Sons of Mississippi

by Paul Hendrickson

  Which is why I need to say clearly that the book that follows isn’t about the figures in this photograph, not finally, not ultimately. Instead, it’s about what’s deeply connected but is off the page, out of sight, past the borders. It’s about what has come down from this photograph, from the moment of history that is its context. While there is much to tell about the seven men suspended here, my real interest is in the twenty-first century. Hidden in this glossy black-and-white rectangle are some modest surprises and small redemptions and blades of latter-day racial hope, however slender and promisory. The most important faces in this story are the ones you can’t see—progeny, the inheritors—not within the margins of a documentary instant that was framed and clicked on September 27, 1962, at a signal event of the civil rights movement.

  And yet even within these four borders, there is a face you cannot really see. It belongs to John Ed Cothran—the one over on the right, the sheriff with his back turned. He is very aged now, the last one alive. His mind is clear, or was until recently, although his hearing isn’t good. I have spent many hours talking with him and Maudine, his third wife, whom he married several years ago on the spur, when he was two days shy of eighty-four, hopping over to Arkansas to find a JP who’d perform the ceremony for them on the Labor Day weekend. He has great-great-grandchildren. He gets up at 5 A.M. to make his coffee and then go to his La-Z-Boy to read that day’s chapter of the Bible. One day several years ago, shortly after we’d met, when I knew very little about the full arc of his life, we were talking and he said, as if he’d just remembered, “Yeah, poor little Emmett. I helped fish him out.”

  “Emmett Till?” I said.

  “Yeah, from the Tallahatchie,” he said, as if it would have been obvious. “I wasn’t sheriff yet. That was ’fifty-five. I was the deputy under George Smith. Me and Ed Weber, who was the other deputy, got Emmett’s uncle in the car and carried him out to the scene and went down the bank and pulled in the body. The durn fan weighed about a hundred and forty pounds, it had so much silt and mud in it. When we got it cleaned up, I guess it weighed about half that. Couple days later, in the Commercial Appeal in Memphis, there was this big picture of me squattin’ next to the gin fan. I caught hell for that from the sheriff, by the way. Said I had no business gettin’ my picture took.”

  That night, at a library in Memphis, there he was, on a roll of newspaper microfilm, so much younger-looking, in his snap-brim fedora, in a white summer shirt with the sleeves rolled up his muscular upper arms, his Leflore County deputy’s badge over his left breast. He was kneeling next to a gin fan still partially caked with mud. “USED IN SLAYING” were the first words of the caption. “Deputy Sheriff John Ed Cothran of Greenwood, Miss., yesterday examined a big cotton gin fan used to weight down a Negro boy whose body was found Wednesday in the Tallahatchie River.” The Emmett Till case and his role in it—which wasn’t critical to the outcome and was fairly minor in the scheme of things—provided the key to unlocking his essential character, which is all about keeping your back turned, about staying morally in the middle, while others around you do the more vile and naked work of racism. Just when I thought I understood his life, I didn’t. Because some other muddying, silting fact had come unexpectedly into play, pulling everything down, throwing everything open to question once more. But John Ed’s story, John Ed’s life—and, far more redemptively, the story of his grandson and namesake, John Cothran, a native Mississippian who is nearing forty and works at the Home Depot—is not where the story begins. It starts with the declining moments in the life of Billy Ferrell. He’s the figure in the center of Charles Moore’s gelatin silver print, biting off the tip of his Lucky, pulsing the air with a stick that’s tapered just like a baseball bat. “Headache sticks,” cops in the South used to call them. Billy with his billy, up front and in the middle of the frame, laving himself in the light, just as always. When he died, at the end of winter in 1999, in his hometown of Natchez, at age seventy-five, you’d have thought the whole of Adams County was in mourning for him, at least if you were just skimming the surface of truth and reading tributes in the local paper. That’s the way the erasure of the past tends to work, by selective memory and willed amnesia and the wearing away of time. And yet there are always some folks around who are willing to remember things whole.

