I am a native New Yorker. I live in Manhattan’s East Village, across the street from where I grew up. I have lived in this neighborhood for all of my life. I am connected to Mississippi through my mother, Eugenia Mae Moseley “Tracy” Bragen, who grew up in Sardis, in Panola County. She was born there in 1936 and left the state in 1958, after graduating from the University of Mississippi. Her relationship to her birthplace was complicated and at times contradictory: she detested the place, and yet in some fundamental way she never quite could leave it behind.
In the years since my mother’s death in late 2017, I have been researching and writing about our family’s Mississippi history, which dates back to the first half of the 19th century. Through my writing, I have been trying to connect the “then” to the “now,” to gain some better understanding of her life, and also mine, through the lens of all that came before.
This particular family story, from the middle of the 20th century, is just a small part of a much larger and more complicated and troubling journey. Our family’s history as enslavers is, from my perspective, a significant part of that journey, though it is not something I am addressing in this particular essay.
Sometime in the 1940s, Tracy’s grandparents Bertie and Archie Caruthers opened the Sardis Hotel & Cafe, along Highway 51 between Sardis and Batesville. The café, which came first, was in operation until around 1970, the year before I was born. A couple of my older cousins remember spending time there, recall red hallways upstairs.
During my mother’s teenage years, her family lived above the café. Her mother Dorothy, Bertie and Archie’s eldest child, ran the restaurant, “working her fingers to the bone”, as Tracy used to put it. (I vaguely recall hearing once about an African-American cook there, who likely also worked her fingers to the bone in that segregated café, but sadly I was incurious at the time, and so that person’s name and history remain in the shadows.)
Dorothy had taken on the position because her husband, my grandfather Paul Wilds Moseley, had lost his work as a cotton classer in Memphis. Paul was, according to my Aunt Virginia, “the town drunk.” Virginia recalled seeing him sober just once: on her wedding day. My mother described her father as depressed. The language for such a thing didn’t exist in their community back then, she said, so he was “self-medicating.” She recalled him gripping a Mason jar full of bourbon and ice in his hand. That vessel, frequently replenished, was with him from morning until night.
Theirs was a turbulent household. Dorothy is said to have stabbed Paul at least once, and also to have shot him. My mother claimed that Dorothy chose to shoot her husband because he had hit one of the children. The implication was that this was the only time he had ever done such a thing, and for that action he had been suitably punished.
To my knowledge, the law did not get involved in any significant way. In that era, this kind of domestic violence—if the incidents ever even came to their attention—likely would have been viewed by the authorities as outside of their jurisdiction, as “personal family business.” (Speaking of “incidents,” decades earlier, Dorothy’s own grandfather, Basil Kotzebue Caruthers spent several years in prison for shooting a neighbor who wouldn’t keep his pig in his own yard.) Dorothy and Paul did split after the shooting, and may even have started proceedings for a divorce, but within a year they were back together. They remained together until Paul’s death from liver failure, at the age of 53.
My mother was the eldest of four: Eugenia, Paula, Virginia and Pete. On the rare occasions that the siblings, who had spread across the country, would find themselves all together in the same place, they would stay up half the night, chain smoking—smoking, for all of them, a lifelong habit—and rehashing the details of their childhoods, trying to make sense of just what they had gone through and what it all might have meant. With their children, my cousins and I, the siblings were secretive about the extent of the violence in the Moseley household. We heard the “colorful” stories, but we were never given the full picture.
Years after my mother’s death, while visiting her lifelong friend Bill Dees in Sardis, I learned that Paul’s abuse of the children had occurred more frequently than my mother had led me to believe. Tracy only told Bill these details in the last months of her life. Though I don’t believe that my mother was ever hit by her father. My sense, rather, is that Pete, as the youngest child and the only boy bore the brunt of the abuse. Pete, who has suffered through his own lengthy bouts of depression and whose own son died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, will never talk about those days. He is private about his feelings, and uninterested in rehashing the past, at least with me.
When I was a teenager, my mother’s biggest fear for me was that I, like her father, and like so many of the boys she'd grown up with in Jim Crow Mississippi, would become a drunk. “It runs in our family,” she would say. “You are susceptible.”
In my twenties, in my hometown of New York City, I certainly drank much more than was good for me, and I am certain that I made her worry. While I snidely dismissed them at the time, I have come to realize that her concerns were valid. Like so many Americans, I have relatives who have struggled with substance abuse issues, whose lives have been changed or ruined by alcohol or opioids. It’s possible that I’m not as prone to addiction as they have been, that I don’t have those tendencies. It’s possible that I simply got lucky.
Here is how I picture the scene of the shooting:
We are in the living quarters behind the hotel and restaurant. You see there, at the top of the stairs? That’s Dorothy. She’s in her late thirties.
It’s afternoon I’m guessing. A weekend perhaps. Dorothy’s got a pistol in her hand.
At the bottom of the stairs—I picture him leaning on the banister—is Paul Wilds. He’s drunk, as usual, but that’s not the issue. The issue is that he has hit one of the kids. Pete? Paula? My mother was older by then, so it wouldn’t have been her.
And probably it wasn’t Virginia. For Virginia at this event is the bystander, there in the stairs—above her dad, and below her mom—the child stuck in between.
You bastard. You son of a bitch, says Dorothy.
She advances down the stairs.
I should kill you.
Oh come on now, honey, replies Paul Wilds.
And she shoots him in the shoulder.
That's my "colorful" version, the story I've concocted as an essayist and a playwright. The true event was almost certainly quicker and uglier. Paul was drunk, and probably had hit a child. I don’t know where in the house the scene actually took place, but I understand from a cousin that Paul and Dorothy struggled over the gun, and that the bullet, which did hit Paul in the shoulder, whizzed right over Virginia’s head. It is a lucky thing that she wasn’t killed.
Pete inherited Dorothy’s gun. He has it still.