The next morning, Sunday, October 26, at about nine o’clock, Shelton’s wife went to the police herself and asked them to arrest her husband for the beating he had given her. An Officer Richardson was dispatched to deal with the matter. He approached the Thomases’ boardinghouse, planning to watch it from a distance in the hope of catching Shelton if he should return. Eventually, Richardson caught sight of him and rushed forward, shouting to him that he was under arrest. When Shelton started to run, Richardson drew his revolver and fired, but the shot went wide. Shelton turned a corner and disappeared.
The following night, Monday, October 27, Lewis went to bed as usual. Around 3 a.m., Shelton got into the Thomases’ house, crept up the stairs to Lewis and India’s room on the second floor, and entered it quietly. He was carrying a sharp-bladed ax and must have paused by the side of the double bed until he could make out his target in the dim light. Lewis was asleep, faceup, lying next to India. Shelton raised the ax, took aim, and brought it down hard on Lewis’s face. The sound of the heavy blow roused India. She propped herself up on her elbows and glimpsed her husband struggling to rise with his arm outstretched; then the steel flashed and another heavy blow descended upon Lewis. India screamed in terror. Shelton dropped the ax, dashed out of the room, and ran down the stairs.
India’s screams roused the household. Frederick, Ophelia, Shelton’s wife, and the other tenants rushed into the room. After several moments of panic, someone got a light, which illuminated a horrific scene. Lewis was writhing in agony on the bed, blood pouring in streams from a gaping wound that extended from his left temple to his mouth. The first blow had cut through his cheekbone and fractured his skull. The second blow had caught his arm above the elbow when he raised it in a futile attempt to protect himself and had cut through the muscle and bone, almost severing it. Lewis struggled to rise several times as blood poured onto the bed and pooled on the floor near the ax that Shelton had dropped. It took several more frantic moments before someone had gathered sufficient wits to telephone for a doctor and the police. The blow to Lewis’s face had nearly killed him. The doctor who arrived could do nothing to help because of the depth of the wound and the amount of blood that Lewis had lost. Somehow, Lewis lingered for six more hours, unconscious, until he finally died at 9 a.m.
Two justices arrived to carry out an autopsy and conduct an investigation. Testimony by all the witnesses pointed conclusively to Shelton. The Memphis police department quickly spread the news that he was the prime suspect. A day later, he was spotted sneaking onto a train heading for Holly Springs, a town in Mississippi some thirty miles southeast of Memphis. When he tried to escape the guards who were waiting for him, they killed him in a fusillade of shots. On the following day, in a display of professional zeal that was also strikingly insensitive to India’s trauma, the Memphis police sent her down on the afternoon train to identify her husband’s murderer. There was no doubt, and the case was closed.
Back in Coahoma County, the news of what had happened to Lewis could hardly have displeased William Dickerson. This black man had caused him a lot of trouble over the years and his death must have seemed like a just reward or even a wish fulfilled. There is no suggestion, however, that Dickerson was somehow behind Lewis’s murder. It was merely bad luck, and the price that Lewis paid for his decency when he decided to help a woman with an abusive husband.
Shortly thereafter, Dickerson got more news that must have cheered him. In October 1890 the Mississippi supreme court issued an explanation of its previous decision. It now stated that the chancery court should never have returned the disputed land to Lewis before recalculation of the debt between him and Dickerson was completed.
But any illusions Dickerson might have had about Lewis’s death putting an end to the lawsuit were quickly dispelled. On December 24, 1890, barely two months after the murder, India petitioned the chancery court to be recognized as the executor of her deceased husband’s estate. As part of the process, she had to take an oath at the courthouse in Friars Point. Her willingness to come back to a town where she would face serious hostility from some quarters proves she was a remarkably determined woman and could not be cowed easily. On January 10, 1891, she revived the lawsuit against Dickerson in her own name and in the name of her two children, Frederick and Ophelia.
The case would continue with long interruptions and various convolutions for nearly four more years. It outlived both of the original litigants: William Dickerson died on February 18, 1894, at the relatively young age of thirty-nine; his widow, Lula, stepped into the breach to continue the fight, just as India had done. In the end, the decision the Coahoma County Chancery Court handed down on November 28, 1894, stated that India owed Lula a much-reduced amount of money. India had to auction off land to raise it, and a year later she was still remortgaging the property to raise money quickly for other reasons, possibly for Frederick.
Through all this time, India continued the case in her and the children’s names, despite the fact that her family had effectively fallen apart and its living connection with the farm in Coahoma was severed. She stayed on in Memphis for a year after the murder, although in a different house from the one she had shared with Lewis, and in 1892 she moved to Louisville, Kentucky, presumably with Ophelia, where she got a job as a cook for a prosperous white jeweler. She worked for him for several years and appears to have died in Louisville sometime in the mid-1890s. The fate of Ophelia is unknown.
Frederick had turned eighteen on November 4, 1890, a week after his father was murdered, and left Memphis shortly thereafter; his subsequent recollection of the exact year was hazy. Decades later, when he had occasion to tell his life story to various Americans he encountered abroad, he did not always hide that his parents had been slaves, as some other black Americans did, but he never mentioned his father’s murder to anyone. Perhaps the memory was too traumatic for him. The only reason he ever gave for leaving Memphis is that living near the railway junctions in Fort Pickering had “stimulated a desire” in him “to travel.”
There is no reason to doubt that this part of what he chose to reveal was true. Indeed, it is easy to imagine a young man on the verge of adulthood being drawn by the lure of the railroad—by the sight of trains arriving from famous cities across the South while others depart for the even more alluring North, their plangent whistles receding in the distance, promising change. Eighteen was the right age to become your own man, to escape the white southerner’s heavy gaze, to see something of the world, and to find a home elsewhere.
2: Travel and Transformation
During the next decade Frederick traveled widely, and for a young black man of his era every step he took was a highly unusual rejection of his past. He left the South and lived only in cities. He mastered urban skills and moved in worlds that became progressively more white. And he would eventually leave the United States.
From Memphis, Frederick traveled a short distance west and crossed the Mississippi into Arkansas. Because Arkansas had been a slave state, and its eastern portion was much like the Delta bottomlands in appearance, history, and reliance on cotton and corn, Frederick did not find it appealing and spent only two months there. He then turned north and “drifted” to St. Louis, as he put it. This was a longer trip of some three hundred miles and represented a more resolute change.