“Suicide Mazey”:  The Stuff from which Legends are Made

Suicide becomes a crack shot, a regular visitor to the hospital, trains a tiger, flies an airplane and plants trees.

When I moved to DeKalb, Mississippi, in 1973 to start my job as Kemper County forester, I found it to be – like most small towns –  populated by many fine people, and some real oddballs: Sort of like Mayberry.

                One of the strangest was Johnny “Suicide” Mazey.

                I saw this strange-looking fellow walking down the street with a mongrel dog on a leash, smoking a pipe and using a crooked limb as a walking stick. I asked Finnery Bunnings, my technician, who he was, and Finnery told me the legend of Suicide Mazey:

                The local General Practitioner, Dr. Mazey, and his wife, after trying for a number of years to have a child, were unable, so they adopted an infant named “Johnny.” From the beginning, it was obvious that Johnny was different: He lived astride the line that separates genius from insanity – and spent much of his time on the far side.

                Even as a young lad, Johnny was fascinated with firearms.  He saved his money from odd jobs and bought a model 1911 .45 caliber automatic pistol, badgered his daddy into keeping him supplied with ammunition and practiced until he became quite proficient. It is said that he could shoot a housefly from the air at 20 feet.

                Johnny took a liking to alcohol, and since his daddy would not give him money for it, and he could not afford the good stuff, he got what he could however he could.  About once a week, he would make his rounds of the hospital, stopping by nearly every room to speak to patients – and stealing mouthwash and other medicinal alcohol when no was looking. He was caught and banned from the hospital, so he turned to a low-cost local favorite – Si Smith’s antiseptic mixed with Coca Cola.

                Back in the 1950’s, when Kemper County was still farm country, DeKalb was a booming place on Saturday afternoons. Farmers and local Choctaw Indians would come to town.  The farmers would first head to the barber shop – occasionally for a haircut, but most for their weekly bath.  The barber maintained a bath house above the barber shop, and for 25 cents, one could get a wash-cloth, a (used) bar of soap and a towel, and have a good shower.  It sure beat heating water on the wood stove and bathing from a no. 3 wash-tub. As a youngster, Johnny would get a stack of comic books and go to the barber shop.  When he got to the head of the line and the barber yelled “next,” Johnny would sell his place for a dime and go to the back of the line to repeat the process. He could easily make a dollar on a good Saturday.

                So, freshly bathed, shaved and possibly barbered, farmers would don their clean “over-hauls” and with their wives, join black folks, also in their Saturday best, and Choctaw Indians with the men, clad in ruffled shirts walking three steps ahead of their women, resplendent in their ankle-length, lace-trimmed dresses and fancy aprons. They walked the crowded sidewalks, mostly window-shopping, but occasionally going in to make a purchase, or maybe they would just sit on the benches outside Sciples Grocery and visit with a friend.

                Saturdays passed  in this bucolic manner – until Johnny grew up and got a tiger.  A what!? Yep.  A tiger.  He won it in a poker game.  It was a monstrous beast, but gentle and well trained.  So one would see the Saturday crowd instantly part – rather like the Red Sea at Moses’ command, and here would come Johnny, half tight from Si Smith and Coca Cola cocktails, with a tiger on a leash, and the imprint of a 1911 .45 semi-auto in his back pocket. People grew concerned, and asked the sheriff to do something about it.

                “Aw,” he said, “he ain’t hurting anything, that tiger’s gentle and he is on a leash, just let him be.” The truth was that the Sheriff wasn’t a fool.  He was not about to cross a man high on Si Smith’s Antiseptic, leading a tiger, with a 1911 .45 semi-auto in his back pocket with which he could take down a house fly in flight at 20 feet.  Things went along fine for a while.  Everyone grew used to Johnny and “Lucky” the tiger walking the streets on Saturday afternoon (they just gave them plenty of room), until Johnny got tired of the tiger and got a yen for an airplane.

                He talked a friend into taking the tiger and him to Key Field in Meridian, where he knew a man dealt in used aircraft.  He found a sporty little Piper Cub and traded the tiger, along with some “boot” from his father’s checking account, for it, climbed in, cranked the engine, took off and followed highway 39 back to DeKalb.  Mind you, he had never even been in an airplane, much less flown one.  Remember that line he lived astride?  This day, he was on the right side. Or was he?

                Johnny decided to have some fun, so he painted “Suicide” on the bottom of one wing, got his model 1911 .45 semi-automatic pistol, climbed in, fired her up and headed for the flatwoods.

                At this point, I need to explain about the flatwoods.  This is a geographic formation (I am not sure of its origin, but, since it is a flat as a pancake and meanders, I suppose it a pre-historic river flood plain) that runs in a swath, about five miles wide, from central Mississippi into Alabama.  If you have ever tried to plow on hilly ground, as I have – with a tiller, instead of a mule – you can understand the attraction of flat ground to the early settlers.  They cleared some of the flatwoods, built houses and tried to farm.  The trouble is that, although fertile, the soil has a very heavy clay content, so it extremely gummy and sticky when wet (it is said that when the flatwoods are wet, you don’t leave your foot prints – you take them with you), and when dry, becomes rock hard and breaks into cracks so wide and deep that birds and small animals fall into them and die. Most of the farms were abandoned in the 1930’s, or before, and the land reverted to timber, for which it is ideally suited.  The Mississippi flatwoods is one of the finest loblolly pine sites in the world.  Most in Kemper County is owned by Weyerhaeuser Timber Company.

                By the early 1960’s there were just a few hangers-on in the flatwoods – cabins slowly returning to the dirt from whence they came, occupied by people who, for three generations, had practiced the family trade – living off Welfare.

                Now, I must dive