Sons of Mississippi

by Paul Hendrickson

  Not long afterward, a white Southerner named John Ed Bradley interviewed Meredith for a story that was published in Esquire in late 1992. His magazine piece on Meredith is one of the few that has ever sought to touch the hatred and sorrow and fear beneath the surface. The journalist took Meredith to dinner, and Meredith began telling of the bird shot he sustained from the shotgun blast in the 1966 March Against Fear. He touched his scalp, ran his fingers over the back of his head. “Feel this right there,” he told the author. Bradley did. “They’re all under the skin, it’s a BB. Here’s one here—see that, right there.” He said, “It keeps a continuous sore, and I can’t sleep more than an hour or so at a time. Occasionally, one will come out, just pop out of the skin, like when you get a splinter and you pick it out.” Bradley watched a tic come to Meredith’s lips, the slightest tremble. The journalist looked away. He was sure Meredith was about to cry. “Used to find them on my pillow,” Meredith said. “What?” Bradley said, staring at his plate. “The BBs.” When he looked back at Meredith’s face, Meredith wasn’t crying. He was smiling.

  I once showed Charles Moore’s photograph to a man named Will D. Campbell. He is an ordained minister and a prolific author and a lifelong student of the South. For many years, he has lived outside of Nashville, but he is Mississippi in his origins and predilections. In the fifties, he had been a chaplain at Oxford. Now, in his little writing cabin, which is a hundred or so yards from his house in Mt. Juliet, Tennessee, the historian and man of God and lover of Mississippi and the South spread the magazine out on his knees and said, moving his head side to side, “Well, these are our people, aren’t they?” There was something so accepting in it.

  I once showed the photograph to a Southern historian and Mississippi native named David Sansing. He is another gentle and gracious man. For years, he taught at Ole Miss; he is mad for the school, its traditions, its football glories, and finds that he can’t stay away from it even in his retirement. A couple of years ago, Sansing authored the sesquicentennial history of Ole Miss. He said that he has his young grandkids already preregistered for enrollment. He got very excited looking at the picture, which, curiously, he’d never seen before. He hunched forward and touched it, as so many have done. “You know what this is?” he said. “It’s life imitating life. These guys are posing for this picture. They know the rest of the country knows what they look like, and, hell, they’re just gonna show them that that’s exactly what they look like.”

  I stood up from the table we were sitting at in the Alumni Center. “These are American white Southern bigots,” I said.

  The retired professor stood up. He looked down at the photograph. “Yep, authentic bigots,” he said.

  “But they insist on being taken as individuals?”

  He hesitated. “Yes and no. What is that old thing? There’s security in numbers. Safety in it. They want to stay part of the group. Because they break down into their humanity when you get them one-on-one. They’re a little afraid of that. I think they’d rather stay part of the mob. This guy swinging that stick knows in his heart it’s wrong. He can’t help it. See, these guys are both individuals, and they are part of a much bigger face. They’re just freckles on a larger face. They couldn’t do what they’re doing if their wives and communities weren’t endorsing it.” None of this was said with rancor, and indeed I got the feeling that if the faces in Moore’s photograph could come to life off the flat page, Sansing would immediately be inclined to invite them into his home, to get a better fix on them, maybe.

  “You sound like a man in conflict,” I said.

  “Damn right,” he said. “Faulkner wrote about me. Remember his Nobel Prize speech? He talked of the human heart in conflict with itself. That’s Mississippi.”

  I once showed the picture to John Herbers, another wise, gentle Mississippi son and retired reporter for the New York Times. Herbers spent most of his journalism career covering the South. He was at the Emmett Till trial as a young reporter for the wire services. “The hate always runs so deep in Southern cops,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “Well, because they come by and large from a blue-collar background. They’ve put on the badge and risen above it a little in their white shirts and ties, but they still know where they came from and so in a sense you could say they hate themselves. It’s a form of self-hate and outer-directed hate at the same time. The line between a criminal and a cop is always very thin. They’re very much alike. They’re prey to the same impulses and secret desires. With the badge on, they can slip over that line. They’re halfway over before they realize.” Herbers looked again and laughed. “None of them could expect to live very long—they all ate too much pig fat.”

  I once showed Moore’s picture to another photographer—D. Gorton. He is a native Mississippian, white, from Greenville, who grew up in the fifties and who was at Oxford as a student at the time of the riot, and who afterward went to work in voter registration for SNCC, and who, much later, became an esteemed photographer at the New York Times and other newspapers. After we talked, he sent a letter. “We find ourselves drawn more and more into discussions of redemption,” he said. “The pressure on whites in Mississippi was so extreme that to act in a moral way approached self-immolation.… A double-bind was presented: to act was to cross lines that might never be recrossed. Not to act was to be complicit. Moreover, judgment of your actions was largely made by outsiders in a secular environment. Meanwhile, one’s black neighbors had been burdened by these very issues for their whole existence on this unwelcoming soil.”

