Sons of Mississippi

by Paul Hendrickson

  August 1962, Greenwood, Leflore County: Welton McSwine, Jr., 14-year-old Negro, was arrested by police after a white woman’s house had been broken into. When police got the youth to the station, an officer said: “All right, nigger, you know why you are here, and we want to know who broke into that white woman’s house.” McSwine told them he knew nothing of the incident, saying that he spent all his time in the cottonfield, and suggesting that his mother could corroborate this. McSwine said officers then took him to a cell and beat him, first hitting him in the head with a blackjack; then one of the policemen beat him in the face with his fist while another hit him in the stomach with his club; then the officers made him lie naked on the floor on his side while they beat him with a whip. McSwine was released after intercession of his father’s white employer.

  Nothing ever came of that brutality, even though the charges (along with photographs documenting the beating) went to the Justice Department and to the FBI. Some of the people who beat McSwine are still living. They were city cops, not sheriffs or sheriff’s deputies, and there is an indirect and tangential relationship to one of the seven men in this photograph.

  In 1964, the year following those Judiciary Committee hearings, in the middle of what is known to history as Freedom Summer, the Southern Regional Council, a civil rights organization based in Atlanta, put out a publication called Law Enforcement in Mississippi. It listed “instances of violence and open intimidation” by cops against blacks and voter registration workers. It was only a six-month list. “Even so,” the report said, “the list is almost certainly incomplete.… But more than are listed below are hardly needed, in order to document the almost unrestrained lawlessness which is permitted within the state against one class of people.” This was at the time of the murders of three civil rights workers in Philadelphia, a Mississippi hamlet named for brotherly love. The names of the murdered became a national chant that summer: Schwerner, Chaney, Goodman. Not long afterward, the umbrella civil rights organization known as COFO (Council of Federated Organizations) assembled a book of affidavits entitled Mississippi Black Paper. It contained fifty-seven personal testimonies of violence against blacks and civil rights workers. The foreword was written by renowned theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. He said: “The crimes described in the following pages, committed either by local officials or with their connivance, include the bombings of homes and churches, the arrests of Negroes on false charges for every type of fanciful law infraction, and—most frightening of all—a brutality by the police that approaches sadistic cruelty and on occasion has resulted in actual murder.”

  In February 1965, six months after the bodies of Mickey Schwerner, James Earl Chaney, and Andrew Goodman had been excavated from under an earthen dam, the United States Commission on Civil Rights came to Mississippi for a week of public hearings. They were held in Jackson. In advance of the hearings, the commissioners had its Washington staff people bone up on the role and power of the Mississippi sheriff, the iconic figure of oppression in the struggle for civil rights. In a later report called “Law Enforcement,” published after the hearings were concluded, the commission said: “The office of sheriff in Mississippi, as in other Southern States, is closely linked in history and character to the early English sheriff. During the last thousand years the sheriff’s duty to enforce the law has remained remarkably unchanged. In Mississippi today, as in medieval England, the sheriff is the principal ‘conservator of peace in his county.’ … Although a sheriff is required to maintain records pertaining to the jail, he is not required to keep any investigation records.… As a practical matter, the elective sheriff is not subject to any executive or administrative review or sanction.” The investigators quoted an earlier Brookings Institution study: “Since the sheriff is elected by the people, he can be made responsible only in part or in a minor degree to any other authority.” The investigators quoted a still earlier study called The Government and Administration of Mississippi: “There is generally no state authority to compel the enforcement of a law by local officers.” The investigators concluded this report: “The failure of law enforcement officials to curb racial violence is largely attributable to the racially hostile attitudes of sheriffs, police chiefs, and prosecuting attorneys.… In addition, failure to make prompt arrests, to take a firm stand against violence, and to announce an intention to punish law violators undoubtedly encouraged vigilantes to feel they could operate with impunity.” It was as if the decent men from the United States Commission on Civil Rights had discovered Mississippi’s laws were rigged.

