Sons of Mississippi

by Paul Hendrickson

  I remember the day Billy Ferrell and I talked of the riot, the two of us sitting side by side on a bench on his fishing dock, Billy sneaking his smokes and keeping an eye out for his wife, Hazel, who was up at the house fixing delicious vittles. The peace officer was in restive retirement at his lake house on the Louisiana side of the river. He had that little red psoriasis sore on the inside of his ankle—he kept reaching down to scratch at it. He plowed his puffy hand through his swept dirty-white hair. He was trying to aggrandize his role; he also kept trying to minimize it. It was clear that he was being selective in what he chose to say. I was aware of gaps in logic and time. I didn’t know it then, but two months earlier he had participated in an oral history interview with a historian from the University of Southern Mississippi. The historian, who came to Natchez for the interviews, asked about “memorable” events during his tenure. Billy responded that “one of the things that sticks out the uppermost in my mind was when I was sheriff was in 1962 … what we commonly referred to as the ‘Battle of the University of Mississippi,’ during the integration up there of—what was that guy’s name?”

  “James Meredith,” the oral historian prompted. Billy then told the story, his version of it, as he did with me two months later.

  Some of what Billy related that day on the dock, thirty-five years (almost to the day and hour) from Meredith’s enrollment, did factually check out, as I later discovered. Other parts of it were flatly inaccurate, or inadvertently mixed up in time sequence. Almost all of it—or so I would judge now—was a manifestation of a dying old man’s need to sanitize and justify long-ago events that had always deeply embarrassed him and that had circled around to annoy and embarrass him anew before death. On the other hand, Billy didn’t have to talk to me about it at all, didn’t have to invite me into his house, or down onto his dock. Even in the sanitizing and distorting, I saw a certain kind of redemption, muddy with mixed motives, but redemption all the same.

  He explained that the “whole reason” he and the other sheriffs “had gone up there in the first place” was because Sheriff Joe Ford, the sheriff of Lafayette County, had “called me and asked for help from the Sheriffs’ Association. Hell, Joe Ford didn’t have but one or two deputies anyway [one of whom would have been Jim Garrison]. When you think about it, Oxford is just a little old country town, nothing there. What do they do there? They bale hay and grow beans, maybe, and they got that big university. So that’s why we went up there, that’s how the whole thing happened, that’s how our picture got took. We went up there not to help Ross Barnett prevent the integration of the University of Mississippi but sorta to help Joe Ford stop any lawlessness that might take place. We went up there to maintain law and order, is what I’m telling you.”

  Billy remembered that he left the campus and returned to Natchez on Saturday the twenty-ninth, the day before the riot—but all the evidence suggests that he departed on Thursday or Friday, as the others had, closer to the time that Moore took the photograph. He came home (it isn’t clear if he left Oxford alone or in the company of other sheriffs), and on Saturday afternoon he drove with his wife to Jackson for the big football game. “Hazel and I was at the Ole Miss–Kentucky football game on Saturday night, as was several of the sheriffs around the state,” is the way he described it. After Barnett’s halftime speech, an announcer on the public address system called out “the code letters of the Lafayette County sheriff’s office radio. This was our signal to get in our cars and come back to Oxford. I forget the code now. Each sheriff in the state had his own radio code. Mine was KKE 323. We heard Joe Ford’s code on the public address. That meant head back to Oxford. I heard it and I turned to Hazel and I said, ‘C’mon, we’re going.’ She said, ‘But the ball game’s not over.’ I said, ‘Well, it’s over for us.’ ”

