Missing stories from “One Night of Madness:” The Leather Belt

A note from the Author Stokes McMillan:

When I set out to write One Night of Madness, I spent much time in Attala County interviewing eyewitnesses to the true story’s events. For many, many hours, I listened in fascination as citizens told their amazing stories.

My first draft of the book contained nearly all of them and as a result, was around 750 pages long. I was warned by publishing professionals that this was unreasonably long. After all, the lengthier the book, the more it costs; the more it costs, the fewer people will buy it; the fewer people buy it, the less it is read. Since I, like all authors, wanted my work to be read, I began cutting.

In two major rewrites, I chopped my work down to its present size. Many great stories were axed, stories that, though adding color to the tale, added no meat to the plot. It was sad to contemplate that these great stories might now be lost to history.

Then I came up with a solution, a way to tell these deleted narratives. I would tell them to you, the citizens of Attala County, where I was born and raised. I would tell them in the pages of The Star-Herald.

Thus, I propose to periodically publish in The Star-Herald several segments of One Night of Madness that were cut from the original version.

These fascinating stories will provide glimpses of Attala County in decades past. It is my hope that, like the book itself, they will generate your own discussions and investigations into your county’s anything-but-boring past.

The first story, as told to me by the late Chatwin Jackson, begins shortly after Leon Turner, a violent, moonshining thug from Newport, is paroled in 1943 from a ten-year assault and battery sentence in Parchman Penitentiary. The largest landowner in the area at the time is Attala County’s Circuit Court Judge John F. Allen, who lived in a house on Highway 14 two miles west of Newport (the house is still there). Pat Smithson is the manager of the Judge’s 7000 acre cotton plantation.



The Leather Belt

Judge John Allen, whose court had sent Leon away to prison in 1940, welcomed Leon back to town when he saw the younger man in Newport after the pardon. That autumn, the Judge contacted Leon, offering a one-time job in an area the ex-con was especially adept.

As was the case every year before cotton-picking season, the Judge and his son-in-law, Pat Smithson, had been readying the plantation’s cotton gin for its coming activity compressing cotton into bales. The men had discovered that one of the gin’s large leather drive belts was severely worn-out and needed replacing. This was a problem since it was 1943, the height of World War II. Leather was reserved for the war effort and in extremely short supply. Familiar with Leon’s reputation for petty thievery, Judge Allen met with him and offered to pay $25 for any suitable leather belt that Leon could “acquire.” Anxious to please the Judge and to get some easy money, Leon agreed to this under-the-table deal.

Leon searched far and wide for a suitable belt but was unable to locate anything that matched the needed size. Desperate to grab this extra money, Leon turned the search closer to home.

A week after offering Leon the task, Judge Allen answered a knock at his front door. There stood a grinning Leon Turner holding a leather belt. Pleased, the Judge stepped outside and inspected Leon’s offering. It seemed to be the right size, but it was old and tattered. Still, it was better than nothing. With the belt in such poor shape, Judge only offered $15, but Leon took the money and left. Judge Allen flippantly threw the belt into the back of a pickup parked nearby.

The next opportunity to work on the gin came days later. Judge and Smithson took Leon’s leather belt to the gin and discovered that the machine’s belt was missing. Leon had stolen the Judge’s original belt and sold it back to him.

Text Only