  Part One

  Deeds of the Fathers

  Where did they come from that day—cheesy and mean little cracker-box houses, or inviting spreads with cool green verandas? Some of both, actually. And why are seven men dressed so uncomfortably for this Indian summer heat? Because they’re on a mission from God. They’re confronting history, and they know it. Over their granddaddies’ Confederate graves will the Kennedy brothers in Washington get away with sticking a black man into a Mississippi place that doesn’t wish him. That was the two-note drumbeat of the White Citizens’ Council when James Meredith was trying to register at Ole Miss, and you could hear the drumbeat all over the state: “nigger/Kennedy, nigger/Kennedy, nigger/Kennedy.” In the mannered sixties South, if a man is being summoned to a moment of grave importance, he knows to look presentable, at least if he has any breeding in him. I’m not talking about peckerwoods and shrimp haulers and backcountry trash, who’ll snatch somebody from sleep with a five-cell flashlight and a .45 Colt automatic. Now, for a proper introduction. These sworn keepers of the Mississippi peace, these leading citizens of their respective communities, in order, going left to right, from the stub of cheap wet cigar on one end to that tourniquet-like armband on the other, are: Sheriff John Henry Spencer of Pittsboro. Sheriff James Ira Grimsley of Pascagoula. Sheriff Bob Waller of Hattiesburg. Sheriff Billy Ferrell of Natchez. Sheriff Jimmy Middleton of Port Gibson. Deputy Sheriff James Wesley Garrison of Oxford. Sheriff John Ed Cothran of Greenwood.

  Dying Billy

  In his retirement, which wasn’t kingly but pretty sweet, Billy Ferrell loved sitting on the dock of his lake house, watching Taco, his Labrador–blue heeler mix, splash around for bream and shad and the occasional white perch. It didn’t matter a doughnut that the dog seldom got anything. It was good just to be down at the pier by himself or with a crony, in a peeling metal chair on the moss-green unpainted wood, looking out over the shallow water of the skinny, torpid lake. Hazel Ferrell would be up at the house, fussing with something or other, and so he’d sneak a smoke, cupping it on the inside of his fist so his wife wouldn’t know, saying to himself, Well, hell, what is life but a series of doing a bunch of little things you’re not supposed to do? Sometimes she’d bring down coffee for him. Seeing his spouse coming, the high sheriff of Natchez—which is how everyone still thought of Billy Ferrell, even if he wasn’t sheriff anymore, that was his boy Tommy’s show now—would quickly stub the cigarette out on the backside of the deck and toss it in the water.

  His arteries were clogging and the circulation in his legs wasn’t good and there was a cancerous mass growing secretly in his lungs, but he was still a handsome man and he knew it. Vanity and pride had always been core Ferrell flaws. He wore gold-rimmed glasses now. The teeth were in trouble and his coal-black hair, which once had glistened in pictures and was parted forty-five degrees to the left, had thinned to long swipes of dirty white. He’d become ruddy-faced and gargly-voiced, and his breath seemed to emerge from him in hard little pants. And yet, this final Billy Ferrell—weakening, sedentary, semi-depressed, widened out—was still capable of coming at you with that old incisored, tough-guy, top-dog grin; with that noted, flat-lined, crow’s-footed, predatory squint. The grin and the squint—didn’t they explain everything about the Mississippi doctrine of Might Is Right?

  Both had been there when he’d campaigned for sheriff the first time. That was in ’fifty-nine. He was a young man then, in his mid-thirties, good-looking as all get-out, albeit with a kind of blocky, sober, big-eared, straight-ahead earnestness in his speech and manner. He’d run ads for himself before the Democratic primary that summer, as all the candidates had, and there were a slew of them, candidates th
at is, something like eight or nine. He was already well known, since he’d been a sheriff’s deputy for eight years, and since he’d lived in Adams County all his life, except for when he’d been to the war. “He has never been known to conduct himself in any manner that would bring discredit to his badge or the people he represented,” the ads said. “We know Billy Ferrell and his Devotion to Duty, His Character, His Sincerity of Purpose, His Unrelenting Courage and his High Principles. Let’s elect William T. ‘Billy’ Ferrell Our Sheriff and Tax Collector.” And Natchez did. They elected him for the next twenty-eight years, with the exception of one four-year window of time, 1964–68, when he couldn’t succeed himself because, back then, a sheriff in Mississippi could be sheriff for only four years at a stretch. In some counties (there are eighty-two in the state), sheriffs would get their wives elected as interim sheriffs, while they did the real thing behind the scenes. Billy Ferrell laid out a term (he sold Ford clunkers at Bluff City Cars and tried to run a Gulf station and hauled some gravel and worked for Premo Stallone’s plumbing business and did a stint as a city policeman, but everybody knew he was just whiling his time), and then he came back in, and then the succession law was changed, and then Natchez and the county seemed willing to make him pope of the county for life. Well, white Natchez always seemed willing, and they had the majority. But after six terms, the high sheriff decided not to run anymore and handed the job over to Tommy in 1988. Tommy still had to get elected by the people, but he had the Ferrell name, and in Natchez, for most of the last half of the twentieth century, that name was almost synonymous with the word “badge.” There’d been a sheriff in Natchez since 1798, and for one-fifth of that time the Ferrells had owned the title.

