Confederates in the Attic (31 page)

But Cotton felt the casinos were spoiling the town’s historic atmosphere and peddling a false version of the past. It was true that antebellum Vicksburg, like many river towns, was a rough place renowned for its vice and violence. But the riverboats themselves were usually tame commercial vessels that frowned on gambling. “If steamboats caught a professional gambler on board, they’d put him off at the next stop,” Cotton said.

Vicksburg also had fought to rid its streets of vice. Its namesake, Reverend Newitt Vick, was a stern evangelical Methodist who founded the town as a model outpost of Christianity. When it became a den of iniquity instead, citizens organized to chase the gamblers out. One notorious gambling den called the Kangaroo refused to close. So in 1835, vigilantes led by a doctor named Hugh Bodley armed themselves and marched on the Kangaroo. As they approached, someone shot through the door, killing Bodley. The crowd then burned roulette and faro wheels in the streets and lynched several gamblers. “Some of the others ended up as catfish food,” Cotton said, gazing out at the water.

A few blocks from the courthouse stood a small obelisk that read: “Erected by a grateful community to the memory of Dr. Hugh Bodley Murdered by the Gamblers July 5, 1835 while defending the
morals of Vicksburg.” When the new casinos arrived in Vicksburg, representatives of Harrah’s came to Cotton for advice about prettying the shore and integrating the city’s history into their design. He showed them a picture of the Bodley monument, though not its inscription. Harrah’s asked if the memorial could be moved down by the water, close to the casinos.

“I think that would be ideal,” Cotton told them. Then he showed them the monument’s words. He chuckled. “They were not amused,” he said.

F
ROM HIS OLIVE SKIN
and unusual surname, I’d guessed that the pharmacist Joe Gerache was of southern European extraction. But when I arrived at his home in suburban Vicksburg, I noticed a Jewish menorah perched on the living room mantel. Then, as we began chatting, he referred to Vicksburg’s
schvartze
. He caught himself and said, “That’s Yiddish for black people.”

“I know. My grandfather used that word all the time.”

“You’re Jewish?” he asked.

When I nodded, Gerache yelled to his wife in the kitchen. “Ann, you know what? Tony’s an M.O.T.!” Then to me: “That’s ‘member of tribe.’” Before I could say pastrami on rye, I’d been invited—commanded—to attend synagogue the next night and hustled into the living room to watch a documentary Ann had taped about Jewish life in Mississippi. By the time I’d finished, dinner was ready and I found myself at the kitchen table as Joe intoned the Hebrew prayers for food and wine.

“Actually, I’m Catholic,” Joe said, noshing on a dill pickle. “My grandparents came from Italy. But I go to Ann’s services and she comes to mass with me.”

Southern Jewry often made for this sort of colorful intermingling. When I’d lived in Mississippi, a Jewish co-worker and I were frequently asked by a small synagogue in Meridian to help make
minyan
, the quorum of ten worshipers needed for a Jewish prayer service. The Friday phone calls were always the same: “Y’all gonna come make
minyan
at church tonight? We’ll be playing poker after the service.” Jewish-Southern culture had also bred the ultimate in
fusion food: Gershon Weinberg’s pork and ribs barbecue restaurant in Alabama.

At Vicksburg’s synagogue, the
minyan
often included three non-Jewish women who sang in the temple’s choir, and several black custodians as well. A visiting rabbi came only on High Holidays, so on other occasions the congregants took turns acting as lay reader. On the Friday night I attended, an insurance salesman in a seersucker suit read the Sabbath service in Southern-accented English. Few among the dozen worshipers appeared to be under sixty. “We haven’t had a bar mitzvah here in ten years,” the insurance salesman said when the short service ended.

As in Meridian, the congregation in Vicksburg kept a curious post-synagogue ritual. Usually, the entire group drove across the bridge to Louisiana to a crawfish joint called Po Boys. On the night I visited, Po Boys was closed, so we went instead to a local restaurant and dined on fried chicken, pork loin and hush puppies. For most of the meal, a woman named Betty Sue held court, quizzing everyone for family gossip, as Southerners were so fond of doing. “What was her maiden name? … Is he Earl’s cousin? … Did he marry that gal from Memphis?”

