even care. It might as well have been fiction.

It is no wonder that many people in Tupelo still felt close to the war in 1955. Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox Courthouse on April 9, 1865, and a mere ninety years is recent history by Southern standards. There were few homes in Lee County, home of Tupelo, Mississippi (named for Robert E. Lee after the Civil War) that didn’t have old trunks tucked away in attics, barns, and smokehouses containing Civil War memorabilia. Dennis and his cousin Amy had spent endless summer hours sorting through an old trunk in their grandfather’s rickety smokehouse on their family farm in Plantersville, Mississippi. There they had marveled at rusty revolvers, medals, faded photographs of long dead Confederate soldiers, and one Confederate hat with a bullet hole shot through it. The soldier’s fate was unknown, but was the subject of endless family speculation.

Most Mississippians in the 1950s were of English derivation and many families had been in the country since the beginning of European colonization. Before Europeans arrived at what is now Tupelo and Lee County, native Indians had occupied the area for thousands of years, followed by the modern Chickasaws and Choctaws. Many Indian burial mounds can still be found throughout the area, and they are replete with ancient Indian artifacts.

The first settlers named the town Gum Pond after the many black gum trees that grew in the area. The tree is also known as black tupelo or just tupelo, and the name of the growing town was changed to Tupelo which sounded more like a place than a tree.

Both Dennis and his best friend, Robbie, had female relative members of the Daughters of the American Revolution. Robbie was a descendent of Daniel Boone and Jefferson Davis, the President of the Confederacy. The old saying that blood runs thicker than water was an understatement in Mississippi.

Tupelo and what later became Lee County was not spared by the Civil War, and two important battles were fought there. The Battle of Brice's Crossroads was fought on June 10, 1864 near the small town of Baldwin. A 4,787-man contingent led by Confederate Major General Nathan Bedford Forrest opposed a 8,100-strong Union force led by Brigadier General Samuel D. Sturgis. The battle ended in a complete rout of the Union forces and established Forrest's reputation as a great cavalryman.

Though the battle was a smashing victory by the Confederate forces over a larger army, it did little other than to temporarily keep the Union troops out of Mississippi and Alabama. The battle is commemorated at Brice’s Crossroads National Battlefield Site, established in 1929.

However much Mississippians savored Forrest’s victory, it was to be short lived because after Sturgis’ defeat, Sherman’s supply lines to Georgia were at serious risk. Andrew Smith was sent to chasten the unrepentant Rebels and on July 14, 1864, attacked the forces of Stephen D. Lee, including Forrest and his 6000 troops at Tupelo. The battles were give and take, and there was no definitive victory, but Sherman’s supply lines were considered secured. Forrest was shot in the foot, but his forces remained intact. A striking monument today marks the spot of the battle at Tupelo Commemorative Battle Field.

Other more horrendous Civil War battles took place not far from Tupelo. The Battle of Shiloh was fought in Hardin County, Tennessee near the Tennessee River between the Union Troops of Ulysses S. Grant and Don Carlos Buell and the Confederate forces of Albert Sidney Johnson and P.G.T. Beauregard. Of 66, 812 Union Troops, 13,047 were casualties, and out of 44,699 Confederate Troops, 10,699 were casualties. At the end of the battle it was a bloody Union victory.

In 1955 there were still Mississippians alive who swore they could smell musket smoke and hear cannon fire in the distance early on still mornings. They firmly believed that the ghosts of our boys were still out there fighting. Some even believed that the kettles of turkey buzzards that circled in the sky on hot afternoons had eaten dead Confederate soldiers—everyone knew buzzards lived forever.

Late August, 1955 found Dennis enjoying his newly-found freedom from infections. On that gorgeous day Dennis had felt thankfulness in his heart as he raced his bicycle to Robbie’s house, waving at friends along the way and avoiding barking dogs. Even the late summer heat felt good.

