First In His Class (5 page)

Nor did she know about the marriage license filed in Ardmore, Okla-homa, on August 11, 1938, recording the marriage of W. J. Blythe and twenty-year-old Maxine Hamilton, or about Maxine's divorce from Blythe nine months later, in which the judge ruled that WJ. was “guilty of extreme cruelty and gross neglect of duty … in that he refused to provide for her a place to live, and within two weeks after their marriage he refused to recognize her as his wife, that he abandoned and deserted her in Los Angeles, California, and refused to furnish her transportation to her parents in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.”

Virginia did not know that in 1940, WJ. married Adele Gash's little sister, Faye, and divorced her after a few months, though his motivation in that arrangement seemed to be not love but a desire to avoid marrying another young woman who claimed to be pregnant with his baby.

She did not know about the birth certificate filed in Kansas City in May 1941 listing W. J. Blythe as the father of a baby girl born to a Missouri waitress to whom he also might have been briefly married.

Bill Blythe married Virginia Cassidy without telling her any of that, and within weeks he was gone off to war,
sailing away
on a troopship headed for the Mediterranean as a technician third grade with the 3030th Com-pany, 125th Ordnance Base Auto Maintenance Battalion. For several months, he was stationed in Egypt at a base in the desert outside Cairo, repairing engines and heavy equipment used in the North Africa campaign. On May 1, 1944, his battalion boarded Transport No. 640 in Alexandria and sailed across to Naples, then marched thirty miles inland and set up shop near the town of Caserta. The technicians and mechanics of the 125th kept the war machine in motion, rebuilding engines, reconditioning transmissions, retooling trucks and tanks, and salvaging junked vehicles for usable parts. Their base looked like a piece of transplanted industrial Detroit.

They were a long way from the fighting. They worked ten-hour days, with Sunday afternoons off, and were able to pass off the worst assignments to Italian civilians and prisoners of war. They had two base theaters, one open-air and one enclosed, where they watched movies five nights a week. There were softball games and boxing matches. Joe Louis came by one night to referee the bouts. A USO baseball tour brought in Leo Durocher of the Brooklyn Dodgers. Every night during the summer, groups of soldiers went into town to swim at the Royal Palace swimming pool. There were weekend trips to Naples, Anzio, Florence, Rome, and the beach at Capua. They encountered social diseases, malaria, and occasional food poisoning.

By the time Blythe reached Italy, Virginia had graduated from nursing school and was back in Hope, living with her parents on Hervey Street and working as a nurse. Bill Blythe had never lived in Hope; he barely knew it, but he listed it as his place of residence on his military papers. Virginia wrote him daily letters about her life there, and put him on the mailing list for
Hometoum News
— a folksy mimeographed letter written by “Mister Roy” Anderson, an unreconstructed Confederate who mixed news of the town with state and national events, describing blackberry blossoms “white as drifted snow,” the G.I. Bill of Rights, Masons taking the Degree, crappie biting in the lake, the ammunition tests out at the Southwest Proving Ground rattling windows five miles away. In one letter, old Mister Roy contrasted his life in Hope with that of a G.I. from New York:

He has seen the tall Empire State Building and Radio Center with millionaires in 'em and I have seen tall pecan and scaly bark hickory nut trees with squirrels in 'em. He has seen Central Park with swans on the lagoon—'ve seen Grassy Lake with wild ducks on it. He got watermelons from a Dago fruit stand, I got mine from a melon patch in the moonlight. He pays a florist $1.50 each for gardenias; I get em in Vera's garden. When he dies, he will have paid pallbearers, I will have six friends to tote my weary wornout body.

All of which brings me to say this: I got a letter from a homesick kid the other day addressed to: Roy Anderson, Hope, Arkansas, God's Coun-try. Ain't it true?

Bill Blythe had
no plans
to stay in God's country when he got home from the war. He had a job waiting for him in Chicago, selling heavy equipment for a company that he had worked for before the war, and he intended to pick up Virginia and take her up there. Virginia, in her later recollections, said that she reunited with him in Shreveport in November 1945, after he had already made a stop in Sherman. But his military records indicate that Blythe did not arrive home from Italy until December 1 and
was honorably discharged at Camp Shelby, Mississippi, on December 7, mustered out with $203.29 in his pocket after serving two years, seven months, and fourteen days. If he then visited Sherman before his rendezvous with her in Shreveport, it is unlikely, given travel times in those days, that they could have seen each other until December 10. This is inconsequential except for one thing: the timing of the conception of William Jefferson Blythe III. For years afterward, there were whispers in Hope about who little Billy's father was, rumors spawned by Virginia's flirtatious nature as a young nurse and by the inevitable temptation of people to count backwards nine months from the birth date to see who was where doing what.

