Sons of Mississippi

by Paul Hendrickson

  These years in semiexile on the Louisiana side of the river were comfortable and pleasant and full of respect, given what a man had accomplished in his life. But they were also flat and tedious years. Just not enough laving light. Billy was a man without hobbies. He’d always been the sheriff. Too often he’d just sit and remember, stare hard. In a more jovial mood, he’d tell cronies in town he’d gone to work for “Honey-Do.” Honey, do this. Honey, do that.

  In 1992, Natchez made him Santa for the annual Christmas parade, a coveted honor, and there was Billy, third car in the procession, red suit, riding through the neighborhoods in a top-down convertible, waving, tossing candies to black and white kiddies alike. Hazel framed the official parade invitation: “Santa and Mrs. William T. Ferrell Sr.…”

  Every Friday, he took his wife to town for her appointment at the hair garage. He’d drop her off and then tool the Lincoln over to the jail and get one of the better-behaved prisoners—a trusty—to wash it for a buck. Afterward, he’d meet Hazel and they’d sit at the Ramada Inn, which has a wonderful dining room with a wide, high-up view of the curling river. Folks always came up to the table to say, “Hello, Sheriff,” and, “Hey, Sheriff, why don’t you run again?” In these instances, they weren’t addressing Tommy Ferrell, who was often sitting right there with his parents. “Sheriff” was reserved for William T. Ferrell the elder, and would always be reserved, as long as he was above ground. William T. Ferrell the younger was head lawman of Adams County now, a man of immense pride and ego and accomplishment himself. He wore cowboy boots and a silver rodeo buckle and a blue blazer and a piece on one hip and a cell phone on the other. He liked to walk with his stomach out in front of him. He wore snappy ties and had two computers on his desk and thought of himself—and tried to run his department—as a kind of CEO of law and justice in southwestern Mississippi. His “agency,” as Tommy called it, had something like fifty-seven on the payroll, twenty-seven of whom were uniformed officers and the rest of whom were support staff, including a doctor and a nurse for the jail. It was a $2.5 million budget he presided over. But for all his modernity, the son was a man with a severe attachment to the past, and the least benchmark of this were the photos he kept in his office. In between beautifully framed prints of Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee was one of Nathan Bedford Forrest, a cofounder of the KKK and a brilliant Civil War tactician. Tommy had been his father’s deputy for almost nineteen years, rising in the 1970s and 1980s above all the other deputies in the sheriff’s department (not without their grumbling about nepotism) to become chief criminal deputy and chosen successor for the top job. And he’d gotten it. SHERIFF TOMMY FERRELL was now lettered in yellow-gold on the plate glass at the front door of the sheriff’s department; lettered on the side of the county’s twenty-four squad cars; lettered on the sheriff’s helicopter; across the hull of a big white racing boat with twin outboards that sat parked and ready right out front of Tommy’s office across from the courthouse, waiting—as if, need be, for the sheriff to morph into Dano on Hawaii 5-0. Tommy was the Ferrell family member moving rapidly through the various vice presidential seats of the National Sheriffs’ Association, so that by June 2002, at age fifty-five, if nothing went sour, he’d become president of the whole shebang, headquartered in Washington, D.C., with its membership of something like 20,000. No Mississippi sheriff had ever striven so high, ever dared so high or public.

  And yet somehow none of this mattered, not on Fridays, not to Natchez, when the once and ever high sheriff of the county brought his wife to town in the white Lincoln for her morning at the hair garage and then sat with her in the window at the Ramada with nearly the whole damn ville—the whole white ville, that is—coming up to say hello. Billy always protested to his family afterward that these homages were embarrassing, but you’d have to be a fool to believe that. One of the main reasons he and Hazel had moved to the lake house in the first place was so Tommy could have his own life. And yet it was so hard for Billy to stay out of town. In the family, whether they were at the lake house or visiting at Tommy’s place in town, he refused to call his son “Sheriff.” Couldn’t bring himself to. And as far as his son’s stature in the National Sheriffs’ Association, as far as Tommy getting his picture snapped in the halls of Congress with Senator Trent Lott of Mississippi and other important politicians up there, that was fine; and it’s true that Billy often said aloud he hoped that the Lord would just let him live long enough to attend Tommy’s “inauguration” in June 2002; but on the other hand the father seemed a little too eager to admonish his son: “Tommy, the people elected you sheriff of Adams County, not sheriff of the United States. You may think you’re sheriff of the United States, but you belong down in Natchez.” And that would rankle.

