Sons of Mississippi

  Acclaim for Paul Hendrickson’s

  Sons of Mississippi

  “In a heroic job of reporting, [Hendrickson]… fleshes out the lives of those seven men and of their offspring to determine whether the sins of the fathers were visited on the sons.”

  —The Philadelphia Inquirer

  “Valuable and powerful.… [Written] with an exquisite narrative skill and a sensitive antenna for detecting the nuances of racism.”

  —The Boston Sunday Globe

  “Using a single photograph as an investigative tool.… [Hendrickson] identifies and explores the seemingly irreconcilable racial attitudes that have shaped his subjects’ lives.”

  —The New York Times

  “In a remarkable feat of investigative journalism, Hendrickson uncovers the lives of each sheriff, animating each one’s insidiously racist actions in the cauldron of the ’60s civil rights movement.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  “Skillfully written, fascinating and dramatic, and often moving.… A kaleidoscopic tour through the recent history of the Jim Crow South that shifts constantly between past and present, trying to peer into the minds and souls of these seven men.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  “A substantial … even essential, contribution to our understanding not only of Southern racism, but also of the ways that the past can mark and mar.”

  —San Jose Mercury News

  “Powerful.… Perceptive and moving … make[s] us think about where we stand in what might be thought of as a photograph of America and her people.”

  —Rocky Mountain News

  “A brave, mournful venture into the heart of modern Mississippi.”

  —The Miami Herald

  “Hendrickson, who could be called a detective, scholar and philosopher, as well as a keen observer of human nature, has done a brilliant job of telling an unforgettable story that is vital to every American.”

  —Deseret News

  “Hendrickson … pivots his wide-ranging, gripping narrative around a single 1962 Life magazine photograph that crystallizes the queasy, virulent hatred of white Southerners at the dawn of the civil-rights era.”

  —The New York Observer

  “Fascinating.… Hendrickson builds a furious case that racism was not personal predilection but a policy of apartheid that Southern statehouses fiercely embraced and the feds treated with cynicism and manipulation.”

  —Entertainment Weekly

  “ ‘Nothing is ever escaped,’ is the woeful reminder Hendrickson imparts in this magisterial group biography–cum–social history, a powerful, unsettling, and beautifully told account of Mississippi’s still painful past.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Hendrickson has a sensitive ear for regional nuances, and a honeyed tongue for description.… He writes movingly.”

  —The San Diego Union-Tribune

  “Brilliant.… Hendrickson shows that the ugliest forms of racism haven’t gone away.… This may be the definitive history of the end of apartheid, Dixie style.”

  —People

  “A rich study of hatred and sorrow.… A valuable addition to the literature about the shameful mysteries of racism.”

  —The Dallas Morning News

  Paul Hendrickson

  Sons of Mississippi

  Paul Hendrickson, a prize-winning feature writer for The Washington Post for more than twenty years, now teaches nonfiction writing at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of three previous books, including Looking for the Light (a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1992) and The Living and the Dead (a finalist for the National Book Award in 1996). He lives with his wife and two sons in Philadelphia.

  Also by Paul Hendrickson

  Seminary: A Search

  Looking for the Light: The Hidden Life and Art of Marion Post Wolcott

  The Living and the Dead: Robert McNamara and Five Lives of a Lost War

  FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, JANUARY 2004

  Copyright © 2003 by Paul Hendrickson

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2003.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:

  Ira Harkey: Excerpt from The Smell of Burning Crosses by Ira Harkey. Reprinted by permission of the author. John Hawkins & Associates, Inc.: Excerpt from “They All Just Went Away” by Joyce Carol Oates. Copyright © 1995 by Joyce Carol Oates. Reprinted by permission of John Hawkins & Associates, Inc.

  Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:

  Hendrickson, Paul, 1944–

  Sons of Mississippi : a story of race and its legacy / Paul Hendrickson.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 0-375-40461-9 (alk. paper)

  1. Mississippi—Race relations. 2. Sheriffs—Mississippi—Attitudes—Case studies. 3. Sheriffs—Mississippi—Biography. 4. Sheriffs—Mississippi—Family relationships. 5. Whites—Mississippi—Attitudes—Case studies. 6. Whites—Mississippi—Biography. 7. Mississippi—Biography. 8. African Americans—Civil Rights—Mississippi—History. 9. Racism—Mississippi—Case studies. 10. Racism—United States—Case studies. I. Title.

  F350.A1 H46 2003

  305.8’009762’09045—dc21 2002029857

  Vintage ISBN: 0-375-70425-6

  eBook ISBN: 978-0-8041-5334-8

  Author photograph © Gasper Tringale

  Map by George Ward

  www.vintagebooks.com

  The author gratefully acknowledges the support of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts; both provided writing fellowships for this work.

  v3.1

  For Wil Haygood, who has shown me with his life

  Make pictures from the very start, and you will feel what you need as you go along.

  —Thomas Eakins, in a letter to Edmund C. Messer, July 3, 1906

  Hopper’s paintings are short, isolated moments of figuration that suggest the tone of what will follow just as they carry forward the tone of what preceded them. The tone but not the content. The implication but not the evidence. They are saturated with suggestion.… Our time with the painting must include—if we are self-aware—what the painting reveals about the nature of continuousness.

