Jackson

By Cindy Marabito

Jody Luther is a 15 year-old white girl battling insanity at home and hate-filled 1970 Jackson, Mississippi leading to the Jackson State Massacre. Jody has landed in Jackson with her alcoholic mother and younger sister, Willie. The book not only deals with racial issues, but police-forced integration leading up to the murder of two young black students.

Jackson is not simply a young adult work, but compelling reading for any adult with a social conscience. The core issue is racism and hate as Jody encounters an assortment of unforgettable Southern Gothic characters.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Publishdrive
• Release date: Jun 26, 2023
• ISBN: 9798837902598

Book preview

Jackson

By

Cindy Marabito

Second Edition

Copyright © 2022 Cindy Marabito

All rights reserved.

Sometimes my burden is more than I can bear

It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there...

Bob Dylan...Not Dark Yet

for Martha

who knows all the secrets

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

First, to my inspiration for so many years, Bob Dylan.

Quoted Not Dark Yet, written by Bob Dylan.

Copyright @ 1997 by Special Rider Music

Mad Girl’s Love Song, written by Sylvia Plath in 1951.

Faber and Faber Ltd., London And, last, but, perhaps most of all,

Thank you to the estate of

Marion Post Wolcott

for the generous use of the cover photograph.

Table of Contents

Prologue: Ghosts in the Boneyard

Grace

Christmas ’69

Sojourn

Jackson

Meet the Duprees

Daisy

Melvin

North State

Eudora

Africa

The High Chaparral

Davey Starr

Emmett Till

Midnight Cowboy

Bless This House

Choctaw Ridge

Greenwood

The Double Mountain

Mississippi Queen

Oh, Susie, it is Dangerous

Horses

10-7

A Two-Way Street

Seize the Time

Ball of Confusion

To Hold a Pen

Prologue: Ghosts in the Boneyard

Insanity in a novel is different than living with it every day. I know, because my mother was insane. I’d lived with it every day of my life. I spent a good deal of time looking out at the real world, a world I never really felt I was a part of. I was always out there looking in.

I knew if I allowed myself inside, to participate, it would break me. So, to protect myself and my own sanity, I watched. Maybe being a misfit and an outsider saved me. This story is about what happened in Jackson, Mississippi back in 1970. It was enough to drive even the strongest of people slap crazy. A lot of people have joked at me and said, you’re crazy, like they do. I always think, if they only knew.

I haven’t thought about Jackson for a long, long time. Looking back now feels like I’m walking through an old cemetery where they forgot to tend the graves. We used to call them boneyards back in East Texas where I come from. What happened back there in Jackson feels almost like I’m watching a movie that happened to somebody else.

I remember that first day of school there in Jackson. We’d just moved to town, my mother, Grace, my sister, Willie, and myself. We’d sneaked out of Beaumont on a Greyhound in the middle of the night without telling a soul. We’d left out of there so fast, I’d barely had time to say goodbye to my dog.

It wasn’t just an ordinary school day with students returning after Christmas break. Jackson was one of the last school districts to integrate in the United States. In fact, the police had been called out and they’d formed a blue line around the entry. They wore the look on their faces that the law was trained to wear. You couldn’t tell if they were there to protect the white students or the black ones.

Hump day—a funny day to start back to school. I’d looked up segregation in the dictionary. It referred to the isolation of a particular race into separate units. That’s what I’d read. It seemed unnatural to me. I was enrolled as a sophomore at Murrah High School in Jackson.

Murrah had the feel of a rich person’s school. I stood outside looking at the front of it for a while that morning. I watched all the students arriving by car. Nice cars. Murrah High School was named after a white man and was situated in Belhaven. I knew all about places like Belhaven. In Beaumont, where I’d come from, it was Thomas Road. Every town had a rich district.