  I met Billy Ferrell on October 1, 1997, the thirty-fifth anniversary of James Meredith’s admission to Ole Miss. He had a year and a half left to him. He came out of the lake house and it was as if ink on a flat surface had come to life, sticking out its thickened paw. “Cut off your motor and come in a minute,” he said. He was in a short-sleeve blue shirt and clean khakis and he smelled pleasantly of aftershave, possibly Old Spice. His wife was right behind him. She had red hair and was extremely well preserved and was putting a creamy lotion on her hands, a woman in a small dither, heading for the Lincoln, the trunk of which was open. “You can stay here tonight if you want to,” she said, in her dither and generosity. “We’ve got to go. Those babies are about to be born.” Paw-Paw and Mimsy were off to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, for the birth of their granddaughter’s twins.

  The day before, I had introduced myself to the paterfamilias on the phone from a hotel room in Jackson. There had been an intercessionary call on my behalf from the top cop in the state of Mississippi, an ex–FBI agent named Jim Ingram, who had offered to ask Billy to talk to me. Ingram was commissioner of the Department of Public Safety and knew almost every lawman in the state. He was particularly good friends with Billy. I had gone to see Ingram at his big office in the T. B. Birdsong Memorial Highway Patrol Building in the capital city in what by Mississippi standards could be called a skyscraper. I had brought the photograph with me and was worried that when I pulled it out and tried to speak in general terms about it, Ingram, whom I had not met before, might not approve of what I was attempting to do. But the opposite seemed true. He held it out in front of him at arm’s length. “Oh, my. Billy was such a handsome guy then, wasn’t he?” he said. Ingram is a huge, gregarious man with a booming voice. He’s originally from Oklahoma. J. Edgar Hoover dispatched him to Mississippi during the civil rights years as part of a federal task force, and Mississippi eventually became Ingram’s adopted home. “Would you like me to phone Natchez and speak to the Ferrells for you? Good friends of mine, the Ferrells, Billy and Tommy. You know, there’s a third Ferrell, too, who’s in law enforcement. They call him Ty. He’s William T. Ferrell the Third. Young fella. Left the state for now. I think he’s a border patrol agent somewhere out in Texas. He hunts illegal aliens. I’ll be happy to make that call over to Natchez for you.”

  An hour later, the phone in my hotel room rang, and it was Billy. “Jim Ingram just called me,” he said. I heard the wariness. “Well, the thing is this,” he said. “Our granddaughter Candi down in Baton Rouge is about to have babies. Twins. Any minute. But if you want to, come over in the morning. Get here about ten-thirty. It’ll take you about two hours’ drive. We may have to go or we may already be gone. We’re hanging by the phone. But come on in the meantime.”

  The next morning, as I drove toward Natchez on the Louisiana side of the Delta, yellow crop dusters were swooping and dipping above me, and behind them in the pale blue sky were their swaths of chemical smoke. Big cubes of baled cotton stood along both sides of the macadam, waiting to be trucked off. At a roadside stop in Waterproof, a portly man came out, inspected me, and said, “Boy, you sure are lost down here in the middle of the Loozyana delta with a shirt and tie on.” I found Lake St. John and passed houses named Heaven and Emotion
al Rescue. I pulled into Ferrell Lane to witness the grandparental dither.

  Billy led me inside. In the hall was the photograph from Life. It was laminated on a piece of plywood. The plywood had been heavily shellacked. The piece was sitting on the floor, propped against a doorjamb. “That’s probably the one you’re referring to, I guess,” he said over his shoulder. I was pretty certain it had been brought out of the basement or a back closet and dusted off. Still, somebody had once cut the photo from a magazine and made it suitable for hanging.

