were married in February of 1930 and Charlotte Custer-Payne moved into that house on Candle Street. She placed her delicates into the dresser drawers, hung her finery in the chifforobe, and set her parasol in the umbrella stand.
You already know that from the very beginning Hemmingway didn’t like Charlotte. Well, I’m sorry to tell you that the middle didn’t get any better.
Hemmingway continued to sabotage their meals, and when Charlotte addressed her, Hemmingway refused to respond. Any orders that Charlotte wanted carried out had to come from Cole.
A year into the marriage, Cole was at wit’s end. For the umpteenth time, he cornered Hemmingway and reprimanded her about her behavior. The young woman innocently batted her eyes and said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
The tension continued to build between the two women until it exploded in a screaming match that sent Charlotte flying from the kitchen in tears.
“She is the help! The HELP—and she talks to me like I am her employee!” she screamed into Cole’s flustered face. “I want her gone, out, now!”
What could he tell his sweet, pretty young wife? Certainly not the truth, which was that he kept the often rude and always stubborn Hemmingway in his employ as a penance for his wrongdoings. Instead he said, “I promised her mother that I would look after her.”
Charlotte was speechless and hurt. She picked up a bottle of perfume and hurled it against the bedroom wall.
Charlotte took the issue to an acquaintance, and after a long, thoughtful moment, the woman said: “White men and Negro women been a problem since forever.”
Charlotte shuddered at the implication, but back on Candle Street she spat those same words in her husband’s face. Cole was shocked and began to stutter his defense.
Charlotte cut him off with a sweep of her hand. “If you don’t get rid of her, Cole, I swear I will smash everything in this house, and,” she added with fierce conviction, “that semen sack between your legs!”
Cole, of course, acquiesced and hired a man who owned a mule and wagon to cart Hemmingway and her belongings to a small house he owned, near the center of town. Hemmingway would live there for the rest of her years.
The years inched by, and in 1936, after Cole sold off the store and the house on Candle Street and moved to another part of the state, the postman walked right up to Hemmingway’s front door and placed an envelope in her hand. The contents included the deed to the house and ten crisp hundred-dollar bills.
Hemmingway hid the money away and continued to support herself by cooking and cleaning for other families on Candle Street. And like her mother, she made and sold johnnycakes. For the most part, she kept to herself.
In 1940, people began to notice that Hemmingway Hilson was putting on weight … in her midsection.
Not quite out of season, but no spring chicken— Hemmingway was nearly thirty years old. She didn’t have a husband and no one had ever seen her keeping company with a man.
Immaculate Conception?
“Nah,” someone laughed, “that only happens to white folk!”
People began placing bets on her due date—if she was in fact pregnant. She hit the waddling stage quick, so was further along than anyone had suspected.
Someone suggested that Cole Payne might be the father, even though he had moved away years earlier. That insinuation raised the stakes to include wagers on the infant’s color.
“Maybe she ain’t pregnant, maybe she’s just fat,” said the fat woman who looked pregnant.
The talk swirled and bubbled in a cauldron of gossip, but no one was bold enough to approach the often-salty woman and ask, “Hemmingway Hilson, you expecting?”
He had been such a sweet child, but after he died and came back again, he was different. J.W. was suddenly fond of torturing living things: cats, puppies, and fledglings. His own baby sister couldn’t escape his cruelty—one afternoon he bound her ankles and wrists with rope, propped her up against a tree, arranged wood and dried corn husks at her feet, and set it ablaze. Thank goodness a passerby saw the smoke and heard the boy whooping like an Indian, or else the girl would have burned to cinders.
His mother, Eula, made up all types of excuses for his devious behavior: He don’t mean no harm. Boys are mischievous by nature.
She coddled him, dubbed him extraordinary because he had died and come back to life. She called him “my little Jesus boy.”
The people around town called him the devil.
When the senior Milam died, Eula married a man named Charles Bryant. He wasn’t a sharecropper like her previous husband, but a businessman who owned two trucks and had purchased the grocery store from Cole Payne.
J.W. gave Charles Bryant the chills. One day he told Eula, “Something ain’t right with that boy.”
Eula rubbed her pregnant belly and retorted nas-tily, “Well, let’s see what your seed produces.”
Charles was hoping and praying for a girl, but Eula gave birth to a son, who they named Roy.
In 1942, J.W. was twenty-three years old and went down and enlisted himself in the army. He was deployed overseas where he could actively and openly pursue his burgeoning passion—murder.
He did it so well that he was awarded a Purple Heart and a Silver Star.
J.W. had departed Mississippi a scraggly specimen of a man, and returned a six-foot-two, 235-pound war hero.
“My Jesus boy!” Eula cried, and burst into tears, when he stepped out of the checkered cab.
His stepfather gave him a job as a truck driver and J.W. bedded every willing female who lived along his delivery route, which snaked through three states.
He eventually married a thick-legged girl named Juanita and the two settled into a small house on the outskirts of this place that I am.
When they made love, J.W. set the .45 he’d brought back from Europe on the nightstand. He enjoyed having it in his sights as he rammed himself mercilessly into his wife.
Juanita knew about the gun, but not the round metal tin which once held snuff, but was now filled with teeth. Teeth from the dead Germans he’d shot and killed in the war. He’d dislodged the teeth by holding the corpse by the hair and slamming the butt of the gun into its dead mouth.
In Mississippi, J.W. tried to feed his passion by hunting deer, possum, and wild Russian boar—but killing animals didn’t offer the same thrill as slaying a living, breathing human being.
When the Korean War began, J.W. went to the
