Editor’s Note: The following is the second in a series of stories about Stokes McMillian’s upcoming book, “One Night of Madness.” The book chronicles the lives of several Newport and area families leading up to the murder of a black family at the hands Leon Turner and his accomplishes in 1950.
Suzie Brewer was just a youngster when her father, Leon Turner, went on trial for murder in 1950.
However, it wasn’t until her mother, Alma, was on her death bed that she learned that Turner was her biological father.
“I can’t explain the feelings,” Brewer, who now resides in Ethel, said.
She said she always had an idea that her step-father might not have been her real father.
“I didn’t look like them (his side of the family),” she said.
When her mother fell ill, she said she found letters tucked away from Turner that talked about a little girl.
“I knew that it had to be me,” Brewer said.
Later on, she made a trip to the Mississippi State Penitentiary in Parchman and she came face to face with Turner.
He told her that he was sorry for what he had done but he knew he couldn’t take it back.
“I told him ‘I love you anyway’,” she said.
And when he passed away, she went to get his body from the state prison.
“People tell me that he was a cold-blooded killer,” Brewer said. “I just tell them that’s not me.”
Brewer said she is looking forward to the publication of the book.
–Leslie N. Dees
The following is taken from “One Night of Madness” Chapter 2, Leon Turner.
After his grandmother, Elvira, went to a great deal of trouble traveling to see the governor, Leon was granted a pardon by on the charges of assault with intent to kill and he returned home to Newport.
Rewarding his grandmother’s sacrifice, Leon lived in her house after his release from Parchman Penitentiary. But he did not straighten himself out; to the contrary, he quickly returned to his former ways.
He was loudly welcomed back at the Holmes County nightclubs. Realizing that Leon was going to be short on money for a while, club owner Tillman Branch gave him a job operating a still in the Newport area. While most of its whiskey was sold at the Blue Flame, Leon was allowed to sell some of the product he made, splitting the proceeds fifty-fifty with Tillman. This temporary arrangement was safer for Leon than operating his own still, for should word of the distillery get to the sheriff, ownership would trace back to Tillman. Leon was untouchable so long as he wasn’t caught at the still.
During winter, when the biting wind rolled unimpeded over barren cotton fields, Leon wore a blue denim long coat, its big pockets stuffed with half-pint bottles of freshly brewed product. He was a walking whiskey store, selling hooch for a dollar to all comers.
In late 1943, at a Kosciusko five-and-dime store, Leon met Alma Reed, a rosy-cheeked, full-figured single woman five or six years older than he. Alma was immediately attracted to the strong, handsome fellow with curly hair. Over the next few months, the two saw each other often. Owning the couple’s only automobile, Alma routinely drove to Newport to pick up Leon.
Their rendezvous were times of intense passion. Sometimes while driving, they pulled over and made love among green rows of cotton.
At last, Leon’s future was growing brighter. Had this period of Leon’s existence been allowed to continue, Alma may have rewritten the remaining chapters in his life story. Sadly, their romance lasted only a single, short season.
Leon continued to operate a still for Tillman Branch near Newport, but the men’s business relationship soured. While Tillman demanded to call the shots, Leon fought being controlled by anybody. The growing tension between the two came to a head one Friday night at the Blue Flame juke joint. Leon, drunk, rode his horse to the parking lot and sat in the saddle cursing at the crowded establishment. Black patrons scattered as the wild-acting white man waved a pistol in the air. Leon called Tillman out, slurring, “You think you’re bad. You done run up against another bad fellow. If you bad, just make your move.”
Danger was nothing new to Tillman Branch; it came with owning a place like the Blue Flame. Still, he knew better than to go gun to gun with Leon Turner. He stayed inside and avoided a confrontation.
This no-win situation cost Tillman face, something he could not allow in his rough world where survival required a ruthless reputation. Branch realized it was time to rid himself of Leon. Weeks later, after arranging for Leon to be at the still on a particular day, Tillman tipped off the Attala County sheriff. The sheriff raided the still and caught Leon red-handed. It was a direct violation of the conditions set for his parole over a year before.
The state revoked Leon’s suspended sentence on February 25, 1944. He was returned to the penitentiary to complete the ten-year sentence imposed for shooting Buddy Gowan.
Alma Reed was devastated. The man she loved was going away to prison for an unbearable number of years. Her misery multiplied when she found out that she was pregnant. Alma grew bitter at Leon for throwing away their future. She decided never again to lay eyes on him.
On October 1, 1944, Leon Turner’s only child was born, a girl her mother named Suzie Lee Reed.
Leon’s imprisonment meant his grandmother could no longer live by herself. Elvira left the house built when she was a newlywed and moved in with her son and grandchildren. Her old home eventually rotted away; no trace of it remains.
