Sweetness_ The Enigmatic Life of Walter Payton - Jeff Pearlman [4]
The truth was significantly more complicated.
Located in the heart of Marion County, Mississippi, a mere 112 miles north of New Orleans, Columbia (population: 7,500), was a town long ruled by expectations. Met expectations. If you were black, your house was situated on the north side of Church Street, in a section branded “The Quarters.” If you were white, your house was located on the south side of Church Street. If you were black, at one time or another you likely worked at the Columbia Country Club, either caddying, cleaning, or cooking. If you were white, you likely played golf at the Columbia Country Club. If you were black, you did all of your food and household shopping at Jeanette’s Grocery, a ragtag storefront on the corner of Owens Street. If you were white, you had the well-stocked, well-maintained Sunflower Food Store.
The unstated yet universally understood rule for the town’s blacks was simple: Deal with it. Sure, there’d be the occasional “nigger” or “boy” references. And yes, the Marion County chapter of the Ku Klux Klan took a certain pleasure in lighting crosses in the nearby woods. But as long as one didn’t complain, as long as one stayed on the right side of the street and walked with his eyes to the sidewalk and entered through the rear of a restaurant and enjoyed movies from up high in the balcony of the Marion Theatre, nobody from the white areas would pay you much mind.
So that’s what Alyne Sibley did.
She was born on January 14, 1926, one of seven children raised on a farm in the rural outpost of Expose, Mississippi. In 1937, Marion County’s Historical Society commissioned a detailed look at the region. The 187-page document spanned Columbia’s founding in 1812 to its temporary status as the Mississippi state capital in 1821 to the rise of the Ku Klux Klan during the reconstruction period (“the best and most honorable men in the community”), and it spared few words in disparaging blacks. Wrote Maggie Byrd, a Columbia-based historian: “By nature and adaptability, the Negroes are best suited to agriculture. Negroes have done very little along the lines of industry in Marion County except in the field of lumbering. They are better suited to the weather conditions and hard labor than the White neighbor who by nature, by rearing and training is far more sensitive. As skilled workmen, even in the lumber trade Negroes have not proven satisfactory in the past.”
Throughout her youth, Alyne was primarily responsible for helping her mother Luola pick cotton. At day’s end her fingers would be bloody and raw from the repetition. Her real strength came in the kitchen. “The first meal I ever cooked, I was nine years old,” said Alyne, whose long, thin fingers reminded people of sunflower stems. “My mother, she was sick and everybody else was in the field working. I said, ‘Momma, I can cook.’ ” With her mother watching from a nearby seat, Alyne built a fire and prepared string beans, potatoes, corn bread, and fried chicken.
Alyne came to Columbia a decade later, and in 1947 she married Edward Charles Payton, a local laborer who, for reasons family members can’t explain, went by Peter. (“In the South,” said Eddie, his son, “everyone had a nickname. It’s a form of respect.”) The Columbia of today bears few distinctions from the hundreds of other desolate, midsize towns across America, what with a half-vacant business district