Sons of Mississippi Read online

  When I saw him, late in the month, he was fogged, depressed, shockingly thin. He had on house slippers, slacks, a sport shirt, a bathrobe. He was sitting in a maroon chair. There was a daybed behind him. I got him talking a little. He told me how he found out about his father’s death. He was in Wem, England, with his Army outfit. This was 1944 and they’d just gotten there. He read the letter from home—no one had sent a wire—and fell back on his cot in the barracks and cried. He decided not to go home for the funeral, even though his superior officer had urged him to go. From his maroon rocker, Billy sort of acted it out for me. He held out his arm and then draped it over a chair. His fingers held an invisible letter. I thought in that instant he was going to cry. He nearly did. And yet what I remember most about that visit—which was the last time I saw him alive—was the way he talked of “raising those kids.” He said it about half a dozen times. He was referring to his son, Tommy, and his daughter, Sherry, who lives in Baton Rouge. “We worked so hard raising those kids,” he said. He mentioned “the hope of the flock.” He was referring to grandkids and spoke specifically of Tommy’s kids—Cricket Ferrell, who was finishing her law degree at Ole Miss, and Ty Ferrell, who was out in New Mexico as a U.S. Border Patrol agent, carrying on the family business. “So you can see, we’ve had this kind of pretty ordinary life,” he said, “just the usual family dreams.”

  He held on through Christmas and into the first two months of the new year and then came the five-column headline on page one of the Natchez Democrat on March 1, 1999: “Adams County Mourns Loss of ‘Greatest’ Sheriff.” There was a photo. “He had so many friends that there’s no way to count them,” someone was quoted as saying. “He was very good to the youth,” someone else said. “We had our ups and downs about how things should be done, but I found him to be fair,” the former mayor of Natchez said.

  One of the stories told at the obsequies concerned the Great Shootout at Lake Mary. Billy had crawled under the floorboards of a shack out in the woods by a lake near the Homochitto River. He was lying on his back, firing up through cracks at a crazed person. The crazed person was black and his name was DeWayne Sampson Russell. According to the newspaper accounts afterward, Russell was an ex-inmate of the state insane asylum at Whitfield. This was in the summer of 1969. “Billy was hit several times and he still carried that lead,” one of Billy’s old deputies told a reporter at the Democrat when the paper wrote up the news of the high sheriff’s death.

  The case files of the DeWayne Sampson Russell incident reveal that two sheriffs from two counties, plus their respective deputies, were involved in the gun battle. Burnell McGraw, sheriff of Wilkinson County, which sits just below Adams County, had called Billy to ask for help. He said there was a hermit in an old house on the north side of Lake Mary, which spreads into both counties, and the hermit was threatening to kill anyone who came near him. Billy said he’d come. Before getting into his squad car with his deputies, he wrote out on a yellow legal pad an account of the phone conversation he’d had with his counterpart in Wilkinson County. He wrote the synopsis in longhand, in the remarkably neat and almost feminine script he’d learned from nuns in Catholic grammar school. The document is four pages long and it’s in the case files in the Adams County sheriff’s office. He wrote:

  After hearing this resume from Sheriff McGraw and being advised that he did not know if the subject would be in Wilkinson County or Adams County, I advised him that I would come myself with two of my deputies and meet him and his deputy at the Court House in Woodville at 2:30 P.M. this afternoon. After talking to McGraw I issued the necessary orders to my department, naming Deputies Jim Logan and Fred Smith as the two to accompany me to Lake Mary. I advised them to have ready 1 M-15 high-powered .233 rifle w/scope and four clips of ammunition, 1 .45 cal machine-gun with two clips, the large gas gun for house barrage, 2 walkie-talkie radios, a bullhorn and Deputy Logan requested that he be allowed to carry his own 30-06 rifle with scope and this permission was granted. We had our standard handguns & belts, etc., so then we proceeded to Woodville, Miss.

