Part 2 of 2 / Part one can be found here.
Jesse Hill Ford
While his successful novels, short stories and the critical and commercial success of “The Liberation of Lord Byron Jones” resulted in Jesse Hill Ford being heralded as “the next great Southern writer,” the film based on his novel was a big disappointment.
Scene from “The Liberation of L.B. Jones”
To make matters worse, many in his community of Humboldt in West Tennessee had not read the book, so the movie was their first chance to see what Ford was telling the world about them. Many of his black and white neighbors were embarrassed by what they saw and many felt betrayed by this young author who had become one of their own.The Ford family began experiencing harassment and threats that only intensified in the days leading up to the shooting that would change the course of Ford’s life.
However, the movie wasn’t the only race-related issue the Ford family was dealing with at the time.One of his sons was captain of the Humboldt High School football team. He and the other white athletes were allowed to keep their starting positions at the recently-integrated high school. After skipping a football practice as a form of protest, every black player had been thrown off the team. If you’re familiar with small towns and their passion for high school football, you can imagine the tensions that were taking place in the community among both black and white parents and students and others for whom the sport had great importance.
The situation must have reached a boiling point for Ford when, during the school’s homecoming parade, the car in which his son was riding had rocks thrown at it and his desk at school was vandalized.Ford’s anxiety and paranoia were only made worse by his use of a drug prescribed by a “doctor” back in Los Angeles. While working with Stirling Silliphant on the script for “L.B. Jones,” Ford met Max Jacobson, the physician nicknamed “Miracle Max” and “Dr. Feelgood.” His celebrity patients had included John F. Kennedy, Truman Capote, Mickey Mantle, Marilyn Monroe and many others.
Jacobson began injecting Ford with B-12 shots that also contained methamphetamine sulphate. The shots were later mailed to Ford, who continued to inject them after he returned home to Humboldt. (1)
Photo/Jesse Hill Ford Documentary Canterfield, the Ford home in Humboldtfrom documentary about Jesse Hill Ford
It was in this environment, on the evening of Nov. 16, 1970, that Ford noticed a car parked in the grass, near the driveway of Canterfield, the large home he had built in Humboldt. Possibly also feeling the psychosis and paranoia that are side effects of methamphetamine use, he felt certain his son, not yet home, was about to be ambushed.
Ford would later testify he fired his .30-06 rifle in an attempt to scare the driver into stopping while his wife called the sheriff. As the car began to pull away, Ford fired a second “warning” shot. Moments later, the driver, 21-year-old black soldier, George Doaks, lay slumped dead against the steering wheel as a young woman holding the hand of a small child, jumped from the car and ran for her life.
Doaks was the married son of a popular Humboldt minister who, it was later alleged during the trial, had parked for a romantic encounter with the young woman who was not his wife. Ironically, she was a cousin of Dorothy Claybrook, the unfaithful wife of the undertaker on which Ford had based his best-selling novel. The young child who had also been in the car was a 4-year-old the young woman was baby-sitting.Ford went on trial for first-degree murder, which was later changed to second-degree murder.
Ford and his wife welcomed the media before and during the trial and participated in many interviews, especially with print reporters with whom Ford felt a natural affinity. When you read the articles, you can’t help but wonder what they were thinking. He later wrote in his journal, “The bar was open. Liquor and food was dished out lavishly, and the drinking and the talking drifted on sometimes into the early hours of the next day.”(2)
The trial did not disappoint those looking for sensational drama as it pitted the famous author known for writing about the mistreatment of black people in the south against the popular black family of the man he killed.The fact that there was only one black person on the jury that eventually found Ford not guilty, offered an additional layer of irony. Many would point out that it appeared Ford had benefited greatly from the same unjust system about which he had written.
Photo/Jesse Hill Ford Documentary
Vintage footage of George Doaks’ sister commenting after the trial
from documentary about Jesse Hill Ford
After the trial, Doaks’ sister stated in a broadcast news report, “If my brother had of killed him (Ford), it would be quite different. He would have been gone a long time ago.” (3) Ford held a press conference at Canterfield where he summed up his feelings about the killing. “A tragedy has occurred out here and we’re all changed by it,” he said. “It is something I will never forget and it’s affected my life from here on out and I’m very sorry for it.”(4)
In a post-trial interview with a great deal of foreshadowing, Sally Ford said, “This week has been just like one of Jesse’s books, but it turned out much better because Jesse doesn’t believe in happy endings.” (5)Although he was found not guilty, a happy ending was not in Ford’s future. Much damage had been done to his career by the shooting and subsequent trial. Even more damage was to come from the long-form journalism that was published after the verdict.