The students looked like people in Seventeen Magazine, well put together and comfortable. A big yellow Bluebird school bus hissed to a stop and snapped open its bi-fold doors like an open trap. About ten young black students were seated inside, nervous fear on their faces. I knew how they felt. Water seeks its own level and I was scared, too. The driver turned back toward them and said something awful to them. Slowly, one by one, they began stepping off that bus like they were landing on Mars. The sight of all those police and squad cars sent a strong message.

One girl caught my eye. She was about my age, maybe a little older. I was struck by how carefully she had dressed that morning. Everything was perfect. I recognized in her the attention to detail girls labor over. She had her hair processed in the style of a soft turned-under bob with a pink bow. She wore a plaid jumper and a winter coat. Girls wore dresses then. She was scared and it showed on her face. But, I saw something else in her face. I saw hope there.

When I think back on that day so very long ago, it seems surreal, almost like I was another person. I think that must be the effect trauma has on the mind and the body. Things would happen in Jackson. Bad things. I call to mind an old black-and-white photograph I’d seen of a lynching. A dead man was hanging from a tree by a rope and a group of white people were standing around looking at him in the picture. They were all dressed up like they were going to a county fair. One young girl, about ten or twelve, stood right close to the swinging body, her hands clasped in front of her. She had short, cropped hair like they wore, like Jean Louise Finch in Harper Lee’s book, To Kill a Mockingbird. They used to cut my hair like that. The girl was smiling up at the figure.

One thing survived from back then almost fifty years ago. The paper it’s written on is so old and yellow, it looks like it wants to curl up and stay dead. I don’t know why I kept it all these years other than to try and not forget everything that happened. It’s my government report on Emmett Till written that year when I was fifteen years old. I wasn’t a child when we got to Jackson, but left there as an adult. My name is Jody Luther.

Grace

The year was 1969 and my fifteenth Christmas on this earth. What I remember most was the cold—how bitter ice cold it was that night. My daddy, Clyde, pushed down hard on the gas pedal. It wouldn’t give anymore, but he kept on pumping like it gave him something to do. I could feel the gasoline trying to work its way into the engine and smell it in the air. We weren’t getting there any quicker.

He looked over at us, me and my sister, Willie. We were headed to Rusk to visit our mother, Grace. Rusk is a tiny town where the state mental hospital is located. Grace had wound up at Rusk over a mattress-burning incident at the last private hospital where she’d been committed in Beaumont. That and the goings on with some male patients. Rusk was the last house on the block so far as mental institutions were concerned. It was the state sanatorium where they sent the criminally insane.

I was thinking that night about fissures as I watched out the car window. We’d been studying about fissures in school and how cracks in the earth’s surface caused earthquakes. I didn’t like East Texas. It had always felt country to me.

Willie was punching the buttons on the old car radio, but each station only played Christmas music. We were all tired of hearing the same songs over and over. There was something depressing about Christmas music. Clyde reached over and covered up Willie’s hand with his own rough one. He was a schoolteacher and made extra money building other people’s houses.

You don’t want to hear the song, Willie? It’s Christmas. You don’t like listening to Rudolph?

Willie rolled her eyes at him. Even though she was only ten years old, there was something adult about Willie. Always had been. I’m tired of Christmas. Why don’t they play rock and roll in the country?

Clyde kind of laughed. Well, I guess ‘cause it’s the country. He reached over toward the dial and I saw the tail of his arm tattoo. He’d gotten it way back when he was in the Navy right before I’d been born. Grace had flown back to Beaumont from San Francisco so that I’d be born a Texan. Clyde couldn’t get leave, so he had Jody imprinted on his arm with a dogwood flower. He had Grace tattooed on his other arm. Her side had a red rose with a long stem and thorns.

Radio static broke the sound of the running engine and I went back to considering the science of fissures. I didn’t even care much for geology, but for some reason, this night was conjuring up thoughts about these things in my head. A fissure is a narrow crack that causes separation and division.

I wondered if it was some sort of a sign. Sometimes when things kept appearing in my thoughts, something would happen. My brain was like that. I had learned to pay attention to my own mind almost like it was a separate entity. If I was real quiet and listened close, it would warn me sometimes. I would get a signal.