But there wasn’t much family to talk about, at least not locally. As in many Southern towns, Jews first came to Vicksburg in the nineteenth century as peddlers. Working their way up the Mississippi, they settled down and opened businesses. But in this century, young Jews began leaving for the city. This migration was hastened by Jewish boys going off to fight in World War II, and later by the civil rights movement, which brought a temporary influx of Northern Jews. Their long hair and liberal views unsettled the local community. “They lived in black areas and related to people differently than we did,” Ann Gerache said, echoing what Shelby Foote had told me. “We didn’t know how our Christian neighbors would treat us after that.”

In several Southern cities, white supremacists fire-bombed synagogues. While there was no such violence in Vicksburg, the Jewish community continued to dwindle and now numbered only about seventy. “That’s including folks who don’t live here anymore but plan to be buried in Vicksburg,” Ann said.

The next day, I visited the Jewish cemetery, wedged between a Pizza Hut and the battlefield park. The fighting at Vicksburg had spilled across the cemetery grounds, and gravestones marked Levy and Metzger mingled weirdly with historic plaques to the Mississippi Light Artillery and the Green Brigade of Texas.

About 20,000 Jews lived in the Confederate states at the start of the Civil War. In some ways, the mid-nineteenth-century South had been more welcoming to Jews than the North, where anti-immigrant sentiment reached fever pitch in the 1850s. Grant, while fighting in Mississippi, often railed against Jewish “speculators” and issued orders proscribing their movements, at one point terming them “an intolerable nuisance” and demanding that army railroad conductors stop Jews from traveling south of Jackson.

But viewed from Vicksburg’s synagogue and graveyard, there was a sad, end-of-the-line feel to Southern Jewry, at least that portion of it living outside Florida and a few big cities. In another decade or two, it seemed likely that all trace of rural and small-town Jewish life would be gone, except for graveyards like this, and the Semitic names—Cohen, Kaufman, Lowenstein—still dimly visible on the front of abandoned shoe shops and department stores across the backcountry South.

M
Y SECOND WEEK IN
Vicksburg, I was evicted from Harrah’s. I hadn’t bothered to book ahead to Memorial Day, naively supposing that no sane person would celebrate the start of summer here, in a town already so heat-struck that every time I stepped outside my glasses fogged and slid down my nose. But gamblers knew no seasons; what better way to while away the 100-degree days than in a climate-controlled casino? Every other hotel in town was also booked. So I cashed my few chips and headed for the Natchez Trace, as flatboatsmen and busted gamblers had so often done in the nineteenth century.

Driving out of town, I decided to make one last stop at the battlefield. The morning paper had mentioned a noonday wreath-laying at the cemetery. Like many Americans, I’d almost forgotten that Memorial Day meant something more than a three-day weekend at the
beach or blackjack table. It was, in fact, the mass slaughter of the Civil War that had led to the holiday’s creation. Vicksburg seemed an appropriate place to see how Southerners honored their war dead.

The ceremony’s site was a shady corner of the sprawling Union cemetery, near a plaque that read: “Forty Four Known By Name, Others Known Only to God.” Of the 17,000 soldiers buried at Vicksburg, only 4,000 were known by name. A motorcade pulled up trailing streamers and flags. Forty people climbed out, mostly graying men wearing army caps and medals. It looked at first glance like any veterans’ gathering, except that all but one of the participants was black.

The group filtered in among the small stumps marking Vicksburg’s nameless dead. Someone laid a wreath and said a brief prayer. Then soldiers fired a 21-gun salute and a bugler played Taps. As the crowd fled the midday sun, I chatted with the ceremony’s organizer, a man named Willie Glasper. He said that Memorial Day observances in Vicksburg had stopped altogether in the 1970s. It had been his decision to revive the holiday with the wreath-laying and a short parade through town.

“I’m a mailman, not a veteran, but I played here as a boy and used to study these graves,” he said. “I look at the War from a freedom standpoint. One side won, the other lost, and we became free as a result.” He paused. “Maybe that’s why the white folks don’t come.”

Like July 4th, Memorial Day had a tortured history in Vicksburg, as it did across much of the South. It was Southern women who pioneered the spring custom of decorating soldiers’ graves (Columbus, Georgia, had perhaps the strongest claims to the first Memorial Day in 1866). But the ritual quickly caught on in both North and South. In 1868, the main Northern veterans’ group, the Grand Army of the Republic, designated May 30th as the date when all veterans’ posts should decorate Union graves. The South, characteristically, went its own way. Southern states declared their own “Confederate Memorial Day,” varying from state to state and timed, in part, to correspond with the peak of the spring blossom season. It was only in this century, as sectional bitterness waned and new wars produced a fresh crop of dead, that the late-May Memorial Day became a truly national holiday.

