The childlessness. It’s a heart sore. He and Betty have never been able to have children, except for that one who came out of her womb stillborn, years ago, maybe back around the time of the war—nobody seems to recall precisely when it was. There is a story around Pascagoula that the baby was three weeks dead when Betty delivered, and that the doctor thought it might have been Mongoloid. After that, they didn’t try anymore, or this is the common tale. There is another story that the sheriff still has a trunk of baby clothes hidden somewhere in the grocery store or perhaps among his disheveled things at the jail. He never talks about that long-ago stillborn, nor for that matter does he talk much about those few years of college. Betty, trained as a nurse, used to work at Pascagoula Memorial Hospital, though now she cooks for the prisoners at the jail. Weekly, she goes through the courthouse hunting for her husband’s whiskey bottles. She gets them out of bottom drawers, from the backs of closets, under mattresses. She’s even found them hidden in the judge’s chambers. She smashes them right over her knee. When the sheriff gets too drunk, they have to ship him over to a resort motel on Dauphin Island in Alabama. He dries out and rolls back to Mississippi. Sometimes late at night, he gets so desperate for a drink he’ll go upstairs and unlock one of the prisoners—a trusty—and send him to the Friendly Café or to the Palace Bar to fetch a half-pint of Seagram’s VO in a paper bag. Sometimes he’ll have the prisoner sign the ticket for the bottle, and sometimes he’ll give the trusty the cash. (Again, this is from a stack of Grimsley documents stored in the vaults of the Justice Department and the FBI; the files were obtained through the Freedom of Information/Privacy Acts.)
A lot of the deputies who serve him didn’t make the long drive northward with their boss in the middle of the night to Ole Miss. “Son, aren’t you going to go?” he said to a one-armed man with flaming red hair who tends the jail and sleeps in the docket room. His name’s Donald Quave.
“No, sir, I’m not goin’.”
“Why not, son?”
“Sheriff, you can’t fight the fucking federal government, you know that.”
“Yeah, well, as long as I’m sheriff of the county, there won’t be a goddamn nigger at Ole Miss.”
He didn’t hold it against Quave for not going—or so Quave will remember four decades hence when a man with a notebook asks about it.
Try doing something for a minute. Place your forearms on top of the photograph with your hands vertical to his face and shoulders, so that you’ve got him shrouded, separated, blocked out from everyone and everything else. Isn’t he now just some old harmless country coot having himself a time at, say, the backyard wedding of his favorite niece? Okay, maybe he’s a little tipsy right now. That flushed-looking face and that spreading nose (it looks put on with a hammer) do suggest a certain alcoholic reproach all on their own.
A story about Grimsley and some of his deputies: They call it the Crowbar Effect. Some of the people who wore a badge for Grimsley back then reportedly had a habit of breaking open the back doors of local grocery stores before dawn and going in and getting what they wanted and stuffing it in the trunks of their patrol cars. Then they’d call the store manager and raise him out of bed. “Been a break-in. Came on it in our rounds. You better get down here.” The store manager had no choice but to go along with the little ritualistic burglary. Bill Dillon, a retired highway patrolman, remembered this story, as did others. Some of Grimsley’s old deputies were asked if it was true. They denied it.
Pascagoula—with its melodic Indian name—is about a hundred flat miles east of New Orleans, about forty marshy ones west of Mobile, Alabama. As long as anybody can remember, the place has been tied to ships and the sea. In World War II, this fishing town on the Pascagoula River and the Gulf, with its population of about 5,900, swelled to an around-the-clock military shipbuilding city of 36,000. After the war, Pascagoula began to sink back to what it was before, although shipbuilding remained crucial to its survival. At low tide on parts of the Mississippi Gulf Coast, you can walk far out over the muddy sand and the water will still only be up to your knees. There’s no surf at Pascagoula. This has something to do with the string of islands off the coast and the sharp slope of the land to the sea. It’s not a pretty town, compared to so many beautiful Mississippi towns, although the big fine homes down near the water are certainly beautiful. Longfellow once mentioned Pascagoula in a poem, “The Building of a Ship.” He told of “The knarred and crooked cedar knees.” He talked of timber that was “Brought from regions far away / From Pascagoula’s sunny bay.” The shipbuilding industry continues on in Pascagoula, but the remainder of the Mississippi Gulf Coast seems mainly about retirement condos and a few obscenely large casinos. The Redneck Riviera is what some people call this curving stretch of sand between New Orleans and Mobile. The condo builders haven’t succeeded in despoiling all of the wide beaches yet. In a way, the Gulf Coast of Mississippi is Florida still on the make.