I felt sad. Christmas did that to me. Especially Christmas night once it started getting dark. That’s when Grace would usually drop me and Willie off at the movie theater and go out drinking. As far back as I could remember, she’d been doing that. The first time was The Manchurian Candidate. It was after Clyde had left us for Wanda. I was still pretty young and always on the lookout for a new daddy. Everybody else loved Frank Sinatra in the movie, but I liked Lawrence Harvey for the job. As messed up as he was in the film, he seemed ripe for the picking so far as I was concerned. I saw the movie a whole bunch of times as Grace used the movie theater as a babysitter. We’d watch the movies over and over again until they shut the place down for the night.

I looked over at Clyde and compared him to Lawrence Harvey. They were opposites. In real life, Lawrence Harvey was British while Clyde came from the backwoods. You enjoying your high school, Jody? he said, his eyes still on the road.

Oh, yeah. I guess. It felt weird to have your parent not know something simple like how you did in school. I think I registered with Lawrence Harvey’s character’s pain. I’d discovered early what some folks take their whole lives to find out, that pretty much everybody feels pain. You have to go through it, like jumping in a water hole for the first time and learning how to swim. I identified with Raymond Shaw. We even had the same name, Ray being my middle name. Everybody has three names in East Texas.

This trip to Rusk was taking forever. It had turned from light to dark without us noticing and now it was black outside. I’d driven this road a bunch with Clyde, both before he married Wanda and after. Wanda’s mother still lived in the same town where we’d all met each other. They would pick me and Willie up in Beaumont and we’d all drive to the grandma’s house. She lived way out in the country next to a deserted old auction barn deep in East Texas Piney Woods.

When we finally arrived at Rusk Hospital, I don’t think any of us was prepared for what met us there and it reflected on our faces. That old building looked like one of those big gothic mansions I was always reading about. I’d read Mistress of Mellyn at least ten times. I identified with all the young governesses in the stories I dogeared. Especially if they were crippled or ugly or had some other problem that caused people to mistreat them. I wanted to be a writer like Victoria Holt and maybe even live in one of those fancy manors with a rich man. I was already writing my own novel, Captured Bride.

Rusk looked like an Eastex version of one of those gothic estates, but more run down and haunted looking. The three of us looked at it with our mouths dropped open. Clyde drove up the long entry way so slow you could hear the shells popping under the truck tires. You usually didn’t see so many seashell driveways this far inland so they must have gotten a cheap load from the coast. Clyde parked and we sat there.

He finally broke the spell a bit. Well, I guess we best get on in there and see your mama. He didn’t seem very enthusiastic, though. Still, nobody moved.

Willie spoke. This place is scary looking.

The bars, I said. The windows throughout had iron bars across them and some of them were going sideways. The effect was fascinating and yet, horrible at the same time. Years of moisture and dirt had ganged up in the corners and looked like the canned snow people sprayed during the holidays.

The facade was a strange art deco. I knew it used to be a prison and wondered who came up with the design. In a weird way, it kind of reminded me of the Alamo, but more like an Alamo for crazy people. The front of the place was manned by an authoritative figure in starched white. Before we could get a chance to enter, she wielded open the big iron door. She kept one hand on it and the other fixed on her hip in a fist. Her name tag was attached to the immaculately stitched pin tuck pleating and read June Bode, RN

Clyde said, Merry Christmas, ma’am. He was a soft-spoken Texas country boy from Hillsborough. It made me want to laugh due to it being anything but a merry Christmas. He went on, We’re here to visit with Grace Luther. It sounded like a question.

She stood there, erect, while she sized us up and down. Finally, she told us to follow her over to a massive brick staircase that looked like it belonged outside more than inside. We fell in like soldiers behind her and began mounting the steps up to the next level. You could hear the jangle of her big ring of keys as they swung from the band around her waist.

