Money does grow on (family) tree, as daughter explains how her father lived vastly different life than racist grandfather, Gov. Vardaman
By Emily Money Vardaman | Originally published by Mississippi Today
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The age-old expression “Money doesn’t grow on trees” applies in most cases with the exception of a branch on my family tree, the one grown by my father, Jim Money Vardaman.
The idiom reminds us that money is a limited resource that must be earned and spent carefully. As it happens, my father wrote a book on the subject of trees and money entitled “How To Make Money Growing Trees.” You can find my dad’s contributions to sustainable tree farming alongside his Big Year birdwatching memoir entitled “Call Collect, Ask For Birdman” in the U.S. Library of Congress, where there is also a pile of nonfiction titles that recognize his grandfather, James Kimble Vardaman, as one of the most racist figures in American political history.
I have a wish that history and people who respect it will also one day recognize his grandson, my father – a World War II combat hero, a pioneer of forestry science and the visionary behind what has become the modern sport of birdwatching.
Money is also my middle name. It was given to me by my dad, and I suppose my mother, Virginia, liked the sound of it, too. For over 40 years, my father carried his folded USD in a 14-karat gold money clip engraved with the initials MIMMN – which stood for Money Is My Middle Name. He was clever, and he had a lot of fun with the audacity of the word over the years. He never minded explaining to people where the name came from – and neither have I.
It’s a family surname rooted in the Mississippi Delta and an ancestor named Hernando Money, a cousin and political ally of my great-grandfather, a former Mississippi governor and staunch segregationist recognized in history books as “The Great White Chief.”
Gov. Vardaman and Sen. Money are also the reason why Money – a small community outside of Greenwood where white men kidnapped 14-year-old Emmett Till before torturing him to death – also has the same name.
Both Vardaman and Money were long dead by the time Till’s murder occurred in 1955, but the evil that men do lives long after them, to loosely quote both Shakespeare and journalist Ralph McGill, who was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for his work on the subject on the segregated South.
In 1958, McGill wrote, “Let’s face the facts. This is a harvest. It’s the crop of things sown.” In his book “The South and the Southerner” first published in 1963, McGill described Gov. Vardaman as a “twig bender” who used populist rage to twist minds into limbs that grew history in the wrong direction. In1963, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. also published his open “Letter From Birmingham Jail” in which he recognized McGill as a rare white ally who “had written about our struggle in eloquent and prophetic terms.”
My father also sent a letter commending McGill in April 1963 on the 15th – a day before King’s dispatch from a jailhouse in the Jim Crow South. His own letter was postmarked from my hometown of Jackson, a city that was harvesting so many seeds of racial violence that it claimed the life of civil rights activist Medgar Evers in June of the same year. The letter my father wrote McGill on the subject of the South and Southerners, like the grandfather he never knew, was short and to the point:
Dear Mr. McGill:
I enjoyed every word of The South and the Southerner and heartily agree with you, even if you did spend three pages taking the hide off my grandfather.
From your studies of the origins of Southern traditions and attitudes, do you think it logical that a twig-bender produced a forester in two generations?
Sincerely Yours,
James M. Vardaman
Mr. McGill never responded nor published his letter, but thanks to a series of journalistic lucky breaks nearly 30 years later, my father came to find out that Ralph McGill not only read his letter, he kept it in his pocket while he attended the American Society of Newspaper Editors convention in Washington. The convention, which was held April 17–20, 1963, was a pivotal event in the timeline of the Civil Rights Movement, and while my father was not at the Statler-Hilton in person, his letter was.
The reason I have a copy of my father’s sentiments on segregation in 1963 is that he sent them to me in another letter that I have treasured since I received it in October of 1989. The next year, I graduated from the University of Southern Mississippi and moved to midtown Atlanta, where I learned a lot about why its citizens changed a street named Forrest Avenue to Ralph McGill Boulevard in 1980.
When my own father graduated from the University of Michigan in 1942, he had no choice but to go Camp Shelby in south Mississippi and be trained by the United States Army for combat as a field artillery specialist.
The birdwatching student of forestry spent the next three years applying himself in the interest of ending World War II, and he also wrote his mother diligently, with loving detail and penmanship, about the birds he saw as he fought his way across Europe to eventually earn a Silver Star for gallantry in action during the Ardennes Offensive, also known as the “Battle of the Bulge.”
After he satisfied his combat obligation, he attended the “Big Three” Allied conference in Potsdam, Germany, as an assistant to his uncle, J.K. Vardaman, who was serving in the capacity of naval aide to President Harry Truman. My father, then a lieutenant, continued to write a flurry of elegantly detailed letters which is why he referred to the ones he sent my grandmother between July 17 and Aug. 2, 1945, as his “Diary of Potsdam.”
I celebrated what would have been his 105th birthday this year by taking a copy of it to Independence, Missouri, to ask a scholar at the Truman Research Library if he thought my father represented an excellent example of an evolutionary branch in the history of a family tree, and I was told I should “write a book” on the subject. I thanked him for the interest and time and left him a copy of my father’s 1980 memoir “Call Collect, Ask For Birdman” for his personal library of great history books.
It is easy to find “twig benders” like Gov. James K. Vardaman recognized in history, and I am writing this in the hope that his grandson, Jim Money Vardaman, will one day be recognized as the branch-building champion of trees and birdwatching.
Emily Money Vardaman was raised in Mississippi, educated by Jackson Public Schools and is a graduate of the University of Southern Mississippi. She has spent most of her professional life selling things, including seven years of carrying Electrolux vacuum cleaners door-to-door in the Atlanta Metro Area. A lifelong music enthusiast, in 2023 she launched an amateur podcast devoted to musical instrument history called “The Lipstick Pickup.” Since 2005, she and her husband Kevin, a fellow Mississippian, have lived in Nashville, Tennessee.
This article was originally published by Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Source: Original Article