  The Ferrells were very cordial, if edgy. The imminent births must have accounted for a lot of the edginess, though not all. Hazel was sort of blurring in the background, her body language saying, Hurry up, Billy. Billy sat in a chair and breathed a little heavily. I tried not to break eye contact with him. I wasn’t fool enough to take a notebook out, not then. When he used the expression “civil rights crap,” he flashed his incisored grin, his predatory squint. He said that if I came back the next day he’d be glad to give me several hours of his time. “We’ll be back from Baton Rouge late tonight,” he said. “You’ll probably want to stay over in Natchez. We’ll have coffee on for you in the morning.”

  The next day, we sat talking on the dock for hours, just the two of us. Did anything startling fall out? Not really. Did he slip and use the word “nigger”? A couple of times, but less than I would have expected, frankly. Was he good company? Quite—if you could mentally block out what was constantly flowing under the conversation. He was being very careful. I was taking notes by then. It was so clear to me that a wily man was working overtime to control the memory of bad deeds. I didn’t see the use in trying to nudge him much in another direction. Things would unfold eventually, I figured. He talked some about Oxford, and about what had happened up there in 1962 when James Meredith sought to enroll, trying always to put himself in the best justifying light. When the words “Robert F. Kennedy” arose, Billy said—and then the grin and the squint were back—“I couldn’t stand that little snivelly-nosed sonofabitch.” He didn’t like either Kennedy, but the younger brother, the attorney general, had always ticked him off royal. Bobby was a pissant featherweight. And then he quickly apologized for saying these things. He apologized almost in a formally comic way. He didn’t wish to be uncharitable about such a high and deceased officer of the United States government.

  We didn’t talk very much about the photograph itself, a copy of which I’d brought with me, and his copy of which was still sitting against the doorjamb in the hallway up in the house. I asked if it embarrassed him. “I resented hell out of it,” he said. He said he wanted to sue Henry Luce at Time, Inc., didn’t fear the Luces’ money in the least. He told me he could still remember the spot on the Ole Miss campus where the thing was taken. He said he knew the tree he was standing under. He said, “Bob Waller, the sheriff standing right behind me, brought over this billy and said, ‘Well, goddamn, Billy, look what I found in one of your patrol cars.’ I was smoking a cigarette and I put it between my teeth and I took hold of the billy and I said, ‘Goddamn, it’s big as a baseball bat,’ and that’s when they snapped it. That’s all there was to it.” He said he heard afterward that the photographer made $1,500 for making a fool out of him that way in a national magazine, not that he could prove the guy made that much, but that’s the amount he’d always heard. And get this: The guy was a Southerner himself, a white man. Billy said that if I really wanted to know, it was a very historic photograph in Mississippi law enforcement terms, because “in that one picture, you got the president of the Mississippi Sheriffs’ Association—that’s me—and then you got the various regional officers of the association standing around me.”

  Everything was so placid down on the pier that day—old fishing poles and drooping Spanish moss and green water lapping at the pilings. The dock was like a fishing camp. Taco splashed around, trying vainly to snare fish in his jaws. Billy said he’d been an altar boy as a kid, raised Catholic. His family had been poor and had moved around town a lot, and he didn’t get to finish high school. He and Hazel had met on a blind date across the river in Ferriday. Her people were from other parts of Mississippi and Louisiana. The war came. Billy got drafted. He and Hazel were married on December 28, 1942—Billy had turned nineteen, his bride was seventeen—and two days afterward he was inducted into the army at Camp Shelby, Mississippi. Soon they’d promoted him to a line buck sergeant. He was in “ETO,” he said: European Theater of Operations. He told how his daddy died horribly on a mail boat on the Mississippi, down near New Orleans, when Billy was overseas in the war. (His father, who’d once been a part-time deputy sheriff himself, had gotten caught in the tug’s rope rigging, and it sucked him in, suffocating and strangling him; he wasn’t yet fifty.) These stories went on, engagingly. Billy had on speck-white Reeboks and a blue pinstripe shirt. He wasn’t wearing socks, and I saw a little psoriasis sore on the inside of his left ankle. He kept plowing his meaty hand through the strings of his hair. He kept sneaking smokes from his pants pocket and watching out for Hazel, who was up in the house, fixing us dinner. In the South, “dinner” means lunch. He had told Hazel earlier that day he wanted me to experience one of her all-out, full-bore Southern dinners. His wife was in a terrific mood, he said. Those babies in Baton Rouge had come into the world safely.

