Sons of Mississippi

by Paul Hendrickson

  The footprint, which seems to be the only footprint in sight, is at the end of a high fence line. The footprint is perhaps a quarter of a mile distant from a wretched-looking “town” called Rancho Anapra. Rancho Anapra is on the Mexican side. Jurisdictionally, the rancho is part of the city of Juárez. It’s a colonia. What the colony of Anapra looks like from the American side is a moonscape of hovels glued and stapled together from corrugated tin and plywood and cardboard and dried mud and whatever else might have been handy or cast off. The dwellings in Anapra seem like a weird and oversized preschool art project. The settlement itself looks built into prehistoric anthills.

  The fence line is used in a kind of funnel effect, Ty explains. “If they’re in Anapra, they know they can’t get through the fence, and so they come down here, to where it stops—or else to the far other end. All they have to do is walk across, if there’s no agent nearby. We can’t cover all this ground at once. They could be hiding anywhere in here. See that tree over there?” He points to a pathetic-looking tree, maybe thirty feet away, on the Mexican side. “There could be one hiding behind there right now.”

  Walking over there to find out would be a violation of international law. That tree is Mexico. There are no federales patrolling on that side, not at this moment, or none that can be seen.

  How did just a single footprint get here? He laughs. “They’re ingenious. They’re always thinking of new ways to get over. They’ll take their shoes off and walk across the road and go fifty yards into the U.S. and put their shoes back on. It’s much harder to pick up the track when they do that. They’ll break off branches and sweep behind them as they walk. It’s called ‘brushing out.’ They’ll tie cardboard to their feet, but if you’re good at cutting the sign, you can tell that right away. They’ll bring a roll of carpet and unroll it and the last guy across will roll it up. Those are usually narcotics people, because one person is not going to carry more than eighty to a hundred pounds of dope across. So they’ll come in fours, maybe. Two will carry a hundred pounds each in a backpack, and the other two will carry the water, because they may have to walk twenty miles in the desert before they’ll be able to unload it. If they don’t have water, they can’t live. They’ll tie cow hoofs on their feet with sandal straps and try to get across. They’ll guide themselves by the lights of the city, or by Mount Cristo Rey, or by a big white tower ball out by the airport.”

  You get “the bike guys coming through,” he says. He tells of an old man named Brujillo. “We call him the woodcutter. He’s been crossing twenty years. He may be eighty. Nobody knows how old he is. He picks up scraps, pieces of wood, old tires. He’s allowed to cross. We don’t apprehend him. He’ll go early in the morning, at daylight, and come back in the afternoon or the middle of the day. We just let him go. He pushes a three-wheeled cart. It’s kinda like a cart on a bicycle. Every day, he scrounges all this stuff from the American side, and then he goes back to his home in Anapra. Every once in a while, there are agents who will pick him up. I never bother Brujillo. In fact, I gave him some gloves. He came up to my truck complaining how cold it was, and I said, ‘Here you go, woodcutter.’ They were my search gloves.”

  Search gloves are what Border Patrol agents use when they’re looking through the pants pockets and jacket linings of suspicious aliens. The fingers of the gloves are reinforced with thick leather: protection against razor blades and knife points.

  They “run drags” to catch the aliens, he says. They attach truck tires to cables and pull them behind their trucks along the unfenced portions of the line. The sand gets raked clean and you can thus track for new prints. “We have all this technology. And a lot of it still comes down to hopping out of a thirty-five-thousand-dollar vehicle and trying to read a footprint in the sand. It’s part of what I love about it.”

  A moment later: “Even if we catch him, chances are we’ll put him back on the other side. We have a threshold. We’ll let a guy come across maybe fifteen times before we put him into the system. Different stations have different thresholds. We have a fingerprint system. Nine times out of ten, they’re in the system, they’re not a first-timer. If he’s put into the criminal system, he’ll do ninety days. Nine times out of ten, he gets out and tries to get right back over. Then we’ll put him in for six months, maybe.” It annoys him, “the fact that he gets out and tries to come right back. But I also try to think of it like this: If he goes to jail in the first place, you’re denying his family the chance to have something better. I want to catch him.” Pause. “I guess there’s a part of me that doesn’t want to do anything else after I catch him but cut him loose.”

  Pause again. “Let him do what he has to do.”