I’d had a lifetime of first-hand experience with mental disorder. Grace had been in and out of institutions as far back as I could remember. The doctors always came up with different prognoses for her issues. Grace had tried many times to quit drinking and I’d tried to help her, but there just didn’t seem to be any cure. I could write a medical essay on the withdrawal symptoms alone. She would have horrible hallucinations, both visual and aural. She’d bat out at the air with her hands and scream like something was attacking her. But, there would be nothing there. Just Willie and me.

Each time I’d read Jane Eyre, I had seen Bertha as the hindrance to Jane’s happiness. I would always be glad when she burned up in the fire at the end. They made insanity more easy to understand in books than in real life. Deranged people were always the bad guys in the stories.

Grace wasn’t the only crazy person in my family. There was a lot of whispering about Grace’s grandfather who died in the state home for the severely insane. He’d earned three college degrees and had never worked an honest day in his life. I didn’t know much, because his daughter and my grandmother, Babe, refused to allow his name to be spoken out loud.

Grace’s mental illness was dark and animated. When she’d go off into one of her spells, you felt trapped in there with her in a real-life cage of terror. I loved her. She was my mother and what I knew. Crazy had become to seem normal to me. It took walking into a place like Rusk to realize how extreme our life really was.

When we reached the first landing we saw a few of the inmates seated in a community area. They didn’t look up or seem to notice us at all. The ladies were disheveled and wearing green hospital gowns that clashed with the government-issue wall paint, also green. Everything was painted in various shades of light greens, even the old radiators that failed to warm the whole place. All they did was clang and sweat big drops of water. It was enough to make you hate green.

Y’all set down over there while I retrieve Miz Luther. Nurse Bode pointed toward the women and waited until we began heading over to the seating area. The three of us squeezed beside a woman whose black hair went out every which way. The couch looked like it started out as a pink, but over time had turned something closer to brown. It was covered in a frieze cloth that was uncomfortable next to the skin. Old and beat up as it was, the material was still scratchy. The silence of the room was paralyzing. The only sound you could hear was the patients’ breath.

Willie leaned over me to Clyde. Thank you for bringing us, Daddy.

He stretched his arm the length of the sofa over our shoulders and looked up at the water-stained ceiling. There were tons of big brown moisture stains and I didn’t think they were caused by rain. Clyde was always good at knowing when to stay quiet. Somebody had drawn bodies on the wall behind the couch. The faces had no eyes. I thought it best not to say anything.

The black-haired woman suddenly jumped up and marched over to a patient seated in the center of the room. She grabbed the lady’s seat from behind and shouted out, You’re sitting in my father’s chair. The way she trilled her ‘r’s reminded me of Yvonne DeCarlo. Not The Munsters’ Lily, but more of a dark European type of character. She then turned and glared right at us. There was dried blood on her mouth.

I’d read Sylvia Plath’s book, The Bell Jar, about a young girl’s experience with mental institutions in the ‘50s. I’d also read a biography about Sylvia’s life. A friend talked about visiting Plath at her Primrose Hill home and being awestruck by how unkempt she was. She had let her hair grow long and had quit brushing it. She’d ceased grooming herself and the visitor had been overwhelmed by the thick and musky odors, like those of a forest animal. When I’d read that, it reminded me of Grace. Grace had a lot of similarities to Sylvia Plath and there was a tragic sadness about them both.

We looked up to see Nurse Bode maneuvering a wild-eyed Grace down the stairs. She prodded her along like they do livestock. She stopped short and shot us the eye. Clyde stood up and I followed suit. Willie broke and ran over to Grace. She grabbed her with both her arms and hugged her tight like children do. Willie buried her face in Grace’s stomach and said, Mommy.

Grace was functional, but you could tell she was medicated. I knew from experience.

Nurse Bode cut in, her voice saccharin. There, now, dear. She touched Grace’s long blonde hair a little too intimately. I got the feeling she assumed the wards in Rusk were her own personal property. It seemed more than just a nurse and her patients. Grace has been a good girl, hasn’t she? Nurse Bode kept feeling Grace’s hair, scrunching it into a curl. For some reason, this provoked me.

