Ole Miss in the Trent Lott Era
CARLSON, RICHARD W.
Ole Miss in the Trent Lott Era What did you do in the race war, Daddy? BY RICHARD W. CARLSON I WAS OFTEN BOTHERED about what happened to my gun during the James Meredith riots at Ole Miss. Quite...
...Stay right there, said the voice...
...Justice Department were planning to enroll Meredith by force...
...A voice boomed out of a speaker...
...A lot of people didn't like Murray's singing, and I was one of them, but this seemed too serious a criticism...
...After all these years, I've never even fired it once...
...John Faulkner along the way...
...The pistol was big and old, but powerful—a .45 caliber Webley six-shot revolver— and I was used to toting it around...
...I told Mr...
...At least I was pretty sure...
...It growled at me so I skirted it and went back to a desk where I saw a police radio...
...By 1990 I was working in Washington...
...Take it back to school...
...He sighted it down the sidewalk and dry fired it...
...He has a deep accent...
...I didn't think Fred would shoot anyone, but he might have given the gun to someone who would—the kind of man who, driven to the brink by sockless Yankees in Bermuda shorts, might have been pushed over the edge by the one black guy who wanted to go to his school...
...What the hell...
...Between the women and the no socks, there was a lot to hate about Yankees...
...I knew them all...
...It's not my problem...
...One afternoon I walked into Oxford with the revolver and ammo in a bag...
...As I became more responsible, I sometimes thought, please God, don't let that have been my gun in any of those shootings...
...I handed it to him, and he spun the chamber...
...They could show you where the houses had been and they knew some of the women's names...
...He was now living nearby in Maryland, had seen my name in the paper, and wanted to have lunch...
...Quite a few people were shot during that crazed Sunday night in the fall of 1962...
...Oh," he said, "I took it home to Clarksdale that weekend...
...One morning, my secretary said, "You have a call from a man who says he is a friend from Mississippi...
...For $25 I threw in the bullets...
...Even then, the Oxford police were not in love with my act...
...You pulled up to the long kitchen table, with Mrs...
...I returned for my second year at Ole Miss in late September 1962, a New Englander straight off a summer job as a cop in Ocean City, Maryland...
...I wandered around and asked if anyone would like to buy a gun...
...I was sure he was too kind a fellow to hurt anyone...
...I always hoped my gun didn't play a part...
...His brother William, who could sometimes be seen driving through the town square in his red Nash rambler, had died late that summer...
...Two civilians died, and 168 U.S...
...Murray had beaten a redneck senior silly the week before because the man kept ragging him about not wearing socks to class with his scuffy Bass Weejuns...
...Charlie was dirty, but he was never late...
...If you did something like that now, you'd have the SWAT team dressed up like a Panzer Division outside...
...I was a veteran, too...
...The bullet appeared to have come from an upperclassman's dorm...
...I showed him the pistol and asked to put it in his safe...
...You know," he said, "I still have it, the Webley...
...When I arrived, Ole Miss was thrumming with excitement...
...Airborne troops in armored jeeps were patrolling the campus as we pulled out in his 1960 T-bird on the way to Route 66 and on to California...
...He was annoyed at my using the radio, but since I'd been a cop for the summer, nothing fazed me...
...Faulkner I had a gun and wanted to turn it in to the police for safekeeping...
...And they were always trying to make moves on the women...
...Yankees had burned this town, and those houses, and had raped some of the women...
...When the flag went up at Ole Miss a couple of days later, and things fell apart, I had a brief image in my head of Fred dry-firing that pistol out the window, maybe even wet-firing it...
...No one ever knew who was responsible...
...They dressed funny, wearing Bermuda shorts and no ties and no socks with those stupid loafers...
...I had spent the Richard W. Carlson is a former U.S...
...I never gave a serious thought to my police gun and a box of ammo sitting next to me in my sea bag...
...James Meredith was due on campus in a few days...
...I certainly thought about it, though, and over the years I was a reporter, I thought occasionally about Paul Gui-hard, the young French newsman who was shot to death—"assailant un-known"—outside a dorm minutes after the riot started, and about the man who wandered on campus to see what was going on and took a bullet in the head from an anonymous shooter...
...Murray was lazy and laid back but he was also huge and very tough...
