Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (55 page)

The U.S. Supreme Court refused to consider Rosalee Mc Gee's story as new evidence warranting another trial and shortly after midnight on May 8, as one writer put it, the string ran out af ter five and one-half years. Mrs. Hawkins' husband, brother and two brothers-in-law were among those who watched McGee's exe cution. The following day the Worker let loose with one last blast: "Willie McGee was murdered," the paper editorialized on page one, "because the white woman who had forced an illicit affair upon him for more than four years suddenly shouted 'rape' af ter the whole town discovered the story."

To turn from the Worker's coverage of the McGee case to Time and Life is an object lesson in political schizophrenia. The one and only story Life ran was printed af ter McGee's execution and was headlined, appropriately enough, "The End of Willie McGee." Its subtitle: "A Mississippi rapist with a slender chance to escape death is 'aided' by the Reds and gets the chair." Life breathed not a word of Rosalee McGee's version of the case, except to remark obliquely that Mrs. McGee had been "taken over by the Communists." The burden of Life's story was that "something very unfortunate happened to Willie. His case fitted too well into the strategy of the Communist International . . . which sought to convince Chinese and Indians and Indonesians that capitalism hates and tortures anyone who is not white." Life seemed particu larly incensed that left-wing rhetoric had constantly called McGee a World War II veteran. "He was never in the Armed Services," the magazine said flatly. Time magazine, which subtitled
its
story "Justice
&
the Communists," did refer to what it called the "new and ugly accusation," answering, "In the small ( pop.
20,000)
town

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of Laurel, there was utterly no evidence of such a relationship."

So to Time and Life, waging their cold war on the home front, it was the Communists who killed McGee, and to the
Daily
Worker it was a lustful white woman who suddenly cried rape.

There was little middle ground to hang on to in 195i.
*

That year Carl Rowan, the distinguished black journalist, former ambassador to Finland and one-time director of the United States Information Agency, was a cub reporter on the Minneapolis Tribune. He had asked for and received a very special assignment to return to his birthplace and write a series of articles on the Southern way of life. One of the stops on Rowan's itinerary, an unplanned stop, he later recalled, was Laurel, Mississippi. The McGee case had drawn him, for he was more than mildly curious about the so-called "new evidence" hinted at during the third trial. "Some of the things filtering out of Mississippi," he later wrote, "read like an episode from my youth in Tennessee." (As a teen ager in McMinnville, Rowan had once sneaked up on a buddy of his and a local white girl who were making out in a secluded spot down by the riverbank. When the girl heard his footsteps she screamed, "Get up! Stop, you black sonofabitch! Jesus, he's raping me!" Later the girl explained in tears, "I was afraid they'd kill me. I thought they had come to kill me.") To Rowan, "The overtones of sex in its role as the dominant factor in Dixie Negro-white relations were spelled out clearly in the case of Willie McGee," and further, "the whole ugly issue of Communism as it affects the Negro's fight for full equality was on review."

Rowan got off the bus and played sleuth in the black section of town. He interviewed some middle-class professionals and then, disguised as a jobless loafer, he spoke with some folks in "a junky cafe." He found no shortage of black people willing to fill him in on The Case. To Laurel's black citizens Willie McGee was "a fool."
"It
was pretty much whispered around among Negroes that McGee was going to get in trouble with that woman," a teacher

*
One exception was a short artic1e written for The Nation by Mary Mostert, a Southern social worker. She wrote: "Many questions are lef t unanswered by both sides, but certainly there seems pitifully little evidence to warrant taking a man's life. Probably no one except those directly involved will ever know the true story. . . . Of course in the minds of professional Southerners there is no such thing as a voluntary sex relation between a Negro man and a white woman-any relation at all, to them, is rape."

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told him. From someone else he heard about the note that was lef t for McGee when he worked at the filling station.
In
the little cafe someone who claimed he knew McGee "pretty well" said, "Yeah, I knowed what was going on. I knowed that McGee told his wife he been doing 'er wrong. He said the only way for him to straighten up was to leave. So he went out west, supposedly to get away from this woman."