There are three counties lining Mississippi’s wedge of coast, and back when James Ira Grimsley presided drunkenly over one of them, a sheriff could rake in $300,000 a year. People claim as much as half a million a year in a sheriff’s pocket, which is a startling figure for such a historically impoverished state. (In 1960, dawn of the movement in Mississippi, median income was $4,209 for whites, $1,444 for blacks.) A visitor hears these figures concerning sheriffs from former Gulf Coast highway patrolmen, attorneys, newspapermen, local historians, other cops—not that any of them can produce a scrap of paper proving it. They’ll shrug, and grin, and say something along the lines of “Thought you’d be getting it by now. There were no pieces of paper for anything those guys did, practically speaking.” One of the lesser mysteries about Grimsley is that he died so apparently impecunious. To listen to some of his old deputies, who still wish to take up for him, Grimsley never cared about money in the first place, and what money he had, he tended to give away.
You’re looking at one image, but here is another. It was taken two decades after the photograph in Life. This one was published in a Jackson County newspaper on November 5, 1986. In the picture, which accompanies a small article, a seventy-four-year-old man with his wet hair parted down the middle is eleven months from dying. He’s wearing a ribbed cardigan sweater and an open-collared shirt. His nose is horribly veined, swollen, pitted. The glasses are starting their characteristic slide downward. The face is hollowed out and shrunken from the one that got captured in Life. He looks phlegmy, rheumy. But it’s him, all right. It’s clear what the asbestosis is doing to him, but the accompanying feature doesn’t say anything of that. Apparently, the town knows he’s going to die soon, and so a reporter and a photographer have come to do this modest-sized puffball piece. The story’s headline: “Former Sheriff Forged New Paths in Law Enforcement.” It’s such a wonderful lie, in terms of the real facts of his life.
Grimsley was a widower then. His wife of forty-four years had died a few months previous, in April. In the north of the state, James Wesley Garrison had died of a brain tumor that July, although Grimsley probably knew nothing of that, and probably nothing of those other six he’d once shared a joke with in Life. (Billy Ferrell, that day down on the dock, said of Grimsley: “Haven’t seen Ira in years. No idea about him. No idea what happened to him. He was only sheriff once, you know.”)
In this 1986 newspaper photograph, Grimsley is holding up yet another picture: an eight-by-ten group photo of a bunch of cops. You can practically see his crooked and liver-spotted hands trembling. The group portrait in his hand is of his younger self and his deputies. There are eleven deputies and most are in uniforms and Stetsons: Pete Pope and Leon Lambert and Tony Greer and Donald Quave and Harold Jones and the others who’d served him from 1960 to 1964.
It wasn’t hard to find Pete Pope. He wasn’t a deputy anymore; he was the head lawman himself. He’d been sheriff of Jackson County since 1988 and was in the middle of another electoral campaign: up for his fourth term and wanted it bad. (He’d end up losing, in the 1999 su
mmer primary, to Mike Byrd, the son of the man who had succeeded Grimsley in 1964. In Mississippi, sooner or later, everything seems to come back around.) Pete Pope said that he was a pup, something like twenty-one, when he went to work for “Mr. Grimsley.” Pope served him for a term, and then, when Grimsley was through, Pope got on with the highway patrol, where he did several decades of trooper work, rising in the ranks. Afterward, he retired from the patrol and ran for sheriff of his home county.