  He told a story about Big Julio May, the town bully. Billy was a deputy sheriff when he delivered a summons to a juke joint on State Street where Big Julio had a job. They got into an argument, but it was just shouting. Billy left the summons on the top of the bar and returned to his patrol car and suddenly there was Big Julio, leaning in over top of him, threatening to kill him. “I said, ‘Julio, they didn’t put me in this uniform to be a goddamn prizefighter on State Street. Now, you got your hand on the door handle. And I got my hand on this thirty-eight.’ See, I’d taken off the safety. I had my hand resting on top of it. I said, ‘Julio, you open this door and I’m going to show you what a goddamn stupid dago you are. I’m gonna blow your goddamn dago head off.’ ” Then the odd, comic formalism was back: “I guess in my heart I couldn’t see myself being a street ruffian and a sworn officer of the law.” He did not end up blowing Big Julio’s dago head off (apparently Big Julio walked away), although later that night, out of uniform, Billy said he went looking for the town bully with a little snub-nosed .25-caliber.

  It was clear he wanted to stay away from the subject of “civil rights crap.” At one point, speaking of protest marches, he said, “You got a town full of half-drunk wild blacks and you’re trying to control things with fifteen officers.”

  I shifted directions and asked about the comforts of his retirement. “All through the providence of God,” he answered.

  Hazel called us for dinner. I washed my hands in the bathroom and saw big, fluffy, nappy hand towels with “WTF” scripted on them. The three of us ate on pewter plates with pressed napkins, sitting at an elongated table in the kitchen by a window. The big TV in the other room was tuned to CNN. Hazel had set out the dishes on the countertop and we helped ourselves, buffet-style. She’d prepared sweet corn, black-eyed peas, steak and gravy, mashed potatoes. We drank sweetened iced tea. As we were finishing up, Billy pulled out something from his pocket. It was in a flat blue case. He slid it across. I opened the case and saw a gold honorary sheriff’s badge. There was a card inside that described him as an “emeritus” lawman of Adams County. It was signed by Tommy Ferrell. “You can’t stay away from it, I guess,” Tommy’s father said, and this time the grin was almost sheepish.

  Almost fourteen months went by before I saw Billy again, and by then there were drastic changes. I had waited much too long. I had come to know a lot, not just about the sheriff in the middle of Charles Moore’s frame, but about his six fellow lawmen as well. By then, I knew more of the crucial parts of the story.

  By late November 1998, however, death had dropped broad hints on Billy. He was now staring aimlessly at a TV in Natchez. The Ferrells had forsaken the lake house so they could be
close to family and hospitals.

  First, there’d been open-heart surgery, a triple bypass. Paw-Paw and Mimsy had been out for the weekend to Tommy’s hunting lodge. They were couch-potatoing, to use Hazel’s expression. It was just the four of them: Tommy and his wife, Carole; Billy and Hazel. In the middle of the night, Billy started feeling sick. It was a tingling in his left arm. He tried to shake it, but the sensation wouldn’t go away. Early that next week, he went to see his doctor, who knew right away what it was and ordered him into a hospital in Jackson. He was sixteen days in a bed in Jackson and there’d been artery splicings in three places. The mass on his lung, undetected for months, had been doing its killing work even while he was under the knife. So they’d come back from Jackson, put the lake house up for sale, found a town house in town on Martin Luther King, Jr. Street (which for decades had been Pine Street, the name change being a sore subject for white Natchezeans, the more so if they lived on Pine). In the summer, a month before the tumor was found, Billy and his lifelong friend Premo Stallone had driven to their Army reunion in Oxford. They’d been going to these reunions of the 219th Signal Depot for decades. Billy seemed almost to be slipping into early Alzheimer’s. They went to a Shoney’s restaurant, and he kept calling back the waitress to place his order. He tried to leave three or four tips. In the fall, he underwent radiation treatments. He was put on the prayer list at St. Mary’s Basilica.