The Brass Balls of Handsome Bailey

The following article contains anti-Black racial slurs.

There are some things in life that just have to be done. The Irish have to kiss the Blarney Stone, Muslims have to make it to Mecca, salmon have to swim back to where they were born to hatch a brood before they die . . . and Handsome Bailey has to lie.

Me, I believe I’d die if I couldn’t get back to the place in south Mississippi where I was born every three or four years. I have to go to the old home place, stir up some mustard greens with some collards, a few turnip tops, wild dandelions and poke salad mixed in. Cook ’em down with lots of garlic and onions, some okra and a few pods of pepper and serve them with pan-fried corn meal spoon bread . . . for that I’d walk into the White House and slap Bill Clinton.

The last time I made it back to Mustard Mecca I was about to sit down to my first plate of greens and here come a chauffeur-driven Cadillac car long enough to put a pool in. Out comes His Honor, Congressman Handsome Bailey. With his high-priced patent leather shoes, he slipped in a fresh cow pie. He came toward the back door calling, “Junebug! Hey Junebug! Where you at, man?” trying to clean his foot as he walked.

I put aside my greens, knowing he’d track mess all over our house without a second thought. I popped the screen door and stood so he couldn’t get to the steps.

“Hey, Brother Junebug, I’m so glad you’re back in town, man. I’ve got the redistricting blues. We need to relight the flames of struggle. They’re trying to rip us off again, Brother.”

“That ain’t news to me, Handsome, and it oughtn’t be news to you, considering how you voted on health care, welfare, education, affirmative action, and everything else that you or some friends of yours didn’t see a way to make money on.”

“I didn’t make the rules, Junebug. I’m just trying to keep us in the game. You know I’ve always been down with the struggle. I really need you to hook me up with that Brother from the VEP, Brown.”

I wouldn’t even help Handsome clean his stinky shoe. I don’t know what made him think I’d support his politics. Handsome always has had brass balls, I thought. He was born like that. B.B. King tagged Handsome in lines from his song, “Nobody loves me but my Mama / and she could be lying, too.”

Handsome is a strange name, but it’s particularly strange for him. His ears stick out at different angles, like a first-grader was trying to make a head out of clay and didn’t know where the ears were meant to go. But despite his appearance, Handsome’s very popular with a certain type of woman and has yet to lose an election.

 

Handsome was a child of wishes. His Mama, Ms. Mildred, wished the boy didn’t look like he’d been beat about the head with an ugly stick. Still, she acted like the sun rose and set on her Handsome. Bought him everything he wanted. His closet was bigger than most people’s houses. The daddy wished he could be certain that the child wasn’t his. “It don’t look like nothing that so much as passed through my family!”

His daddy, Mr. “One Stop” Bailey, had a store at the Mars Hill Crossroads. They called it Bailey’s Hill Top — One Stop Service Station & Gro. We called it One Stop cause if you stopped one time you wouldn’t stop no more. One Stop went for bad among black folk but was known to be more than a little skittish among white people.

What got me so upset with Handsome happened when I came out of the service in ’56. I’d joined the Voter Education Project to organize “citizenship education” classes to teach people to pass the “literacy test.” It was hard enough to get people to the point where they could read and interpret the state constitution, but when One Stop Bailey started the rumor that I’d got “shell-shocked” in Korea, people wouldn’t even come out to New Mt. Zion Church in the evenings to take the classes for fear I might get out of control, like Mr. Pud Johnson still did from time to time.

One Stop told everyone that he had seen plenty of cases of shell-shocked people during World War II and that I was worse than Pud had been when he first came back. I went out to the store one day to see why he was bad mouthing me. When I got there, he was sitting on the counter holding court like a judge. Most everyone there owed One Stop money, so they had to be careful.

“Why else would Junebug be running around the county trying to stir stuff up just when we got things moving on a smooth track? Ain’t been no bad trouble here since Col. Whitten’s cousin killed Miss Parker’s son (so they say) for trying to organize voter registration.”

“They got Frozine Johnson’s boy for the same thing last year,” said Jake Tucker.

“That boy died on the way to the hospital in Jackson,” One Stop said.