  He took his wife home—it would have been about a two-and-a-half-hour drive from the football stadium—but apparently he didn’t start out for Oxford again until late the next day, Sunday. His plan was to drive up U.S. 61 to Port Gibson and pick up Jimmy Middleton and then go on to Vicksburg and collect the sheriff of Warren County. His intention was to lead a “column” of Mississippi sheriffs northward to the fight. But as he was leaving Natchez, or perhaps when he got to Port Gibson, word came from the highway patrol to detour over to Jackson to pick up several prominent state officials, who were gathered in a room at the King Edward Hotel. One of these seems to have been Lieutenant Governor Johnson. Billy remembered that he offered the loan of his Adams County sheriff’s car to Johnson, who needed a vehicle to get him to Ole Miss. Billy remembered that another official in the hotel was State Senator George Yarbrough, but this doesn’t seem correct, because by late Sunday afternoon, Yarbrough was en route to Oxford as Barnett’s official stand-in. (Most accounts have Yarbrough, president pro tem of the state senate, arriving on the campus about 6:30 P.M.) Billy recalled that the other legislator in the hotel room was State Senator Russell Fox of Port Gibson and Claiborne County, and this seems accurate. However, as Billy was relating the story, he kept getting the day mixed up, believing that the riot occurred in the middle of the night Saturday, instead of the middle of the night Sunday.

  Billy: “So I stopped at the hotel with Jim Middleton while the others went on to Oxford, and we went in this room at the King Edward Hotel.… ‘What in hell is going on?’ these two important guys, Yarbrough and Fox, said to me. ‘I thought you’d tell me,’ I told ’em. ‘Billy, you’re the president of the Mississippi Sheriffs’ Association—don’t you know?’ they said. Well, we called Washington, D.C. We got on the line up there with Senator James Eastland of Mississippi. Big Jim Eastland. One of the most important and respected people in the United States Senate. I didn’t know him from Adam, other than that Jim Eastland was our senior senator. His wife answered. They were in bed. It’s in the middle of the night in Washington. The riot was going on—we were getting radio reports from Oxford. I get on the phone line with Senator Eastland in Washington—Senator Russell Fox, the state legislator, just stuck the phone at me—and I say, ‘Sir, this is Sheriff Billy Ferrell, the head of the Mississippi Sheriffs’ Association, and, sir, all I gotta say is we have a tremendous problem up there at Oxford. And if you have any influence with that tousle-headed sonofabitch sitting over there in the White House chair, I wish you’d try to use it, because our whole state is about to go up in flames.’ I remember those were my exact words. Eastland said, ‘Who’s got control of the campus?’ I said, ‘The rioters have got control of the campus.’ Eastland said, ‘Well, are the federal marshals there?’ I said, ‘You bet, they’re the sons of bitches that started it all, Mr. Eastland.’ ”

  Billy interrupted this recollection to say, “What Kennedy did was in direct violation of what he said at the Democratic National Convention in San Francisco. [He meant Los Angeles.] He promised he’d never send in troops the way Eisenhower did in Little Rock in 1957. Direct violation, and I want you to know that and put it down in your book, you hear? See, the whole thing wasn’t a thing in the world but the manufacturing of political ambitions by Barnett and those Kennedy brothers.”

  What happened after that? He seemed embarrassed to tell. “Well, kinda funny to say, but I missed out on going to Oxford. It was too late by then. I stayed put. Didn’t have my car. In the middle of the night, Kennedy moved a whole Afro-American military police battalion right up sorority row. Now, was that going to incite folks?”

  A few days afterward, he went home to Natchez and walked into a bazaar at St. Mary’s Cathedral parish, where his wife was seated at a long table with friends. Every head turned as he strode through the hall, the place growing deathly quiet. “One of the strangest feelings I ever had. Have you ever been in the wrong place at the wrong time, and just couldn’t figure it out? I go up to my wife and I say, ‘Hello, honey,’ and, guess what, she’s got three of the books sitting there with her, the Life books, they’re just out on the newsstands, and she plops one in my lap and opens it up to the middle and says, ‘Look here
.’ And I look. And I say, ‘What? Why, that’s me with that stick.’ And Hazel, she says, ‘Yeah, and I’m married to him.’ ”

  That day down at the dock, a year and a half before he died, with the water lapping at the pilings, with his blue heeler splashing around trying in vain to snare a fish, Billy neglected to say that his and Hazel’s only daughter was an undergraduate in her first year at Oxford when it all took place. Perhaps this fact slipped his mind. Perhaps he didn’t think it an important detail to bring up. I learned of it subsequently, by reading through his oral history with the grad student at the University of Southern Mississippi, but more important, I learned of it from Billy’s son and successor in the office of Adams County sheriff. Tommy Ferrell said one day, his feet up on his desk, surprise in his voice that could not have matched the surprise in my face: “You mean you didn’t know my sister, Sherry, was up there when Meredith was getting in? Oh, yeah, that was an awfully big part of it for my father, you know, that his daughter was at the school, his concern for her welfare, when James Meredith was forcing his way in.”