  He has come on Guatemalans and Salvadorans and Hondurans and even Chinese in the bush, Ty says. There they are, the Chinese, staring up at him in their Asian garb and faces. Maybe they’ve made their way from mainland China to Mexico City. Maybe they’ve paid somebody in Juárez $2,500 so they can be smuggled into a stash house on the other side, in a community called Sunland Park, New Mexico. What they’re really hoping for, he says, is to catch a bus to Las Vegas, where dishwashing riches wait for them in big hotels. “OTMs” is what Border Patrol agents will sometimes say when they’re talking of nonwets they’ve taken in. OTM: Other than Mexican.

  He stands up. “Let him go, whoever he is. I’m one guy. I can’t stop the Mexican nation from coming into the United States.”

  He climbs back into the Suburban, drives a quarter mile down the fence line, stops directly across from the hovels of Anapra. He gets out. “I want you to hear something.” On the other side of the high white metal fence, which you can see through, is a welter of high-pitched, unintelligible sound. It’s coming from the direction of the dwellings, inside of which are human beings, but almost none of whom can be glimpsed from here. The noise sounds like transistor radios on bad frequencies, babies squalling, animals bleating, old women crying hysterically to themselves.

  On this side of the fence, desert silence. On this side, the tantalizing dream, America. Over there, twenty-five yards off, the hovels, the caterwauling, of Rancho Anapra, colonia of Juárez.

  The agent is standing against the fence, looking through. He doesn’t seem like a cop, he doesn’t seem like a Ferrell—but that is illusion. He is speaking softly, almost to himself. “It just goes on like this all the time. I’ve come out here to listen to it.”

  Pause. “They don’t have toothbrushes over there—we’ve asked,” he says.

  Pause. “They burn tires for their heat and light,” he says.

  Pause. “No medicine over there,” he says.

  Pause. “No sewage, no electricity, no running water,” he says.

  Pause. “I don’t understand it. You would think with the two countries so close together, one would pull the other up. Somebody can be born right over there, and somebody else, born right over here, and living their lives so close.”

  And you say, “But isn’t this Mississippi, same injustice?”

  The offspring of a man in a photograph turns away from the fence. He’s looking directly at you. “Yeah, I guess you could say that, come to think. I don’t know that I ever thought of it in those same terms until just now. But, yeah, okay.”

  A snapshot in time—current time, past time—of his particular Mississippi, the one down in the southwestern corner of the state where almost every Ferrell is from. In a way, it’s as if Natchez itself, its curious character, wants to offer clues.

  The physical beauty and charm of a place are often a cruel mask for all that lies beneath them, inert, or seemingly inert. You come into the town where the last three generations of William T. Ferrells were born and reared, and it’s like stepping into some lush antebellum dream on a high-up Mark Twain summer morning. Arguably, there is no more beautiful spot in Mississippi and perhaps only a few more beautiful towns in the entire South. From a fence line at Anapra to the east bank of the Mississippi, where Natchez is, is about fourteen and a half hours by
car—Ty knows the way. Basically, it’s a direct shot eastward. Once he hits Dallas, his heart begins to lift, because he can see trees and sense something faintly green. Once he gets to Shreveport, Louisiana, and then on to Alexandria, everything begins to feel intensely familiar.

  The oldest civilized settlement on the Mississippi (two years older than New Orleans) sits on bluffs two hundred feet above the river. For a first-time visitor, the vista can be breathtaking. The Louisiana side of the river is flat and weedy, while Natchez rises in the morning mists. Natchez, with those surreal, Gone with the Wind mansions, the largest and most stunning collection of pre–Civil War homes in America. Natchez, where sternwheelers trimmed out in gingerbread are bobbing almost imperceptibly at anchor, making you wonder what century this is. (The boats are visiting floating tourist hotels—such as the Delta Queen—that ply the Mississippi in the good months of the year. There’s also a permanently moored casino at the foot of Natchez, in the old pirate-and-harlot quarter known as Natchez Under the Hill.)

  You almost wish to be lulled into a historical forgetting, such is the instant outward grace. “The beautiful architecture and careful restoration makes the city an ideal site for telling America’s story” is how the brochures from the visitors’ bureau put it. “At one time, the greatest concentration of millionaires in the United States lived in the townhouses and plantation homes of Natchez.” This was just before the outbreak of what is still known as the War Between the States. Almost right up until the day the cannons fired at Fort Sumter, the aristocrats of Natchez lived as if they were an extension of Georgian Britain. They loved the hunt. The ritual wasn’t conducted on foot, in the style of the shabby little people of Natchez. It was conducted on great steeds with packs of dogs running out front. The brochures and the tour guides who convey you on trolleys around Natchez aren’t interested in having you think about whose collective back all this was built on, don’t wish you to focus on the other Natchez, the hurting and haunted and gothic and bloody one. There are many Natchezes, for in truth the home ground of the Ferrell family is an almost schizoid-seeming place—perhaps more so than any other town in Mississippi, which is saying something. Maybe this has something to do with the culture of the river itself—the Mississippi was always floating in the next round of dreamers and schemers, card sharks and prostitutes and cutthroats and carpetbaggers. In Life on the Mississippi, Mark Twain wrote of Natchez Under the Hill: “It had a desperate reputation, morally, in the old keelboating and early steamboating times—plenty of drinking, carousing, fisticuffing, and killing there, among the riffraff of the river.” If river towns are different, Natchez seems the most different. In this sense, there is something far more open about it than there is about other deeply divided and racist Mississippi towns—Greenwood, for instance, up in the Delta, which isn’t on the big river, and where you can feel the eyes upon you almost as soon as you park your car. Natchez welcomes its outsiders, if they have dollars. Outsiders weren’t so welcome during the civil rights era.

