Sons of Mississippi

by Paul Hendrickson

  Why was it so stressful?

  “I’m not sure. I think because of the way the officers and instructors drove us. Finally, I dropped out. I dropped out in the December drill.” He would have been commissioned a second lieutenant the following June. His father couldn’t understand the decision to quit. Tommy had gotten his officer’s commission in the U.S. Army back in 1976. He’s a lieutenant colonel in the Mississippi National Guard, military police branch.

  Did he tell his parents about the weekly knots in his stomach? A quick and almost violent shake of his head. “And show my weak side? Show my weakness? No, obviously not.”

  Then: “When I was in high school, I’d be terrified to come home after I’d done something wrong—staying out late or whatever. No matter what I did, and I never really did much wrong in the first place, I was always getting caught. He’d get all over me. You don’t know what it’s like to have to face him. My little sister, Cricket, would give it right back to him. He’d be following her down the hall to her room, just right on her neck, yelling at her, and she wouldn’t say a word, just slam that door right in his face. Which of course would drive him crazy.” (Some months later, when Tommy Ferrell was asked about the knots in his son’s stomach, he said: “No, I didn’t know about that. But my response to that would be, ‘Well, why not triumph over it?’ ”)

  When he was in the guard, Ty trained to be an air traffic controller at Fort Rucker, Alabama. He has always liked aviation and he had this idea he’d finish his military commitments and join the Federal Aviation Administration as a civilian controller. He also had wondered about a career in aerospace. He did very well in his air-traffic-control training courses, and he even did some instructing on his own. But he didn’t pass the FAA exam. He was apparently too knotted up.

  Once, on the Gulf Coast, working as a lawman, he saw something that knotted him emotionally for weeks. In a way, it was the obverse of the incident with the cop who’d brutalized the squirmy Asian teenager. A much older man named Roy had gotten a job in law enforcement. He was a sympathetic character, not cut out for the work. He’d gotten the job as a kind of favor owed to him. One day, he was given an assignment to escort a funeral cortege. He got caught in an intersection on his motorcycle, after the line of cars had gone through. He was hit broadside by a car that wasn’t part of the funeral, and the force of it sent him sailing off the cycle. Ty, who was in the vicinity and who liked the old man a lot, heard the 1099 emergency call. He tore to the scene and saw the officer on his back, with his teeth out and his hair all bloody. The paramedics were working on him. Ty started to break down. He felt people were looking. He walked away. It’s one of the only times he can recall breaking down on the job.

  The idea of going to work for the Border Patrol came about inadvertently. Ty was working as a transport officer in the sheriff’s department of Harrison County on the Gulf Coast, and one day he drove over to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, to pick up a prisoner from the Border Patrol. He asked the agents about their work. They talked it up. “You’ll probably have to leave Mississippi,” they told him. He didn’t really act on the idea for another two years. When his father heard that his son was thinking about entering the Border Patrol, he blew up. Goddamn security guard job, was Tommy’s approximate reaction. A few years later, Tommy would tell a Natchez reporter, “They didn’t get the bug for the badge and the gun.” He was talking of his children—one in law, the other in the Border Patrol.

  What about going home to succeed his father as sheriff when Tommy has had enough—has he thought of it?

  Immediately: “I want to do that. I’ve always wanted it. I’d want to go back and take over his job, succeed him, just as he did his father. I think I could be good at it. It’s different now, though. You can’t work as a deputy to your father anymore because of the nepotism laws in the state. Even my dad had to get some kind of exemption for it. I’d have to do it totally on my own, just go back there and establish my name in some kind of job, maybe not even law enforcement, and then when the time came, run for sheriff, using the Ferrell name.”

  What’s keeping him from trying?

  The palms upward, the ruddy-faced grin: “Fear.”

