In the Pines, page 8
It would not have been an easy job. In rural Mississippi, many Black and white farm families hung on to their relative self-sufficiency by growing what they ate, making what they wore, and otherwise avoiding most purchases that required cash. Yet burial insurance that covered the costs of embalming the body, a nice casket, and an engraved headstone—a set of practices that seemed to permanently plant the remains of a loved one in the ground at their church or family plot—also had great appeal. Cemeteries with proper headstones functioned as community archives, repositories of the information about the members of that separate Black world. While lynching dehumanized and mutilated the bodies of Black people, burial insurance literally helped preserve them, marking a family’s existence on the landscape in a lasting way.
Estus probably started by selling policies to his relatives and neighbors and the other members of Green Grove before branching out. Then he used what he had earned selling policies for R. C. Cook to form his own business. In 1928, the Johnson Funeral Home and Burial Association opened in a borrowed building on St. Stephens Road near the Prentiss icehouse. Because he knew J. E. and Bertha Johnson well from church and some of his kids attended the Prentiss Institute, he got permission to store his coffins on campus. It was a perfect Jim Crow business model. Segregation created a niche because white funeral homes did not serve Black customers. And by combining burial insurance and the funeral home business, Black owners potentially profited twice: once when they sold the policies and again when their customers used the payouts for these policies to buy funeral services.
In 1929, the year the US stock market crashed, Johnson was still not a landowner. Then, suddenly, his situation grew worse. A building he was constructing to house his business burned to the ground, and then his wife, Rosie, died. At the end of the year, he married Frankie Weathers, adding two stepdaughters to his family. In the years to come, he and Frankie would have four more children of their own.
Estus Johnson’s new family expanded while the economy continued to shrink, because in farm country the Great Depression was already well under way before the market crashed. Falling cotton prices after World War I, floods and droughts, and the boll weevil, which arrived in Jeff Davis in 1907, hammered farm profits. Many Black families got by because their teenage boys and men worked off and on at sawmills or on timber-cutting crews. But Frankie and Estus Johnson prospered. If money could be scraped together for anything, the burial policy got paid. No one wanted to send their loved one to heaven without a proper ceremony. No one wanted to bury a family member in a cardboard coffin in a grave without a headstone.
By the 1930s, Frankie and Estus had saved enough to buy a lot on Fred Street in the Quarters, the Black section of Prentiss. There, across from the gin and the cotton warehouses, they constructed a wood-frame building with space for the funeral home on one side and on the other, living quarters for Estus’s son Central—then in his early twenties—and his family. This arrangement enabled a Johnson, Central or one of his brothers, to be available twenty-four hours a day if anyone called and needed the hearse, which doubled as a Black ambulance, to take someone to the hospital or to pick up a body.
Success in the death business had finally enabled Estus Johnson to get what he had always wanted, his own land. And he did not stop with the lot on Fred Street. He also began buying pieces of property west and northwest of Prentiss near where he had lived as a child. By 1940, he and Frankie and their kids lived on their own farm, which shared a long boundary line with the farm where my grandfather Oury Berry had grown up and his parents, my great-grandparents, still lived.
Maybe it was Oury who phoned that day in August 1947 from the Lipsey farm. Whoever called, it was Estus’s son Central Johnson who answered. In such a small place, given their jobs and the fact that their families owned adjacent land, Oury and Central must have known each other. What did Central think as he held the receiver to his ear? As he drove the waxed and polished hearse the short mile or so to the Lipsey’s place, parked, and walked up to where law enforcement officials still stood over Versie Johnson’s body? Somehow, Central picked up the corpse of a Black man a little younger than he was, a person he probably knew at least by sight, a human who had been alive so recently he might have still been warm. Sure, as a trained embalmer, Central was accustomed to death. But given the accusations against Versie Johnson and how he died, this one must have been hell.
4.
