Man of the House: A Memoir

By Dr. Colm McAindriu

Between the years of 1944 and 1963, Dr. Colm McAindriu was just a kid, a Black kid living in the Jim Crow Mississippi Delta. His story brings to light what living day and night under the threat of death looks like for a Black kid in this era. Should he look at the white gi

• Language: English
• Publisher: Authors Press
• Release date: Nov 3, 2023
• ISBN: 9781643148946

Dr. Colm McAindriu

After leaving for Chicago in 1963, Dr. McAindriu went into the military and later obtained two Doctorates. In his research, he is passionately focused on Self-realization as a life-purpose. He is currently working on his third PhD. His hobbies include scenic drives to the mountains and beaches, reading, and meditation. He holds a special interest in self-realization research, study, and writing.

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Copyright © 2023 by Dr. Colm McAinDriu

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

ISBN: 978-1-64314-893-9 (Paperback)

978-1-64314-894-6 (E-book)

AuthorsPress

California, USA

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Foreword

I will never forget

the first time I met Dr. Colm McAindriu. I’m pretty sure he hasn’t forgotten it, either.

We were in the living room of my house north of Tallahassee. My then-wife, Dr. Caroline (Kay) Picart—and yes, there are a lot of PhD’s in this brief Foreward—often invited local ballroom dancers to our home to try out our family room/dance floor.

One evening, a middle-aged Black man introduced himself to me. I asked, Where are you from? He replied, Mississippi. Of course, Colm had me at Mississippi, but I had to know more.

Where in Mississippi?

I’m from a little town in the Delta, Shelby. You’re from the Mississippi Delta?

Yes, that’s where I grew up.

Wait, you were born there? Did Dr. Howard bring you into the world?

Colm’s smile went ear to ear: You know Dr. Howard!? My Mom was in love with him. Yes, he delivered me at the Taborian Hospital in Mound Bayou.

I can’t swear that the above conversation is word-for-word, but I promise you it’s close; that’s how unforgettable meeting Colm was. You simply don’t meet many folks from the Mississippi Delta in your living room who were brought into the world by a civil rights legend. Thus began a warm friendship that continues to the present day.

Over many years, my students at Florida State University have gotten to know Colm as well. They are as fascinated about his story as I am. I have a hunch you will be, too.

Because Colm lived through Mississippi’s Second Reconstruction, I was very eager to know more; here was a living eyewitness to the history that I taught. Let me back up for a minute, though.

I’d only gotten interested in our country’s civil rights history when I was invited to put together an anthology of speeches about the civil rights movement. But there was a catch to that project: the publisher wanted only speeches that were largely unknown, and by movement figures we knew little to nothing about. A daunting task, to be sure, but the archival intrigue was real, and so one of the places I set my sights on was Mississippi. I learned pretty quickly that the belly of the beast had some powerful orators—from Fannie Lou Hamer and Cleveland Jordan to Aaron Henry and Reverend Ed King.

That oratory got me very interested in the movement in Mississippi; I eventually found my way to the Mississippi Delta with my students in the fall of 2003. One of our most memorable stops on a field trip orchestrated by Delta State University was the hollowed-out Bryant Grocery and Meat Market in Money, Mississippi, where 14-year-old Emmett Till whistled at Carolyn Bryant on a hot August night in 1955. Colm was 11 years old and lived 20 miles to the west from where Emmett was kidnapped. Turns out Colm knew the case very well; he’d been forced to live in its shadows until he fled the state in 1963. But the stuff I was reading about in books like John Dittmer’s Local People and Charles Payne’s I’ve Got the Light of Freedom was, in one sense, very far removed from Colm’s Mississippi Delta. That is, both authors were tracking movement activities in small communities across the state. Their emphasis, as such, is on movement leaders and the constant, and often lethal, resistance they encountered. Typically, their focus was on the vote, as organizational leaders had deemed resistance such as sit-ins as much too dangerous. Voting might also interest the Department of Justice of the federal government, too.

I learned from Colm that he’d never participated in formal movement activities during his teenage years. He was too busy trying to stay alive and keep his enormous family alive, too. There also wasn’t an organized resistance in Shelby even as the county seat in Cleveland did attract the interest of the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO).

In many respects, though, the details that Colm writes about in Man of the House are far more interesting than the vicissitudes of movement organizing. How so? Colm offers a nuanced glimpse for what life was like if you were poor and Black in Jim Crow Mississippi. Colm walks his reader through the brutality of his life—and yet even in this short book that brutality too quickly becomes quotidian, banal in the words of a famous critic of 20th century Fascism. I can’t tell you how many times I felt the perspiration form on the back of my head reading about Colm’s harrowing daily life in Shelby in Bolivar County, then in Cascilla in Tallahatchie County. The cruelty, the ritualized violence, the horrifying deprivation, and always the fear that punctuates every breath of sweat-soaked Delta air, Colm walks you through his impossibly hard life.

And yet.

And yet even at its most horrifying moments, Man of the House offers glimpses of a secular salvation always bordering on the spiritual that Colm somehow cultivated—in the comfort of a classroom, in the dank humidity and dark solitude underneath a neighborhood church, and in white and black members of a community who somehow could glimpse an inquisitive boy, a beautiful soul, in a brutalized child.