  I first met Ty Ferrell’s fear-inspiring father on October 1, 1997, in the afternoon of the same day I first met Ty’s grandfather. This was two years before I went to the Southwest to meet Ty. When I pulled up to the lake house on Ferrell Lane that morning, Paw-Paw and Mimsy were just getting ready to bat off to Baton Rouge for the imminent birth of their granddaughter’s twins. After the Ferrells departed for Baton Rouge in the white Lincoln, I drove back across the river and into town and parked opposite the sheriff’s office. It was still early in the day, and I thought I would just take my chances and see if I could get a few minutes with the current sheriff of Adams County, who was also the rising fifth vice president of the National Sheriffs’ Association. In the next five years, Tommy was slated to proceed through the four vice presidential chairs ahead of him before reaching the top-dog slot, in the early summer of 2002. Tommy and I had spoken briefly on the phone from Jackson the day before I arrived in Natchez.

  Tommy’s squad car, with his name across the side of it, was parked out front of the sheriff’s department, which also serves as the jail, and is directly across from the courthouse. It’s a handsome, modern, redbrick building. A secretary sitting in an outer office seemed immediately to know who I was. She talked of how wonderful it was that Paw-Paw and Mimsy were about to be great-grandparents, and how they are all just family in the Adams County sheriff’s department, and how deer season for bow and arrows had just opened, and how she and her husband preferred hunting deer with rifles. “Next up’ll be the rifles,” she said. On the wall, floor to ceiling, were pictures of Tommy, standing next to officials from across the state and the nation. There were certificates and awards and citations. There were pictures from his high school reunion; pictures of himself with Trent Lott, with the then–attorney general of the United States, Janet Reno; pictures of himself and his fifty-odd-person agency—a museum of Tommyville.

  An inner door opened and the sheriff appeared, his voice preceding him. It was very loud and deep. Everything seemed large—stomach, greeting, attire. He was extremely cordial. He had on a silver rodeo belt buckle that looked the size of a tennis shoe. He had on handsome and soft-leather cowboy boots. He had on a big gold watch. His hair was prematurely white and made him look less a law enforcer than a florid Southern politician. Running diagonally down the collars of his brown uniform shirt were two gold bars, the kind military officers wear. The bars said SHERIFF. He looked and didn’t look like his father.

  The CEO of law and order led the way down the hall to his office. He closed the door. He didn’t go around and sit behind his desk but instead took a seat on a little red leather settee. Behind his head were beautiful prints of Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee and Nathan Bedford Forrest, the last being a cofounder of the KKK, but also a romantic and ruthless ex–cavalry general in the Confederacy’s western armies. In The Mind of the South, W. J. Cash wrote of the Lost Cause and the cult of the Confederate general as it affected grandsons and great-grandsons in the twentieth century: “Every boy growing up in this land now had continually before his eyes the vision, and he heard always in his ears the clamorous hoofbeats, of a glorious swashbuckler, compounded of Jeb Stuart, the golden-locked Pickett, and the sudden and terrible Forrest … forever charging the cannon’s mouth with the Southern battle flag.”

  No sooner had he sat down than the sheriff of the county stood up and took the gun off his hip and placed it on his desk. Tommy went around behind the desk and took the receivers from two phones off their hooks and placed them on his desk. (The two phones were side by side, next to two computers.) He came back to the settee and sat down again and crossed his legs. There was a ballpoint in his shirt pocket. He took it out and began clicking it on his boot top. His glasses were suspended by a lanyard around his neck. The office, not huge, was full of photo
s, awards, recognitions. There was a bumper sticker that said TRENT LOTT FOR PRESIDENT. Lott is his very good friend, he said.

  He was blunt, arrogant, likable, candid, almost comically full of himself. It was as if he was so far out there into egospace that the fact of it did a strange turn in your head. It was like a brilliant theater piece, except that it wasn’t acting, apparently. It was Tommy. After a while, you could take the performance on its own terms, be almost perversely charmed by the cocksureness.

  He called his domain “a li’l ol’ redneck sheriff’s office down here in Mississippi,” giving a big grin to the big lie of it. He said (he was tabbing on his fingers) that a successful sheriff, in order to be successful, “has to be, in my opinion, one, arrogant; two, egotistical; three, straightforward blunt; and, number four, in an all-assuming position of leadership.”

  “By arrogant, Sheriff, do you mean confident?”