He grinned at his buddy, Robbie Smith, engrossed in the local newspaper—The Tupelo Daily Journal—an unusually progressive and business-like paper for a Mississippi town in 1955. The liberal (he had even been called a Communist by his enemies) editor/owner of the paper, George O’Leary, and an influential group of downtown business men had worked tirelessly to make Tupelo a thriving business center. O’Leary had also fought for better schools and better living conditions for colored folks. He was neither a rabid integrationist like William Hodding Carter, Editor of the Delta Democrat Times, nor like most editors of Mississippi’s newspapers, which were steeped in segregationist tradition. Tupelo was a calm place where people got along and the radical groups like the White Citizens Council (90,000 Mississippi members in 1954), Ku Klux Klan, and NAACP were less active there than in other parts of the state. But the Klan was there and eagerly awaiting an opportunity.

Dennis remained silent and allowed Robbie to continue his reading and thought about the status of his own life. He was happy, and he had enjoyed his first healthy summer, and only his poor grades from the previous school year haunted him. He was determined to stay well and do better next session. Dennis enjoyed spending time with his best friend, Robbie Smith, who had never been sick a day in his life, never made a bad grade, and was a sponge for information—any kind of information.

Dennis’ patience finally ran thin, and he whacked the newspaper with the back of his hand and exclaimed, What’s so interesting, Jerk-O?

"I could explain it to you, but it would be way over your redneck head, Jerk-O."

Dennis laughed at his friend’s clever retort; whatever Robbie said was always funny to Dennis. Try me.

OK, since you can’t read, it says that a fourteen-year-old black kid named Emmett Till—he was visiting from Chicago—whistled at a white woman and was kidnapped by her husband, Roy Bryant, and an accomplice, J.W. Milam. Says they beat him, gouged out his eyes, and shot him through the head. Then for good measure, they tied a heavy cotton gin fan around his neck with barbed wire and threw him in the Tallahatchie River. That was on August 28 in Money, Mississippi. The article goes on to say that this follows on the back of the shooting of a black NAACP member named George Lee for trying to vote in Belzoni. Umm—that was back in May.

So, there are plenty more of ‘um left; aren’t there?

Robbie gave Dennis a look of mock horror. That’s not the point, you insensitive, little shit.

Well, what is then?

Robbie sighed, "Like most of you brain-dead, Mississippi rednecks, you don’t see what all this racial violence is leading up to. Since you never bothered to study your history, let me remind you of a few facts. Over ten years ago, President Roosevelt basically said that the Southern Jim Crow segregation laws were wrong and it was illegal to discriminate against colored people in hiring and so on. After that, they felt liberated and empowered and have been climbing on white busses and trying to integrate lunch counters and schools and stuff. And, by the way, the federal government has all the tools they need to integrate the public schools right here in Tupelo. I’m certain you don’t remember that Brown v Board of Education business last year. The Supreme Court ruled that separate schools for the whites and blacks are inherently unequal."

So?

Ah, my slow-witted friend, can’t you see that Mississippi isn’t exempt from this? Right now, every black that demands his place is getting his nuts shot off by the Klan or worse. That just means that when President Eisenhower brings the federal government down on our heads, it’s gonna be hard, real hard.

Well, Eisenhower is a Republican and that just ain’t gonna happen any time soon.

We’ll see—probably gonna transfer your sorry ass to Carver High School when it does happen.

Dennis replied, trying to sound serious, Fine by me—At least I wouldn’t have to study all the time to compete with a bunch of jungle bunnies.

Robbie grinned his holier than thou grin—like he knew it all—like his shit didn’t stink. "One of these days the colored folks will miss the Carver High Schools of this country and the whites will wish they had something that good. Mark my word!"

Dennis gave him a clueless look and asked, What else is in that stupid paper?

"Well, there’s an editorial in here about this highfalutin black preacher in Montgomery, Alabama, who calls himself Doctor Martin Luther King. Looks like he is rapidly becoming the undisputed leader of the black movement. Says the FBI is already investigating his connections, whatever that means. Somebody will probably name a street after him someday."

Right; and I’m the leader of a black movement in the john every morning. They gonna name a street after me?

Robbie laughed at the foolish analogy. Not likely.

Listen, Robbie, I’ve got to get home, and it’s a long bike ride, so....

Come on, Dennis, you can stay a little longer, this conversation is just getting interesting; you just want to go home and jerk off while you look at ladies’ underwear pictures in that Sears and Roebuck Catalog you keep hidden under the bed.