BLACK BOY
Sometimes official documents record the lives of Black people, but just as often these archives also erase them. Of the forty-one pieces of evidence I have located that refer to Versie Johnson’s life, fewer than ten directly address what he did before his last days. In almost every case, officials struggle to get his name right, rendering it variously Versey, Bursie, and Vernon across three census reports, a birth certificate, a World War II draft registration, and two mentions in a small-town paper. It’s not much to work with, fragments rather than a whole, a man described not so much by how he lived but by how he died. And yet it is enough to see the outlines of a time when Versie Johnson had a future.
When I started this research, I did not know whether I would be able to find the right Versie Johnson at all. In a year and a half of research trips to Mississippi, I did not speak to a single current or former resident of Jeff Davis County who remembered him. And the written record was sketchy. The Prentiss Headlight article simply called him a “local” Black man, and articles about his death in other newspapers provided contradictory information, sometimes describing him as a sawmill worker and other times as a farm laborer. Few newspapers stated his age, and those that included that detail did not agree. I did not know whether Versie Johnson was married or widowed or single or where he was born or his parents’ names. Compounding the difficulties, Jefferson Davis and nearby counties were full of Black Johnsons in the first half of the twentieth century.
I decided to start by looking for a man in his twenties or thirties. A census search turned up both a Vernon and a V. H. Johnson in that age range in Jefferson Davis County in 1940, but I did not even know if he lived there seven years before he died. To find out more, I broadened my search, combing through long lists of Black Johnsons in nearby counties that shared boundaries with Jeff Davis: Covington, Lawrence, Simpson, and Marion. Then I added other nearby counties. When I hit a dead end, I read the original handwritten census tract sheets, which have also been photographed and digitized, to check the spelled-out names against the indexes and account for the not-at-all-rare errors in transcription. Staring at all those names, I grew more and more worried that this search would fail.
Then one day I got lucky. I found a Versie Johnson, age four, living with his parents, Bill and Lizzie Johnson, in the 1920 census for Lincoln County, Mississippi. It was easy enough to find Bill and Lizzie on the same or a nearby rented farm in Lincoln County in 1910, four years before their son was born. Using these names for Versie Johnson’s parents, I systematically searched again in broadening circles out from Lincoln County. Remembering that a few papers had said he was a veteran, I searched military records. Those reports were wrong. But I did find a World War II draft registration for “Versey Johnson,” living in the town of D’Lo in Simpson County, with a mother named Lizzie Johnson living in Jeff Davis County.
To me, that draft registration coupled with the 1940 census listing for Vernon and his mother living near Prentiss proved this was the right Versie Johnson. But I hired a specialist in Black genealogy, Sharon Morgan, to check my work. When I laid it all out for her, she was skeptical. That 1940 census said Versie Johnson and his mom lived with Reggie and Velma Knight, his brother-in-law and sister, and I had not documented a sibling with that name. Sharon then did more research.
When she found Versie Johnson’s sister Eula Mae and her husband, Reggie Knight, through the World War II draft registration of their son Reggie Knight Jr., she emailed me the discovery with the subject line “Eureka!” That find led back to the 1940 census entry that I had found where the census taker had probably gotten Eula Mae’s name wrong or listed her under a nickname. Velma had to be Eula Mae. Then Sharon advised me to request the birth and death certificates from the Mississippi State Department of Health to confirm that the elusive Johnson we were tracking was the man who had died in Prentiss on August 1, 1947. When those certificates arrived, it was clear. We had found him.
Putting together these government records for Versie Johnson with the documents that describe his ancestors and siblings, I can tell a story about his birth, his childhood, and some of his adulthood. What I cannot tell you is whether he preferred to spell his name Versie or Versey. I have chosen Versie, because it appears early, in the 1910 census when he was four, and then shows up again at the end, when one of his sisters provided the information for his death certificate. In the absence of more substantial records about Versie Johnson’s life, such hints about how he lived—his preferences, pleasures, and pains—are doubly precious.
It was cold for southern Mississippi and probably still dark when Bill Johnson slipped out of his family’s cabin near the crossroads settlement of Nola. Lizzie Cooper Johnson’s pains had started. Lord willing, this child would be their seventh, and Lizzie’s labor was likely to proceed quickly. It was time to get help.