  Billy had been number 32a on the ballot machines in that first race, and in the runoff campaign between himself and Morris Doughty, some unsavory elements had tried to buy him into withdrawing. There’d been a secret meeting on the levee, on the Louisiana side of the river, and somebody had produced a gob of hundreds, maybe $10,000 worth of hundreds, and stuck it at him. All Billy had to do was take his name off and let Doughty win. He’d never dreamed of so much money. But he wouldn’t take his name off—not that he didn’t think it over a heavy minute, walk around the back side of the pickup and discuss the situation with his old pal Premo Stallone, whom he’d known practically all his life. William T. Ferrell stayed on the ballot, and on election day, the lever with his name on it was the one that got pulled by enough Natchezeans for him to squeak it out. That contest marked the first time a county in Mississippi went modern with voting machines, but corruption being what corruption is, it didn’t stop bribes or offers of bribes.

  The lake house, to which Billy and Hazel had repaired after he’d hung up the gear, was on the Louisiana side of the Mississippi River, upstream a little bit from Natchez. To get there, you took the big bridge over to Vidalia, Louisiana, and then went to Ferriday, Louisiana, and then drove north to the lake and came on around to the back side of it and started looking for Ferrell Lane. When Billy and Hazel first got a weekend place up on Lake St. John—Billy was still sheriffing—all they could afford was a double-wide trailer. Now they had a three-bedroom brick house. If the garage door was open, and the retired couple was home, you’d spy a white Lincoln, never dirty. In the living room, the console TV with the fifty-two-inch screen would doubtless be going. Paw-Paw and Mimsy, as their grandkids called them, had an antenna that could pull in Moscow and Monterrey, Mexico, but they couldn’t get good reception from a Natchez station, which was only across the river and about a half hour’s drive away. Billy enjoyed tuning in Russia and Mexico on his giant wood-encased TV even if, as he said, he didn’t know what the hell they were saying. He watched an awful lot of television in those last years at Lake St. John—not sex shows or Oprah, but news programs. He liked to say he knew what was going on, which is what he’d been content to say of himself when he was in office: He “had the rap from the ax,” was his expression.