...Charlie's senile and toothless mom and a half-dozen grubby kids, and tucked in to bowls of chicken fried steak, gravy, plump fried chitterlings, sweet potatoes, turnips, collard greens, okra, pickled beets, corn bread, fresh butter and fresh milk and a deep-dish fruit pie for dessert—all this, with coffee, for exactly $1 each, cash, no checks...
...He was a bit of a charlatan...
...I left it at my parents' house so nothing bad would happen with it...
...So the South and its ways weren't an entirely new experience...
...Soon after that, we rented the farmhouse for $60 a month...
...Even so, Mississippi was in a cultural world pretty much of its own...
...Wisps of smoke were still rising from charred vehicles when one of my Yankee roommates and I collected the remainder of our out-of-state tuition ($400 for the semester) and withdrew from school...
...The country wasn't into liability yet...
...Fred, where was the gun when all those shootings took place...
...John was a writer, too, talented and accomplished, but of course completely overshadowed...
...His repertoire consisted mainly of proletarian folk songs, crooning and strumming about the toils of Tom Mooney or Joe Hill and the Wobblies...
...I got on it, introduced myself to whoever was listening and said, I've got a gun, I'd like a policeman to come back to the station...
...I walked on to the police station on the square...
...There was lots of talk about violence, and it seemed like a good idea to get rid of my gun...
...A bullet thudded into the wall near his head...
...When I last saw him, he was spinning the chamber and dry firing out the window...
...Dirty Charlie looked like he never bathed and had crusted over...
...He later wound up in San Francisco, where he became the guitarist for the Quicksilver Messenger Service...
...Everyone knew who he was: a 29-year-old military veteran, a Negro who had been turned down for enrollment by the university and governor the previous year because they didn't want Negroes, and who now had the support of the Kennedy administration...
...Yankees still stood out 100 years later at Ole Miss...
...I drove while they made out furiously in the back seat...
...We took most of our meals on a neighboring dairy farm...
...Yankees had done bad things to the ancestors they felt a direct connection to even after all those years...
...I found out almost 30 years later...
...You could feel trouble coming that fall...
...No way, he said...
...The name fit...
...There were very few Yankees at Ole Miss that year, maybe a dozen or so undergraduates...
...Burns Tatum, large and red-faced, barreled through the door...
...I had already given my name once, so I repeated it...
...Bobby Kennedy and the U.S...
...ambassador who once ran the Voice of America and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting...
...One of my roommates really drove them crazy...
...It was almost empty...
...That is a real horse pistol...
...One of my kids dragged it out of a box a few years ago...
...I want to turn it in...
...The farmer was known to diners, friends, and relatives as, no kidding, Dirty Charlie...
...Who is that...
...His wife was fat and cheery and a terrific cook...
...A police dog, a German shepherd, was tied to a desk...
...A few minutes later, I heard a car skid to a stop outside...
...Their fathers and grandfathers didn't like them either...
...They didn't like Yankees...
...Murray played the banjo...
...I'll take it, he said...
...Dinner was served at four...
...Murray was plunking his banjo one night in his dorm room, warbling into a tape recorder so he could savor his own singing, when the window shattered...
...The girls loved him...
...Good idea to give it to Tatum, boy," is what he said, referring to the police chief...
...If you weren't on time the door was barred and you didn't eat...
...A fellow named Louis Fred Fredericks, a plump, friendly sophomore who'd lived on my floor the year before, came out in his skivvies and asked to look at it...
...His name was Jim Murray, a shambling, sloppy, bear of a guy from Philadelphia...
...Five of us lived in a farmhouse we rented about a mile from school...
...I stayed in California for the next 23 years...
...I hitchhiked from the Maryland shore to Oxford, Mississippi, in a day and night, catching a ride from two libidinous honeymooners...
...It was Louis Fred Fredericks...
...marshals were wounded when bullets flew into the Lyceum Building...
...I don't have any male friends from Mississippi, I thought...
...I never saw the old Web-ley again...
...So tell me," I finally said to Fred, as we sat at the Occidental bar next to the Willard Hotel...
...I had gotten to know him the year before, because he hung out in the same restaurant where I studied at night...
...previous year at Ole Miss under an NROTC program for enlisted sailors and Marines who'd graduated from the Naval Academy Prep School...
...What did you ever do with that gun I sold you back when James Meredith came to school...
...We had all moved from our dorms, in part because of hostility from some of the Ole Miss men...
...Let me take a look at it, he said...
...I ran into Mr...
...I walked on back to my old dorm...
Vol. 8 • December 2002 • No. 16