I caught the look out of Grace’s eyes. It was terror.

I said, hasn’t she? Nurse Bode’s sweet voice was hard and singsongy.

Grace’s voice caught in her throat. She moved her mouth, but nothing came out.

Nurse Bode spoke to Clyde, ignoring Willie and myself. We haven’t had to use the water on her in almost a week. She turned back to Grace. Haven’t we, dear? She used the word dear to instill fear in Grace, and I could tell it did the trick. It scared the pants off me and I could tell Willie and Clyde were cowed by her as well.

Grace uttered, Yes.

Nurse Bode’s eyes were focused on Grace like a vulture. Yes, what, dear?

Grace was trembling. Yes, Mother Bode.

With that, Nurse Bode flashed a horrible smile, one that was thoroughly devoid of any joy. It was a picture I knew I’d have a hard time forgetting. That’s right. Grace will be a good girl. She nodded. No more dirty thoughts, right, dear?

Grace went white. No, ma’am. No, ma’am, Mother Bode.

I wondered, as I often do about people, what caused Nurse Bode to go into nursing as a career. And on top of that, to work in the state hospital for the insane. That had to be a depressing job. Didn’t she have a family to celebrate the holidays with? What a way to make a living, I thought.

Nurse Bode turned toward Clyde. You may take Grace for a walk along the grounds if you like. She tightened her Tangee red lips, her mouth framed by hundreds of smoker’s wrinkles. Have her back by seven. She held up her gold plate Bulova and pointed to the face, her fingernail the same shade as her lipstick. You could tell she was proud of the watch and enjoyed any opportunity to show it off. It had a Duchess wristband and tiny diamonds or what appeared to be diamonds. Sharp. She tapped hard on the crystal.

Willie was still holding onto Grace’s middle. Merry Christmas, Mommy. I stood there between Clyde and Willie not knowing what to say. I finally reached over and touched Grace on her arm, but careful, as though she might break.

The air outside was heavy and wet, a sure sign of an East Texas winter. The huge shadow of the old haunted-looking institution dogged our every step as a morbid reminder not to stray too far.

Grace grabbed my arm hard enough to leave a bruise. You have to get me out of here. Her eyes were wide open with fright.

Clyde didn’t seem to have heard her. Are they treating you okay? He spoke to her in his soft Texas drawl. Grace had tears in her eyes and there was white stuff around her mouth. We all kept shuffling ahead, one foot and then the other.

When Grace didn’t answer, he went on, That’s okay. You don’t have to say nothing. The only sound was that of our footsteps along the ground. Willie held onto Grace’s hand.

The sound of my own voice pierced the mood. Daddy?

What, Jody?

We can’t let her go back in there. I looked at him serious.

He stopped walking. She has to go back, Jody. She’ll be getting out soon enough.

Uh-uh. No sir. I held my ground

What you’re talking about is breaking the law. And what would we do with her anyways? I have to think about Wanda and the kids. I could tell he was sorry he said it the minute it came out of his mouth.

I realize you’ve got Wanda and the kids. I said it sarcastic, like I could. I knew it hurt him when I would bring up Wanda and their family, but tonight, I didn’t care.

The words did the trick and I saw the pain on Clyde’s face. I kept on with it. I have my Christmas money I got and we can put her on the bus to Beaumont. Please. She can’t go back inside that place.

Willie jumped in, too. Please, Daddy, please. Don’t make her go back in there.

Clyde looked long and hard at Willie. He was probably remembering how everybody had dropped the ball when Willie’d been born. Him included. He opened up his mouth as if to say something, but then thought better and closed his lips back together. He turned and looked back at Rusk Hospital looming behind us. We all did. Everybody stayed quiet. He finally shook his head and looked down at the ground. He pulled out a bent-up pack of Winston’s and put one of them in his mouth. Oh, Lord. He fumbled in his pocket and whipped out his old Zippo lighter. He flicked it open with an easy snap and lit up the cigarette. The sharp smell of lighter fluid broke the still air and you could hear the dry crackle of tobacco as he took a hard long draw off it. I thought about the people on TV who rode around in convertibles smoking and laughing.

