As I drove into the countryside, I reflected on what I’d witnessed in Jackson that morning: the arraignment of a former Klansman named Ernest Avants on a thirty-four-year-old murder charge. The victim, Ben Chester White, a sixty-seven-year-old black farmhand with no involvement in the civil rights movement, had been killed by a group of Klansmen on June 10, 1966, in a national forest in the Natchez area. Avants was the only suspect still alive. White had been murdered, the theory went, because the Klan was trying to lure Martin Luther King, Jr., to Natchez. The Klan wished to assassinate King, and they thought that killing White, an innocent old man, might be an effective bait. There are other theories about the slaying, too—but the point is, it was just one more unsolved Mississippi murder, with characteristically grisly details. (The victim was all but decapitated from the final gun blasts.) So I had watched that morning in the James O. Eastland U.S. Courthouse in downtown Jackson as a shackled Ernest Avants was led in for a presumed date with justice at last. He was sixty-nine, hunched, confused, in work boots and bib overalls and a sleeveless denim jacket. He wasn’t wearing a shirt. It was as if he’d been outfitted for this time warp by central casting. Beyond the railing, stylishly dressed black reporters, both male and female, from Jackson TV and radio outlets wrote notes on legal pads as the federal murder indictment was read aloud to the prisoner. Once before, in 1967, Avants had been tried and acquitted for White’s murder, even though he had submitted a statement to FBI agents acknowledging that he had shot White with a shotgun (claiming, however, that he had fired after White was already dead from other blasts). The State of Mississippi had conducted that trial. He was being charged anew with the crime because latter-day researchers and federal investigators had made the discovery that White was killed on federal property, in the Homochitto National Forest. Thus federal prosecutors also had jurisdiction in the case and thus Avants could now be indicted on a federal murder charge for a civil-rights-era crime. The killing of Ben White was the eighteenth slaying from the South’s civil rights years to be reinvestigated since 1989. Three of those cases, in Mississippi, had made their way into the courtroom and had found convictions. (The most significant conviction was that of Byron De La Beckwith in 1994 for the 1963 murder of Medgar Evers.) “Mr. Avants, you’re able to read and write?” the U.S. magistrate asked. “Yes,” he said. He pled not guilty. The judge set his bail at $100,000. “No time is too late to vindicate our country’s repudiation of acts of racial violence,” U.S. Attorney Brad Pigott of Jackson said afterward to the press.
I mused on that as I drove into gathering dark.
It was pitch dark when I found John’s place. I knocked on the screen door of a double-wide. There didn’t seem to be any lights on. He came to the door and I sensed something ominous. He’d gained weight and his eyes were red and his skin looked blotchy. We shook hands and he invited me in. A patch of color glowed behind him. “Sitting here watching the TV,” he said. “I couldn’t tell you what’s on.” He shut off the box. “I told you I wouldn’t be living long in that hole on Evelyn Street. How do you like my new digs?”
I said I liked them.
“It’s an all-white community. That was part of the incentive.”
Briefly, he grew animated. “I got three acres here. Got this double-wide and the land it’s sitting on for $68,000. They moved the house onto the property for me. Didn’t have to put hardly anything down. Got the furniture free. I’ve already thought about selling it for the profit. It’s almost brand-new. I think I could get eighty-five or ninety right now. If I don’t sell it, I got lots of plans for it.” He said he wanted to improve the site, put in a driveway, shrubbery.
He showed me around inside. The place was extremely neat. His water bed was in one bedroom. In the other bedroom was a queen-sized bed, with a matching chest of drawers. “This is my bedroom suite,” he said. “I ain’t sleeping in here, though. That damn bed gives me headaches.”
He said he had two beers in his refrigerator, and we sat in the living room drinking them. I had to keep the conversation going. There was a heaviness in the room, an awkwardness between us. I asked about his kids. They were good, but he was having arguments with his ex. I asked about work and some of the Depot employees I’d met on earlier trips. Work was lousy, he said. He was getting more and more fed up with being a supervisor. He’d gone in and tried to resign being a supervisor, but the bosses wouldn’t let him. There was a new store manager, somebody they’d sent from the company headquarters, and this guy was bearing down on all the department heads. Taking away some of their responsibilities, making them do more Mickey Mouse shit, even more paperwork than before.
