It was a bristling assault. I was standing in the crowd, watching Warren blast away, and just over his left shoulder I could see "SUGGS" hanging from the window.
Theo began by introducing his wife, Rex Ella, a Mabry from right here in Clanton. He talked about her parents and her grandparents, and her aunts and uncles, and before long Theo had mentioned half the crowd. Clanton was his second home, his district, his people, the constituents he worked so hard to serve down in Jackson.
It was smooth, fluid, off-the-cuff. I was listening to a master on the stump.
He was chairman of the Highways Committee in the state senate, and for a few minutes he bragged about all the new roads he'd built in north Mississippi. His committee handled four hundred separate pieces of legislation each session. Four hundred! Four hundred bills, or laws. As chairman, he was responsible for writing laws. That's what state senators did. They wrote good laws and killed bad laws.
His young opponent had just finished law school, a notable accomplishment. He, Theo, didn't get the chance to go to college because he was off fighting the Japs in World War II. But anyway, his young opponent had evidently neglected his study of the law. Otherwise, he would've passed the bar exam on the first try.
Instead, "he flunked the bar exam, ladies and gentlemen!"
With perfect timing, someone standing just behind young Warren yelled out, "That's a damned lie!" The crowd looked at Warren as if he'd lost his mind. Theo turned to the voice and said incredulously, "A lie?"
He reached into his pocket and whipped out a folded sheet of paper. "I've got the proof right here!" He pinched a corner of the paper and began waving it about. Without reading a single word of whatever was printed on it, he said, "How can we trust a man to write our laws when he can't even pass the bar exam? Mr. Warren and I stand on equal footing - neither of us has ever passed the bar exam. Problem is, he had three years of law school to help him flunk it."
Theo's supporters were yelping with laughter. Young Warren held his ground but wanted to bolt.
Theo hammered away. "Maybe if he'd gone to law school in Mississippi instead of Tennessee then he'd understand our laws!"
He was famous for such public butcherings. He'd once humiliated an opponent who'd left the pulpit under a cloud. Pulling an "affidavit" from his pocket, Theo claimed he had proof that the "ex-reverend" had an affair with a deacon's wife. The affidavit was never read.
The ten-minute limit meant nothing to Theo. He blew through it with a series of promises to cut taxes and waste and do something to make sure murderers got the death penalty more often. When he finally wound down, he thanked the crowd for twenty years of faithful support. He reminded us that in the last two elections the good folks of Ford County had given him, and Rex Ella, almost 80 percent of their votes.
The applause was loud and long, and at some point Warren disappeared. So did I. I was tired of speeches and politics.
* * *
Four weeks later, around dusk on the first Tuesday in August, much of the same crowd gathered around the courthouse for the vote counting. It had cooled off considerably; the temperature was only ninety-two with 98 percent humidity.
The final days of the election had been a reporter's dream. There was a fistfight between two Justice of the Peace candidates outside a black church. There were two lawsuits, both of which accused the other side of libel and slander and distributing phony sample ballots. One man was arrested when he was caught in the act of spray painting obscenities on one of Theo's billboards. (As it turned out, after the election, the man had been hired by one of Theo's henchmen to defile the senator's signs. Young Warren still got the blame. "A common trick," according to Baggy.) The state's Attorney General was asked to investigate the high number of absentee ballots. "Typical election," was Baggy's summary. Things came to a peak on that Tuesday, and the entire county stopped to vote and enjoy the sport of a rural election.
The polls closed at six, and an hour later the square was alive and wired with anticipation. People piled in from the county. They formed little groups around their candidate and even used campaign signs to stake off their territory. Many brought food and drink and most had folding lawn chairs as if they were there to watch a baseball game. Two enormous black chalkboards were placed side by side near the front door of the courthouse, and there the returns were tallied.
"We have the results from North Karaway," the clerk announced into a microphone so loud it could've been heard five miles away. The festive mood was immediately serious.
"North Karaway's always first," Baggy said. It was almost eight-thirty, almost dark. We were sitting on the porch outside my office, waiting for the news. We planned to delay press time for twenty-four hours and publish our "Election Special" on Thursday. It took some time for the clerk to read the vote totals for every candidate for every office. Halfway through she said, "And in the Sheriff's race." Several thousand people held their breath.
"Mackey Don Coley, eighty-four. Tryce McNatt, twenty-one. T. R. Meredith, sixty-two, and Freck Oswald, eleven." A loud cheer went up on the far side of the lawn where Coley's supporters were camped.
"Coley's always tough in Karaway," Baggy said. "But he's beat."
"He's beat?" I asked. The first of twenty-eight precincts were in, and Baggy was already predicting winners.
"Yep. For T.R. to run strong in a place where he has no base shows folks are fed up with Mackey Don. Wait'll you see the Clanton boxes."
Slowly, the returns dribbled in, from places I'd never heard of: Pleasant Hill, Shady Grove, Klebie, Three Corners, Clover Hill, Green Alley, Possum Ridge, Massey Mill, Calico Ridge. Woody Gates and the Country Boys, who seemed to always be available, filled in the gaps with some bluegrass.
The Padgitts voted at a tiny precinct called Dancing Creek. When the clerk announced the votes from there, and Coley got 31 votes and the other three got 8 combined, there was a refreshing round of boos from the crowd. Clanton East followed, the largest precinct and the one I voted in. Coley got 285 votes, Tryce 47, and when T.R.'s total of 644 was announced, the place went wild.
Baggy grabbed me and we celebrated with the rest of the town. Coley was going down without a runoff.
As the losers slowly learned their fate, they and their supporters packed up and went home. Around eleven, the crowd was noticeably thinner. After midnight, I left the office and strolled around the square, taking in the sounds and images of this wonderful tradition.
I was quite proud of the town. In the aftermath of a brutal murder and its baffling verdict, we had rallied, fought back, and spoken clearly that we would not tolerate corruption. The strong vote against Coley was our way of hitting at the Padgitts. For the second time in a hundred years, they would not own the Sheriff.
T. R. Meredith got 61 percent of the vote, a stunning landslide. Theo got 82 percent, an old-fashioned shellacking. We printed eight thousand copies of our "Election Edition" and sold every one of them. I became a staunch believer in voting every year. Democracy at its finest.
Chapter 28
A week before Thanksgiving in 1971, Clanton was rocked by the news that one of its sons had been killed in Vietnam. Pete Mooney, a nineteen-year-old staff sergeant, was captured in an ambush near Hue, in central Vietnam. A few hours later his body was found.
I didn't know the Mooneys, but Margaret certainly did. She called me with the news and said she needed a few days off. Her family had lived down the street from the Mooneys for many years. Her son and Pete had been close friends since childhood.