  “No, I pretty much mean arrogant as arrogant,” he said.

  “I’m a very regimented individual,” he said. “I have a calendar in my drawer here so that I can tell you who I was with, who I was talking with, every minute of the last twenty-eight years.”

  “Really?”

  “Exactly,” he said.

  On the stereotype of Mississippi sheriffs: “It’s frustrating, it’s embarrassing, it makes me mad. When I go to my national sheriff meetings, guys from New England or California or somewhere will come up and give me the business about Mississippi. Not only is it embarrassing to me personally, it is unfair to Mississippi. It’s part of my mission to enhance the image of law enforcement in our state at the same time I am improving it nationally. I love it out of every pore to be a Mississippian. I was born and raised here. I’m a seventh-generation Mississippian. I hate that ‘Ghosts of Mississippi’ and ‘Mississippi Burning’ crap that Hollywood puts out about our state. I hope you won’t be doing that in your report.” I told him I would do my best not to fall into traps of stereotype. “Good, that’s mighty fine,” he said in the public-address-announcer’s voice.

  We talked for nearly two hours—he just made the time. “I made the Little League games, the dance recitals, the tryouts,” he said. “Okay, maybe a little distracted, and then, too, you walk in with a firearm at your side and that stops everything.” He said that he was a “proactive sheriff—meaning that I fight the crime.” He said that the job was 50 percent political, 50 percent professional law enforcement, and “soon as you tip it one way more than the other, your troubles begin.” He said that 85 percent of the crime in the county these days was drug-related. He said he felt himself damn lucky not to have remortgaged his house or lost his marriage due to some damn crack-cocaine habit of his own. “I know lots around here who are like that. Providence of God. By the way, I’ve been successfully married thirty-two years.”

  I asked about Billy, whom I’d only briefly met. He said his father “was a fair father, not a good one.” He said that Billy “couldn’t do it now. It passed him by. He’s a dinosaur. He stayed four years too long as it was. If he’d have stayed four more as sheriff, he would have been in a federal penitentiary.” This topic was pushed a little, but the politician-lawman wasn’t buying. “The rules changed, is all,” he answered.

  He said they were mainly Southern Baptists in his family, although a few Ferrells, like his father, had grown up Roman Catholic, not fervidly.

  He said that his daughter, Cricket, was up at Ole Miss Law. She’d done her undergraduate work out of the state. She could have had a scholarship to college if she had stayed in Mississippi and gone to school, but, no, she had to do it her own way, go to LSU in Baton Rouge. He said, “She’s a good student. She’s not a brilliant student, because she’s a cop’s kid.” He said that when Cricket was in high school, she went out for sergeant major of the drill team at the public high, and of course she got it, because she had put her mind to it, just as she had to get into the homecoming court, and just as she had to get the top dance spot, “the chief ballet thing for the Audubon legend. Now, I don’t know why every girl in the South has to take ballet, but they do, it’s just one of the rules.” He and Cricket pass John Grisham’s novels back and forth, he said. One of the things he loves about Grisham is that Grisham’s “got this stuff in there about the passage of time, how things get handed down in families.” For a while, he said, it looked like Cricket was going to study literature in school. “ ‘What the hell we gonna have now, an English teacher?’ I said to her one day after I heard that. Well, it looks like it won’t work out that way now.” He grinned the toothy Ferrell grin.

  He said that his son, whom everybody called Ty, had recently gone out to Santa Teresa, New Mexico, as a federal agent, and “that my little granddaughter, Mallory, is out there, too, and it’s just too damn far away.” He had Mallory’s picture, framed, sitting on his desk. In another corner of the office was the portrait of Billy, Tommy, and Ty looking heavenward with their guns. The conversation moved on.

  Natchez was about as layered and stratified a place as you could get, he said. That very night, he could, if he wanted, get himself into a monkey suit and go off to some reception at the civic center for actors Kurt Russell and Goldie Hawn and that guy who runs the Disney studios. (He was referring to Michael Eisner.) Only he didn’t want to. “And tomorrow I could just as easily fit into a barbecue in a gravel parking lot in my jeans, and the next day after that I might appear at some function at Mt. Zion Baptist Church. Which is black. But my point is, this is what I mean by stratified.”

