Louisiana purchase: love of family inspired William Jefferson to do great things. it also explains that $90,000 in his freezer

Washington Monthly, April, 2008 by Jason Berry

The Jefferson's were not sharecroppers, but farmers who owned their land and their four-room wooden house. This gave them a certain respectability in the eyes of their neighbors. Jefferson's father, Mose, was a church deacon and a sideline plumber who later landed a job as an equipment operator for the Army Corps of Engineers. Still, poverty was inescapable. "They were so poor that often the only meat was if someone shot a rabbit," says Allan Katz, a New Orleans political consultant and former Times-Picayune reporter who covered state politics while Jefferson was in the state legislature. "From the time [Jefferson] was eleven his dad would hand him a rifle with one bullet and say, 'Don't miss, son.'" The tale, a familiar one in Louisiana politics, may be apocryphal, but it folded into the persona of a man who triumphed over hardscrabble origins.

Some of the most vivid impressions of Jefferson's youth rise from the pages of a book he self-published last fall called Dying Is the Easy Part. Billed as a collection of short stories that he wrote in 2002 while he was recovering from a heart attack, the book reads more like a memoir than fiction. Jefferson declares in the introduction that the stories are about "the people, the surroundings, the difficulties, and the triumphs of my life," and he writes about family members by name.

Jefferson's mother, Angeline, is the heroine of Jefferson's stories. Bent on resisting the institutional segregation of her time, Angeline "was regularly in the faces of the all-white school board members arguing for more books and good teachers for our colored schools. And she was always taking the literacy test to register to vote," Jefferson writes. "When the registrar once told her she would register to vote over his dead body, she stirred things up when she replied to him that she could live with that, provided it happened soon."

One of the stories in the collection best illustrates Jefferson's feelings about his mother. In it, Jefferson's older teenage brother gets into a scrape with local whites and runs home. Fearing retaliation, the family stays up all night, guns at the ready. Eventually, the sheriff arrives with his deputies and informs Angeline that her son had better go north if he intends to fight with whites. Jefferson recounts:

   Mama was simply up against it, up against all the racial
   discrimination and hate she found so hard to accept--to
   abide, to endure. She boiled over. "He's gotta
   go up North to keep somebody from whippin' his ass?"
   she screamed out. "He ain't goin' nowhere." Mama had
   a big voice to match her size. Tonight, with this declaration,
   her loud voice seemed to echo off our towering pecan
   trees, through the pitch black night, and right straight
   across Black history.

The sheriff and his men left; the family prevailed.

Thanks in part to the self-assurance that Angeline instilled in her children, most of them attended college and pursued careers in business or education. Their achievements sometimes took them to worlds beyond Angeline's imagination. Years later, when Bill told his mother that he had been accepted to Harvard Law School, her face went blank. She brightened when he explained that Harvard was the college that President Kennedy had attended.