  In the back of the file there’s an envelope with about fifty color snapshots, every one a picture of a dead man at the bottom of some wooden steps, arms akimbo, a leg stretched wide, the other leg behind him, a hat a few feet away, blood everywhere. The snapshots, taken from many angles, document a man stopped in a running motion. Also in the case file is an order for immediate closure, written and signed three days after the incident by an Adams County superior court judge. It’s one page long: “State of Miss. vs. DeWayne Sampson Russell. This matter having come on for hearing on this day, and the Court having determined that the Defendant, DeWayne Sampson Russell, is now deceased and that it is to the best interests of the State of Mississippi that said matter be retired to the files and no further action taken with the cost of retiring this matter to be borne by the State of Mississippi. It is therefore hereby ordered and adjudged that this case be retired to the files.”

  What isn’t in Case Report Number 7074—you’d have to look in other repositories in Mississippi—is an FBI roster of old Adams County lawmen (sheriffs, deputies, constables, police chiefs, city patrolmen) alleged to have once been active members of the Ku Klux Klan. Burnell McGraw’s name is on one of those FBI lists. And on another lengthy FBI list (undated) of alleged members of the Adams County Klavern of the White Knights of the KKK, there’s this: “Ferrell FNU.” FNU means “First Name Unknown.” There are other lists, too, in other repositories, where the name Ferrell can be found, without particular documentation, linked to the KKK. In the archives of the special collections at the University of Mississippi, there’s a multipage listing of “Natchez Individuals Suspected of Belonging to Klan.” This list is broken into categories: “RNC—reported, not confirmed.” “UK—United Klans.” “KS—strong klan sympathizer.” “WK—white knight.” The names on this document seem to have been compiled privately in the mid-sixties by civil rights activists in Natchez, when Billy was out of office as sheriff. The titles and job descriptions include owners of cab companies, employees at Johns Manville, International Paper, and Armstrong Tire & Rubber, bus station workers, a logging contractor, service station employees, a justice of the peace, an electrical inspector, city firefighters, attorneys, a bartender at a local club. The fourth entry on the first page of the list: “Ferrell, William T., or ex sheriff, now city policeman (UK) said to handle propaganda and spread rumors.” I cannot prove that Billy Ferrell was or was not a Klansman. A name on an old list, whether from the FBI or a civil rights group, doesn’t prove anything. There’s a mound of circumstantial evidence to suggest he was in the Klan—and there’s just as much circumstantial evidence and personal testimony, if not more so, to suggest the opposite. (A former Mississippi Grand Dragon said recently that Billy was not a Klansman.) I’ve since had the family’s denials and explanations.

  The funeral at St. Mary’s parish on Tuesday, March 2, 1999, was grand—flag on the coffin, uniformed lawmen from across the state, twenty-one-gun salutes, slow-moving line of police cars to the cemetery, wires of condolence from high officials in Jackson. Tommy arranged for most of it. The day of the wake, Monday, was the last day for filing for the upcoming sheriff’s race, and it looked as if Tommy might go unopposed. But just in case that turned out not to be true, he posted a deputy outside the courthouse to keep him informed. On the afternoon of the wake, Billy Ferrell’s son kept excusing himself from the line of mourners to step outside Laird Funeral Home so that he could get an update on his cell phone from the deputy stationed at the courthouse. Damned if an old known Kluxer from the sixties, with no prayer of winning but who hated the Ferrells, didn’t come forward at about 4:30 P.M. to post his name for the race. This enraged Tommy. It was the Ferrell family flaw. His pride and spleen couldn’t bear the thought that somebody could run against him, siphon off a few votes righteously his.

  In the late nineties, a twin son of James Meredith was in graduate school at Ole Miss, at the same time a granddaughter
of Billy Ferrell was a grad student there, walking under the same beautiful trees. She’s Tommy’s child, the brainy one everybody in the family calls Cricket. While the painfully shy Joe Meredith worked toward his Ph.D. in finance, the terribly confident Christina L. “Cricket” Ferrell, a few buildings away, studied for her law degree. Their lives overlapped in Oxford for more than two years. For a while, they lived in off-campus housing a few blocks from each other, neither aware the other existed. Surely, they passed each other on walks every week. In time, I met them both. I wanted to arrange an introduction, but that didn’t work out. One, I knew, was too inward, the other too cognizant, savvy. No percentage in it, she’d have said about sitting down to chat with the son of the guy at whom her granddaddy was figuratively swinging.

