“Didn’t anything happen to you?” Doar asked.
“Oh, yes,” Steptoe said, “they tried. They sent and told my father to come on over to their place, but I told him, ‘Dad, don’t go over there; that’s a trap he got set for you.’ So my Dad didn’t go. A few days later he come see my Dad and made ‘tend he was sorry and said he was wrong.”
“Are you taking any special precautions now?” Doar asked anxiously. Being Steptoe was a risky business.
“I maybe ought not to say this,” Steptoe said. “If they get me I don’t care, but we have our guns loaded, and they know this.”
Steptoe lifted up a couch pillow to reveal a concealed pistol. Then he showed Doar a shotgun he kept behind the door.
“The sheriff has been up here,” Steptoe added. “I asked him what he want at my place. ‘Just checkin’,’ he says. ‘Just checkin’.’ But I know he was checkin’ whether he could hide hisself and find a way to bump me off, or kill someone else, whatnot.”
“The sheriff?” Doar looked troubled.
“Oh, yes, here in this county every time a white man beats a Negro or kills a Negro, he gets promoted to higher office. Here in Amite County you don’t know what might happen; you don’t know what might take place. And you want somebody with you who is not afraid to tell what happened to you, if something happen to you. Because here in Amite County they’re afraid to tell who did it; afraid to tell how it happened; ’cause they’re afraid the same thing will happen to them.”
After we left Steptoe’s farm, Doar and I drove over to Herbert Lee’s place to take an affidavit from him. The children were out back by the barn playing hide-and-seek. They cried, “Bob, Bob,” when they saw us and ran up to see the new car Doar had rented in New Orleans. Their father wasn’t home.
On the drive back to McComb, we were both deep in thought. Finally, Doar broke the silence.
“It’s hard to believe,” he said, his voice wavering, “that this is America.”
2
A few days later I was in the Masonic Hall when the phone rang. It was Doc Anderson at the Negro funeral home in McComb.
“There’s a body down here,” he said somberly. “We’d like you to come over and see if you can identify it.”
My heart sank with apprehension.
“It’s a Negro male,” he continued, “short, about fifty. Shot in the head.”
“Where was he killed?” I asked, fearing that I already knew the answer.
“In Liberty.”
The body, still in farm clothes, was stretched out on a cold metal table; a small dark hole was visible above the left ear.
It was Herbert Lee.
Lee had been shot at A. B. Westbrook’s cotton gin early that morning. The body had been left uncovered where it fell. No one, black or white, in Liberty would touch it. Finally a hearse was summoned from McComb. The few blacks at the scene were too frightened to even say the dead man’s name.
“Was it Hurst?”
“Why, yes!” Doc Anderson looked at me with perplexity and surprise. “It was self-defense. Seems Lee went berserk and attacked Hurst with a tire iron.”
“Says who?”
“There’s no point getting upset. Five people witnessed it. Three of them were Negroes. They all told the same story. Seems Lee owed Hurst some money. A coroner’s jury has already acquitted him.”
“Naturally.”
I waited for nightfall, and then Curtis Bryant and I drove the pitch-black back roads of Amite County until I found someone brave enough to talk. Louis Allen, one of the three Negroes who had seen Hurst shoot Lee, was willing to tell the truth:
“I’d been haulin’ logs in my truck that morning,” Allen said, “but it broke down, so I was walkin’ into town to get a fan belt when I come by the gin. I saw Herbert Lee drive in with a truck-load of cotton. He was waitin’ in line when Mr. Hurst nosed up behind him in an empty pickup, the blue one that belongs to Billy Jack Caston. I heard some yellin’, an’ I knew I ought to keep walkin’, but I turned my head an’ saw Mr. Hurst shoutin’ at Herbert Lee. I was standin’ off to the side by a telephone pole. I didn’t think they could see me, but I could see them. I knew I shoulda kept goin’, but I couldn’t move. I saw it all.
“Hurst come over to Lee’s truck, on the driver’s side, an’ was shoutin’ about somethin’. He waved his arms in the air; then he pulled a pistol from his belt—I think it was a .38—an’ pointed it at Lee.
“‘I’m not foolin’ with you this time,’ Hurst yelled. ‘I mean business.’
“‘Put that gun down,’ Herbert say, ‘or I ain’t talkin.’
“Hurst stuck that pistol back in his belt under his coat, an’ Lee slid across the front seat an’ got out on the passenger side. I think he wanted to keep somethin’ solid between them an’ talk to Hurst over the hood of his truck. But Hurst, he run ‘round the front, out come that pistol again, an’ he shoots Lee right in the head from a few feet away.
“I hurried on away from there as fast as I could, hopin’ nobody seen me. But they come for me at the garage an’ taken me to the courthouse. They had them a roomful of armed men, an’ the Deputy Sheriff, Daniel Jones, he tole me that what they had was a clear case of self-defense. He said they found a weapon under Lee’s body. ‘If you just say that Herbert Lee had him a tire tool,’ he said, ‘there won’t be no trouble.’”
To protect his family, Allen lied to the coroner’s jury. He said that Lee had swung at Hurst with a tire iron and that the gun had gone off accidentally as Hurst was whacking Lee on the head. The jury decided it was a case of justifiable homicide, declaring that Hurst acted “in defense of his person while being attacked by the deceased with a deadly weapon . . . known as a tire tool.”
“I didn’t run,” I saw Hurst boast to reporters, who must have noted that he was nearly a foot taller and at least fifty pounds heavier than the man who allegedly attacked him. “I got no rabbit in me.” Hurst had known Lee since they were boys; he claimed that the dispute had nothing to do with civil rights but was over five hundred dollars. “That son of a bitch owed me,” he said.
I called John Doar and told him what I had learned.
“Doc Anderson didn’t find any powder burns,” I reported.
“I’ll have the FBI photograph the body and examine the entry wound,” Doar replied. “If there were no powder burns, and this eyewitness you’ve found will change his testimony, we might have a case against Hurst.”
The next day at the funeral, Mrs. Lee, shaking from grief and with reproach in her eyes, confronted me. “You killed my husband!” she wailed. “You killed my husband!” Her words cut me to the quick, but even harder to take was the fact that none of her nine children, lined up in the front row, would look me in the face. Even though Herbert Lee was my friend, and I had wanted only the best, I felt the sting of complicity in his death. I knew that martyrs in the Movement were inevitable, but why did