Sons of Mississippi

by Paul Hendrickson

  In any case, he won. The hocking of the furniture and car was worth it. Good thing he never got that job with the Sov-Com.

  During the campaign for his reelection (there were the usual rumors of bribes), he was led one night to a backwoods meeting of “the bedsheets,” as Billy called them. This, too, is a well-known Natchez story. Billy himself told it many times over the years. (He told it in his 1997 sessions with the oral historian from the University of Southern Mississippi, and he told a somewhat different version to me on the dock.) Supposedly, a fellow police officer (who almost assuredly was in the Klan) said to the candidate one morning at a breakfast joint that a secret group of local men would like to hear what he had to say. “Do they vote in Adams County?” Billy asked the brother officer. “Yes, every one of them,” the officer said. “Fine,” Billy said. “I’ll make a speech before them, a political speech, but I want to set two stipulations. I’ll be armed. I won’t come to a Klan meeting without my gun. Number two, I’ll have somebody else with me.” The somebody else was once again Mario Hernandez, who’d served as his chief criminal deputy for several years in his first term. Billy sometimes liked to refer to him as “the Cuban.” He was a crude and tough individual. He is dead now. His name has shown up on various old Klan lists.

  Billy and Mario met the messenger at night on U.S. 61, south of town, out front of what everybody in Natchez knows as Black Mammy. Black Mammy was a restaurant in the shape of an igloo, crowned by a twenty-eight-foot-high Aunt Jemima. (On the other side of apartheid, the structure is still there, beside the highway, recalcitrant, out of time, like Bryant’s Grocery & Meat Market in deserted Money. Now, it’s called Mammy’s Cupboard, and you can go inside and get lunch, buy jams and jellies.) The messenger led them to the meeting. From Billy’s oral history with USM: “And we pulled up in this little old lane into the woods and there’s a cattle gap across the road. Well, when we got to the cattle gap, a bedsheet got up … from out of the bushes. Had a long shotgun with him. He walked over to the car and looked in at me, and I said, ‘Good evening.’ He looked at Mario and Mario says, ‘Hi.’… The meeting was held under a big pecan tree that had four of those gas lamps hanging around the bushes. There was fifteen men in the group.” About a week later, according to Billy, two FBI agents stopped him on a downtown street and said they knew he’d been at a Klan meeting. “I says, ‘How’d you bastards know that?’ He says, ‘Well,’ says, ‘you want me to tell you how many people was in the field?’ I says, ‘I’ll tell you. There was fourteen or fifteen people there.’ He said, ‘Yeah, and five of them was ours.’ ”

  He won the election and took office again at the start of 1968. “That thing” would be his for the next twenty years, until he’d had enough. A handful of times, the FBI investigated the sheriff for alleged financial improprieties and physical abuse and intimidation. Complaints were filed against Billy for reputed bootlegging, taking kickbacks from gamblers, being involved in prostitution. Nothing much came of any of the charges, and some of the accusations—as can be determined from available documents—seem to have been concocted by those who despised the Ferrell family. In any event, there were no criminal indictments, and the cases died. Almost all of the names in the documents have been blacked out by government censors. A complaint to the FBI, filed August 28, 1976, stated: “A male, who declined to identify himself, telephoned the Jackson Office and related information to the effect that the above captioned subject [William Ferrell, Adams County Sheriff] is involved in the receipt of kickbacks from gamblers and prostitution activities in the Natchez, Miss., area. The complainant advised that a black female [blacked-out name and description] operates a well known house of prostitution on [blacked out] in Natchez. The prostitutes employed at this house come from varying locations around the United States and this house of prostitution is allowed to exist with the consent of Sheriff FERRELL, who is completely aware of this activity.… Gambling activities with high stakes games occur in Natchez and FERRELL purportedly receives kickbacks” from local businesses.

  The whorehouse was almost certainly Miss Nellie Jackson’s. The FBI supervising agent wrote on the bottom of the case file in his own hand: “She has too much on the town to have to pay off.” The case died.