He was in his office on the ground floor of the gray stone courthouse in downtown Pascagoula. It’s the same courthouse where Grimsley hid his bottles. The sheriff had a desk of piled papers before him. He was in a coat and tie. His white squad car was parked on the other side of a window. He was sitting in a burgundy leather swivel chair. On the wall in the hallway, there was a signed picture to the “high sheriff” from Senator Trent Lott, a Pascagoula boy who made good. (The then Senate majority leader helped Pete Pope get a helicopter for the sheriff’s department.) The back of the burgundy leather executive’s chair was covered with a black cotton doily. The word SHERIFF was written across the doily in huge bright yellow letters. Middle-aged, loud, sure, silver-maned, liquid-voiced, friendly as tap water: this was Pete Pope, in control of his jurisdiction. Phones were ringing, radios squawked their half-intelligible sentences. The sheriff of the county was uninterested in any unflattering pictures that he thought some outrider might be coming to draw of “Mr. Grimsley.”
He looked at the Life photograph and also a copy of the local newspaper photograph from 1986. He set them aside. “Compassionate man, his intentions were well,” he said. “Called everybody ‘son.’ Called his wife that one time, I believe. Tickled me. He was a leaderman at Ingalls Shipyards way back, maybe about the time of the war. My own daddy had worked for Mr. Grimsley. We had come down here from a little town called Electric Mills. Listen, this guy was the most benevolent man you ever met in your life.” The sheriff went into a story about how it was nothing for Grimsley to take money from his own pocket just so a prisoner’s wife could get bus fare back to her hometown in another part of the state. Then another story about his own first campaign for sheriff. “Summer of 1987, probably it was. Over to his house. All bent up and old and couldn’t breathe. And he’s sitting there in the darkened room and you know what he said? Now, remember it’s my first campaign for sheriff, didn’t have any campaign money, and I’m sittin’ in this room with this man I have so much reverence and respect for, and he says, ‘Son, there’s three hundred dollars sitting in the top of that dresser drawer over yonder, you take it. You take it for your campaign.’ Now, I couldn’t do that—and I needed that three hundred dollars. That’s just the kind of man Mr. Grimsley was. Why, he’d go up there in the jail on a Saturday night and buy ice cream for the prisoners.”
“How did he treat black people?”
“Treated ’em like you or I would,” the sheriff said.
At the end of the visit, Pope said: “You know, we’ve changed down here in Mississippi. We’ve changed. Things aren’t like they used to be. I was on the highway patrol working Interstate 10 out here in the county as a trooper, and we’d pull somebody over with out-of-state plates. You’d go up to the car and the person sitting in there would roll the window all the way up, maybe just two or three inches from the top, afraid to talk to you, afraid to talk to you.” The sheriff shook his head in wonderment. “Mississippi’s not like that anymore. I don’t think you’ll find anyplace that’s made as many changes as Mississippi has. We’re not just a bunch of ignorant rednecks anymore.”
At the outset of the conversation, Pope had said, eyeing his interviewer steadily, his voice even, no seeming warning in it, smiling: “Now, I didn’t go up there to Oxford the second time with Mr. Grimsley that weekend, I want you to know that. Mr. Grimsley went up there twice that weekend, you know. I went with him the first time—me and Tony Greer and Leon Lambert. The second time was when the riot broke out. That’s when the trouble was. He took a busload of folks from here up there that time. You may know something about that. I wasn’t along then. I stayed home. I think this picture in the Life that you have here with you was from the first time, wasn’t it? They were gettin’ ready for the riot. It hadn’t happened yet, it hadn’t quite cracked open yet, it was the eve of the riot, you could say. Truth is, I can’t remember very much about going up there with Mr. Grimsley to Oxford. We left in the middle of the night and just hurried up there. But what I do know is I didn’t go up there the second time, when all the burning and destruction were happening. You’ll get that part right in your book, won’t you?”
He was assured of it.