  —Mark Strand on the work of Edward Hopper

  1. Oxford, home of the University of Mississippi, integrated October 1, 1962, and where James Wesley Garrison was a deputy sheriff in 1962

  2. Natchez, William T. Ferrell, sheriff, 1960–64, 1968–88

  3. Greenwood, John Ed Cothran, sheriff, 1960–64

  4. Money, site of Bryant’s Grocery & Meat Market, entered by Emmett Till, August 24, 1955

  5. Sumner, where Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam were acquitted for the Till murder

  6. Pascagoula, James Ira Grimsley, sheriff, 1960–64

  7. Hattiesburg, Bob Waller, sheriff, 1960–64

  8. Port Gibson, Jim Middleton, sheriff, 1950–52, 1952–56, 1960–64

  9. Pittsboro, John Henry Spencer, sheriff, 1960–64

  10. Kosciusko, James Meredith’s birthplace

  11. Jackson, James Meredith’s home

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedicat
ion

  Epigraph

  Map

  Prologue: Nothing Is Ever Escaped

  Part One: Deeds of the Fathers

  Dying Billy

  Lost Boy

  Grimsley

  John Henry, Jimmy, Bob

  The Man with His Back Turned

  Part Two: Filling Up the Frame

  American Haunting

  Part Three: Hopes of the Sons

  Sometimes Trashy, Sometimes Luminous

  The Distance from Natchez, Mississippi, to Santa Teresa, New Mexico

  In the Family of Meredith: Loving What Is Theirs

  Confederate Shadows: Good Son

  Epilogue: Hope and History Rhyming

  A Bibliographical Essay

  Acknowledgments

  James Meredith leaned forward in his living room in Jackson, Mississippi, examining the photograph as if it were a document. He touched the face of the man tearing off the strips of gauze. Then the face of the one taking the tight practice chop with the two-foot-long hickory club. Then the face of the one in the Stetson, with the leering laugh, whose glasses are starting to slide down his alcoholic nose. He’d never seen the photograph before.

  “They were Mississippi sheriffs?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “And they were there at Oxford?”

  “Yes, but they kind of disappeared when the rioting started.”

  “And you’re writing a book about what happened to them?”

  “Yes, but it’s more about their descendants. If I can find them. If they’ll talk to me.”

  He nodded. “You want to know what came down from these guys.”

  A semireclusive and famous and not-well man in his mid-sixties, trying to overcome prostate cancer and diabetes and maybe the demons in his mind, went back to looking. Meredith moved forward in his chair a few more inches, and just the slight moving made him look uncomfortable, old, in pain. His hand was still drifting across the glossy surface of a forty-year-old black-and-white photograph. It was as if his elegant fingertips were helping him to remember things.

  “It wasn’t this element that truly terrified me when I integrated Ole Miss,” he said. “It was the element below this element. It was the element that wanted to be this element. First of all, every one of these men is what you’d call a leading citizen in Mississippi. My knowledge of this is what enabled me to defeat Mississippi in 1962. I knew these people better than they knew themselves.”

  At the door, he shook hands. There almost seemed new strength in him. “Well, keep reporting to me on your progress as you go around our state inquiring about these gentlemen,” he said. Outside, in the Meredith backyard, a little dog with a black eye was still yipping and jumping behind the fence he couldn’t get over. There was such determination in it.

  September 27, 1962, Oxford, Mississippi

  Prologue

  Nothing Is Ever Escaped

  It’s made of wood and brick and cinder block, but from across the road it seems like something almost papery, as if from a dream. Once it was a Delta grocery store. Now it’s a falling-down building in an all-but-deserted place called Money. But it is its own kind of American shrine. It holds the ghost of a little fat black kid from Chicago called “Bobo” Till, who is known to history as Emmett Till.

  He was fourteen and never had a chance. They didn’t just murder the cocky and supposedly fresh-mouthed Emmett Louis “Bobo” Till that Sunday morning in August 1955. They made him undress and caved in his face and shot him in the head with a .45 and barbwired his neck to a seventy-five-pound cotton-gin fan. Then they dumped him into the Tallahatchie River. His crime? He had reputedly wolf-whistled at a twenty-one-year-old married white woman named Carolyn Bryant, who was tending the counter of the grocery alone. He had supposedly called her “baby” and maybe popped his just-purchased two cents’ worth of bubble gum in her direction and perhaps squeezed her hand and even asked her for a date. Maybe all of it was true, and maybe just shards of it. But something forbidden—or perceived to be forbidden—between a white woman and a black teenager in the rural Deep South of the 1950s seems clearly to have happened, and yet precisely what it was remains clouded in the historical mist. But there is no arguing the historical consequences for the course of civil rights in America, for America.