  Two years later, another case judged by the FBI to be without merit, or at least not worth pursuing, involved an Adams County black man who charged (quoting now from the declassified document itself, the names blacked out) “that he has been harrassed [sic] by the sheriff of Adams County, Mississippi, since he made allegations to the FBI in Alexandria, Louisiana, indicating the sheriff was involved in bootleg liquor. He advised that when he returned to Natchez, Mississippi, ‘hit men’ are after him at the sheriff’s request. He advised the sheriff was keeping him from drawing unemployment and that he needed protection from the FBI.” The investigation was dropped when the complainant was determined to have mental problems, which may have been precisely the case.

  In January 1968, when Billy came back into office, his boy, Tommy, who would eventually succeed him, was twenty and in night school. Billy liked to call him his boy, in the way Tommy would eventually speak of his own son as his boy. It’s a term of endearment. Tommy had not had a success in college, first time around. After finishing public high school in 1965, he put in a year at Mississippi State University in Starkville. When his dad was reelected, Tommy was living in Natchez, working as a dispatcher for the Arkansas Freight Company. (In the KKK story, Billy reputedly borrowed Tommy’s little VW beetle to go give his political speech—he didn’t want to tip anybody off by showing up at Black Mammy in his own sedan.) Tommy, who had a damn fine head but was never meant to be a rocket scientist—this was Billy’s own estimation of his boy years later, down on the dock—“had overbooked himself that first term in college with high technical courses.” There was another complication, in that Tommy had gotten married in 1966, at nineteen, to the former Carole Anne Christina of Camden, Texas. He needed money to support his new family. As they say in the South, “a bun was soon in the oven.” That was William T. Ferrell III, born in the first year of Billy’s new administration. Tommy, more earnest about the books the second time around, earned his bachelor’s degree in business administration in 1969 at the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg. He and Carole and little Ty went to Houston, where Tommy took a job at a subsidiary of Texas Instruments. Houston proved to be a horrid experience: a hot, swarming city; cramped up all day in a little box of an office with no window. It was as if he was fighting his own nature. He lasted three months. This was the first and last time that Tommy would try to stave off the family profession. One morning, he called his father and begged to come home to Mississippi and work for him as a deputy. Practically his whole life, the son had been around the sheriff’s department without an issued gun or formal badge. “They tease me that as a child I teethed on a six-point star,” Tommy liked to say. As a teenager, he had loved riding with the sheriff on Saturday night, helping clean out slot machines from the back rooms of the juke joints. “Toting slots—that was me in high school,” Tommy would tell interviewers after he had that thing himself.

  Tommy came back to Natchez to start working for his father for real in 1969 as a sheriff’s deputy in the tax department of the Adams County sheriff’s office. (By at least 1971, Mario Hernandez was the head of the tax division in the office—then he went to work for H&R Block. Hazel Ferrell also worked for the county in the tax office and knew Mario well. For a time, Hazel also served without pay as a sheriff’s deputy.) When he returned home, Tommy had a wife and a one-year-old, and a renewed zeal to make good, and thus began the start of his own amazing climb in law enforcement. There weren’t any drug problems in Natchez in 1969 for a lawman to combat, other than controlling the moonshine bootleggers. The son sheriffed for his father for almost nineteen years, the last nine as his chief criminal deputy. “Deputy Ferrell, go do this,” the sheriff would bark at his boy, not cutting him any slack, and people in the office would g
rin. They knew Tommy was the sheriff-in-waiting. By the late eighties, the succession and transformation were complete. Billy felt old, felt tired. Tommy felt ready. On December 30, 1987, the eve of the takeover, there was William T. Ferrell the younger in the Democrat, with his own incisored, tough-guy, top-dog grin. “Like Father, Like Son” was in the headline. The story said: “The chief deputy will replace his father, retiring Adams County sheriff of twenty-four years, William T. ‘Billy’ Ferrell, for whom he’s worked for the last eighteen years.” The story quoted the sheriff-elect as saying that the only real difference between father and son “is age difference. The sheriff who is retiring was sheriff in an era that was not as complicated as today. The only way I’ll be different is in the technology of changes that have come along.” Tommy said that he intended to combat the stereotype of the tobacco-chewing, cola-drinking, potbellied, bigoted, bribe-taking, illiterate Southern sheriff. “I’ve got to fight that image,” he said. He was going to promote a modern image, a righteous image, of an educated, “well-groomed sheriff’s department.” The old ways were the old ways, he said.