  It’s gothic and haunted. Take the great Rhythm Club Fire for example. It was a black dance hall, on Jefferson Street near the Triangle service station. The flames broke out on April 23, 1940. This was long before civil rights, of course. (Billy Ferrell, not quite seventeen, was soon to quit high school and go to work and then to marriage and Uncle Sam and the war.) As the papers related, “203 negroes bought 50 cent tickets to eternity.” They died stampeding toward the only door or clawing at the two-by-fours nailed across the windows like burglar bars. They’d come that night to hear the Walter Barnes Orchestra, a noted black swing band. The organizers had decorated the place with Spanish moss, and the moss had been sprayed with gasoline to kill the mosquitoes, and apparently somebody emerged from a bathroom in the middle of the dance and lit a cigarette and flipped his match. The match got into the moss. “CRIES OF BURNING NEGROES HEARD FOR BLOCKS. IDENTITY OF DEAD UNKNOWN EARLY THIS MORNING,” the paper said. Those 203 names are on a tarnished tablet of gray stone on the bluffs overlooking the river, overlooking the landing where the tourist sternwheelers tie up. There is a little carved wreath below the two columns of the listed dead: Johnnie Boy Logan, Casiana White Turnipseed, Thelma Lloyd, Willie May Jackson, McKinley Kingsberry, Annabelle Fisher Knight—and all the rest. Who were they?

  That’s what you ask a man shining his heap with a rag one day near the stone. “My aunt and uncle,” he says thickly. He has no teeth. There is an eye missing from his face. He points at the tablet. “Only one way out. Happened way back. I be eighteen. For years, people be walking round Natchez with scars on their bodies from the flames. Don’t see them around anymore.” He takes your notebook and draws a map, writes out the names of his aunt and uncle.

  Near the Rhythm Club Fire monument is another. It commemorates Richard Wright, author of Native Son and Black Boy, who was born in 1908, “near Natchez, where he spent his early childhood. His lifelong quest for freedom led him to Paris, France, where he died in 1960.” Post-totalitarian Natchez has appropriated him. At the big visitors’ center, down closer to the water, they’ve had this same gall—putting the bit about Wright and his lifelong quest for freedom into a film and exhibit. But to read the native son’s novels is to know the purity of his lifelong rage against Mississippi and the South and all of America.

  Quite aside from its record of sixties civil rights brutality—one of the worst in the state in terms of how many burnings, bombings, beatings, floggings, outright murders—Natchez has apparently always had about it a whiff and aura of “sin,” for lack of a better word. (“Dee-caydent,” is the word Billy Ferrell used, sitting down on his dock, his love for his hometown welling up in him with a big grin.) It’s the same aura of sinfulness and decadence you get almost immediately in New Orleans. In a way, Natchez is a little New Orleans, in its fleshy appetites. Tony Dunbar, a New Orleanian who has written several fine books about Mississippi, has said that New Orleans “smells of salt air, coffee, garlic, crusty bread, gardenias, sweet olive, and the river.” There is a similar sensuosity and sensuality about Natchez, just not quite as pronounced. In the early 1800s, Frances Trollope, mother of novelist Anthony Trollope, came from Britain to visit the Americas and wrote of Natchez: “… the abundant growth of the pawpaw, palmetto and orange, the copious variety of sweetscented flowers that flourish there, all make it appear like an oasis in the desert. Natchez is the furthest point to the north at which oranges ripen in the open air.”

  This is a town famed for once having had one of the greatest whorehouses in the South. Nellie Jackson’s place, at the corner of Monroe and North Rankin Streets, operated right into modern times and all through the long reign of Sheriff Billy Ferrell, right up until the late 1980s, when an aggrieved client burned the brothel down, and Miss Nellie with it. Miss Nellie, as she was respectfully known, used to ride on a float in the big Natchez Christmas parade (just as Billy did, when he had the honor of portraying Santa seven years before his death), another way of saying that Natchez has never been afraid to showcase and parade its sin—certain kinds anyway.