Nine months before August 19, 1946, Tech 3 Bill Blythe was still in Italy. Virginia heard the talk. Her answer was that Billy was born a month early. He had been induced weeks ahead of schedule because she had taken a fall and the doctor was concerned about her condition.

V
IRGINIA
Blythe had
little time
to get to know her husband. Two months in 1943 before he shipped out. One week in Hope at the end of 1945. Three months in Chicago in early 1946, living high up in an old hotel. And of those Chicago days, subtract the many nights that he was out on his sales route, driving around Illinois and Indiana in his dark blue 1942 Buick Sedan. By May 1946, Virginia was back in Hope. She and Bill were waiting for a house to open up in suburban Forest Park so they could move in, and until it was ready it made more sense for her to live with her parents than in the hotel, pregnant and alone. Altogether, she was with him less than six months.

May 17
was a Friday afternoon, the end of Blythe's work week on the road. The house in the suburbs was ready. He turned his dark sedan south and drove toward Hope to pick up his wife and to bring her back. He headed diagonally through the flat farmlands of Illinois, past Effingham and Salem and down to the tip at Cairo, where he drove west across the Mississippi River into Missouri. At ten-thirty he pulled into a service station in Sikeston and refilled the tank. Then he sped into the night mist along Route 60, determined to make it to Hope before dawn. It seemed that everyone was out on the road that night, moving too slowly for Blythe's taste. He passed Elmer Greenlee, who was on his way home after closing his roller rink. He passed Roscoe Gist, who was driving home with his wife after a night at the movies. He passed both men so fast that they took note of the big, dark Buick as it went by. Three miles west of town, one of Blythe's front tires blew out. The car swerved across the oncoming lane and cut through the corner of a field, rolling over twice and landing upside
down near the service ditch of a farm road intersecting the highway. Greenlee arrived at the scene a few minutes later. The doors to the Buick were closed. The radio was still playing. The headlights shone into a nearby field. The car was empty.

Soon a crowd gathered. Several men turned the Buick over, fearing they might find someone crushed below. Two hours later, Chester Odum and John Lett were wading in a nearby drainage ditch when they spotted a hand. They pulled Blythe's body out of a shallow pool of stagnant rainwater. Coroner Orville Taylor, who was at the scene, determined that Blythe had probably crawled out the driver's side window and staggered toward the highway, only to fall into the ditch. The only bruise on his body was a bump on the back of his head. “Salesman Drowns in Ditch After Car Turns Over,” read the headline in the Sikeston newspaper the next day. In the
Hope Star
, it was front-page news: “Husband of Hope Girl Is Auto Victim.”

Eldridge Cassidy drove up to Sikeston to recover the body. The funeral for William Jefferson Blythe was held that Sunday at one o'clock at the First Baptist Church of Hope. He was buried in Rose Hill Cemetery in a plot that Eldridge had already bought for himself, his wife, his daughter, and his daughter's husband. Billy was born three months later.

O
N
the
day that
Billy Blythe was born, the latest edition of
National Geographic
arrived in the mail with a pictorial feature on the new Arkansas: “Louder than hounds or fiddles are the challenging voices of this born-again Arkansas as it shouts to make itself heard above the roar of new paper mills and aluminum factories.” But not everything was new in the New South in the summer of 1946. On that same August day, baying blood-hounds and a rifle-toting posse surrounded a swampy hollow on the edge of Magee, Mississippi, flushing out two black World War II veterans who had been falsely accused in an ambush shooting. In Georgia that day, a series of lynchings of black men inspired Governor Eugene Talmadge to declare that, while he ran the state, “such atrocities will be held to a minimum”—a promise that, according to a wry editorial writer in the
Arkansas Gazette
, would “not mean much to the person or persons so unfortunate as to constitute the minimum.” On that day in Columbia, Tennessee, a jury was being chosen for a race riot trial, and in Athens, Alabama, a probe had begun into the beating of several blacks.