"And aren’t you the one to talk? Goodie Two Shoes Robbie who swipes Sexology Magazines at Chester’s Grocery and then gets all the pages stuck together so I can’t read them. By the way, wanna go to the movie on Saturday? Blackboard Jungle is playing at the Lyric Theatre. Glenn Ford is a teacher in an inner-city school and tries to deal with students who are a bunch of thugs with switchblades."

"Yes, I think I can, and that’s the movie that features the song Rock Around the Clock, sung by Bill Haley and his Comets. Got kids jumping from their seats to dance to that song. I won’t catch polio from you; will I?"

Screw you, Robbie.

Chapter Three

A Shocking Conversion

September 1955

And just as it is appointed for man to die once, and after that comes judgment.

Hebrews 9:27

Despite a lack of stellar academic performance and the social concerns of the time, Dennis had a passionate interest in electronics. He also built and flew gasoline powered model airplanes with his two older cousins and friends, but his true love was the vacuum tube. To Dennis, a vacuum tube was a lot more than a sealed tube used to regulate the flow of electricity—it was something to see and behold. He even loved the way an old radio smelled when it heated up.

In 1955, radios and televisions were complex assemblies of vacuum tubes, resistors, transformers, speakers, and capacitors—components that could be salvaged from discarded radios and televisions dumped into the trash behind repair shops. Dennis frequently visited these places and collected every piece of discarded electronic junk he could lay his hands on. Once home and in his small shop in the back of the house, the discarded radios were soon reduced to categorized piles of parts, ready to be reassembled to create Dennis’ own inventions. As time passed, he created several amazing devices that might have actually been of value, but eventually his passion became kits from which he built shortwave radios, transmitters, and hi-fi amplifiers.

Dennis’ neighbor, Harry Mims, shared in the hobby and their interest became wireless communication. The boys delighted in being able to talk to one another from three houses away with their simple transmitters. The addition of a 100-foot long-wire antenna and a deep ground wire provided an incredibly illegal signal that could be heard on car radios all over Tupelo. That’s when Dennis was overcome with the need to become a HAM or amateur radio operator and talk to the world. He knew everything you needed to know to pass the test, and he knew the requisite Morse code, but he couldn’t distinguish a dot from a dash when he heard it over his Hallicrafters SX-99 receiver. It wasn’t surprising because Dennis was also tone deaf and couldn’t distinguish one musical note from the next.

Not to be denied his passion, Dennis rigged a microphone and his hi-fi amplifier to his powerful transmitter and became a HAM radio operator without a license but with the ability to talk to the world, at least part of it. Call letters—no problem—Dennis became W-5-BBB (bad-bad-boy).

One day he was waiting to show Robbie his newly-found prowess as a worldwide communicator when the front door bell rang. It was Ed Stellar, a local HAM operator (W5-EHX) and member of the Tupelo group of amateurs responsible for giving amateur radio qualification tests to applicants for the FCC. Dennis knew Stellar because the generous man had spent an afternoon demonstrating his powerful rig for the boy. Dennis knew he was in trouble when he noticed that Stellar was holding a portable short wave radio with a directional antenna in his hand. Dennis feared it was pointing his way.

I need to speak to you, Dennis.

Yessir, come on in.

Thanks. So, here’s the thing—Several of the local radio guys, including me, have picked up a pretty strong signal from an unlicensed operator right here in Tupelo, and I have just followed the signal to your house. Any chance you are W-5-BBB?

Dennis figured there was no reason to lie. Yes, I am.

And you have no amateur radio operator’s license?

I do not.

Why not?

Dennis explained that even though he had memorized the Morse code, he had a problem with deciphering the letters when he heard it keyed.

Stellar nodded and asked to see the boy’s equipment. When Dennis complied, Stellar whistled when he saw the amplifier and microphone plugged into the key jack. Looks like a pretty clever way to voice modulate a transmitter meant to send only keyed code.

Thank you, Sir.

But, listen to me, Dennis, there are heavy fines, possibly jail time, for operating that thing without a proper license. You learn the code, and we’ll give you a license; you use it without one and we’ll know it and turn you in. This time, you get off Scott free. Stellar smiled, and asked, By the way what does BBB stand for?

Bad, bad, boy.

Figures.

Dennis thanked the man and showed him the door. When he was gone he