Shalom, Skeeter

A chapter recently closed in the history of my hometown, Rosedale, Mississippi, when we buried Jerome Levitt “Skeeter” Michael, who as far as I can tell was Rosedale’s last resident of Jewish descent. He was 68.

Jews have been living on the riverside of Bolivar County since the first cotton planters came there. Some early Jewish settlers became cotton planters, themselves, and you can still find a scattering of farmers in the Delta with Jewish lineage.

The rich, deep dirt of the Delta created opportunity and drew people. Skeeter’s own family qualified as pioneers. Much of the Delta’s interior was still swamps, forests and cane breaks when the Michaels came to Rosedale.

Along with operating a retail business, Skeeter's step-grandfather, Isadore Mostkoff, bought and sold furs. Rosedale is situated between the mouths of the Arkansas and White Rivers as they converge on the Mississippi from the Arkansas side, so for anyone in the fur trade it would have been an ideal location at the turn of the last century. Where you find rivers, you find fur.

On occasion, Mr. Mostkoff traveled along the Mississippi and up the Arkansas River to buy pelts from riverfolk. He carried a substantial amount of money on those trips, and his traveling companions were a pair of hardy rivermen, Johnny Mott and Fred Couey. Mr. Couey, himself, was part Indian. They slept on sandbars to make it harder for anyone to sneak up and rob them, as Skeeter recounted the family stories to me a few years back.

Even within my memory, the Michaels still bought a few furs from part-time trappers. But the frontier by then was well in the past, and the Delta was changing in ways that made small town merchants obsolete. After World War II, mechanized farming reduced the need for steady labor. Farms consolidated, which also cut into the population. Skeeter and his father’s half-sister, Louise Mostkoff, made a run at keeping the family’s clothing store open, but their customer base kept shrinking, and with better highways, people drove to Cleveland or Greenville to shop.

The Michaels also had gotten into the pecan business, buying nuts from local folks and selling accumulated loads to brokers. Eventually, Skeeter put most of his time into the pecan trade.

Skeeter was always on the short side, physically speaking, which accounted for his nickname. Like many small men, he was animated, trying to fill up more space than physics would allow. He came naturally to partying in a section of Mississippi that never quite switches off its social life.

Everybody at the funeral had a story about Skeeter that involved either a girl, a late night out, a deck of cards or an Ole Miss football game. Somebody remembered how his friends went into a panic when Skeeter didn’t come back one night from a trip on the river. Search parties were dispatched, only to find that his motor had conked out.

The Delta was ingrained in Skeeter Michael like part of his DNA, and Skeeter’s funeral reflected his own history and personal journey.

First, a priest officiated at a brief service at the town’s tiny Episcopal church. At some point along the line, Skeeter had joined the church. In the first write-through on this, I thought it was simply because Skeeter's first wife was a Baptist, and Anglicanism was a compromise of sorts. But one of Skeeter's relatives told me later that he thought that Skeeter's friend, the late Harry "Brother" Wilson, had led him into the Episcopal faith after the divorce.

After that service, we drove 5 miles south to the cemetery at Beulah where Marshal Klaven, a thoughtful young rabbi from Jackson, said prayers in Hebrew, read scripture, delivered a brief homily and led a throng of Baptists, Catholics and assorted other Gentiles in the 23rd Psalm. He didn’t know Skeeter but spent most of two days in Rosedale hearing stories about him from friends and Skeeter’s wife, Vivia.
 
When Skeeter’s Uncle Toby died a number of years ago, the rabbi in nearby Cleveland officiated at Mr. Michael’s funeral. The rabbi, who was the last one the city would ever have, told one of Skeeter’s cousins that in the 1950s the Cleveland synagogue was the spiritual home to about 125 families, including those in Rosedale. By the mid 1990s, maybe 25 families were connected to it, many of them elderly couples whose children had moved away.

And now Skeeter is gone. He’s buried among the same folks he grew up around. They are all Skeeter’s people, even if their roots trace to other places, other times and other faiths.

At the end of the service, the rabbi invited us to pass by the grave, take a handful of dirt and throw it on the coffin, a traditional way to honor the deceased and to say goodbye.

I walked over to the still-cool pile of dirt. It had been brought up by a backhoe, so you knew the deepest soil was on top. It was loose, silty, good for growing cotton, even from that far down. After a season of drought, it even felt faintly moist. It was the same soil that had drawn so many people to the Delta.

And now the Delta with its rich earth holds Skeeter Michael, and he will belong to it for the ages.

- Owen Taylor