He looked down at his watch and flicked the cigarette even though there was no ash. He stared past us down at the two-lane road we’d come in on. Well, come on. We just got forty-five minutes before they call out the law and God knows who else on us.

Euphoria is the word for what I felt right then. My whole body felt like it could burst open with a deep-rooted feeling of ecstasy. It was the same feeling I’d get when a movie ended perfectly. I guess it was hope.

The four of us squeezed in the front seat of Clyde’s old Ford pickup as he revved up the engine. He only had to pump the gas twice and it made a welcome sound, that motor. Like something true. For the first time in a long time I felt almost safe, almost happy. Willie put her head on Grace’s shoulder and I could smell the child smell off her long hair. Grace stared straight ahead like a large still doll.

As we pulled out onto the road, the dark got even darker. Tall pine trees loomed up high on both sides of the highway as we drove deep into the Big Thicket, those old East Texas woods that held onto so many secrets. Strange flowers and orchids grew there that you couldn’t find anywhere else on earth. People had spotted black panthers prowling around in those woods. I’d always look when we drove through, but I’d never seen one myself. It was a place where people had disappeared.

I felt giggly. Willie and I’d shut down the Gaylynn Theater every night when Bonnie and Clyde played there. That’s what I thought about that Christmas night, like we were all running from the law like the Barrow gang. I guess Clyde had seen it, too, because he said out of nowhere, Whatever you do, don’t sell that cow. I burst out laughing like Bonnie and Clyde had in the movie and it felt good.

Clyde was as good looking as Warren Beatty. I had an old black-and-white picture of him in his Navy uniform. He was wearing his white Dixie Cup hat he’d squared off and that big smile of his. I could see why Grace had fallen in love with him. She had torn the picture up, but I’d saved it away in my secret things. Maybe that kind of love is what drove Grace so crazy. They had been a violently passionate couple and I was born heiress to it.

I looked over at Clyde driving, his strong hands on the steering wheel. Everybody said I looked just like him. They always said, That’s Clyde’s girl. At least, they used to. I loved him and had always been closer to him than I was to Grace. And I had never loved him more than I did this night when he gave us this best ever Christmas present, busting Grace out of Rusk.

He looked over at Grace and I wondered if he still had feelings for her. I knew she still loved him. She’d be drinking and playing her old Patsy Cline and Skeeter Davis records over and over, always crying. Seemed like every one of those old 45s told the same sad stories. I always knew she was crying over Clyde. Him leaving us for Wanda had cut us all pretty deep, but I think it hurt Grace the most. I didn’t understand why adults did the things they did. I wondered if he ever regretted leaving her.

We drove along the edge of the Davy Crockett National Forest. I loved the smell of the pine trees. Always have. Looking out at the velvet evergreen blanket, I wondered how they knew where to draw the boundary line. Where did the piney woods stop and where did regular civilization begin? Whose job was it to try and figure out how to organize nature?

We stopped outside Alto at a little gas station. It looked like that place where Gomer worked on Andy Griffith. There was a coke machine outside, the old kind where you had to reach in and pull the bottle out of the ice. It was good and dark now, and a couple of negro people sat on the bench waiting. There was a big Trailways bus, red and gold, running with the door open. The driver’s seat was empty.

Playing Bonnie and Clyde had worn off and I was starting to feel a little nervous. I could tell Clyde was, too. There weren’t any sheriff cars, so that was a relief. Clyde parked and turned off the ignition while Willie looked out the window. Grace said, Where are we?

Clyde patted her knee like you would a child. Honey, we’re gonna put you on the Trailways to Beaumont. He said it matter of fact, like breaking his ex-wife