“How’s Buddy Harris?” I asked.
“Transferred to the Cordova store. That’s fine with me. He said I was riding him too hard. We discussed it face-to-face one day. I said, ‘Yeah, but why am I riding you so hard, Buddy? Because we’ve sent you for six weeks of training at company expense, and you aren’t wanting to work hard enough. And anyway, I’m not riding you.’ Buddy’s got an attitude. He thinks I don’t like him because he’s black.”
“How’s Ariel Jeffords?” I asked.
“She’s a know-it-all now,” he said. “You can’t tell her a thing. There’s this new black associate in my department, a woman. She’s like Ariel, only Ariel’s white. She said I was sexist in my relationship with her. I told her she could file a complaint. That kind of shut her up.”
We talked a while longer and I finished my beer and then said I had to go back to town and find a room because I had a lot to do the next day. I said I wouldn’t wait so long next time to see him. We shook hands. I drove back to Senatobia and slept in a Motel 6 beside the interstate, only I didn’t sleep. I tossed for most of the night, listening to the whine of big-rig trucks beyond my door. After a while, I turned on the lamp and retrieved from my bag a copy of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. I reread that section near the beginning when Agee speaks of going down to Alabama in the summer of 1936 armed with his arrogance and presumptions, hoping nonetheless to achieve a truthful and “independent inquiry into certain normal predicaments of human divinity.” But the lyrical words in that lyrical book, where the “truth” of the South and those sharecropper lives keeps double-backing on itself, exploding on Agee, exploding on the reader, provided no comfort.
They call him Ty. He’s the Ferrell who lives so far from home, the one in the family who so often seems close to tears, whose particular field of law enforcement is apprehending desperate people, aliens trying to get to the other side of a tantalizing dream. A bat bristling in the afternoon sun of September 27, 1962, had brought me here, two generations and forty years onward, in this desert scape called Santa Teresa, to the ironic predicaments of this soft, sensitive, doubt-filled grandson, a U.S. Border Patrol agent. William T. Ferrell III doesn’t really look like Billy, though, not the Billy limbering up, that Lucky on his lips.
The Distance from Natchez, Mississippi, to Santa Teresa, New Mexico
There have been times, out there looking for them on horseback, or spraying around the desert in pursuit of them on an all-terrain vehicle, or tracking them on foot, alone, sometimes with a partner, sometimes in the middle of the night, armed with his cuffs and flashlights and billy stick and water bottles and radio and standard-issue .40-caliber Beretta, armed—you could say—with nothing past his wits and family genes, but loving it all, the hunt and chase, the implicit danger, the primitive and atavistic and somehow authentic cop-cowboy feel of running lawbreakers to ground, when Ty Ferrell will ask himself: But what’s wrong with it, really? What’s wrong with trying to better your life, make a better world for your family? We’ve made it a crime, coming across the border illegally. It’s my job to stop it. I do. But wouldn’t I be doing exactly what they’re doing if the situation were reversed? Why shouldn’t these people have a moral right to try to make their lives better?
Billy Ferrell’s grandson and namesake and Sheriff Tommy Ferrell’s namesake and only son—who did the unthinkable ma
le Ferrell thing a while back of learning how to change his infant daughter’s diapers; the Ferrell who’s always inclined to stop in the road and rescue a stray kitten—has just turned his palms upward. He’s grinning, although a moment ago he was choking back tears.
This U.S. Border Patrol agent is sitting in a restaurant in a shopping mall on the edge of El Paso, Texas. It’s our first face-to-face meeting; the interview is less than thirty minutes old. Out in the parking lot, on the back seat of a rental car, is a magazine, and in the magazine, spread across pages 40 and 41, is a picture of his grandfather bristling his bat in all of his ego and arrogance, in his intolerance and racial fears.
“You see my dilemmas,” the inheritor says, not specifying.
The word “compassion” enters the conversation, in this context: “So when you catch them, you have compassion for them, even though you still love being able to catch them?”