  It was the “forcing his way in” part that put a stronger angle of light into my imagination about Moore’s photograph. It was after this I began to think of it much more directly as a lynching narrative, its power tapping straight into the myth of Emmett Till, straight into all the old nineteenth-century Southern myths of the “black beast rapist.” In the late nineteenth century, especially in the 1890s, racist hysteria gripped white male Southerners—the spiritual and literal grandfathers and great-grandfathers of the men in Moore’s photograph. Almost overnight, whites across the South seemed to develop a fear and hatred of blacks that approached the genocidal, at least in figurative terms. No one knows the exact numbers. According to scholar E. M. Beck at the University of Georgia, in his study A Festival of Violence, beginning in the year 1882, and running for about the next five decades, some 2,500 black men, women, and children were lynched in America. The greatest number of the killings occurred in Mississippi. And without doubt the grisliest decade of the lynch festival was 1890 through 1899: at least 100 black men were put to death every year.

  It wasn’t until 1941, at the back end of this national shame, that the Southern historian W. J. Cash connected the history of lynching across the Deep South to a crisis of white masculinity. In his landmark study The Mind of the South, Cash theorized on the white man’s “rape complex.” He wrote of an endangered male authority and the deep neuroses of gender and sexuality it brought. The condition, Cash argued, was the result of the overthrow of slavery’s order. The ultimate and as-yet-unrealized expression of the overthrow of slavery in the white male mind would be the destruction of the white sexual order, which is to say, the taking, somewhere far down the road, but maybe not too far, of his own wife, of his own daughter, of his own yet unborn granddaughter. Cash explained:

  For the abolition of slavery, in destroying the rigid fixity of the black at the bottom of the scale, in throwing open to him at least the legal opportunity to advance, had inevitably opened up to the mind of every Southerner a vista at the end of which stood the overthrow of this taboo. If it was given to the black to advance at all, who could say (once more the logic of the doctrine of his inherent inferiority would not hold) that he would not one day advance the whole way and lay claim to complete equality, including, specifically, the ever crucial right of marriage? What Southerners felt, therefore, was that any assertion of any kind on the part of the Negro constituted in a perfectly real manner an attack on the Southern woman.

  The so-called rape complex seemed to bring out the worst in almost any Southern mob, but in Mississippi, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, some of the executions and tortures of blacks beggared imagination: death by blowtorch; a scalding with hot irons; a severing of and handing around of the genitals; a gouging of the eyes until they “hung by a shred from the socket” accompanied by a simultaneous corkscrewing of “big pieces of raw, quivering flesh”—so the Vicksburg Evening Post informed its readers in a 1904 report of a double Delta lynching. More than 1,000 attended that one, munching on hard-boiled eggs, swilling lemonade and whiskey. The victims were forced to extend their hands while their fingers, one at a time, were chopped off and passed around as souvenirs. Perhaps what is most shocking about some of these lynching narratives in the Deep South at the turn of the century is estimates of crowd size—sometimes in the thousands. Sometimes whole families attended. Men are posing casually, without hiding their faces, smiling, no apparent shame, pointing at the charred or bludgeoned thing up above. Women and children can be seen in the frame. For some Southern lynchings, there were excursion trains to the site, with photographers on hand making commemorative postcards. At a lynching in Corinth, Mississippi, in 1902 (seven decades before Jim Garrison managed Long John Silver’s there), “reserved seats were placed for the women who might desire them,” according to a newspaper account. “Special trains were run to the scene and hundreds took advantage of the opportunity. The brother of the murdered woman lighted the fire.”