  The general counsel of those 1965 hearings was William L. Taylor. He is upper-aged now and has had a long, distinguished career as a civil rights attorney based in Washington. He can still remember some vivid things about traveling to what seemed like the moonscape of Mississippi. He and several investigators went to the state in late 1964 to do advance work. He was in Natchez, staying at the Eola Hotel, the city’s finest. He went down to breakfast. Some local intimidators came up to stand a few feet from his table. They didn’t do anything, they just stood there and looked at him while he ate. One evening, Taylor was interviewing a local white Catholic parish priest, active in the movement. They were talking in the priest’s parlor in the rectory, and Taylor heard this funny cracking sound beyond the window. They turned down the light and went to the window and looked out and saw a man standing under a lamppost at a filling station across the street. He was lazily working a bull whip in the direction of the rectory.

  In the published record of the hearings, there are little novels within novels. This exchange, for instance, with the sheriff of Natchez and Adams County—who wasn’t Billy Ferrell. Billy was out of office; Natchez had a new head lawman. Billy would be back, for keeps, as soon as it was legal for him to run again, but in 1965 the sheriff was another local son, Odell Anders, whose name was already beginning to show up on certain FBI lists of Mississippi cops who reputedly belonged to the Klan. Anders had been subpoenaed to the hearings, and he was under oath, and some of the questioning concerned his predecessor and the keeping of records as they related to certain criminal investigations the committee was interested in.

  Mr. Anders: I didn’t take office until January 6, 1964. So we don’t have anything whatsoever which was, you know, before we took office in ’64.

  Mr. Taylor: Are there no records in the sheriff’s office pertaining on that matter which may have been filed by one of your predecessors?

  Mr. Anders: If there are, I haven’t found them, no, sir.

  One of the commissioners asks Anders’s attorney: “Are you saying that the sheriff’s office maintains no records?” The attorney representing Anders says: “There are some records, but nothing pertaining to those incidents.”

  Mr. Anders: If there were records in the sheriff’s office, I didn’t find them. Now there might be; I don’t know. But if there are any records on these four things before January 6 of ’64, I don’t know where they are.

  Commissioner Griswold: Mr. Sheriff, have you made a search for these records?

  Mr. Anders: In the Adams County office, yes, sir.

  Further down in the transcript:

  Commissioner Griswold: When you took office as sheriff, did it appear that all or most of the papers and records had been removed by your predecessor?

  Mr. Anders: Sir, I don’t—I don’t know how many had been removed or, you know, that hadn’t been removed in the sheriff’s office. I don’t know what was there prior to January 6.

  And none of this will “explain” seven figures in a rectangle, sentient beings and sons of Mississippi who lived and strutted and died, but who’ve come together from different parts of the state, standing fearless in these refracted slivers of sunshine, to make their unwitting picture, to enjoy their group joke, to bar a black man from trying to improve himself, to keep the damn federals and anybody else from forcing something down their sovereign throats. So back, back to the one laughing loudest today, enjoying it most, “chortling,” as the Life c
aption writers in New York will shortly describe it, bellied in the fan-whoosh of Billy’s bat, this ribald, uncouth, bloated, dangerous, childless figure: James Ira Grimsley. It’s as if he wishes to be the ripe burlesque of what already exists in America’s mind when the words “Mississippi sheriff” are uttered. Grimsley, with a name that’s out of Faulkner, and Charles Dickens, too. Faulkner, both goad and god of Mississippi, has died less than three months ago in Wright’s Sanitarium in nearby Byhalia, Mississippi.

  In a sense, you know the particulars of his life story already. Mark Strand, who writes so acutely about the paintings of Edward Hopper, has said: “Hopper’s paintings are not vacancies in a rich ongoingness. They are all that can be gleaned from a vacancy that is shaded not so much by the events of a life lived as by the time before life and the time after.” And another sentiment, this one from John Szarkowski, former director of the department of photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He was once looking at the photographs of Eudora Welty, whose stories and novels about her native Mississippi are second only to Faulkner’s in their literary beauty and understanding of the state. In the thirties, she’d made pictures of Southerners as an amateur and gifted and itinerant government photographer, and Szarkowski wrote of this work: “It would be both false and wrong to say that we envy the people described in these pictures; people cursed by ignorance and poverty and bad diet and worn-out ideas, but there is something visible here that prompts in us inchoate feelings of longing for lives that have in them something of the beauty and elegance of good theater.”

