How Lena Gray & Al Thomas Saved My Life
I am reading The Help right now which is set in Jackson Mississippi where I grew up. Much of the film was shot there and in parts of the Mississippi Delta, and especially Greenwood Mississippi where I was born.
Every page in The Help — indeed almost every paragraph — evokes a memory, many of which I described several years ago in a novel set mostly in Jackson. That novel, Perfect Killer is part thriller and part family history relating my own coming-of-age story.
I thinly disguised my story and the family history: the protagonist, Bradford Stone is primarily me up until he gets kicked out of Ole Miss for leading a riot in 1967 and is subsequently disinherited from his portion in a Delta plantation owned by my grandparents, J.W. (“The Judge”) and Mattie (“Miss Sue”) Bradford. Get it? Bradford Stone is really a Bradford — my mother’s side of the family.
This undated photo of Lena Gray and Al Thomas was taken at my Aunt Jane Barner’s house in Ruleville, most likely in the 1970s
THINLY DISGUISING THE FAMILY HERITAGE
Because of all the historically accurate information — and some of my comments about the life and culture — I had to wait until my mother died before I could write this book. And I disguised two other important people in my life: Lena Gray and Al Thomas got renamed Grayson and Thompson. I did this because I took many fictional liberties with their lives and offspring in the years after I lost touch with them both.
Because my former publisher wanted a straight-forward thriller (and I wanted to interlace a whole ‘nother Delta novel inside it) much of the Mississippi story that means so much to me had to be edited out. I intend to remedy that by providing all the outtakes here on my blog and adding other memories evoked by The Help.
In Perfect Killer, I described how Al Thomas saved my life while Lena argued with him about exactly how he was going about it. Al was my grandmother Bradford’s full-time chauffeur and gardener. Lena was the full-time cook and domestic diva.
Both of them provided me with the stability and consistency that were lacking in my early family life: My mother and father somehow married each other and divorced each other three times by the time I was a sophomore in high school. They both subsequently married a fourth time — but not to each other.
INNOCULATIONS AGAINST RACISM
During the family chaos, Al and Lena were my rocks.
I have no doubt that this helped immunize me in a way that later allowed me to recognize and reject racism. And to get involved on the fringes of the civil rights movement in the mid-1960s
I explore that in Perfect Killer as I try to understand how good people can do evil things. Good Germans turned their heads from Nazis and death camps. For their part, good Mississippians turned their heads from the KKK and lynchings. That’s haunted me for decades. Still does. A lot of Perfect Killer, including the contemporary thriller, grapple with that.
GOOD TIMES WITH AL
As I read the first few chapters of The Help, Lena and Al’s faces kept coming back. And I remembered things: Lena’s house, good times with Al.
I went everywhere with Al. And as much as I loved my Papa– and cried for him all the times he was never living with us in Itta Bena — I spent more time with Al, learned more about life from him than I did my Papa. I’d ride with Al out to “the place” (Mossy Island Plantation – still owned by my cousin Billy).
Other times, I remember being in the back of a pickup (back when tailgates were secured with chains and steel hooks). I’d sit back there on the wheel well as we crossed the Roebuck Bridge heading for dusty roads and points east that I don’t remember so well now, given that my days with Al were all when I was maybe three to six … and not much afterwards.
I do, however, remember the spicy pungency of the DDT powder sifting down from an old Stearman biplane crop duster that would pass just over our heads. These were the pre-Rachel Carson days when organophosphates were our friends and helped by killing boll weevils and mosquitoes … but we still got vaccines against Typhoid fever because the mosquitoes maintained that disease at endemic levels.
Al also kept an eye on me when he was tending bar at the American Legion hutch at the east end of downtown. Mind you, Prohibition was still the law of the land in Mississippi. The saying was that Prohibition would last as long as the Baptists could stagger to the polls. There was even an official Black Market tax on bootleggers and places like the American Legion hutch … which also had slot machines as well. Blind eyes were turned.
I’d play outside on the howitzer, but mostly inside where he could make sure I wasn’t getting into trouble, which I did a lot. Like the day I snuck off to the back entrance of the post office with the son of a crop-duster I wasn’t supposed to play with (white trash my Mama said). We were just a couple of five year-olds hanging out and getting in the way of people. I don’t remember what kind of trouble we caused that day. However, I do remember my friend managed to escape. And I found myself stuffed in a heavy canvas mail bag that was special delivered to Al. I recall that Al was emptying the change out of the slot machines when I got dragged in.
LENA’S HOUSE, AL’S STREET
Lena Gray’s house was in Balance Due, the “nigrah” section of Itta Bena. It was called Balance Due because everybody there owed “The Man” and the balance was always due.
Balance Due was a place where few white folks and no young heirs to plantations ever went. But I must have been with Al Thomas that day.
Lena’s house in Balance Due was little more than a shack you reached by walking over a 2X12 board that spanned a ditch that served as an open sewer. That’s about all I remember of Lena’s house. I am told that Mamie (my grandmother Bradford which everyone called “Miss Sue”) deeded the house over to Lena in her will. She also left Al the deed to his house. I hope this is true.
In 2003 and 2004, when I spent a lot of time back in Itta Bena and the Delta doing research for Perfect Killer, I searched for Lena’s house. I couldn’t find it because the ditches were gone. Homes were still modest, but several cuts above ramshackle and folks had indoor plumbing. There are still way too many shacks where poverty spills from the doors and windows like an avalanche.
I remember looking for Al Thomas Street which was on the map, but had no sign on the ground. When I went to city hall — located in the old marble building once occupied by a bank that Daddy owned part of — the workers there laughed at my offer to pay for a sign.