A few months later, Pope was still running hard for reelection. He was in the burgundy swivel chair again. The phones and radios were still ringing and squawking. This time, there seemed more candor in the frame—some. “I wasn’t going to bring it up before, but I wasn’t going to lie to you, either, about his drinking,” he said. “Truth is, he was so bloated, he could take one drink and be flat drunk. But he was a good man, a good man. I won’t go back on that.” Pope said he knew of no criminal thing Grimsley had done in his life, certainly not while he was sheriff. He was shown some government documents strongly suggesting otherwise. Documents alleging gambling, prostitution, payoffs. Documents alleging rape. Documents suggesting both direct and indirect links to planned murder, or at least talked-of murder, including the planned or talked-of murder of James H. Meredith. Pete Pope said he didn’t care about such documents nor did he need to look at them—he knew what he knew about James Ira Grimsley. He brushed them off. He rose from his desk, shook hands. “Treat my man right, will you? Say what you want about me. But be fair to Mr. Grimsley. And here’s another thing you got to remember. All the people in this town who elected him and then later forgot him knew he was a drunk. You got to think of that. And here’s another thing: Was he ever charged with anything? Not that I know of.”
Grimsley’s sister, Bessie Randall, was ninety-three, sitting in her kitchen. She shooed a visitor in. “His wife, Betty, always wanted him to go be a doctor,” she said. “He ended up a sheriff.” She seemed to grow a little sad. She described how some men in the Grimsley family had died of drowning—almost a pattern of drowning, she said. The word “drowning” suggested the word “alcohol,” but the conversation didn’t go that way. She was too old, too nice, to have ill thoughts of the dead spoken in her presence. “I stayed with him three months before he died,” she said. “When I would sit with him at night till it would get late, he’d say, ‘If I just had me a granddaughter, Bessie.’ ”
Leon Lambert was still working as a cop, in another county, in a town called Lucedale. He had on a blue straw Stetson, black cowboy boots. “Guess you want to know about that brick,” he said.
“Brick?”
“I guess it wasn’t a brick, it was a piece of concrete or cement. It was up there at Oxford, the second time he went up. They caught him with that arm coming down with a brick just as he was about to smash it through a window. It was when the riot was going on. I had a copy of that picture for the longest time. It was in some other magazine or newspaper, I forget which.”
“What did he think about the pictures of him in national magazines showing him doing these things?”
“He wouldn’t talk about it. About all he’d say when somebody would bring it up was, ‘Well, they say I done that. I guess I don’t remember.’ ”
Tony Greer was still in the Jackson County sheriff’s department—working at a desk for Pete Pope. He seemed an old soft man, exhausted by life and police work. “I won’t say anything bad about Mr. Grimsley,” he said, and turned back to some papers before him.
Donald Quave, the one-armed ex-jailer, lived way back in the county, far from town. It was a Saturday about eleven o’clock in the morning. The ex-deputy was in a cement-block house, in a narrow bed, a fly swatter resting on his stomach, his arm in a plaster cast. He was staring at the ceiling. “Come in,” he said, his voice meshing through
a rusty screen door. A cow had run him down a month earlier, Quave said, going right into conversation. He hadn’t felt right since. He said he was seventy and had never married. His red hair was sticking up wild. There seemed such a disconnect in his words about Grimsley. “One of the finest people I ever knew. James’d pull off his shoes and give ’em to you. He was always broke—he’d give money away fast as he’d get it. We’d get to fussin’. We were always fussin’ at each other. He said to me one time, ‘You country sonofabitch, you get your goddamn rags and get out of here, you’re fired.’ And I said, ‘Hell, no, I’m not gettin’ outta here. Somebody’s gotta cover for your sorry mistakes.’ And he kinda thought about that and laughed that big ol’ laugh of his and said, ‘Goddamn, Quave, I guess you’re right.’ You know about Betty, his wife. She’d find that whiskey bottle and bust it right in the middle of the courthouse floor. She’d make him go sleep downstairs with me.”
Regarding Oxford and the Life photograph, Quave shrugged. “He was gonna show them ‘goddamn niggers’—those were his words—that they weren’t going to take Mississippi. I guess that’s just about the way it was in his mind.” The deputy was asked about what happened to Grimsley’s life after Oxford, the way it seemed to go quickly down. “He got to where he stayed drunk all the time. The town knew. His deputies supported him. But everybody knew he was washed. He just went down.”
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