  Is his tie made of imitation watered silk? Is there a yellow-brown scorch from an iron imprinted somewhere on his eighteen-and-a-half-inch shirt collar? If you were giving this lawman a made-up name, before you knew anything about him, wouldn’t it be “Mr. Loving It All”?

  James Ira Grimsley, the profaning pope of Pascagoula. He drove up to Ole Miss in the middle of last night with three of his deputies: Pete Pope, Tony Greer, and Leon Lambert. (They have to be close by.) They got here a little before dawn. It took about five hours, what with these poor roads, in this very vertical state with its great distances between north and south. Even to do it in five hours, they had to haul. Grimsley’s a native of the Gulf Coast, where the sunsets are magnificent and the sand fleas large and the bathlike ocean waters extremely shallow. He runs Jackson County down there, with its strings of whorehouses and uncounted gambling joints and “shinny” business, which is a localism for bootlegging. (Don’t confuse Jackson County, sitting on the Gulf of Mexico, with the capital city, Jackson, which is Mississippi’s only real metropolis and is up toward the center of the state.) Pascagoula is the place known throughout the South for making ships. The Ingalls Shipbuilding Corporation is the largest industrial concern in all of Mississippi, employing thousands. In Pascagoula today, Pascagoula being the seat of Jackson County, and “today” being September 27, 1962, the banner headline in the local paper is “Sheriff Goes to Oxford.” The subhead is “Shooting Possible at School Campus, Says Rep. Hester.” The story starts: “Sheriff James Ira Grimsley and three Jackson County deputies left early today for Oxford. James Meredith was reportedly expected to make another attempt to integrate Ole Miss later today.” The piece tells how Governor Ross Barnett is said to be on his way back to the tinderbox campus, and how, in the capital city the day before, a legislator took to the floor of the statehouse to declaim it was possible a gun battle could erupt between Mississippi lawmen and the federals. Pascagoulians could read this news in their local daily for five cents if they were buying the sheet on the newsstand, and for even less if they were getting the paper at home.

  It’s not known whether he’s got raw onions in the side pockets of his suit coat, but down in Pascagoula, he almost always has them. He’ll carry them in his coat and try to sneak chawnks when he thinks folks aren’t looking, hoping thereby to mask the foulness of his breath. He shows up at circuit court with the hidden onions, sits in the pews and joshes with his neighbors while he waits to go on the stand against some black he’s arrested without cause. Everybody in town knows the sheriff is washed, not least his wife, Betty, not least his deputies, who try to cover for him, not least the judge hearing the case, who has contempt for his drunkenness but who more or less puts up with it, not least the prisoner in question, who’s about to be shanghaied to the county farm for something like having a taillight out.

  He weighs approximately 220 pounds and he’s a shade under five feet ten. (This is from FBI documents that were compiled on Grimsley in the several months following the Meredith crisis.) He’s a charter member of First United Methodist. He belongs to the Freemasons and the Odd Fellows. In his youth, he was an amateur boxer, and apparently not half bad at it. He sleeps in an apartment on the top floor of the courthouse and jail—when Betty Roberts Grimsley allows him up there. If he’s too drunk, his wife will make him sleep downstairs in the docket room with one of the deputies. For all his bloatedness, he’s agile on his feet. Allegedly, he likes to “cut” black women, which is a Southernism for trying to attack them sexually. (Again, this is from Justice Department and FBI documents, but also several Pascagoulians were willing to say it, remember it, all these years later.) Within less than a month from the moment of the photograph, the sheriff’s own former chief criminal deputy, Harold Jones, having earlier resigned from the sheriff’s department and having left the state and gone into the Army, will allege in a statement before a lawyer that will then be forwarded to the DOJ in Washington: “Worst part about the sheriff is that he’ll try to cut every woman he gets alone. Women who come to visit their husbands in jail.… Wife of a guy we held on car theft charges. Everytime she came in sheriff would cut her.” He’ll also say in this sworn statement before a lawyer: “There was no bag man. Each guy paid off directly to the sheriff.” Was the former chief deputy telling the truth? Jones was known to be a straight cop, albeit a typical Mississippian who apparently felt it was fine to use the word “nigger” throughout a statement charging his superior with evil things.