Bill probably hitched the mule to the wagon, drove to the midwife Henrietta Jett’s house, and carried her back. If she lived close, he might have walked or sent their oldest son, Willie, then around ten. Their girls Ella and Cora were fourteen and thirteen, but they would have been helping their mother, and Black parents in Jim Crow Mississippi were reluctant to send a daughter out alone before light. Eula Mae, around nine, would probably take care of little Gertrude, two, if she woke up. At six, son Jesse was old enough to mind himself.
Whoever went, the message got through. Henrietta Jett probably arrived sometime that morning. In rural Mississippi in 1915, Black women usually gave birth at home, attended by midwives. Jett, who had lived in that part of what was then western Lawrence County and eastern Lincoln for decades, might have delivered some of Lizzie and Bill’s other children, too. So far, all of Lizzie’s babies had lived. For a while, at least, this one would be no different.
Around thirty-five and an experienced mother, Lizzie Johnson carried the memory of what to do in her muscles and joints as well as her head. She knew. She also had women there to help her, probably her mother, Clara Cooper, and her sisters, Anna and Ella. When the midwife arrived, she would have put her hands on Lizzie’s body to check the baby’s position and if necessary, worked to try to turn the child in the womb. If the baby was lined up right, Jett and the other women would have wiped Lizzie’s brow, held her hand, and helped her through the contractions. Sometime in the late morning, the circle of Black women would have watched as the little head crowned. A few more hard pushes, and this part of Lizzie’s labor at least was done. The Johnsons had a new son.
Versie Johnson’s mom probably held him as Jett cut the umbilical cord and then used a soft rag to wipe the blood and vernix from his skin. Taking in her tiny boy, Lizzie would have noticed if he had his father’s nose or her brother’s mouth or her grandma Rachel’s chin. When at last the baby was clean and swaddled and suckling at Lizzie’s breast, Jett marked the time. A week later when she filled out the paperwork with the county registrar, she listed the time of birth as 10 a.m. on November 23, 1915, and the place as the Nola voting precinct in Lawrence County, just to the east of the Lincoln County line and near the Fair River settlement where Lizzie grew up.
Lizzie and Bill Johnson favored family names. They called their first child, Ella, for one of Lizzie’s sisters, their first son, Willie, after his father, and their second son, Jesse, for Lizzie’s brother. It was possible the name they chose for this new baby, their seventh child, was also a family name, too. Alternately, Lizzie, who unlike her husband could read and write, might have come across the name at school or in a book or newspaper. Virginous, the name on the birth certificate, was an unusual choice, and by the time their youngest child was four, his parents would shorten it to Versie.
Growing up in Fair View, Lizzie Cooper completed the eighth grade, at that time the first year of high school—a notable achievement for a Black woman raised in the rural South at the end of the nineteenth century. While Lizzie was still in school, Bill, about five years older, lived with his first wife. People married young in the country. Surviving records do not reveal whether Bill had any children from this union, or what broke up their marriage. Bill’s first wife might have died giving birth or left her husband for someone else. Or maybe Bill left her for Lizzie. However that relationship ended, in December 1898 Versie Johnson’s parents, Bill and Lizzie, married in Lincoln County, not far from the Nola district of Lawrence County where their son would be born nearly two decades later. In January of 1900 they had Ella.
A few months later, the census taker found the new mother and the baby with Lizzie’s grandmother Rachel Baggett. Lizzie’s parents lived next door in the house where Lizzie grew up. James and Clara Cooper were probably renters rather than sharecroppers, because they stayed on the same land in the Fair River voting precinct in Lincoln County for decades. This distinction meant the Coopers had resources—their own tools and a mule and other animals—and thus paid a set amount for the land they farmed rather than a percentage of the crop they grew. Rachel Baggett, Clara’s mother, had her own separate dwelling on this land, where she lived alone after her husband, Jack Baggett, died sometime between 1870 and 1880.