  Lost Boy

  Second from the right—ripping the strip of gauze, bogarting his smoke, furrowing his brow, surveying the barrel end of Billy’s bat—is Jim Garrison. He looks to be forty, easy, maybe even forty-five, right? He is twenty-seven. He’ll be dead by fifty-one. In the summer of 1986, he’ll be laid gently in the family plot, which is about a hundred yards from the Faulkner family plot, down a grassy bank. “I am older at twenty than a lot of people who have died,” says Quentin Compson in Absalom, Absalom. That’s the story in which Quentin is at Harvard and his Canadian roommate, Shreve McCannon, says: “Tell about the South.… Jesus, the South is fine, isn’t it. It’s better than theatre, isn’t it. It’s better than Ben Hur, isn’t it. No wonder you have to come away now and then, isn’t it.”

  Garrison has just another twenty-four years. Who could know he’d wind up the manager of a Long John Silver fast-food joint in Corinth, Mississippi? Hey, fries are up! Pull around to the next window, please, ma’am. The restaurant is out on the bypass, Highway 72, and the local cops are his buddies and they stop in for coffee during the day to sit with him on break in the second booth along the wall. It’s always the second booth for Garrison, sometimes looking out the window toward the parking lot and cursing about how many slopeheads and Mexicans are getting into the country nowadays. To get to the job from his two-bedroom mobile home in the Woodlawn Trailer Park, he drives his Buick Regal through the town’s historic district (Confederate commanders, wounded at Shiloh, once lay dying in these beautiful homes), past Chevrons and Billup stations, past the Grace Bible Baptist Temple, past the public library that keeps stacks of old Life magazines up on the second floor. He was christened James Wesley Garrison, the son of Webb Garrison and Grace Alvis Garrison, and was the younger brother of Marion Webster “Billy” Garrison (another cop in the family with an oddly uncoppish name), and who, just like Marion, is destined to die early of the family curse: cancer. In both cases, and in other cases of the extended family, too, it eats them grindingly.

  He looks a little like Timothy McVeigh, who blew up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995 and was executed for it six years later in a Faulknerlike grotesquerie of public attention. That’s an ink pen or a ballpoint hooked in James Wesley’s shirt pocket, next to his badge, which is bouncing light. It looks like there’s a wire of some sort coming up from the back of his neck and alongside his scalp, but actually it’s a police antenna on the hood of another squad car barely visible at the back of the frame. He went to Uncle Sam at age sixteen, served a long hitch, and has been out only a year or so, which possibly explains the G.I. flattop. He prevaricated about his age to get into the Army. He served in Germany and Korea, making sergeant, signing up for MP duty, busting heads of drunk soldiers on weekend liberty, writing an occasional postcard back to his hometown of Oxford to his kid sister, Pat, that went along the lines of “Hiya, Sis. Nothing to do over here. Army’s OK. Don’t get married till I get home. Hope to be a cop when I get back. We’ll get some fishing in at Sardis Reservoir. Miss Mississippi bad. Your big brother, Jim.”

  When the tumors came—in the mid-eighties, after law enforcement, after the bad marriage—they lodged in his esophagus and in his stomach and then metastasized to both sides of his brain, one side at a time. He lived for about a year. His obituary was three paragraphs long, deep on an inside page. Attorney General Ed Meese’s Commission on Pornography had just issued its big report after a year-long study. The Oxford High basketball cheerleaders had just been awarded the Spirit Stick at summer cheerleading camp. Almost everybody from the Corinth Long John’s drove over for the funeral—they’d shut the restaurant down that day. Even some big shots from the corporate offices in Kentucky came to pay respects.

  He has two markers in the family plot, and the first one is small and black and flat to the ground. It doesn’t say anything about his once being a sheriff’s deputy or a highway patrolman or running a Long John’s or having been depicted hugely in Life in 1962. It says JAMES W. GARRISON. SGT. US ARMY. KOREA. FEB. 18, 1935. JULY 9, 1986. The first time I was there, standing on the late-spring spongy earth, somebody had placed plastic lilies at the base of his stone. Next to the flat marker was a larger upright stone and on it was a carving of two hands folded in prayer. Beside the monument was a small white plaster angel. From the corner of my eye, I could see a tour group of Faulkner shrinegoers, taking photographs, bending over to read the inscription on the master’s stone, which has been darkened with moss and the years of dampness. They’d disgorged from a bus that was parked at the roadside, next to a green historical marker with gold lettering that said THE CREATOR OF YOKNAPATAWPHA COUNTY, WHOSE STORIES ABOUT HIS PEOPLE WON HIM THE NOBEL PRIZE, IS BURIED TWENTY STEPS EAST OF THIS MARKER.