Every moment I get to spend with Colm these days I express my amazement that we are sharing the same space, breathing in the same Florida air, and exploring our two Mississippi’s. How impossible that the two of us met in the first place, not because meeting a stranger is, mathematically speaking, a very rare event. No, it’s because the distance from that plantation shack in Bolivar County to my living room in the Tallahassee suburbs only has meaningful measurement in Colm’s impossible journey.

It’s a journey made possible, finally, in the pages of this memoir.

Davis Houck

Tallahassee, Florida

Contents

Acknowledgements

Chapter 1

Chapter 2 Mother’s Prayer

Chapter 3 The Magic Words

Chapter 4 Sexual Abuse

Chapter 5 The Good and the Bad

Chapter 6 A New Day

Chapter 7 Back to School

Chapter 8 Sometimes It Be’s That Way

Acknowledgements

This book is first

in a planned three-volume memoir. It began as an idea during a Christmas party in 2005 with Prof. Davis Houck of Florida State University (FSU) and other friends. Davis began the discussion with the question: Where are you from? I told him: Shelby, Mississippi, and he informed me that he teaches Mississippi Cultural History at FSU. That question and response led to a discussion which continues to this day. Over the years Davis has inspired me to write this book and to plan the writing of two others. For all that and more, I am grateful to him. Through our friendship, Davis has introduced me to others of his friends, including Dr. Steve Whitker. I read Steve’s 1963 Master’s thesis, A Case Study in Southern Justice: The Emmett Till Case Study. Florida State University, Tallahassee, Florida. http://purl.fcla.edu/fsu/etd-05272004-140932, and learned much from his scholarly knowledge and his gift of friendship before his recent untimely passing. On reflection, Steve and I used to come to Davis’s class and share our contrasting background experiences. I miss Steve. Beauvais McCaddon, Steve and I grew up in the Mississippi Delta. Steve and I grew up about 6 miles apart from each other. He is white and I am black. We lived on different sides of our respective towns: he in a middle-class family and was resented by the Ku Klus Klan, and I in a lower cottonfield working class black neighborhood and resented by the Ku Klux Klan. Steve and I were often guest-lecturers in Davis’s classes at FSU and shared our contrasting background experiences of growing up in Mississippi’s Delta during the Jim Crow years. Beauvais, too, is white and has kindly offered me her friendship, critical reflections, and deeply inspiring thoughts of my book. As with Steve and I, Beauvais and I have stunningly contrasted backgrounds and sometimes chat about those differences and our similarities. My cohort from the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS), Dr. Suzanne Baldon, Criminal Justice professor at McLennan Community College, has been an ongoing inspiration since our days at CIIS. She, too, is white. Suzanne designed the cover for this book. Davis, Suzanne, Steve, and I (four PhDs) have been friends for many years, and I have benefited from their intellectual and scholarly inspiration. I continue to benefit from Beauvais’s friendship and her deep scholarly wisdom. Davis has written and published numerous books and I have gained many insights by reading most of them and critiquing a few.

Chapter 1

This is my story.

My dad walks out on us, and I am three. He never looks back. Now I am age four. It is a dusty afternoon in 1948, and Mother is taking me with her to buy food. She has crowned me Man of the House and said she is going to enroll me in kindergarten class at the St. Andrews Church real soon. I feel my shoulders getting strong, and my chest feels big now. She says I am a man. And I’ve got to protect her and my brother, too. We walk out of our house front door and turn right onto the gravel road. Mother clutches my right hand and pulls me along. We soon turn left onto the concrete sidewalk, and she says, "Keep real quiet! White people live over there, pointing to the right, and we can’t upset the White people. She had told me that as Man of the House, I must always walk on the outside when I am with a lady" to protect her. She says I’ve got to be a gentleman.

We are going to town now, and I am real happy. Maybe she will buy me something. As soon as we turn left on the sidewalk, I see nice, clean, big white houses on our right side, and Mother says, White people live in those houses. She raises her finger to her lips and says, Shhhhhhhheeeeeeeeh, like don’t say anything. I’ve got to keep real quiet now. White people will kill Black folks if they make noise, she says. We walk faster and faster. I can see Highway 61 ahead of us. We turn right now, and Highway 61 and the railroad track are on our left side. Mother squeezes my hand really tight and says, "Don’t look at that White girl coming toward us! Keep your eyes on the ground! Do you hear me?!"

I say, Yes, ma’am, and look down after I take one little glance at her. She is pretty, and I want to play with her.

"Let’s get off the sidewalk and let the White people pass by! she says, and pushes me off on to the grass to the left. The lady and her daughter come close, and I look at the girl from the corner of my eyes and see her looking back at me, with her head down, too. Mother hisses, I told you not to look at that girl! White people will kill you!" It’s too late. Mother walks faster, and I have to run to keep up with her. Soon, we get close to town. There is a big white car parked on the left side of us. There is a man in the car. He looks like a real big man, ’cause he has a big hat on his head, and the hat looks like it is touching the top of the car. Mother tells me to tip-toe