But old habits died hard. Glasper said there had long been two American Legion posts in Vicksburg, one all-white, the other all-black. “Their attitude is, ‘You do Memorial Day, we’ll do Veterans Day,’” he said. Each year, Glasper went through the ritual of inviting the white Legion post to the wreath-laying. But the only white in attendance this year was a non-veteran: Vicksburg’s mayor. The white Legion post didn’t even open on Memorial Day. And its own observance, on Veterans Day, was held at a downtown median strip decorated with monuments from this century’s wars, rather than at the Civil War cemetery.

“It’s that way with a lot of things here,” Glasper said. “If blacks put something on, whites don’t come. And too often when whites put something on, we don’t go. We’re self-conscious around each other.”

Glasper invited me to a reception at the American Legion post, a small building on the back street of a black neighborhood. En route, he pointed out a new museum he and several others were setting up to honor black Vicksburgers (whose ranks include Sarah Breedlove Walker, America’s first black woman millionaire). I asked why the group didn’t try instead to include its exhibits at the city museum I’d visited at the Old Courthouse. Glasper looked at me strangely. “That’s theirs,” he said. Even the YMCA in Vicksburg had two branches: one white, one black.

At the Legion hall, veterans and their families sat beneath balloons and bunting, slathering hot dogs with relish. The mayor circulated through the small crowd, glad-handing veterans and droning on about his achievements (“Reduced taxes, paved fifty-eight streets, built a new swimming pool and ballpark, halved unemployment, put in an eleven-million-dollar sewer system …”).

I found a seat beside a woman who had been teaching at Vicksburg’s schools for twenty-five years. She said school integration occurred without incident and blacks were now well represented politically. But socially, the color line remained intact. “You’d think veterans, of all people, could cross the line. They have so much in common,” she said. “But then, most of these men fought in all-black units, even in Korea. So I guess they just never reached out to each other.”

Across from me sat an eighty-year-old named Laura Jones, who served as president of the Legion’s women’s auxiliary. She was the granddaughter of a black soldier who had served at Vicksburg; his name was etched on the Illinois monument. When she was a girl, her family would visit the battlefield park every weekend. “It was free, we could play on the monuments, pick pecans and walnuts and plums, and look for Grandaddy’s name.” She shared two other vivid girlhood memories. “The Klan hanged a boy on Grove Street. I remember the tree. And I saw a woman with tar all over her. She washed clothes for white folks and some white man had taken a liking to her. That made it her fault, of course. Luckily, someone stopped the Klan before they put the feathers on her, so she just got the tar.”

Laura Jones had seen that sort of terrorism vanish in her lifetime. But she despaired of ever seeing true racial amity in Vicksburg. “Instead of ironing out our differences everyone wants to go their own way.” She’d asked the local high school if its band might participate in the Memorial Day parade. “They said, ‘School got out a few days ago and the uniforms have been washed and put away.’ Well, we can wash them again. The cleaners aren’t leaving town. But that’s their excuse. There’s a Miss Mississippi pageant in July. I bet you the school band comes out for that. And they come for the Christmas parade, when school’s out.” In the end, the Legion hall had paid for several black bands to come from out of state.

I was surprised to learn that the racial divide ran so deep. Vicksburg had largely escaped the civil rights violence that wracked so many Mississippi communities. And, like river towns everywhere, it seemed more open and cosmopolitan than inland communities. The Vicksburg economy was now strong, thanks to gambling, and blacks I’d spoken to over the past week had praised the casinos for their equitable hiring practices. Nor had I seen the sort of inflammatory displays of rebel emblems common to Todd County, Kentucky, and other places I’d visited.

But Laura Jones said I shouldn’t be fooled by Vicksburg’s veneer of geniality. “Things haven’t changed because deep down people’s hearts haven’t changed. No law, no government, no corporation is
going to make you do the right thing. That comes from inside.” She swatted a fly on the relish jar. “The outside’s changed,” she said, “but the inside’s the same.”