The last lynching in Hope had been in the 1920s, when a black man accused of raping a white woman was tied to a rope and dragged down Main Street behind a horse and then hanged from an oak tree. But
the race
issue still defined Hope, as it did most southern communities. Tension between blacks and whites had increased in the months after the war.
Some white G.I.s were upset to come home and find black men working in the factories, making decent wages and holding jobs that the whites felt belonged to them. Black veterans came home to find that they were still denied their civil rights and had to live in houses that lacked indoor plumb-ing, confined to several blocks in the fourth ward on the northeast side of town in a sector known to whites as “Colored Town.” Most of the black women in the fourth ward crossed the railroad tracks to work as cleaning ladies and nannies for the white families. There was a black-owned funeral parlor and hotel, but the grocery store on the edge of the black neighborhood was run by a white proprietor: Eldridge Cassidy.

His days
as the iceman had ended a few years earlier, cut short by bronchial problems. He gave up his ice truck reluctantly, and searched for another job that suited his personality. He worked at a liquor store for a few years during the war until Hempstead County voted to go dry, then borrowed some money and opened the grocery on Hazel Street across from Rose Hill Cemetery. The store was one of the most integrated establishments in Hope, with black and white customers who bought the same canned goods from one counter and sodas from the ice box, along with illegal whiskey from a cabinet below the register. It was through credit that Eldridge Cassidy got the money for the store, and he was equally free with credit for his customers—and reluctant to collect. If the store was not a profitable proposition, it served a function that he cared about more, offering a place away from home where he could see people and tell stories and boast about his grandson Billy.

Mammaw, Pappaw, Virginia, and Billy lived together in the house on Hervey Street for less than a year before Virginia left for New Orleans, alone, to train at Charity Hospital as a nurse anesthetist. It was the only occupation that interested her. She never liked just being a nurse, following the orders of imperious male doctors, and she certainly did not like following in her mother's footsteps as a practical nurse in Hope. She told her friends that it was difficult for her to leave her baby son for months at a time. But she had decided that learning anesthesia would allow her to make more money to support him. And she was eager to get away from her mother, who acted as if she were in charge of Billy anyway and was longing to care for him. And she loved New Orleans, a city that she had got to know during her nursing school days. Virginia left in the fall of 1947, when Billy was one, and was gone for most of the next two years. One of his earliest memories, Bill would say decades later, was visiting his mother in New Orleans, then getting back on the train with Mammaw and looking out the window and seeing his mother on her knees, crying, as she waved goodbye.

Edith kept
him occupied in Hope. When he was two, she began preparing
homemade flash cards with letters and numbers on them and taught him the rudiments of reading while he sat in his high chair. It was not, he would say later, “like John Stuart Mill reading Milton at age five or anything like that—but it was reading.” She dressed him in knickers and fine pin-striped outfits. She introduced him to church at age three, enrolling him in the Sunbeam program at First Baptist. Often, when she was busy, Eldridge would take Billy over to the country store, where he would play with little black kids from the neighborhood. Billy came to respect Edith, but it was Pappaw who won his heart, “the kindest person” he ever knew. Yet it was gentle old Pappaw who unintentionally brought another man into Billy's life, someone with a decidedly different manner and temperament, a free-wheeling sharpie from Hot Springs named Roger Clinton who ran a car dealership in town and on the side occasionally supplied the Cassidy grocery store with bootleg whiskey.

Virginia had met Clinton at her father's store before she left Hope, and saw him occasionally in New Orleans or during her trips home, which he usually paid for. She knew nothing about him except that he ran the Buick agency in Hope, that he came from Hot Springs, and that he lived up to his nickname, “Dude.” He loved to drink and gamble and have a good time. He was a natty dresser, his face splashed with cologne, who always went to work “looking like he was freshly out of the bathtub.” Virginia was unaware when they began dating that
Clinton had
a wife and two stepsons back in Hot Springs. She did not know that when his wife, Ina Mae Murphy Clinton, filed for divorce in August 1948, she charged in court papers
that he
had abused her, once taking her pump shoes and smashing her in the face, leaving her with a black eye and a bloody scalp. She did not know that he was not as adept with money as he seemed to be, that he was often bailed out of financial scrapes by one of his older brothers, Raymond, who owned the successful Buick dealership in Hot Springs and had set Roger up in business in Hope.