Woman sweeping while man delivers milk.

Coming Up North

William M.   Williams

[William M.   Williams was eighty-six years old when I interviewed him.   The following events occurred in Jonestown,  Mississippi,  when Williams was about seven years old.   His father was a sharecropper who worked land owned by "Mr.   MacArthur."]

Mr.   MacArthur wanted to take the wagon for the next day: My father said no,  he could have it after we took the wagon to the [cotton] gin.   He got angry,  came over to whip my father.   That's when the trouble started.

I had a fourteen-year-old brother,  I never saw him miss nothing he shot at.   Mr.   MacArthur struck my father.   When he did that,  my brother cocked both barrels to blow his head off.   My mother knocked the gun up.   That's all that saved him [MacArthur].

[MacArthur] went home,  got on the phone and started forming a lynch mob.   They said they weren't going to do nothing but whip my father,  but they were going to lynch my brother.   It so happened that one of the people he called,  my first cousin,  heard the message. She had living quarters behind the main house.   They weren't paying her any attention.   She went and told her husband,  and her husband went to the rest of our boys.   They got ready for action.

But my father and brother went into the woods. They went through the woods until they got to my aunt's house [twelve or fifteen miles away].   The mob came to the house looking for my uncle too,  but he was up the creek,  in the yard,  hiding.   When they left,  he came down the same time my brother and my father walked up.

They told him they wanted to go to the other little town and catch a train.   He told them no,  no train — they'd have the mob lined up from one little stop to the other,  and they'd search the train.   So my father and brother walked through the forest and across the fields until they got to the river between them and Helena,  Arkansas.   A ferry boat goes across there,  they called it Trotters Landing,  and that's how they got across.   Then they caught a train.   And when they stopped,  they were in Hayti,  Missouri.   That's where I grew up at.