Photo/Life magazine Article about Ford in Life magazine by Marshall Frady, Oct. 29, 1971One story in particular, written by Marshall Frady for the Oct. 29, 1971 issue of Life magazine was particularly enlightening. Frady, born in Augusta, Georgia and the son of a Southern Baptist minister, was well known for his work as a writer in the civil rights movement. In 1968, he had published a controversial biography of George Wallace and he would go on to write biographies of Billy Graham, Jesse Jackson and Martin Luther King, Jr.Bill Morris, staff writer for The Millions, an online magazine offering coverage on books, arts, and culture, wrote that Frady’s article is one of his favorite pieces of journalism and he re-reads it every year. “Digging it out,” he wrote, “is always worth the effort. (6)
“Ford had written with an acute understanding of how literally white southern society had cursed itself with the brutalizing legacy left by its old crime of slavery. But now, it was as if he had decided that he must invest himself totally into that society, into all those old demons and dark charms of violence at work in the South and in his own nature, with which he had always been only tentatively in communion.”(7)
Ford’s literary career was essentially over. He was financially ruined and, shortly before the trial, his wife discovered that while in Los Angeles, he had been unfaithful. Two years after Ford walked out of the Humboldt courthouse a free man, he was back to watch the same judge from the murder trial grant his wife a divorce.At the University of Memphis, where he was a writer in residence, members of the English department circulated a petition for his dismissal and he was no longer booked for lectures and public appearances. (8)
The Raider by Jesse Hill Ford
Ford released another novel set in West Tennessee, The Raider, on which he had been working throughout the trial. A historical novel, it was “a sprawling epic of West Tennessee before and during the Civil War.” It was only moderately successful and would be his last published novel. Of course, I have now ordered one to add to my growing stack of books I plan to read when I get a chance. Although, I seem to have more books in the stack than chances to read.Ford moved to Nashville where he remarried. Although he seemed to enjoy life to some degree, friends believe he continued to struggle with unresolved feelings about the shooting.He occasionally wrote as a guest columnist for USA TODAY in 1989 and 1990 where “he emerged as a crotchety, outspoken conservative who defended Oliver L. North, railed against the American Civil Liberties Union and said flag burners should have their heads broken.”(9)
In the spring of 1996, Ford underwent open-heart surgery at age 66. After weeks of struggling with severe depression, he locked himself in his study with a .22-caliber pistol and took his own life.
Ford had been working on an autobiography that was found in his office after his death. When writing about his departure from Humboldt after his trial and divorce, he provided a little insight into his feeling about the town he came to love but which figured so significantly in his downfall:
“Goodbye to Humboldt, the city with the ungainly name and the beautiful soul…Goodbye to the springtides and strawberry season, to the parades and the bands…Goodbye to our secret society parties and dances…Goodbye to Kentucky Lake, where my children learned to hunt, to camp, to fish…Goodbye to the preachers and the bootleggers, the cops and the politicians, the harmless town loony who thought he was a night watchman, and was in many ways a night watchman…Goodbye to the hot, sultry summers of that cotton climate, and to the fertilizer plant just south of town chuffing its red smoke…Goodbye to the storms sweeping up from the gulf, to the tornados, to livid sunsets streaked with long and lovely wisps of oxford-gray cloud; and to the sounds of geese in autumn…Goodbye to so much rich material for stories…” (10)
For more blog entries, visit my Blog Home Page or to check out the genealogy research about my specific family lines, go to my Haywood County Line Genealogy Website.
(1) John Taylor, “The Liberation of Jesse Hill Ford,” Esquire, February, 1997, 74.
(2) Ibid, 75.
(3) Moling, Troy. writer. “Jesse Hill Ford” YouTube. Online video clip, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smkkRPmMdBo (accessed Oct. 11, 2015)
(4) Ibid
(5) Robert McG. Thomas Jr., “Jesse Hill Ford, 66, a Novelist Who Wrote of Race Relations,” New York Times, June 5, 1996.
(6) Morris, Bill. “A Year in Reading: Bill Morris.” The Millions. 18 Dec. 2014. Web.
(7) Marshall Frady, “The Continuing Trial of Jesse Hill Ford,” Life, October 29, 1971, 74.
(8) Taylor, “The Liberation of Jesse Hill Ford,” 77.
(9) Thomas, “Jesse Hill Ford”
(10) Taylor, “The Liberation of Jesse Hill Ford,” 79.