Leon served out the remainder of his sentence uneventfully. For five years, he caused no trouble within the often brutal Parchman prison; he merely survived. On September 3, 1948, with time credited for good behavior, thirty-seven-year-old Leon Turner completed his sentence and went home.
The Leon Turner that returned to Beat 4 was only slightly changed physically from the one who had left. His body had filled out slightly, but he was by no means fat. His full head of wavy brown hair now bore a tuff of gray at the hairline above his forehead.
His biggest change was mental. Prison had hardened Leon and made him even less compatible with the ways of the outside world. He went in an angry man; he came out angrier.
Newport had changed little. The same families lived in the same houses, went to the same churches, traded in the same stores. Every now and then, Leon heard of a place that had burned down a while back, but mostly his old stomping grounds were intact.
In the people who had formerly touched his life, however, major changes had occurred. Alma Reed was history. Curtis, Kook, and Lice had married. Judge Allen had retired from the bench. Parvee Rutherford had been in a fight where someone blindsided him in the head with a piece of lumber. In addition to leaving a large crease at the bald crown of his head, the impact affected his health, producing slower movement, hesitant speech, and other physical ailments. He was now in the care of his family.
Even the place Leon called home changed, for his entire family had moved north of his grandmother’s land. Leon now lived in a small shack crowded with Elvira and Howard Turner and five of Howard’s children. These youngsters were now nearly strangers. When Leon first went to prison in 1940, Bug had been ten, Ape seven, and Hop, Junior, and Rat even younger. During Leon’s brief period of parole, he had kept away from them. Now, after years of the structured routine of prison, Leon was thrust into the undisciplined, chaotic world of teenagers.
Bug wasn’t bad. At nineteen, he was older than many men who had served time with Leon. Bug took a lot of responsibility running the household.
Ape was a pretty sixteen-year-old who did most of the cooking and housework. To Leon, she was far and away the most unpleasant member of the family. Moody, testy, and impulsive, she treated him like an unwelcome intruder into her life. Since this attitude did not set well with Leon’s need for respect, the two clashed often.
Hop, Junior, and Rat—ages fourteen to ten—were always together and always rowdy. They hardly knew and didn’t particularly like Leon. Having quickly learned that he was easy to anger, they avoided him as much as possible.
For the first few weeks after leaving prison, Leon tried logging with his father and Bug. But, reminded of the years of chain-gang labor in prison, Leon soon became fed up with the hard work. He quit logging and returned to an easier activity. Assembling a still on a small creek not far from his grandmother’s original house, Leon resumed making and selling moonshine. He found two or three black men to bootleg his whiskey.
The outrageous partying that Leon maintained as a young man was now but a memory. None of Newport’s young adults wanted to hang around this legendary old troublemaker. On occasion, he hooked up with other undesirables and rode around drinking or going to his old Holmes County honky-tonks. But the spark of wild, uninhibited revelry of his younger years was gone. Mostly, Leon spent his time alone.
He got around either by foot or by an undersized old mare that Leon pushed mercilessly. On Sundays when his father didn’t work, Leon borrowed one of the pulpwood trucks; he drove it as hard as he did the horse.
More than ever, Leon drank. He wandered the roads and trails of Beat 4 in solitude, drinking from an ever-present jug of moonshine.
Leon was an anomaly around Newport. The community, as well as life, had passed him by during his years in prison. Where the end of World War II had ushered in a modern era, Leon’s ways were stuck in the past. He had become a loner who came and went like the cool breeze that signaled the approaching end of 1949.
A Thanksgiving tradition at one of Newport’s white churches was to hold evening hayrides for youth. Kids whooped and hollered and sang and flirted as a preacher-driven tractor pulled a hay-filled wagon along remote county roads. One crisp night, as a crescent moon cast its gray light on the ghostly landscape, the tractor’s headlights illuminated a lone figure walking in the distance. Wearing a hat and a long coat, the apparition seemed to be staggering toward them, following a nonexistent crooked path in the road. As the wagonload of noisy kids drew closer, some recognized the darkly dressed phantom as the mysterious Leon Turner. They all knew of him. Drawing within hailing distance, the group quieted a bit. They could see that Turner’s left hand was cupped at his forehead, shielding his eyes. Grasped in his right hand was a jug.
From the driver’s seat, the preacher shouted a warm “Hello, Mr. Turner.”
Over the sound of the tractor engine, the group heard a mumbled reply: “If y’all don’t turn that damn light out, I’m gone shoot it out.”
Newport entered the last weeks of 1949 with a lighted fuse in its midst. Far from mellowing in middle age and becoming a part of his community, since coming out of prison Leon had become more volatile, more unpredictable, and more detached from normalcy than ever. Although they witnessed this change for the worse, none of the residents who had known Leon all his life foresaw the tragic turn he would take. The real tragedy, however, was that Leon’s path would run through the most innocent of people—people simply trying to survive in peace among the cotton fields and wooded hills of Attala County.