  An example: Some collegians and two of their teachers got off a bus on July 5, 1961, in the semitropical antebellum river town of Natchez, which is in the southwestern corner of Mississippi, sitting on great bluffs, at a bend in the river. Billy had been sheriff of Adams County a year and a half then. The students and their two faculty chaperones were from Adelphi College in New York, and they were traveling on an interstate carrier out of New Orleans. From nearly the moment they stepped into the Trailways bus terminal at 5 P.M., they were watched. Even though Natchez was a tourist town, famous for its plantation “pilgrimages,” site of the South’s oldest slave-owning cotton aristocracy, they would have been watched: They were suspiciously young, traveling in a group, Northern accents. But even more so in this case, since right away they’d begun asking impertinent questions about the terminal’s segregated waiting rooms. That evening, Sheriff Billy Ferrell sent a Teletype under his special teletypewriter number, NTZ-44. He sent it to General T. B. Birdsong, commander of the Mississippi Highway Patrol (he used to be a colonel, but now he was a general), and also to the director of the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, which was a state-sponsored and tax-supported agency whose charter was to spy on the civil rights movement. The Sov-Com was based in Jackson, the capital city, two and a half hours away. THIS AFTERNOON ON A BUS FROM NEW ORLEANS LA SEVEN WHITE MALES AND FEMALES COMBINED ENTERED THIS CITY AND COUNTY.… THESE SUBJECTS HAVE BEEN CONSTANTLY UNDER SURVEILLANCE SINCE THEIR ARRIVAL BY OFFICERS THIS DEPARTMENT. THEY HAVE MAILED TWO LETTERS SINCE THEIR ARRIVAL. It was clear from the wire and from typed reports written in subsequent days by investigators of the Sov-Com that the desk clerk at the Eola Hotel had listened in on the group’s phone calls and had reported to the sheriff. It was clear the postmaster was in on it, and so, too, the editor of the local newspaper, with whom the travelers naively thought they might arrange an appointment. SUBJECTS TOLD DESK CLERK AT LOCAL HOTEL THAT THEY WAS EXCHANGE STUDENTS TOURING THE COUNTRY TO FIND OUT ALL LOCAL CUSTOMS PRIOR TO THEIR SHIPMENT TO OVERSEAS COUNTRIES, the wire said. The authorities in Jackson wired back to Billy: OK WILL ADVISE ALL CONSERN. The collegians and their teachers left town on a bus the next morning. They were headed toward Little Rock, Arkansas, via Vicksburg, Mississippi. It was known they intended to stay at either the Albert Pike or the Marion Hotel in Little Rock. The constabularies up there would be alerted that a Barbara Wexler (W/F, ADDRESS 14 GRANGE LANE, LEVITTOWN, NEW YORK) and a Gail Yenkinson (W/FM, SAME ADD) and an Emilio Rivera (SAME ADD AND SUPPOSED TO BE A PROFFESSOR AT THIS COLLEGE), along with the others, were on their nosy way.

  No one told this story at Billy Ferrell’s wake and funeral; no one trotted out an old and semi-inconsequential document from the recently declassified files of the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission. That would have been a rude and inexcusable thing. And yet such documents existed, by the fistful, available for anybody’s reading by the time he expired. All an impertinent person in the post-totalitarian society of Mississippi would have had to do was drive over to Jackson, park his or her car, walk past the monument to the Confederate dead out front of the Department of Archives and History, near the State Capitol, across State Street from the big sign that says WELCOME TO DOWNTOWN JACKSON. BEST OF THE NEW SOUTH. All he or she would’ve needed to do was enter a room on the first floor and fill out a brief application and log on to a Hewlett-Packard Vectra XM2 computer. Soon as the nosy soul started punching up “William T. Ferrell” or “Ferrell, Billy,” he or she would start to come on all sorts of interesting if essentially unsurprising items from thirty and forty years back—not evidence of murder or outright brutality, no; just greater or lesser little bigotries and incontestable evidences of a general mind-set, such as this one, for instance: “Sheriff Billy Ferrell agreed to furnish the Chief of Police with the names of the negroes who had been participating in the afore mentioned activities, and also to begin a file at once in keeping records and names of any known agitators or any would-be agitators in his county and to keep us advised on current activities
. The other Sheriffs likewise agreed to do the same.”

  In their retirement, the high sheriff and his wife had traveled some and generally enjoyed it. They had a motor home, until they sold it in 1996, and wondered afterward why they did. They’d gotten as far north as Edmonton, Alberta, gasping at the Canadian Rockies and the rest of the Lord’s handiwork up there. Billy would do the driving, his only requirement being that Hazel and her sister—who’d be in the back, yakking—kept a pot of fresh coffee going for him at all times. One of their favorite destination spots was Branson, Missouri, where Las Vegas–like country music extravaganzas are based. Once they saw an eleven- or twelve-year-old kid in a spangled suit impersonating Elvis, damnedest thing you could imagine. Mickey Gilley, the big country star, had his own show and restaurant in Branson. He was from Ferriday, down near home, and he and Hazel were something like third cousins maybe a time or two removed. Gilley and Jerry Lee Lewis and the great TV preacher Jimmy Swaggart (you know: the one who’d taken illicit female flesh but wept for the nation’s forgiveness) were all Louisiana boys and first cousins and performers who’d done well in the fame and loot department. More than once Billy and Hazel got to sit down with Gilley in his restaurant and have a drink with him and get some free show tickets. One time, Hazel carted up to Missouri a box of decorative golf balls from Gilley’s old high school golf coach in Ferriday. He’d treated the two of them just like kin.