  In Natchez, you see Queen Anne houses with delicate filigree standing next to homes with a kind of French Quarter motif standing close to commercial buildings that are supposed to be peerless examples of the Greek Revival architectural style. Historically, in Natchez, blacks and whites have always lived near each other all over town. There are black quarters of Natchez, but the larger pattern of interracial neighborhoods prevails even now (although it’s less true in the subdivisions). The pattern is rooted in the days when slave shacks surrounded the planters’ houses.

  So something is instantly kicky and jazzy and Dixieland about this place, which has less than 20,000 people now and is no longer the main river port between Memphis and New Orleans. Something is also immediately blue-collar and factory-worker-sultry about it. The rise of modern industrialization was a postwar phenomenon, after cotton and oil had faltered. The blue-collarness is mixed right in with, snugged up to, the tourism, the visual splen
dor of the antebellum homes with their manicured gardens. The houses have names like Rosalie, Monmouth, Montaigne, The Briars, Stanton Hall. (The last one takes up a city block.) People from around the world come to Natchez for the twice-annual tour. The mansions—about thirty-two of them—form the heart of the Natchez Pilgrimage, sponsored by the town’s garden clubs. Off the buses the pilgrims roll, to peep inside the slightly faded drawing rooms while latter-day family members, in costume, show off the handed-down china, crystal, the dark portraits of their cotton-owning and indigo-planting ancestors. Blacks are not a part of the Natchez Pilgrimage. Natchez has so successfully marketed its history, one slice of it, that tourism makes up about 50 percent of its economy. In the old economy, the mansions had bells on embroidered pull strings, so that a slave (or, later, a domestic, who was a slave just by another name) could tell by the tone of a particular bell where in the house he or she was wanted.

  All of the un-chamber-of-commerce history of Natchez is there, under the surface, like malaria. If you approach the touristy town from the other side, off the Natchez Trace Parkway, you’ll end up on St. Catherine Street. On St. Catherine, across from E-Z Credit Motor Company, there’s a plaque marking the Forks of the Road. It says: “Site of the South’s second largest slave market in the nineteenth century. Enslaved people were also once sold on city streets and at the landing at Natchez Under the Hill. Natchez slaves were freed in July 1863, when Union troops occupied the city. The Forks of the Road market then became a refuge for hundreds of emancipated people.”

  Elizabeth Proby, direct descendant of one of the emancipated, lives in this neighborhood. She’s in the small print of civil rights literature—and deserves far more. In 1965, she was one of hundreds of Natchez blacks who marched in protest against the latest round of car bombings and economic repressions and random beatings. Late summer and the fall of 1965 were a very bad time in Natchez. The marchers were rounded up and arrested. Because the local jails weren’t large enough, the protesters were held temporarily in the civic auditorium and then removed to Parchman penitentiary in the north of the state on commercial buses—three busloads on a Saturday, two on Sunday, one on Monday. At Parchman, the males were made to strip naked, and the women were made to take off their outer clothes. Both males and females were force-fed laxatives. The single latrine in each group cell—as many as eight were shoved into one cell—quickly backed up. There was no toilet paper. Feces ran onto the floor. Female prisoners later testified that they were using their rations of bread and biscuits to wipe themselves. They testified in court documents that they had to tear up their panties for sanitary napkins. The guards watched this sport unfold. Elizabeth Proby was a young woman. She was later part of a lawsuit filed against the city of Natchez and the prison, and she remembers that eventually she got a reparation check for something like $20. “They didn’t make me take off all my clothes at Parchman, no,” she says, as if it’s important to make the distinction. “I had a light brown corduroy jacket with half-sleeves, and just a bra underneath, and so they said I could keep that on. I was appreciative. That night, when it got so cold, when they were turning the exhaust fans on us to make us shiver, I was sharing the jacket with other girls.” After she got out of Parchman and had come home, Proby tried to go back to her job at Krouse Pecan Shelling. But they fired her for having caused the city so much grief. She did maid work and registered at Alcorn A&M University and eventually got certified as a schoolteacher. She is in retirement. You ask her one day, having just knocked at her door, having been invited in, if she thinks that some of those who were guilty of treating her that way back then might have any regret now. “I expect they do. I expect so. If they have any kind of heart, and most people do,” she says, letting it go at that. “I try not to keep grudges,” she adds.