'Sometimes the South Really Is Something Out of a Flannery O’Connor Story'

I am white and my family is from Memphis and Covington, Tennessee, just a few miles up the Mississippi Delta. My family was something that most people today are more than reluctant to admit: It was violently on the wrong side of the Civil Rights Movement. It’s a complex and brutal story that still haunts me at age 55.

My grandfather, Joe Oscar Hill, was born in 1901 to a father who was 60 years old. My grandfather was dismissed from school in the second grade because the teacher thought he was retarded. (In his early 20s, he discovered that he only needed glasses.) At 25, he married my grandmother, who was 14. Neither of them were literate. My father grew up on their 200-acre cotton farm without electricity and indoor plumbing.

In 1949, when my grandfather was a deputy marshal in Covington, he, the town marshal, a store owner, and another man seized an African American father, Jimmy Wade, outside the Sunday evening services of the Church of Christ in God. They took him to the field behind the store owner’s house, castrated him, shoved his privates into his mouth, and dragged him behind the car by a rope. When that didn’t kill him, they shot him 20 times.

According to an article in the Covington Leader newspaper [PDF], Wade had tried for the marshal’s gun. The autopsy done by the county coroner, who I interviewed at 94 years old, declared his death by four gunshot wounds. I was able to put together the real story through interviews with people in the community.