Initially at least, Dickerson’s multilayered trap worked. Lewis and India thought they knew him well. So, they must have reasoned, if Dickerson was good enough to warn them of the dangers they faced from the whites around them, and if he said that they had to sign their farm over to him to make things right between them, he must be telling the truth, and they had to do what he said. Accordingly, on February 10, 1886, they signed the deed, although for a reduced and recalculated debt of $9,600.
Lewis and India had lost everything that they, and Hannah, had worked for during the past seventeen years. But at least they could get away from Coahoma County with their lives and children. Or so they thought. They waited one week, then another. The promised wagon and two mules never arrived, and neither did the $2,000. When Lewis sought out Dickerson and confronted him about the delay, the white man flatly denied ever having made the promise.
Given Dickerson’s wealth and prominence, it is hard to understand what would have motivated him to try to take the Thomases’ land in the first place. He owned around eight thousand acres between Clarksdale and Friars Point, of which four thousand were under cultivation, as well as a store with goods worth $8,000 and various buildings and land in Friars Point worth more than $50,000; and he had interests in several Friars Point factories. The Thomases’ 625 acres and other possessions were minuscule in comparison. Could Dickerson have been seeking to take what he believed was legally his? Or could it be that the rich white man thought he could simply brush the black couple aside because their success was “obnoxious” to his racist sensibilities? Subsequent events would suggest that the Thomases had become victims of an ignominious episode in the Dickerson family’s past.
For the Thomases, Dickerson’s reneging on his promise meant they were now destitute. But rather than meekly accept this new blow, Lewis and India found the strength to rally. They began to doubt what Dickerson had told them. Although they did not keep many paper records on their farm, they did have good memories, especially when it came to cotton harvests. Furthermore, Lewis and India had tenants or sharecroppers who had worked their land and who also remembered what years had been good, middling, or bad. When they all put their recollections together and tallied the bales of cotton they produced each year and what the bales were worth, and when they recalculated all the other business transactions that they had naively entrusted to Dickerson’s reckoning, Lewis and India could not understand how they could owe him the enormous sum he claimed. Had Dickerson in fact credited them for all the cotton that they had delivered to him? Was not the interest he had charged them “excessive and usurious”? Had he not “wrongly charged them” for “illegal and unwarranted items”?
Also very troubling was Lewis and India’s discovery that none of their white neighbors had actually written the threatening letters to Dickerson that he had pretended to read to them. They concluded that Dickerson had invented these in order to frighten them, to make them anxious to get out of the county, and to accept his low offer of a buyout. Fighting him would be difficult because of his and his family’s wealth and prominence. But the Thomases felt so wronged by what he had done that, in an extraordinary display of courage, they resolved to seek justice anyway.
Swindles such as this were not rare in the South and often had a crippling effect not only on the victims but also on their children. A young black man in a different state whose father had been cheated out of his property by whites concluded: “it weren’t no use in climbin too fast… weren’t no use in climbin slow, neither, if they was goin to take everything you worked for when you got too high.”
However, Frederick learned a very different lesson, judging by his behavior in subsequent years. He was thirteen in the spring of 1886 and old enough to understand the kind of elaborate deception that his parents were facing. Growing up in Coahoma, he would have known from earliest childhood the belittlement, hostility, and violence to which blacks were routinely subjected. But his parents’ reaction was hardly the usual response to such treatment, and it showed him the possibility of fighting for what was his no matter who the opponent or how slim the chance of victory. Even though the circumstances would differ markedly in Moscow and Constantinople, Frederick would show the same kind of tenacity there when he faced attempts by merchants, moneylenders, and lawyers to cheat him.
The Thomases must have been greatly encouraged by the willingness of a small team of prominent lawyers (all white, of course) to take on their case—George F. Maynard and the brothers Will D. and John W. Cutrer. John, or “Jack,” Cutrer was also a politician with good connections who would marry well and become a rich, notorious, and flamboyant figure in Coahoma County. (In 1890, in the midst of the protracted Thomas lawsuit, he would shoot dead in broad daylight a white newspaperman who had questioned the purity of his white ancestry; and he would get away with it.) By contrast, Dickerson had only one lawyer, Daniel Scott. This imbalance suggests that there may have been some degree of antipathy among leading whites toward Dickerson—and the suggestion is borne out by later events.
On May 6, 1886, Lewis filed a lawsuit in the Coahoma County Courthouse in Friars Point against Dickerson. He sought to cancel the deed transferring the farm to Dickerson; to have the accounts between them reexamined, recalculated, and purged of usurious interest and illegal charges; and to receive credit for all the sums to which he was entitled and which Dickerson had denied him. Dickerson must have been taken aback by the audacity of Lewis’s lawsuit. Not only was this black man trying to wrest a fine piece of property from his hands just when he had seized it; he was also impugning a white man’s honor in full public view and with the assistance of other leading whites.
But there was even more reason for Dickerson to be outraged. The lawsuit would also resurrect memories of a series of scandals in his family’s past involving an especially sordid intersection of race and money.
The Dickerson family’s roots in the area went back to the early days of white settlement in Coahoma County. Around 1847, three brothers from Maryland—Peter, Levin, and George Dickerson—bought land and established what became several of the largest and richest plantations in the county’s northwest quadrant. Peter was William Dickerson’s father.
The first scandal in the family involved Levin, William’s uncle. He never married but chose instead to live more or less openly with a black woman named Ann from 1855 until his death in 1871. Although before and during the Civil War many white men in the South kept slave women as concubines and sexually assaulted slaves at will, interracial marriage had been illegal under slavery. An open liaison was still a rare occurrence even after the Civil War and was seen as deeply shocking by white planters. Moreover, Ann and Levin had two children, Susan and Oliver, and Levin acknowledged them despite their “illegitimacy.” These two embarrassing offspring were William’s first cousins. When Levin died, leaving “a large real and personal estate” worth $115,000, his two children assumed they would inherit it all. However, Peter Dickerson and his family had other plans. Peter himself, his daughter Mary, and her husband, W. N. Brown, sued in the Coahoma County Chancery Court to get possession of Levin’s land and property by claiming that they alone were his legal heirs. They won, and Mary and her husband took over the plantation from Susan and Oliver to work as their own.