  The elder’s dreams had been confined largely to Mississippi. Like a character in Faulkner, Billy had striven to rise above his low origins. He could have been out of the Snopes clan. He’d achieved a certain bourgeois respectability. The next in this line had far larger ambitions. It’s how families in America are supposed to up themselves. When Billy sat down and wrote a letter of application to the Sovereignty Commission in 1964, he composed it in his imperfect grammar and got his résumé onto one page. To see a copy of Tommy’s professionally done résumé almost four decades later, in the late nineties, after he’d been in office a decade and enjoyed national stature among lawmen, was to understand a lot about generational improvement. Tommy’s curriculum vitae ran to more than seven pages of qualifications and awards and organizations. He listed everything, from his membership in Ducks Unlimited to appointment as vice chairman of the nominating committee of the National Sheriffs’ Association in 1993 (just one more rung on the ladder of his climb to the eventual presidency of the NSA). But, really, it was the same Ferrell hubris and hunger to improve oneself, just more technologically enhanced and sophisticated. If Tommy had the ego and arrogance of the man in the middle of Charles Moore’s photograph—and then some—he also had the kind of polish and political acumen, not to say higher education, his father never had. Tommy presented himself in office as the leading practitioner of law enforcement on a county level in his home state. He felt himself the equal of any sheriff anywhere, applying business school techniques and computer technology to run criminals to ground—and the presentation was difficult to argue with. But for all the modern ways, he was a Ferrell, his father’s son, and a large part of being a Ferrell was loyalty to one’s own and devotion to history. At certain moments, it came back, in hard bites.

  In late 1987, when Tommy, at forty, with a growing paunch, with an extremely loud voice, was assuming the office of head lawman, the third in this line of WTFs was nineteen and screwing up in college. It was as if a swerve had come in the family fortunes and destinies. This inheritor was a law enforcer in his soul, as all the Ferrells were, but in his father’s view he was also a confused and rather soft and disappointing child-man who’d zigged and zagged too much. Tommy loved his son, there wasn’t any question of that, even if he had a hard time showing it, just as he had a hard time showing it to his younger child, Cricket, the brainy one. But had his own father ever showed it directly to him? Billy had transmitted his love by indirection, through pride of work and other things. It’s what Tommy tried to do, too. It was as if his boy, Ty, didn’t really know what he wanted from life. It was as if he’d somehow gotten all these feminine genes inside him. No one in the family had any idea then, but a decade hence, Ty would be doing the family work in the racially complex American Southwest. Doing it very well, doing it with what seemed like existential torment, as if he were meant to be a roiling repository for so many unnamed, unclaimed Ferrell family shames.

  Responding to a question, he’s once more choking back the tears: “I think he is. I think he might be. I’m the only son he’s got. If I was washing dishes at Burger King, he’d still have to be proud of me in some ways because I’m his son. I’m the only one he’s ever going to have.” The choking back came on the last few words. The question I asked him was: Is it possible your father is prouder of you than he’s able to let on?

  It came up just now because last night, over dinner, Ty had said, “It relieved me, having a daughter instead of a son. I don’t want to say I had Mallory as an experience, but I somehow think it’s easier, you know?” He said it searchingly—and, again, almost tearfully. Because the moment had been strained, the conversation shifted. Perhaps the tears didn’t come because both Mallory and Carla Ferrell were in the restaurant booth with him. Later, Ty said he had been worried during Carla’s pregnancy that if the baby “had come out a son, I wouldn’t know how to do it. You know what I mean? I don’t want to say I didn’t have a dad, growing up. That’s not accurate. But I guess I worried that I might not have anything to fall back on.” The honesty seemed coupled to the lack of bitterness in it.

  Also at the Golden Corral last night, Ty had said that “the only time in my whole life I’ve ever seen the man break down was at the funeral—and that was for maybe twenty seconds.” He was talking about Tommy, at Billy’s funeral.

  “Can you imagine living with a tyrant like that?” he’d said a moment later about his father, in a slightly different context. But again, it wasn’t condemnatory.

