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olhanson
, February 05, 2007
(view all comments by olhanson)
“My Mother’s Witness: The Peggy Morgan Story” by Carolyn Haines tells such a story of pure meanness and evil that, at times, it’s hard to allow yourself to believe it really is the truth. This biography is the story of Inez Albritton and her daughter Peggy Albritton Morgan, two women whose lives paralleled each other in a “world that was in torment and transition—a mirror image of the turmoil and violence within their family. Within their society,” Haines writes, right down to their connection to “two of the most notorious racial murders committed in Mississippi.”
Peggy Albritton, sixth child of Gene and Inez Albritton, vowed to never live the life her mother had lived in Greenwood. Inez had married and remarried Gene, then was beaten by him within an inch of her life on a regular basis, often in front of little Peggy and the other children. Inez was forced to work back-breaking labor or starve even while Gene made money selling illegal moonshine, keeping the money for himself and the women he had on the side. Inez had nothing to call her own except her children and the certainty that she had to tell someone what she’d heard her husband, some relatives and friends discussing—the circumstances surrounding the death of Emmett Till in Money, Miss., that horrible night in 1955. When Gene realized what his wife knew, he beat her “until she was unconscious, and then ordered the children to put her in a tub of cold water,” Haines writes. “He had pulled her from the water, his fingers twisting in the wet material of her dress, and told her if she ever spoke the name Emmett Till again, she would pay a terrible price.” Years later, as her mind broke more and more beneath the weight of the truth, Inez said to Peggy, “’I haven’t forgotten. What they don’t want me to say. … About the colored boy … I know the truth. Tell the truth, Peggy. You have to tell the truth.’’
For Peggy Albritton, the truth was that she desperately wanted out of her life on Basket Street in Greenwood, so much so that when Lloyd Morgan—a man as handsome to her as Elvis Presley—came along and treated her as someone of value, she went against the wishes of both her parents and married him just after she turned 17—and soon relived her mother’s nightmare roller coaster ride. Before she finally divorced him in 1983, Morgan had been beaten, cheated on, lied to, threatened, and left to fend for herself and their three children alone.
The final horrible strand that connected Morgan with her mother came about one July 4th weekend in the early ‘70s. Morgan found herself in the front seat of her 1964 red and white Ford, between her husband and Byron De La Beckwith, on the way to Parchman to visit her husband’s brother. As they passed a group of blacks walking alongside the road, Beckwith began a white-supremacist diatribe, ending with a confession: “’I killed that nigger, Medgar Evers,” he repeated several times.
Like her mother, Morgan was not able to forget what Beckwith had said. Even though the memories nearly cost her her sanity, in the end—by telling them to district attorney Bobby DeLaughter and later at Beckwith’s third and final trial in 1994—Morgan not only made peace for herself, but she vindicated her mother—who had told her over and over that telling the truth was the only way.
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