  He talked of the number of blacks on his force and in his support staff. He said that the ratio of blacks to whites in Adams County was about 60 percent to 40 percent, and that was the approximate ratio he tried to keep in his agency. (According to the 2000 census, the ratio is 46 percent white, 52 percent black, two percent “other.”) He said that in every civic election the blacks were about 3,000 votes behind the white community, and that always tipped the scales in favor of the whites. There were two blacks on the county board of supervisors—out of five. He said it irked him to have to go “prostitute myself annually before a bunch of incompetents called a board of supervisors” in order to settle his department’s budget. He said it was important that I talk to some of the black deputies who served him. “You’ll need that perspective.”

  In the middle of this, the door opened and an elderly woman shambled in. She was mumbling and looked disoriented. The sheriff stood up. Suddenly, he seemed out of character. “Uh, can I help you, ma’am?” he said. There was a deputy right behind her, and he quickly got her by the arm and led her out. “I must apologize to you for this woman in my office,” Tommy said with an odd, comic formalism that I would experience again the next day, when Tommy’s father, down on the dock, suddenly spoke of Bobby Kennedy as a pissant featherweight and a snively-nosed little sonofabitch. A few minutes after the woman was led away, the deputy returned to make his own elaborate apology to the sheriff. The woman had been on a bus to Hattiesburg, but had gotten off and come to the sheriff’s department. Before anybody could stop her, she was in Tommy’s office. “Okay, okay, you explained it, now get the hell out of my office,” Tommy said to the deputy. And the deputy did, grinning through his anxiety.

  Occasionally, there was banging above our heads. There were about a hundred prisoners upstairs, he said. Some were awaiting trial, others were serving their term. “Mostly drugs, robbery, driving under the influence,” he said. The greater percentage of the prisoners were black males, he said. “So you’re gonna get accused of it, racism, by what I call radicals. I get accused of racism by the radicals because of the disproportionate number of black arrests.” He paused. “I’m color-blind when I make the arrests. I don’t care who the violator is. I arrest criminals. I process twenty-five hundred people a year through this jail. In a ten-year period, that’s twenty-five thousand people. What we do here in Mississippi is successfully enforce the law.”

  He said he “gets sued all the time by his inmates—frivolous jail s
uits. My lawyers love me. Never lost one yet.”

  Over the next couple of years, there were several more lengthy talks with Billy’s son. For instance, he made himself available for two such extended conversations in the summer and early fall of 1999. (I still hadn’t met Ty yet.) The sheriff of the county was up for reelection for his fourth term, and even though the outcome wasn’t really in doubt, Tommy wasn’t taking chances. He chose not to campaign—that would be unseemly—but he was apparently talking up his achievements every chance he got in every unsubtle way that he knew, so I was informed. ABC-TV correspondent Connie Chung was scheduled to come to town in a few weeks to interview him for a 20/20 segment about modern law enforcement and about old unrequited civil rights crimes in Mississippi. (After the interview, which took place in August, Tommy updated his résumé with the fact. For a long time afterward, he kept snapshots of himself and Chung on his desktop, to show visitors. The segment itself on 20/20, which aired in the late fall, generally annoyed him. A lot of it was playing on the standard old Mississippi stereotype crap, he told me on a later visit. But he still loved the fact that Connie Chung came to town to interview him.)

  The sheriff had arranged that I be given a tour of the department and the jail. There was much to be impressed by, at least in the way the CEO had things locked down. The menus for the week were posted on heavy doors and walls in the jail. (“Lunch: 1 cup Irish stew. 1 cup string beans. 1 piece cornbread. Two tabs butter. Koolaid or coffee.”) There were windows up there, but you couldn’t see out of them. They were covered over and were tinted. The reason for this, Tommy later explained, was because the prisoners “were up there making such clatter—they’d beat on the windows and yell down to people on the street. They were yelling through the vents and disturbing the public. Judges across the street would complain that they were disrupting their courtroom.”