  Still later in the evening, talking of the things that pass invisibly down in families, he’d said: “I think it’s a learned behavior. Basically, we’re going to become our parents. They were teaching us to be parents all along.”

  Carla Ferrell has her own disarming honesty, and in this and in other ways, she seems a match for her husband. She’s a mile-a-minute talker. She likes to give Ty lists of things to attend to at home, and this seems fine by him. She’s something of a Southern pistol, not quite a belle, who loves to doll herself up in stylish clothes and cosmetics and go out to eat. She gets along wonderfully with her father-in-law—she and Tommy talk straight at each other. When Tommy calls from Mississippi, he’ll say, after a few minutes of difficult conversation with his son, “Listen, put Carla on, will you?” Then he’ll get all the news. They’ll talk for half an hour. Carla and Tommy send emails back and forth. She knows she’s the bridge in the fragile relationship.

  At the steakhouse last night, Carla said: “Here’s the thing with my husband you gotta know. He was doing all that for his father, and he’s doing this out here for himself. That’s why he loves this job. He’s free of Tommy.” Like her husband, she said it with no discernible judgment. By “all that,” she meant the various things that Ty tried, in Mississippi, in and out of law enforcement, before entering the Border Patrol Academy and coming out to the Southwest, where he soon found himself in love with the work and sick for home.

  There was something off about the waiter at the restaurant last night. He seemed eager to please to the point of being sycophantic. Was the guy just trying to build his tip? When this theory was proposed to Ty, he shook his head. “No, it’s something else. He’s an ex-jailbird. He’s got a crude tattoo on the top of his hand. He probably put it on himself, with a needle and ink from a pen. He could have gotten an ink pen in the joint because they made him a trusty. The way he’s running around this restaurant, doing anything to please us and everybody else, tells me he’s almost not even aware of what he’s doing. It’s a learned behavior from prison. You’ll do anything to stay on their good side, as a manipulative way of getting what you really want. Which is more freedom. See, a guy in prison is always trying to get something over on the people who run it. He wants something more specific—more privileges. That’s the psychology of what’s going on here, and this guy doesn’t even realize he’s giving himself away.”

  Carla said,
“That’s a Ferrell talking.”

  Her husband grinned. “It’s normal life to me. I wouldn’t know how to react any other way. You’re always observing, sizing it up.”

  Today the inheritor, without his wife and child, is sitting in the café of a Barnes & Noble bookstore in the suburbs of El Paso, around the corner from the small apartment where he and Carla and Mallory live. He’s had his eye on a panhandler working the bookstore’s customers for cigarettes and change. “He was in the parking lot when we pulled up,” Ty says. “I noticed him right off.”

  It was his suggestion that we come here to talk. He likes bookstores, likes taking his daughter to them. In college, he’d thought briefly of becoming an English major. That was at the University of Southern Mississippi, which everybody in the state seems to refer to as “Southern.” He put in about three semesters at Southern. “After second semester, when I again didn’t make grades, my parents refused to support me.” What was he studying? “Business,” he says, his palms turned upward. “How vague can that be? I never knew what I wanted to be, what I was doing there. I had no idea what I was doing there.” He had this notion of restaurant management, but, really, he sees now that he was just trying to avoid the family profession.

  He left Southern and came back to Natchez and worked for a while as a waiter at the Cock of the Walk—which is not a restaurant named for the first and second generations of Ferrells. He also took courses at the local community college. He moved to Jackson and worked for an upscale restaurant. For two years (1992–94), he worked in drug enforcement support on the Gulf Coast. For the next three years (1994–97), he was a deputy sheriff in Gulfport under Sheriff Joe Price, who was a good friend of his father. In this same period, he was training to be an officer in the National Guard. He felt that perhaps a life in the military might take him away from family tensions. “The commitment was three weekends out of every four. I’d work all week on the Gulf Coast and then drive up to Camp Shelby in Hattiesburg for OCS on the weekend. It was terrible. I’d get knots in my stomach, couldn’t sleep, get constipated.” It would start happening to him on Wednesday, before the Friday night sign-in. “By Thursday, no sleep at all. Just overcome with anxiety.”