He answers: “I don’t know if I have a compassion for them. I think I have an understanding. You’re not angry at them. The only ones you half can get angry at are the ones you catch who are just going into El Paso to beg or steal. But even then, the majority of them are doing that to feed their families. Like I say, it’s just what I’d be doing.” He hesitates. “I’m not sure I should say this. Just because a guy’s got fifty pounds of marijuana in his backpack, does that make him a bad person? I almost hate to say that because it sounds soft. But how much different is it from the five guys you caught the night before at Cristo Rey, who were just trying to get to Denver to make a living? Yes, smuggling drugs into America is a crime. It’s our job to stop it. But I’m raising a different question.”
A moment ago, Ty Ferrell choked back his tears at a mention of his grandfather’s funeral. He flew home for that funeral with his wife and baby daughter. He choked tears back again at mention of his father, who meticulously took care of the details of Billy Ferrell’s huge and front-page Natchez burial at 3 P.M. on March 2, 1999. “Oh, I hate him for his pride,” the son and grandson suddenly said of William Thomas Ferrell, Jr., head lawman of Natchez and the county since 1988, who took over from Billy when Billy had had enough, and whose fame and ego—Tommy’s, that is—now spread far beyond Adams County and Mississippi and the South as he ascends to the presidency of all the sheriffs in America.
The son and grandson had gone on: “In so many ways, I’ve never been able to please him. I can’t live up to him. The way I see it, I’ll never be able to measure up. My dad scares the shit out of me. He can break me down on the phone. He scares the shit out of my little daughter, and he doesn’t even mean to.” His voice broke when he said “my little daughter.” Despite the harshness of the words, there seemed a lack of judgment or condemnation in his voice. And just as quickly as his eyes had glistened, they dried, and he recovered.
This is a Ferrell who raises many un-Ferrell-seeming questions—and in whom a certain unspecified, existential torment seems continually to exhibit itself. But don’t get the wrong notion. He is a Ferrell all the same, which is to say he’s a law enforcer, by any other name or mask or current domicile or specific job description. That, too, seems a larger truth the more you get to know him. It’s in his pores and bloodstream, being a law enforcer. It’s something he feels he almost has no control over, in the same way he often feels he has no control over the propensity to cry. He has tried to be some other things in his life, do some other things. But he has always come back to the family business. What we resist in this world, we are often stuck with.
He is talking of that work, in its current guise: “Ninety-nine percent of them are very passive people. They’re not criminals. They’re just trying to get over.” That’s how they’ll say it, sometimes, in their scrap English, when he’s got the light trained on their faces, when they’re looking back at him, petrified, in the washing cone of his beam: get over.
“You try to get north of them,” he explains, something almost dreamy coming into his voice. “You hopscotch it with the other agents. You’re on radio contact. It’s a big rush, it’s very exciting, you get out there with a gun, and if it’s at night, with a flashlight. It has a tremendous potential to be very dangerous. If you stopped to think about it, you’d never put on the uniform and go to work. It would spook you to death.”
Later, on another visit, when you are discussing again the implicit tensions of having sympathy for those who are so atavistically and pleasurably being run to ground, this is asked: “What do you usually call them, the ones you’re hunting?”
“Aliens,” he says. “I’ll call them aliens most of the time. Sometimes, I say illegal aliens. On the radio, though, I call them wets. On the radio we all call them wets. We’re not trying to be politically correct then. We’re trying to catch them.”
What would he do if he were chasing a wet on horseback in the middle of the night and the wet wouldn’t stop? “I’d run my horse into him,” he says, with a little of course in his voice.
“At night, we use infrared motion sensors to get them,” he says. “We call them ‘hits.’ You get hits on the sensors.”
They’ll “bush up,” he says. “Bushing up” is when your quarry is trying to elude your beam by hiding, maybe facedown, behind some stunted growth of mesquite or cactus or other desert flora.
“They’re mainly men,” he says, “although women and children, too. We’ll get pregnant women coming over just before birth so that they can claim their child as a U.S. citizen.”
And he understands that? “I guess I’d do it too.”