Lizzie began her life as a new mother there, surrounded by family and at home, in the place where she had always lived. Her grandma Rachel Baggett had been enslaved when she had her own children. But Lizzie’s mother, Clara Baggett Cooper, had been able to draw on Rachel’s help and wisdom as she gave birth during Reconstruction to her first baby, Anna, and in the years after, to at least seven more children. As Lizzie became a parent, she in turn relied on her ma and grandma as well as her pa, her siblings, and other members of an extended family whose bonds had survived slavery.
But Bill, her husband of about two years, was living elsewhere when the 1900 census worker knocked on Lizzie’s grandmother’s door. There were many possible destinations that could take a Black man in Mississippi away from his wife and new baby at this time, not all of them good. About twenty miles southwest of Fair River, the Butterfield Lumber Company paid Black men good money, and Bill Johnson might have been away working at their Norfield sawmill or on a crew cutting logs or laying railroad track in southern Lincoln County, trying to earn some money in order to set up a new household with Lizzie and Ella. Alternately, Bill might have been a prisoner. As far as southern law enforcement officials were concerned, Black men were guilty, if not of the particular crime at hand, then of another for which they had not been caught. Penitentiaries and jails needed bodies, people to work the prison farm or laundry or to serve on chain gangs building county roads or to lease out to white landowners or businessmen who used them as household servants, farm laborers, or members of turpentine crews. If Bill was not imprisoned or working in the timber industry, he might have still been living with his first wife despite his marriage to Lizzie. In the 1900 census, I found Bill and Willie and William Johnsons the right age in all these scenarios.
Whatever caused Bill and Lizzie’s separation, they started their life as a family apart. Yet the land and the promise of independence from whites that it enabled, even for sharecroppers, would help bring them together again.
At some point between 1900 and 1910, the Johnson family reunited and got a farm, what locals called the process of entering a contract with a landowner to live on and work particular acres for around half of the crop. They were poor, for sure. No one with other options made this choice. The work was endless, the risk high, and the pay as often as not virtually nothing. The children came fast, seven in fifteen years, a period in which Lizzie was almost always pregnant or nursing. Like many sharecroppers, the Johnsons sometimes moved after the year-end settle, looking for richer soil or a more generous landlord. But they did not go far. They had married in Lincoln back in 1898, and census takers found them there, in the eastern part of that county, in 1910 and 1920. When Versie Johnson was born, either they had settled just across the line in western Lawrence County or the midwife had been confused about their location. All these places were close to Lizzie’s parents in Fair River.
Like most farmers in Mississippi, the Johnsons organized the rhythms of their collective life around the cotton crop. At times, every member of the family strong enough to hold a hoe or pull the fibers out of the bolls probably labored in the fields. Other tasks—work in the house, the garden, the yard, and the barn—were usually divided according to gender. Lizzie would have taught the girls to piece quilts, sew clothes, and cook and preserve the food they grew, passing along the lessons she learned from her granny Rachel and her ma. The boys would have followed Bill everywhere and learned by watching how to dress fish and game, call out “gee” and “haw” to turn the mule, and pull the teats just right so the cow gave the most milk.
Winter was short in the southern part of the state. By the time the new baby was two months old, his father and oldest brother and maybe a sister or two had started breaking up the soil and setting the rows in the fields, preparing for the planting that would start in early March. After the cotton sprouted, whoever was needed helped with the thinning. In April, they “chopped” the cotton, cutting the weeds away from the crop. As the plants grew bigger, Bill used the mule to plow the rows while some of the kids came behind with hoes, cutting the weeds where the plow could not reach. If the whole family worked the fields, Lizzie or Ella probably tied little Versie on her back and told Jesse, too young to get much done with the heavy hoe, to keep an eye on the toddler Gertrude. When it got hot and sweat soaked through the men’s and boys’ overalls and wet the back of the women’s and girls’ dresses, someone—possibly Eula Mae—filled a bucket at the spring and toted it and a tin cup up and down the rows, giving everyone a cool drink.