  In a more recent scholarly work, Making Whiteness, Southern historian Grace Elizabeth Hale picked up on Cash’s 1941 thesis: “Cash implied that white male power challenged by black men’s political and economic advances translated into white male sexuality threatened by black male sexuality. Rape of white women signaled metaphorically white men’s fear of the loss of ability to provide for white women and physically their fear, given their treatment of black women, of the loss of white racial purity.”

  The leering man in his Stetson; the cigar-chomping man in his see-through white shirt; the grim and almost funereal man in the black hat at the back; the stick-swinging man in the middle biting down delicately with his two front incisors—you study all seven of them in the light of the foregoing suppositions and scholarly analyses and isn’t each of them requiring the same thing, namely, instant and bloody redress for a perceived wrong? Is it too much to suggest that there may be a faint undertone of sexualized tension in their faces? According to Hale: “Lynching was the brutal underside of the modern South, the terrifying and yet for whites also perversely titillating practice and increasingly meditated narrative that made the culture of segregation work, and even seem sane.” According to Cash, “What the direct willfulness of his individualism demanded, when confronted by a crime that aroused his anger, was immediate satisfaction for itself—catharsis for personal passion in the spectacle of a body dancing at the end of a rope or writhing in the fire—now, within the hour—and not some ponderous abstract justice in a problematic tomorrow.”

  And hadn’t he understood it as a lynching moment, a lynching narrative, with all that it implied? James Meredith knew what the metaphor of penetrating—or threatening to penetrate—a previously white and “virginal” sanctum of learning meant to the white Southern male mind. Meredith understood about the South and its taboos in ways that an outsider—say, Emmett Till—could never know. Meredith was making an unwarranted advance on Mississippi and womanhood and manhood—and who could say where the advance would lead? To quote again from Three Years in Mississippi: “What are the essentials of a lynching ceremony? There must be a common victim for the lynching community and he must be guilty in the minds of the lynchers of threatening the virtue or purity of the white woman. It is important to understand that the whole community is always involved in a lynching, even though the actual violence itself may be done or even observed by only a small group from the community. If the community is not totally involved, it would not constitute a lynching.” The day the photograph was taken is the day Meredith described as “lynching time.” The fact that an unfathomable man, unfathomably heroic, unfathomably messianic, didn’t get lynched, not on the afternoon of Moore’s photograph, not three nights later, during the fifteen-hour campus rampage, seems almost an accident of history, the same kind of accident that saw to it that Billy and Ira and John Henry and John Ed and Bob Waller and Jim Garrison and Jimmy Middleton came up missing that nig
ht, or mostly so.

  In his oral history with the USM scholar two months before we met, Billy never made mention of Moore’s photograph. He may have had it in mind, however, when he said that Oxford and Meredith were “something we never have talked about because of the—the people of the state of Mississippi was indirectly involved in that in its entirety and stood the chance of embarrassment to no end.” He explained to the interviewer, as he did to me, that it all got out of hand up there because of the violence and bullying of federal troops: “… it had progressed from just a simple rejection of a black student into the University of Mississippi. It had really got raunchy by that time. When you can go around without declaring martial law in a state or without declaring martial law in a community and having federalized troops arrest local officials, that sounds more like Moscow instead of Mississippi.” He said that his daughter, Sherry, had been spirited out of her dorm and off the campus and from under harm’s way by a family friend and former sheriff who was at the scene and had access to a car. (Several years later, when I briefly discussed that night with her, Sherry Ferrell Bernhard confirmed the story.)

  Earlier in this book, I asked: Where did the hatred and sorrow go that flowed out of a caught instant under some trees—and out of a lot of other moments like it in seven particular lives that didn’t get stopped by a camera and reproduced across two pages in a national magazine? Where did it go, the hatred and sorrow encapsulated and symbolized by that image, and where does it reside today? One answer might be that it went too many places to know. It took on too many forms and faces. It spread outward into too many hearts and spleens, like the capillary seepage of water through stone, which is the way of hatred and sorrow.