“The women of Columbus, Mississippi, animated by nobler sentiments than are many of their sisters, have shown themselves impartial in their offerings made to the memory of the dead. They strewed flowers alike on the graves of the Confederate and of the National soldiers.”

Attributed to the New York Tribune, and the preface to the 1867 poem “The Blue and the Gray”

The first Memorial Day, then called “Decoration Day,” was held at Friendship Cemetery in Columbus, Mississippi in 1866, when ladies from the small town on the Tombigbee River decided to decorate the graves of both the Confederate and the Union soldiers. 

But this story is not about them.

In Plot 894 of Friendship Cemetery is a memorial marker for Thomas E. Duckworth, U.S. Navy, Seaman 2nd Class. 

His father, Jasper Ezekiel Duckworth, and his mother, Meacon Albina “Binie” Shelton Duckworth, made their home in Columbus. They had four other children, the youngest of whom was named Alice.

Alice had been begging her parents to have a little brother. She had been born April 29, 1909, and by 1920, her hope for a baby brother was still strong. There were photographs of babies and small children in the newspaper, an advertisement of a certain kind. These little ones had been orphaned or had parents who, for any number of reasons, had chosen to place them for adoption.

Alice saw the faces of these children, and she prayed hard.

Alice Kyle Duckworth was the oldest person I ever knew. She didn’t have to start taking blood pressure medicine until well into her nineties, and she mowed her own yard just as long. She always washed the dishes after holiday dinners, muttering that she didn’t want to be a burden. We shelled pecans together in my living room, the jagged hulls littering the coffee table and surrounding carpet. She baked egg custards and chocolate-chip cookies. She never married, and she never had children.

She passed away at the age of 102 in 2011, and for a substantial portion of my life, I had the privilege of knowing her.

At her home on Browder Street in Columbus hung a photograph of the U.S.S. Sims (DD-409), a destroyer commissioned August 1, 1939. In the opening months of World War II, in the Pacific Theater, the Sims had been assigned to protect the U.S.S. Neosho, a tanker. The two vessels were traveling in a purported safe zone in order to refuel American ships. However, a Japanese scout plane discovered the two ships, mistaking the Neosho for an aircraft carrier and the Sims for a cruiser. 

In the ensuing battle with Japanese dive bombers, the crew of the Sims fought valiantly, but several bombs struck the midship area, causing catastrophic damage. The crew of the Neosho witnessed in horror as the Sims split in half and sank beneath the rough waters of the Coral Sea, but not before firing off one last shot from its forward five-inch gun.

It was May 7, 1942. Of the 252 men onboard the vessel, only thirteen survived.

“My little brother Tommy was on that ship,” Alice recounted, as we stood in the hallway looking at the pictures on the wall.

She grew more thoughtful, and she continued: “He was adopted, you know. In those days, we didn’t tell children that they had been adopted, at least not until they had grown up. He turned 21 after he had gone away for his basic training, so we never had the chance. He never knew any different.”

After the war, their mother Binie decided to research the adoption records, and she tracked down Thomas’s birth mother in south Mississippi. A friendship ensued, with the two ladies meeting yearly to discuss their lives and share their heartache. They often met in the middle, in Louisville, Mississippi, at the restaurant at Lake Tiak-o’Khata.

The little baby who would become Thomas Duckworth had been placed for adoption because his birth mother and father felt that they could not support another child. Maybe someone else could give their boy a good home. It was the right thing to do.

The two mothers’ friendship grew, and Thomas’s birth mother got his military medals, bestowed by none other than Binie, a woman from Columbus, Mississippi, whose “nobler sentiment” overcame her own motherly attachments to hold on to her son’s decorations of war.

She also had a desire to give a child a home and fulfill her daughter’s request for a long-hoped-for baby brother.

It was the right thing to do.

A photograph of Seaman Duckworth in his uniform hung on the wall beside the image of the U.S.S. Sims, along with a letter signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, sending condolences to the family on the loss of their son. In that black-and-white picture, his shining brown eyes, wavy brown hair, and strikingly handsome smile make him look so alive that you forget that he died in the service of his country.

You’ll not find his picture if you Google his name, but you will find a photograph of that stone in Friendship Cemetery. His parents are buried in Plot 894, as is Miss Alice and other relatives.

I’ve been there, having accompanied her on a visit. Toward the end, she repeated stories and phrases, as the aged often do, but I never tired of hearing her say the following words:

“I had a little brother. His name was Thomas.”

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There are two excellent sources I came across after searching to see if any information existed on Thomas Duckworth.

Tombigbee Tales, a podcast by P. Shannon Evans, has an episode from January 30, 2025 titled “Thomas Edward Duckworth – The Battle of the Coral Sea.”

I also found some eyewitness information on the sinking of the U.S.S. Sims at delsjourney.com “The Battle of the Coral Sea: The U.S.S. Sims (DD-409).