  After Oxford, massive resistance was mostly finished in Mississippi. So was the Citizens’ Council mainly finished—certainly you can begin to mark the waning of its power from that moment. That seems a large part of the meaning of Meredith’s entry—the resistance wave had crested, and nobody really understood so at the time. In many ways, Meredith at Ole Miss—a somewhat forgotten moment in America—was the culminating event of civil rights in Mississippi, even though still ahead were so many bad and notorious moments for Mississippi and for the rest of the South and for the country itself. Ahead in Mississippi was the reemergence of the Klan—the revival began in Billy Ferrell’s Natchez and spread through the state. Ahead was the astonishing hate of already astonishingly hateful places like Greenwood. Ahead were Bull Connor and the dogs of Birmingham. Ahead was the slaying of Medgar Evers. Ahead was the murder of four little girls in the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham. Ahead was Freedom Summer of 1964 and the murder of Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman in Philadelphia, Mississippi. Ahead was Bloody Sunday in Selma on March 7, 1965.

  And yet also ahead were the triumphs and the moral turning of a country: the August 28, 1963, March on Washington (“I have a dream,” Dr. King cried to the more than 200,000 faces gathered below him); the signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 on July 2 of that year; the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. That civil rights legislation became law on August 6, 1965. In March of that year, only 6.7 percent of all eligible blacks in Mississippi had been registered to vote; but within two and a half years—by September 1967—the percentage would be 59.8 percent.

  Ahead, too, were the burnings in cities—Newark, Watts in Los Angeles, Detroit, Hough in Cleveland—and in the wake of these northern fires, a slow fragmenting of the movement. The Black Panther party rose, and with it Stokely Carmichael, once of SNCC, calling by then for apocalypse in the ghetto. On April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr., died on his motel balcony in Memphis, and two months and one day later, on June 5, Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in the pantry of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, falling backward with a quizzical expression on his face. He lived for about another twenty-six hours—until 1:44 A.M. on June 6. And then there was the funeral two days later at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York. And that same afternoon, there was the train ride southward, attended at towns and crossings by the silent and curious—perhaps a million trackside mourners in all, black and white alike.

/>   It was a blur of time in America, from the front end of the sixties to the back end, during which so much about our national life went helter-skelter. By the back end of the decade, Vietnam was the hemorrhage no one could stanch, and it had superseded almost everything, including the struggle for civil rights, which had been won and not won.

  Several years ago, I was visiting a civil rights museum in Memphis. I was standing at the exhibit panel that told about Meredith after he’d made it into Ole Miss. On a green card in white lettering, I read: “For almost a year, Meredith has lived in a kind of ‘No Man’s Land.’ He found few friendly faces on the white side.… He never admits to the pressure or tension he feels. He either denies it or makes fun of it.” In the next room, I could hear the recorded sound of fire hoses knocking people over. It was an exhibit about Bull Connor and his cops and dogs in Kelly Ingram Park, seven months after the events at Oxford. Charles Moore had taken the photographs of the Birmingham police dogs with their teeth bared, lunging against their choke chains, ripping the clothes of demonstrators. Historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., later said, “The photographs of Bull Connor’s police dogs lunging at the marchers in Birmingham did as much as anything to transform the national mood and make legislation not just necessary, which it had long been, but possible.” After Ole Miss, after Birmingham, Moore had moved to other racial battlegrounds. He was at the Selma-to-Montgomery march in 1965, and yet by then he could feel something dying in him.

  A month after that assignment, he was sent by Newsweek to shoot the civil war in the Dominican Republic. He was on a balcony in his hotel in the dark, watching machine-gun fire in the distance. “But I was tired of being involved in violent things,” he would say years later, trying to explain. He left the Dominican Republic and went back to Miami. He bought an around-the-world ticket on Pan Am and didn’t return to America for eight months. For the next several decades, he made Southeast Asia his base of photographic operations. He shot many national and international magazine covers. He made portraits of celebrities and movie stars—Kim Novak, Raquel Welch, Lauren Hutton. He did corporate photography for Fortune 500 companies. He became interested in landscape and nature photography. He lived, among other places (these are not in any strict order), in Singapore, San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, the gold mining country of the Sierra Nevada of California, western Massachusetts, the mountains of North Carolina. He collected overdue awards, not enough, not the truly big ones he deserved. He gave speeches and starred at various symposia—always with his winning modesty. He got married and unmarried—more than once. Many years removed from that summer-of-’62 freelance try in Manhattan, he wrote a letter to his brother Jim, five years younger and his closest friend in life: “I ran away from the pain of a very bad marriage, and into the more painful life of being away from my children whom I loved so much.” In the spring of 2000, a wanderer and wounded man and yet still an intensely curious and kindly soul moved back home to northwestern Alabama, thinking at last he’d settle, and this is where we first met, a few months after the move, in the town of Florence, as he was getting a deck built on the back of his new house, as he was shelving books in his living room. I opened a coffee-table book. It was a retrospective of the work of the great portrait photographer Arnold Newman. Newman had written in the flyleaf: “For Charles. I’m floored and flattered to be asked to sign this book by such a great Master, with humble respect and admiration and from an old friend. Arnold.”