He has come on “whole families, hiding out there in the bushes.” Maybe they’re Indians from the Mexican state of Oaxaca, which is deep in the interior of the country. Maybe they’ve ridden a bus up to Ciudad Juárez, which is the Mexican border city opposite El Paso. Hoping to cross undetected, they’ve made their way out of the lights of the city into the nearby New Mexico desert, where Ty patrols. “There they are, they’re in your flashlight, the grandmother, the father, the teenage son, the mother nursing babies with snot running out their noses. I’ve found that. I’ve had that. They can be very offensive in their body smells. All they want is to get over and beg for a month on the other side, sleep in a gas station lot, or a drainage ditch, make enough to go back home and live for the rest of the year.”
What happens next?
“We’ll either process them and send them back or, if we’ve caught them many times before, we’ll put them in jail. It just depends.”
Appended softly: “None of it seems exactly fair, does it?”
Hemingway once said, “Certainly there is no hunting like the hunting of man and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it never really care for anything else thereafter.” Billy Ferrell’s progeny owns a T-shirt with the quote lettered in green on the back of it. He got it when he was finishing up his seventeen-week training course at the U.S. Border Patrol Academy in Charleston, South Carolina. The shirts were being sold semilegally in a store on the academy grounds—until they were deemed too impolitic, and maybe a little too truthful. Ty doesn’t wear the shirt much, but he isn’t inclined to get rid of it.
There are probably a lot of ways to think about the riddle of his story, but one of them is that an immensely likable and palpably conflicted man has picked up his family’s whole history with race and carried it about 1,000 miles westward, into a twenty-first-century setting, a new-millennium setting. In the old century, it might be said, America’s core tragedy was painted in black and white. But in the new, as Hispanics have overtaken African-Americans as the country’s largest minority, that tragedy has shaded itself with additional colors, not least the color brown. Not that Ty is seeing it or thinking of it this way. He’s living his life, doing his job as a fourth-generation Ferrell law enforcer. (Fourth generation at minimum; his paternal great-grandfather, whom he never knew, was a part-time deputy sheriff.) He’s doing it in a place where not just the colors, but the landscape and light are so different from all that he’s ever known. What he
misses is the South’s density, its greenery. On the border, the light isn’t filtered through moisture and overhanging trees. It isn’t “latticed with yellow slashes of dust motes,” as Faulkner wrote of the lovely, late, still, dead Mississippi afternoons. “If it’s east of Texas, it’s home,” Ty says. “Home to us can be anywhere in the South. If it’s not east of Texas, it’s not doing us any good.” Until he moved to the Southwest, he never knew what the longing for a place could be like.
One of the reasons why this skilled and homesick law enforcer, who’s in his mid-thirties, with a wife and child he is devoted to, is so quickly likable is because his ego seems nothing like that of his two same-named forebears. All of that celebrated Ferrell peacocked strut and hungering need to be at the center—that wouldn’t describe Ty. “Oh, I’ve got the ego, the Ferrell ego,” he assures you. “It’s just that I’ve got the fear, too. I’m always worried and worrying. I’m a tremendous worrier. I worry about things I have no business worrying about. And I guess that works against the ego and is always sort of pulling at me.” He adds, “When I’m doing my job, I’m a different person. I guess it’s a persona coming out of me.”
On the phone, before the first meeting (which was in late 1999, about eight months after his grandfather was buried), he’d said, as if in warning: “I have trouble with my emotions. My emotions come out when they’re not supposed to.”
Doing his job, a persona coming out. The federal agent—who is in the employ of the Department of Justice—was on foot one night when he came on four illegal immigrants and instantly understood something was different. His partner wasn’t close by. He’d gone on duty as he always does, with five full magazines of ammunition. He’s very skilled with firearms, having grown up around them, having hunted for small game since he was a boy. (He has served stints of TDY, temporary duty, as a firearms instructor at one of the two training academies in the United States that the Border Patrol maintains.) He’d packed two flashlights—the one with the big beam that recharges on his belt when it’s not in use, and the smaller 3-D cell Maglite, which he always keeps in a little holster Velcroed to his waist. He had his billy, which is made of steel and known in the Border Patrol as a “baton.” You could crush bone with it. There are firm guidelines and periodic refresher courses concerning the use of the batons, Ty says. “Basically, you hit them in parts of the leg or arm where there’s a lot of flesh and muscle. I’ve almost never used it. I feel I don’t have to.”
Sons of Mississippi Page 30
