May 30, 1999

BOOKEND / By TERRY TEACHOUT

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mall towns rarely make the big-city papers, and are even less likely to turn up in books. I know of just two biographies that mention Sikeston, the Missouri town where I grew up. David Maraniss's ''First in His Class'' records that in 1946, Bill Clinton's father died in a car crash three miles outside town; nine years later, according to Peter Guralnick's ''Last Train to Memphis,'' Elvis Presley gave a concert there, back when he was young, scared and thin. Someday the New Madrid Fault will put my hometown on the front pages -- the last major earthquake to hit southeast Missouri was so strong that it changed the course of the Mississippi River -- but until now the only time Sikeston made news was after an event nobody likes to talk about: one Sunday morning in the winter of 1942, a man named Cleo Wright was dragged through the streets by an angry mob, doused with gasoline and burned to death.

Thus it was with considerable interest that I read ''The Lynching of Cleo Wright'' (University Press of Kentucky), a book by Dominic J. Capeci Jr., a professor of history at Southwest Missouri State University. Of course I knew a man was lynched in Sikeston. It was no secret: my father watched from his window as Wright's near-naked body bounced over the cobblestones of Center Street. But it wasn't a tale he relished telling, and I can remember only one other person who brought it up unprompted in all the time I lived there.

It is a strange experience to learn about one's hometown by reading a scholarly monograph, especially one written in a style that is two parts Joe Friday and one part academic lingo. Yet it was only by reading Capeci's book that I learned of the myriad ways in which Wright's ugly death overlapped with the idyllic small-town life of my boyhood. To be sure, I had to go searching for some of them, since history almost always rings untrue to the rougher texture of life as it is lived: you would never know from reading Capeci's book what Sikeston looks like or smells like. So I looked, and this is part of what I found.

Early in the morning of Jan. 25, 1942, a black man broke into the home of Grace Sturgeon, a white woman who lived on what was then the east side of town. He spat on her, sliced open her belly with a six-inch folding knife -- her intestines fell out -- and fled on foot before help could arrive. (Incredibly, she survived, and was still alive in 1993, when Capeci interviewed her for his book.) A half-hour later, Hess Perrigan, a night marshal, and Jesse Whittley, a neighbor, were driving west toward Sunset Addition, Sikeston's black ghetto, searching for the unknown attacker, when they ran across Wright, a 26-year-old oil mill worker, walking down the road, his pants covered with blood. They stopped and searched him, and found the bloodstained knife. Wright pulled a second knife and stabbed Perrigan in the face; Perrigan then shot him four times, and Whittley beat him to the ground.

Word of the arrest spread, and by 11:35 a mob had gathered in front of City Hall, where Wright, who had since confessed his crime, was lying on a cot in the town lockup, near death from his own wounds. David Blanton, the county prosecutor, told the people to go home, but they pushed their way through the doors, breaking one of Blanton's ribs in the process and dragging Wright into the street. The ringleaders commandeered a Ford, hooked his legs over the rear bumper and led a caravan to Sunset, stopping in front of a Baptist church whose terrified congregation looked on as the lynchers poured five gallons of gas over his broken body and set him ablaze; he cried out once, then died. A grand jury was empaneled six weeks later, but no indictments were handed up and no one ever went to trial.

All these things are recounted by Capeci plainly and dryly, with none of the journalist's eye for telling detail (I doubt it occurred to him, for instance, to point out the ghastly irony that the spot where Wright was executed without trial lies between Lincoln and Fair streets). But bare facts in dry relation can be enough, especially when they hit close to home. For I never knew that my family doctor was the nephew of David Blanton, who stood on the steps of City Hall and struggled vainly against the will of 700 passionate men, or that my favorite teacher, a Civil War buff whom I loved like an uncle, was the son of one of the grand jurors who let the lynchers go. And though I spent countless hours talking with my best friend about everything under the sun, he never told me that his aunt was the woman Wright had knifed, or that it happened a half-dozen blocks from my childhood home, where my mother lives to this day.

In a small town, past and present stand side by side, almost too close to tell the difference. But there are a thousand differences. I drove up and down the streets of Sikeston on a cloudless day not long ago, looking at the familiar sites Capeci mentions in his book. The old City Hall has been torn down and the cobblestones covered with asphalt, but Grace Sturgeon's battered house is still standing, and it is possible to follow the precise route along which Cleo Wright was dragged to his death. I drove past a pretty park with a white bandstand, and the town bakery, which fills the air with the innocent yeasty smell of Bunny Bread, and stopped at last in the parking lot of a red-brick church whose motto is ''The church where no one is a stranger,'' not 10 blocks from the graveyard where my father is buried. As I marveled that green grass could grow on such unhallowed ground, an old black man strolled out of the parsonage. ''Would you happen to be the piano tuner?'' he asked, smiling broadly. I mentioned at supper that night that I was reading a book about a lynching. ''What's a lynching?'' asked my 10-year-old niece.

Times, then, have changed, if only up to a point. I had no black friends when I lived in Sikeston a quarter-century ago, and there doesn't appear to be much more racial mixing now. And while Dominic Capeci may not be the most graceful of stylists, he knows something I don't know: the names of the 20 men whom F.B.I. agents identified as having taken part in Wright's lynching. I gather he even spoke to some of them, though he identifies them only by pseudonyms. Their median age in 1942 was 35, and most were surely alive when I was a boy, but I knew them not. Did I play with their children? How did their neighbors feel about them? Were they heroes, or pariahs? Or were their identities slowly forgotten?

Those who forget the past, we are told, are doomed to repeat it. I believe this -- and yet few things are really neat enough to be folded into an aphorism. Never to forget is sometimes never to forgive. We see on our television screens every night the awful results of historical memory run amok, of ancient irredentist rivalries resolved by shedding rivers of tribal blood. Wright's lynching was awful too, but the fact remains that it was not repeated, at least not in my hometown. Of course his murderers should have been brought to trial, though it is hard to imagine that they would have been convicted, not least because there was no serious question as to Wright's own guilt. (Presumably this is why his name is no longer widely remembered.) But since they were never even indicted, might it be for the best that they were forgotten, their ultimate punishment left to the all-knowing disposition of a higher court? I only know one thing for sure: I feel no temptation to further disturb their unquiet sleep.

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Terry Teachout is the music critic of Commentary and a contributor to Time magazine. His books include ''City Limits: Memories of a Small-Town Boy.''

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