  Nearly every Mississippi story sooner or later touches this one, ends up—in some spiritual, homing way—right here, in absurdly misnamed and depopulated Money, along this ribbon of Illinois Central railroad track, on this backcountry asphalt, before this tottering and yet somehow beautiful and abandoned building where fatback and bamboo rakes and Lucky Strikes and lye soap and BC headache powder and so many other simple, needed goods and wares and staples were once sold to the locals. They were sold to black field hands of the Delta, primarily, who were living, as their forebears had lived, in tar-paper shacks stuck up on cinder blocks. On this spot, it seems more possible to imagine what some of it was like, the “it” being many things, but primarily the unpunished lynching of someone callow and roly-poly from the North who was visiting relatives in Mississippi and who didn’t understand, not nearly enough, about the pridefulness and bigotries and paranoia and taboos and potentially lethal rages of the Jim Crow South.

  There’s no plaque from a state historical commission. It just is: a monument in ruin, forgotten, recalcitrant, collapsing in on itself, set against memory and the wind and these five decades of change—and nonchange—in American race relations.

  Jet magazine, in showing the photographs of the battered corpse a little while after the killing, reported to its readers that when Till was pulled from the sludge-green river, a piece of skull three inches square fell loose from his head. Those pictures in Jet helped awaken a generation of future young black activists to what would soon, in the next decade, be called “the movement.” That’s the true legacy of the lynching of Emmett Till—it put so many eyes on the eventual prize. (Three months later, on December 1, 1955, in Montgomery, Alabama, a forty-two-year-old ascetic-looking seamstress named Rosa Parks would decline to give up her seat on a homebound suppertime city bus, and this, too, was to become one of the anchoring posts of twentieth-century American history.)

  The beauty of the building has to do with its look of extreme fragility. A good cough would knock it over. Every five minutes or so, a car or pickup truck blows past on the two-lane, and then the structure seems to tremble and shudder a little more in its foundations. The wood looks thin as balsa. The double front door is padlocked. There’s a peeling decal for Raleigh cigarettes by the doorknob. A crushed Sprite bottle is on the landing. Small creatures scurry about. Through the blades of broken plate glass in the door, you can see beams and rafters and other parts of ceiling and walls that have fallen to the foundation. You couldn’t walk around in there. Just the randomness of the way things have crashed and settled themselves in against the flooring seems strangely purposeful.

  Next door is an old wooden filling station with an overhanging slat-board roof. Someone lives in the back of the gas station, but nobody’s answering the door. There are four signs in the two front windows: OUT OF BUSINESS; SORRY CLOSED; CLOSED; SORRY CLOSED. The windows are covered over with nailed-up blankets. On the other side of the grocery store, across a small side street, there’s a mobile home. It’s the town post office. But the clerk has left for the day.

  Where there was once a window on the side of the building, there is now only a hole in a brick wall. On what was once the second floor of the grocery, a toilet is hanging on the far wall, and there is nothing below it. The toilet is bolted against the bare wall, with only air beneath, a ludicrous sight.

  When Bobo Till walked up onto this porch and through these doors on August 24, 1955, the place was Bryant’s Grocery & Meat Market. There were four Coca-Cola signs on the front. There were wooden benches outside, for checkers and idling. A chubby visitor, who knew how to dress smartly, entered about seven-thirty that evening. It was a Wednesday. He’d been in Mississippi about t
hree days. The store was owned by a twenty-four-year-old former soldier named Roy Bryant and his pretty wife, Carolyn. They lived in the back and upstairs with their small children. She had coils of dark hair and had won beauty contests in high school. Till and his cousins and several friends—about eight young people in all—had come into town from the country in a 1946 Ford. The citified Northerner had a slight speech impediment caused by a childhood attack of polio. Perhaps this is where some of his known cockiness originated: in the need to overcompensate.

  There were no real witnesses to what transpired. That’s because the others who were with Till stayed outside and tried to watch through the plate-glass windows. The most commonly accepted version of what happened—although it has been subject to divergent accounts—is that Till, who’d been bragging to his country relations about his white Chicago girlfriend, maybe even showing off a photograph of her, was suddenly double-dared, egged on, to go in there and ask Carolyn Bryant for a date. She would later testify under oath that a Negro with a “northern brogue” had come in and made lewd advances—grabbed her, she said, jumped between her and the counter—and that he was still wolf-whistling as he sauntered out.

  Roy Bryant was off trucking shrimp to Texas. He had a powerful and balding half brother named J. W. Milam. Big Milam, as he was known locally, was thirty-six and had a ninth-grade education and weighed 235 pounds. He had honored himself as a soldier in World War Two and you didn’t want to make lengthy speeches when he was riled. Two days after whatever happened inside the store, an unaware husband came home to Money to his wife and two baby sons. Not immediately, but soon, he heard the story.

  Two nights later, in the early hours of Sunday, August 28, two half brothers, bent on teaching a lesson about the customs of the Southern way of life, came for Emmett Till. They took him from his great-uncle’s unpainted cabin, which was three miles from Money, off a gravel road, behind a cotton field. The great-uncle, Moses Wright, was a sharecropper and preacher. There were cedar and persimmon trees in his yard. Big Milam had a five-cell flashlight and a .45 Colt automatic.