  About two miles from the immortal grave and the nearly anonymous grave, I am sipping the Coke that Pat James, a sweet-mannered and round-faced middle-aged woman, has brought to me in a tumbler, with a paper napkin around its glass base. An hour ago, when I called Jim Garrison’s kid sister out of the blue, she said, after a moment’s hesitation, “Sure, you can come over.” She said she was just folding laundry and watching a TV movie. It was a Saturday afternoon. I mentioned Life. “Yes, that would be my brother,” she said. “Oh, I know my brother was involved in that riot, because he had that picture in Life magazine. I remember his face was blistered after the riot, from the tear gas. My husband—he wasn’t my husband yet—was turning hamburgers at the university grill when James Meredith was trying to register. He won’t talk to you about any of that, though. I was very young.”

  She’s in a back room, searching for something. On a bookshelf in the living room, with other family portraits, there’s a colorized and framed portrait of her brother in a state trooper’s uniform. This was in the seventies, after he’d been a deputy sheriff. He has blue eyes, at least in the colorized version. Pat comes back. She has a man’s old leather billfold in her hand. It’s a threefold wallet and she holds it out in front of her and lets it fall open, in the way a cop might do who’s just knocked at the door and is flashing his identification at you. There he is, on the other side of a cracked and broken little plastic window: his driver’s license with a thumbnail picture of him. The face photostatted on Mississippi license number 001-52-7167 looks anything but serene. A very ill man must have gotten his license renewed, aware that he’d not need to renew it again. “It’s his,” she says, pressing the billfold to her bosom. “I keep things like this.” She seems close to crying.

  When he got on with the highway patrol, it was such a life’s dream realized, she says. But it didn’t work out. He left early. “His wife would go to roadblocks, they’d fight right there while he was on the job, it was terrible. Now, whether he resigned or if he was asked to leave, I don’t know. He’s my brother. I just leave it at that.” Afterward, he worked in the family bait shop. Then he found the restaurant job at Long John Silver’s in Corinth.

  “All our men are buried there,” she says of her brother’s grave. She follows me out to the car. “If you ever get another one of those Life magazines, I’d love to have it,” she says. “You know, keepsake.”

  In Corinth, up near the Tennessee and Alabama borders, about a ninety-minute drive
from Oxford, Susan Plunk is about ready to get off work at Long John Silver’s. She’s in her thirties, very pretty, a new mom. She took the four-month-old to Kmart last evening, she says. She’s worked at the restaurant since she was sixteen. “Of course I knew him,” she says. “He was my first manager. He helped me with the first down payment on my first car. I needed a thousand down. He gave me five hundred. He was always doing things like that. He said, ‘Susan, you shouldn’t be driving any old car. You need a car like mine.’ He went to the lot and got the deal. He took care of his parents, too. I know that. Their names were on his checkbook.”

  She used to sit with him every morning in the second booth. She was a high school kid and he was in his mid-forties. He’d drink coffee, she’d have a slice of pecan pie. At ten-thirty, they’d open for the day. He was always a tough boss, but fair. There were eighteen employees and all were white. Well, there was one black kid working in the place for a while, but it didn’t work out. “He took a knife away from the kid. He drew it on Jim. He was a strong guy, you know.” After that, there were no more blacks working for him.

  I ask about his friends. “Cops. He liked hanging around with the cops. They all knew him.”

  Once, she brought in her high school annual for him to sign. He signed the yearbook so beautifully, she thought. It was something like “Susan, you’ll always be in remembrance of me.” On holidays, he’d have the staff out to his trailer. He’d do all the cooking. He’d turn the music up and everybody would dance. It was as if he never wanted to be alone.

  I show her the magazine. The picture was taken two years before she was born. She stares at it for an instant. Jumping up: “Yes! It is him.” She sits down, studying it. There’s a smile on her face. “He didn’t tell me about this. He never told me about this. I didn’t know anything about this.” She is somewhere between amused and peeved.