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Will’s wealth was the new, twelve-room house to which Simon and Bertha brought their son.
    Will and Cynthia were overjoyed with their grandbaby, called Palmer but also named Alexander for Simon’s father and Murray for Cynthia’s father, Tom Murray, who had established his family in Henning in 1874. Will Palmer had longed for a son. His and Cynthia’s own firstborn, a boy, had died as an infant. Will immediately began minding little Palmer. He built a crib and installed it at the lumber company in order that he might take the baby to work with him. Cynthia doted on the little boy almost as much. Early on, she took over much responsibility from Bertha for rearing Palmer.
    A tall, brown-skinned woman with flowing dark hair, Bertha considered herself a musician above all. She had studied with a white teacher from Memphis, then at Lane, and at the music conservatory at Cornell during the previous year. In his new house, Will built a music room from which Bertha conducted Saturday afternoon recitals for residents of Henning, black and white. Simon, the grandson of two Irish immigrants who fathered children with slave women, was light enough to pass for white. He grew up in poverty in Savannah in western Tennessee, but he intended to move up in the world. After Lane, he graduated from North Carolina A&T in Greensboro. He enlisted in the military, serving in World War I and rising to the rank of sergeant in an all-black unit that fought at the Argonne Forest, where they were gassed. Simon enjoyed taking Henning residents into Will Palmer’s vegetable garden and identifying okra and cabbage by their Latin names. At the New Hope church, Simon had sung “In the Garden” with Bertha’s accompaniment, and he liked to opine after services on subjects about which he was expert, all the while twirling the Phi Beta Kappa key attached to the lapel of his three-piece suit. “Dad would start talking all kind of wisdom, using big words that not a soul in the crowd understood a syllable of except him,” Palmer recalled. “After a while all eyes in the crowd were on that little key.” Sister Scrap Scott, a feisty local woman, always stood directly in front of Simon as he pontificated. One day she pointed at the key. “’Fessor Haley, what is that?” He explained in Greek and Latin phrases about the Phi Beta Kappa honor society. Sister Scrap was not satisfied. “But ’Fessor Haley, what do it open?”
    Palmer, who would become the writer Alex Haley, had been born into an African American family atypical in the early twentieth century. Both of his parents had been to college, and his father would earn a graduate degree from an Ivy League university. Also unusual was Will Palmer, who in 1895 had been asked by white men in Henning to take over the lumber company at which he worked from the drunken white man who had driven the business into bankruptcy. Will proceeded to make the company into a thriving enterprise highly valued by local whites. He was well-to-do and occupied the finest new house in the town, set amid white neighbors. He spoke deliberately, and everyone paid attention to what Will Palmer said and did. He was something of an autocrat from his living room rocking chair. When Will spoke, his grandson later said, “nobody dared utter a whisper. . . . You just listened to grandpa. . . . And when he would quit speaking, there would generally be a respectful little lull . . . before anybody else would venture something.”
    These unusual circumstances occurred in a time of terrible discri mination against African Americans. Lauderdale County was typical of the Mississippi Delta with its large population of black sharecroppers. Henning sat fifteen miles from old Fort Pillow, where in 1864 General Nathan Bedford Forrest and his Confederate cavalry massacred hundreds of black Union soldiers after they had surrendered. In 1866 blacks were murdered during rioting in