  Standing before the Meredith panel in the Memphis civil rights museum that day several years ago, reading the words “never admits to the pressure or tension he feels,” listening to the recorded sound of pressurized fire hoses and the barking of dogs in the adjoining room, I began to come slowly to a new feeling about the unknowable figure who lives behind drawn blinds on Meadowbrook Road in Jackson. Although Meredith can’t be seen in Moore’s frame, he is in the picture. He is, you might say, filling it up, controlling and directing all of its spaces.

  I once believed that the pressures of Oxford had cracked Meredith. I think the closer truth is that his dilemmas and demons were already present. Oxford, and the aftermath of Oxford, exacerbated and catalyzed all he became. The cruelty of the ordeal at Ole Miss got welded onto the already mystical-messianic temperament, and what resulted, in the long after-years, was a life no one has been able to decode, not least the man himself. Increasingly, he became a marginalized figure in America, and the sheer frustration of that must be overwhelming to him behind those drawn blinds. This fact needs be put into the mix: The world has never had enough compassion for Meredith. He himself has seen to that. In John Ed Bradley’s 1992 Esquire piece, there are phrases like this: “… no more than a dressed-up errand boy for a race-baiting southern senator.” And: “Sadly, the diatribe seemed the ravings of a megalomaniac devouring whatever shred of a reputation he had left. And the vicious irony was that the more Meredith confessed his ambition to be the savior, the more people turned away—not in political disagreement but in pity and confusion.” Those judgments are as tough as they are fair. The easier path for most white journalists, as the decades went on, was to write the confoundment–contradiction–crack-up story, with mockery at the margins, and with little or no attempt to recognize their own complicity in the terrors of a whooshing bat that in a sense has never stopped whooshing. Let that thought be stated another way: Aren’t all of us who are white in America in Moore’s frame too, unseen yet present, standing in the ring of batterers, maybe even trying on our own leer or sneer, just to see how it fits?

  And so a personal story. On October 16, 1992, in a mid-South farm town called Morganfield, Kentucky, a thirty-one-year-old man named Terry Frazier gained entry to a house at the corner of Poplar Street and West O’Bannon Street. At home that early afternoon were two people—a two-year-old named Steven, asleep in a bedroom, and Steven’s thirty-one-year-old mom, who was doing housework. Her name was Tina M. Waggener, and she knew the intruder well. She’d gone to Union County High School with Frazier, as had her husband, Doby Waggener, who, at the time of the robbery and murder, was cutting hair in his barbershop. Frazier, who is now in a Kentucky penitentiary, is black; his old classmate Tina, whom he murdered about two o’clock for reasons that are still murky, was white. It is not known if he intended to attack her sexually, although that has been much speculated. What is known is that he stabbed her repeatedly in the face and throat. He pursued her out into the yard where he caught her and perhaps stabbed her again as she screamed and clawed for a fence. That’s where they found my first cousin, next to a fence, eighty-nine feet from the house. I remember the chillingly soft way my father said, when I asked him for facts, “I think he got her climbing the fence, son.”

  Tina was my Uncle Leon’s child. My Uncle Leon Hendrickson, who is my dad’s brother, along with my Uncle Jimmy Hendrickson and my Uncle H. C. Hendrickson, have lived in Morganfield all their lives. The Morganfield phone directory has many listings for the name Hendrickson. That Indian summer afternoon, my three uncles were hauling corn to market. My father’s family is descended from farm people who go far back in that rural region of Kentucky. My father is third-oldest and eldest surviving son in a family of eight boys and one girl, some of whom, including my octogenarian father, have been out of Morganfield and off the farm for decades. But each of them was formed and deeply marked as a Depression-era child in that segregated place. A generation later, in my own fifties childhood, when I was riding on the fenders of my uncles’ tractors for several weeks out of every summer, Morganfield remained a deeply divided community. My older brother Marty and I were Illinois boys, and we couldn’t wait to get down to the pleasures of the Kentucky farm.

  Tina Waggener’s 1992 murder shocked Morganfield. It was so out of the order of things, so against the town’s social and moral history. Three years after her death, I was standing one night in a West Coast bookstore when a black-and-white photograph of some men in a half circle took strange hold of me. And do you know what? For the first sev
eral years of my Mississippi travels, I missed the most obvious and central thing about this photograph, obvious and central insofar as my own history is concerned. I suppose this is exactly why I missed it, because it was and is so obvious to my own history, namely, that the man in the middle, swinging the bat, biting the Lucky, bent on his murderous vengeances, could be my own dad as a younger man. The physical resemblance is remarkable.

  But the “real”—what assaults the eye before the eye begins its work of selection—is never on the verge of dissolution, still less of appropriation. The real is raw, jarring, unexpected, sometimes trashy, sometimes luminous. Above all, the real is arbitrary. For to be a realist (in art or in life) is to acknowledge that all things might be other than they are. That there is no design, no intention, no aesthetic or moral or teleological imprimatur but, rather, the equivalent of Darwin’s great vision of a blind, purposeless, ceaseless evolutionary process that yields no “products”—only temporary strategies against extinction. Yet, being human, we think, To what purpose these broken-off things, if not to be gathered up, at last, in a single ecstatic vision?