  What else is known? He’s very attentive to his mother. He’s the owner of Grimsley Grocery Store on Canty Street, where he extends credit to folks who seldom have the cash. It’s a mom-and-pop affair, one cash register, lone bulb in the ceiling, oiled floors, and he doesn’t tend the place himself, now that he’s sheriff.

  What else? He’s got a beautiful letterhead on his engraved stationery, with renderings of the courthouse. “James Ira Grimsley,” it says on the top left-hand corner. “Sheriff and Tax Collector.” Three months ago, June 29, 1962, this letter went out on his stationery, under his name, to the director of the State Sovereignty Commission regarding one Hansel C. Travillion, “colored male”: “Dear Mr. Jones: The above subject is the Director of Civil Defense for the colored in this County, he also operates the colored funeral home in this county. To my knowledge this subject has always been an up standing citizen and has no dealings with the NAACP or any other subversive organization.” Those kinds of letters get written all the time.

  What else? He tried to go hoboing in his youth with his first cousin Jack Maples. They’d hopped an eastbound freight, but by the time they got to Alabama, they were homesick for Mississippi. “Jack, don’t you think mama’s biscuits would be tasting mighty good this morning?” he’d said to the cousin.

  Something else you’d hardly imagine from the picture itself: The sheriff of Pascagoula, a crude and physically sloppy man in so many ways, was in a premed curriculum at Millsaps College in Jackson from September 1945 to August 1947. Millsaps is one of the best liberal arts institutions in the state. The premed studies are probably part of the reason why he was able to get elected to the post of Jackson County coroner. In Mississippi, in these years, a man doesn’t need a medical license to serve as coroner, although any kind of expertise or knowledge in that direction wouldn’t hurt your chances. Grimsley served as county coroner from 1957 to 1960. He always had his eye on making the bigger prize of sheriff, folks say. He woul
d go around to hospitals and funeral homes, doing his work, sitting with the families, plying for the vote.

  (At Millsaps, in the registrar’s office, they had to dig around for a while, but sure enough, there it was, written in ink on an old yellowed eight-by-ten card: his name and dates and courses and grades. The woman who looked up his record declined to show his grades, but, from the other side of the counter, she reported that he did passably well. She read off some of the courses he took: anatomy, physics, physiology, trigonometry, history, psychology. There was a note on the bottom of the record saying he withdrew but offering no reason. On the back of the card was an intriguing note: In 1964, a man who’d just vacated the office of sheriff in some shame and had made a general fool of himself at Ole Miss had requested Millsaps College to send his transcript to Ole Miss.)

  Something else that may surprise: The sheriff of the county has a black deputy on his staff. They call him Cap’n Dan. Dan Wells lives up in Three Rivers, which is a black community twelve miles north of Pascagoula. He wears two pearl-handled six-shooters and rides a motorcycle and is allowed to do police work only among blacks. There is a story locally that Cap’n Dan once forgot himself and stopped a white woman. Harold Jones—chief deputy—reputedly got all over him, pulled the badge right off his shirt, and said: “You goddamn nigger, you know better’n to stop a white woman.” (Captain Dan Wells, still alive, was asked about this story. Wells was in his eighties, still riding motorcycles. He was still a part-time policeman, in another county. While he didn’t deny the story, he didn’t quite confirm it either. Surprisingly, he didn’t talk in particularly bad ways about Grimsley—not that he spoke fondly of him.)