The year I was 15, I liked nothing better than driving my 1979 Caprice Classic out into the Mississippi Delta. As long as I was in town, I'd follow the speed limit, but as soon as I crossed the bridge spanning the Tallahatchie, I'd slam the gas pedal flat to the floor, racing down Money Road, a long straight shot cutting through the flat expanse of cotton and soybeans fields. There was only one sharp curve where you had to be careful, right near the Little Mt. Zion Missionary Baptist Church, where Robert Johnson is buried. Money Road led out to what once had been known as Money, Mississippi, but by 1989 was nothing but a decaying cluster of buildings. I was drawn to one in particular, a crumbling two-story structure collapsing under the kudzu. I never went inside. PRIVATE PROPERTY, red letters on a white sign stated, NO TRESPASSING. VIOLATORS WILL BE PROSECUTED. Instead, I sat in the Caprice, listening to music, staring at that building. There I would think about the 14-year-old boy who had once come all the way to the Delta from Chicago to visit his cousins, whose death sparked the civil rights movement, whose legacy, given the recent attacks on Black history, on libraries, and on education by Republican ideologues, has been on my mind.
Even though I lived in Leflore County, where the young boy last ran around and played with his cousins, four miles from the grocery where he crossed paths with the White woman, still living, still free, who bears responsibility for his death, I only learned about him in ninth grade in my Mississippi History class at Pillow Academy. However, when my teacher told us about him, he wasn't the lost son from Jet Magazine who became the symbol of the civil rights movement, nor was he the falsely-accused predator of Look Magazine, but instead he was this kid, the same age as most of us, who had come to Mississippi from Chicago to visit his cousins, and had crossed paths with the wrong rednecks.
