Leppo’s body sagged perceptibly, as though something, some entity, had fled his body as he died.
When the Montclair cops burst inside the bedroom, they found a young woman sitting on the floor with her arms around a sobbing, trembling nine-year-old girl with a deep knife wound on her shoulder. A middle-aged man lay slumped against the girl’s nightstand and bed, dead from two gunshot wounds. The young woman pulled one arm away from the thrashing, wailing girl, showing the armed police officers her FBI badge.
“Agent down…” Odessa said, hyperventilating. “Agent down…”
1962. The Mississippi Delta.
He was briefed on the investigation by a supervisory special agent on the short predawn flight from Knoxville into Jackson, Mississippi. The particulars of the case featured many notable peculiarities, but the fact that the Bureau had chartered an airplane to expedite his immediate reassignment to the Jackson Field Office—he, Earl Solomon, a twenty-eight-year-old rookie FBI special agent just four months graduated from the academy—indicated above all else that this was to be no ordinary inquiry.
A sedan picked him up from the airport tarmac for the long ride north on Route 49 into the Delta. Aside from an initial, perfunctory greeting, the driver, a white agent in his late thirties with a twang in his voice that was just this side of hillbilly, remained silent during the ride, preferring to flick cigarette ashes out his open window rather than dirty the dashboard ashtray. Solomon understood the dynamic. He also understood why he had been dispatched to this tinderbox of civil rights activism and violence. It had nothing to do with his abilities as an agent, nor with his experience, which was almost nil. A disturbing number of lynchings had occurred recently in the Delta, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation was being stonewalled by local law enforcement. They needed to present a black face to the locals.
Solomon was one of the first three black agents accepted into the FBI Academy earlier that year. In his few months in Knoxville, he had gotten along fairly well with his fellow agents, most of whom had military experience and so had previous exposure to integration. Solomon supposed he had endured no more than any other green agent learning the ropes through the most menial assignments. When the call came in the middle of the night for him to report to the office, he didn’t know what to expect, but it certainly wasn’t a flight to Jackson, Mississippi, to join his first active criminal investigation. His special agent in charge in Knoxville intimated that the reassignment order may have come directly from Mr. Hoover himself. Solomon felt the eyes of the Bureau upon him.
Because this was no ordinary investigation. Another lynching had occurred, this one in a remote, wooded thicket, apparently with ritualistic aspects at the scene. Local law had cited irreligious characteristics of the crime, reported as “satanism,” but there were no crime scene photographs yet and local law was notoriously unreliable. That wasn’t the most incendiary part of this homicide, however.
This time the lynching was of a white man.
The local agent drove him northwest from Jackson, up Route 49, north of Greenwood, well west of Oxford. The town was called Gibbston, a fertile stretch of land between the Mississippi and the Yazoo Rivers where cotton—and the white race—was king.
They pulled up outside the post office, a small shack that looked like a bait shop with a faded federal shield on the door. The Jackson agent got out and waited for Solomon to join him, though never looking Solomon in the eye. They crossed the street to a clutch of white men in suits without jackets, fanning themselves with their hats, mopping their brows with sweat-dampened handkerchiefs. Solomon was introduced to the local sheriff, two deputies, and the Jackson special agent in charge, whose last name was Macklin.
“When they said they were sending somebody named Solomon to help with the interviews,” said Macklin, “I told them we needed a Negro, not a Jew.”
Macklin’s mouth unzipped a thin-lipped smile that revealed his teeth the way a surgeon’s incision reveals interior organs. The other men smiled also and waited for Solomon to respond, so that they would know what kind of Negro they had on their hands here. Solomon looked each man in the eye, letting them twist in suspense a few moments longer than necessary, then nodded and smiled. He needed their help, and he was the low man on the totem pole—if he was even on the totem pole.
There was more idle talk, but Solomon became distracted, his attention tuned to singing in the nearby church. There was, in the congregation’s voices, none of the joy he associated with a Southern Baptist service:
He goes before me,
And is beside me,
So I am not afraid.
It was a mournful song. There was great anxiety in the air, hanging oppressively along with the heat and the humidity. Assigning Solomon here showed desperation on the part of the FBI, perhaps at the direction of the White House. Dispatching him to Gibbston to liaise with the Negro community in the Deep South was akin to sending a Communist to listen to the concerns of pinkos.
The service ended and the churchgoers started filing out. Dressed in their Sunday best, they made their way down the steps to the dirt sidewalk, the men replacing their hats upon their heads.
Macklin and the others had advice for Solomon. “Just let them see you here, let ’em get curious. You don’t want to scare anybody.”
But Solomon knew that Sunday morning from eleven A.M. to noon was the only time the majority of the local black community would or could assemble. Missing this opportunity meant waiting another week at the very least.
He said as much to SAIC Macklin.
“No,” Macklin told him, “we’ll go around and do some interviews individually later today and tomorrow.”
Solomon watched the churchgoers saying their goodbyes and getting ready to disperse. He thought that there was an element of…if not fear, then trepidation, in Macklin’s desire for him to avoid this crowd.
“Sir,” said Solomon, already stepping into the street, “I’m going.”
Solomon got halfway there before he realized the men were following him. Solomon couldn’t have that. Why was he here, otherwise?
“Sirs,” he said, “I think it best you wait here.”
And they did. Solomon continued across the street, and he saw the congregants watching him come. They saw that he had stopped the white lawmen from accompanying him. They were stunned that a young black man had such authority.
“Good day, ladies and gentlemen,” he said, introducing himself to the silent observers. “I am Special Agent Earl Solomon.” He showed them his badge and ID card from his flip book, then replaced it inside his jacket breast pocket. He noticed many of them looking past him at the white lawmen across the street. “The Bureau dispatched me here to Gibbston to assist in the investigation of the homicides by lynching.”
The pastor emerged from the church doors, stopping on the top step, behind the faithful. He had shed his robe, dressed in an open-necked white cotton shirt and dark slacks, mopping at his brow. A blaze of silver in his black hair distinguished him with the effect of a candle in the darkness.
Solomon nodded to him respectfully, but felt an unusual suspicion in the preacher’s manner. Perhaps the pastor was simply unused to another black man compelling the attention of his assembled faithful.