But Rowan had a journalist's problem. No one he spoke with was willing to be quoted and the men in the cafe, he learned, had even given him false names. When it came to an interracial rape case and the fearsome charge of "playing ball with the Commies," one informant told him, "nobody wanted to get his fingers burned." Rowan didn't file his story. He later wrote, "Even I took the cowardly way out by sheltering my own fingers and proceeding to forget that I ever visited Laurel." A few weeks later Rosalee McGee held her press conference in New York City and the young black reporter learned that her story was substantially the same one that he had dug up.

Rowan eventually did write about the McGee case, and with great sensitivity to its lasting ambiguities. He included a chapter on McGee in
South of
Freedom, a report on his year of travel. "Only the craziest Negro," Rowan wrote, "would walk into a white man's house and rape his wife while the white man slept in the next room-unless he knew his way around in the pitch-black house, and unless he had reason to believe that the white woman wouldn't cry out. And the one thing nobody had accused Willie McGee of was insanity." Yet on the other side of the "tiring, weird befuddlement" was this:

The defense was wishy-washy. The story of Jong-standing illicit relations between McGee and the alleged victim appeared to be an admission that the defendant might have been in bed with the woman, but at her invitation. How did this square with Communist contention that McGee was driving his truck in Hattiesburg, thirty miles away, ·at the time of the attack? And how did either of these stories jibe with testimony of a woman defense witness that McGee was with her at the time of the alleged attack? And why was McGee silent all this time; why didn't he tell his own story?

Almost twenty-five years have passed and Rowan's questions remain unanswered, but to Congresswoman Bella Abzug, who as a

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young labor lawyer directed McGee's defense for the third and last trial and presented his high-court appeals, the Willie McGee case is a closed chapter in a life that has since been filled with more successful battles.

Bella Abzug agrees today that the McGee case was filled with ambiguities but the ambiguities are too far in the past for her to want to sort out. "I placed my own investigators in town," she told me one af ternoon in her office. "The aff air between the two was common knowledge among blacks and whites." Then why hadn't she put McGee or his wife on the stand? "No jury was going to believe it. Challenging the word of a white woman just wasn't done. The strategy was to depend on a lack of concrete evidence. Nobody believed you could win an interracial rape case in a South ern court. You could only win on appeal."

"Do you think McGee was in the Hawkins' house that night?" "I don't think he was there that night. I think she had to entrap him to get out of the situation. We had lots of debates and

discussions over that."

"Look, Bella," I ventured, "even from your point of view McGee was a philanderer and Rosalee McGee knew it.
It
must have been difficult for her to come to terms with her husband's longstanding aff air with a white woman. Is that why, when she finally did talk, she pictured her husband as an unwilling partici pant? Four years is a long time to be an unwilling participant in any affair.
If
McGee wasn't unwilling, he probably was in her bedroom that night. Do you believe Willametta Hawkins simply woke up in the middle of the night and started shouting that she'd just been raped by an unknown black man, and that an accidental chain of circumstances led the police to the very man with whom she'd been having a clandestine affair?"

Abzug agreed that these were debatable questions, but insig nificant compared to the horror of McGee's execution in what she still terms "the Southern slavocracy."

"Bella, do you believe today that Southern white women have a history of crying rape?"

"I believe," Abzug said heavily, "that the white woman was always the pivot, the excuse. The black man was played off against the white woman and the white woman was played off against the black man, to keep both oppressed groups down."

"You successf ully raised the issue of the exclusion of blacks

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from McGee's jury, why didn't you raise the issue of the exclusion of women?"

"I don't think it ever came up. In those days we were never consciously raising that issue."

I understand Bella Abzug's desire to leave forgotten, painful history undisturbed, but the questions of journalists are seldom compatible with the concerns of defense lawyers, who seek to leave judge, jury and public with reasonable doubt. I would like to believe that the defense of Willie McGee was based on truth, that McGee and Mrs. Hawkins had been carrying on a secret liaison and that perhaps Troy Hawkins had awakened that night to discover the presence of a black man in the bed of his wife. I would also like to believe that McGee fled in haste and that Willametta Hawkins had no alternative but to say she had been raped.

Willametta Hawkins never wavered. She had been raped, she said, but she could not identify her assailant. For this she was vilified and harassed by lef tists who smeared her in print as an oversexed and vengeful white witch. Willie McGee, too, did not waver. He kept his silence to the end. Perhaps he had come to a philosophic acceptance of his fate for crossing the forbidden barrier and encroaching on the white man's property. Perhaps to him also this encroachment bore the same gravity as rape.