Mr. Joe Whittie, more independent than the other men there, said, “He didn’t need no trip to the hospital when they arrested him. Willie Gladstone told me that he had to wire that boy’s jaw to his cheekbone to keep his mouth shut for the funeral.”

“That would’ve been the only way to shut that nigger’s mouth anyway. He wasn’t scared of nothing,” Willie Montgomery chipped in.

“All the more reason Junebug should not be tempting and teasing these crazy crackers about voting. I tell you, he’s shell-shocked and crazy as a rabid dog and twice as dangerous.”

“That’s the biggest lie I ever heard!” One Stop jumped like I had shot at him. “Mr. Bailey, you should be ashamed of yourself! You claiming to be a race man, too.”

“It’s a difference between a race man and a fool, Junebug. I been here a long time and intend to be here a good while longer.”

“If you scared of the white folk, just say so, but we’ve had as much as we’re going to take. You even got your 15-year-old son going all over the county lying on me. Is somebody paying you to keep us from voting? If it wasn’t for a pity I’d take you out and whip your butt myself.”

“See! What’d I tell y’all? He’s just like Pud Johnson!”

“You ought to stand strong for the progress of the race. You got your own business, and I sure don’t see no white folk in here spending their money to make you rich. And they sure as hell ain’t paying you rent for them little shack houses you got all around the county.”

“People need what I got to offer, Junebug. And they don’t need you. You so crazy, you don’t see the gun that’s pointed at your head, boy. You can go anywhere, do anything you want, but we got to live ’mongst these crazy crackers. Why don’t you go on about your business and leave well enough alone?”

It took some years before I found out why One Stop acted like he did. One Stop was up to his eyeballs in debt. He had money to handle — he didn’t have money to keep. What he did get, Ms. Mildred spent as quick as she could get her hands on it.

He did his banking at Col. T.L. Whitten’s bank up in McComb. Like most of the other property owners around there, white as well as black, One Stop couldn’t go outside to relieve himself without Whitten’s say so. The colonel told One Stop, “I don’t see where niggers need no vote.” That was all One Stop needed to know that I had to go.

With One Stop and Handsome working one side of the street and Whitten working the other, I didn’t stand the chance of a snowball in hell. Feeling like a prophet in his homeland, I went somewhere else to work.

But Whitten, One Stop, and the others like them had misread the flow of history. They couldn’t keep us from winning our right to vote. But when it got so it was safe for black folk to run for office, we let our guard down. Handsome Bailey was the first one to jump to the front of the line to run for office. He claimed he had been a leader in the struggle for our rights. And that was the least of the lies he told. He won a seat in the State Legislature and stood there for three terms before they elected him to Congress. I couldn’t say that all politicians lie as much as Handsome does, but he does seem right at home in that business.

The Voter Education Project is gone now. Toward the end, a friend of mine, Ed Brown, was running it. Ed had called on Handsome to help with some fundraising for VEP. Handsome told him, “What do I need to get more people on the rolls for? The ones who are already registered are the ones that voted me.”

“You burning the bridge that brought you over,” Ed had told him.

 

“. . . so that’s why I need you to contact your buddy, what’s his name . . . ?” Handsome finally stopped talking.

I wanted to insult the man, hurt him. I told him that the cow dung he was standing in smelled better than he did, but nothing I said moved him. Finally, I said to myself, some things just have to be done. I grabbed Handsome by the scruff of the neck and the seat of his pants and tossed him back in his Cadillac car and told the driver, “You better get him out of here before he really gets hurt.”

I went on back in the kitchen, but it was the next day before I could enjoy my greens like I wanted to.

Time went by. One Stop died from a stroke while ringing up a sale in his store. Too cheap to buy a grave, Handsome buried One Stop beside the gas pump, closed the store, and put Ms. Mildred in a rest home. Col. Whitten’s over 100 now. He wound up with the first statewide bank in Mississippi. Here lately I heard he financed Handsome in a string of convenience stores called Handsome’s Pantry — One Stop Stores. Meanwhile, the average black person is worse off than we were in ’56, but it won’t be long before that berry’s ready for the plucking.