Sons of Mississippi

by Paul Hendrickson

  There had been a riot in one cell block of the jail in 1998. There were both blacks and whites in the block. It went on all day. Camera crews from around the state showed up on his doorstep. It all defused when a special crisis intrusion unit from the highway patrol went into the block and broke the riot’s back.

  I had also talked by this time to some cops in a special drug-unit task force that Tommy had organized with fellow law enforcers and federal agents from other counties and nearby states. Again, there was much to be impressed by. The drug enforcement officers were using the latest digital cameras and recording devices. They communicated to each other by computer: “CENTER INTELLIGENCE SUMMARY. Davidson County, Tennessee—58 pounds marijuana, 1 vehicle, 2 arrests … at 1843 hours, Tennessee 20th Judicial District Drug Task Force Agent Mike Garbo stopped a 1992 Mercury Grand Marquis, Texas registration … at mile marker 196 eastbound on Interstate 40, for a traffic violation.”

  I had also spoken to half a dozen deputies who worked directly for the sheriff, several of whom were black. In the main, they had good things to say, and this included the ones who were offered the opportunity to speak anonymously. I also talked to some secretaries and support staff (they, too, generally had good things to say), who opened some of the departmental bookkeeping and recordkeeping. Under Tommy’s directive, the sheriff’s department was storing all of its old available case files—reaching back to 1953—on permanent computer disks. The only trouble was that some of those case files, especially from the movement years, were extremely sketchy. When he left office the first time, in 1964, Tommy’s father had taken with him all of his old records. This surprising fact had come to light when Billy’s successor in office, Odell Anders, appeared before the United States Commission on Civil Rights at hearings in Jackson in February 1965. Anders said he couldn’t find his predecessor’s records, they didn’t seem to be anywhere about. Another sheriff, John D. Purvis, was asked about this disappearance later in the hearings. Purvis was a sheriff up in the Delta. “Do you know of any practice in Mississippi by which some sheriffs, at least, take away all the records and turn nothing over to their successors?” a commissioner asked. Purvis replied from the witness stand: “I have heard of it, but I can’t say I know of it, because I don’t.”

  When Billy returned to office, he brought his case files back, at least portions of them. And his son was putting them on disks now, for history’s sake. According to Tommy, what his father had done was perfectly legal in Mississippi statutes. And he could have gotten away with bringing nothing back. “I could do it, too, if I wanted. Nobody could stop me. But I won’t.”

  I had also talked in the interim to several dozen other people around town who weren’t in Tommy’s employ. Some were involved in local politics, others were ordinary citizens. By and large, people on both sides of the color line seemed to think of him as a fair and straight lawman. Certainly, it was easy enough to find Natchezeans who hated the Ferrells, who hated Tommy for his infernal ego, just as they had hated Billy for his. But relatively few Natchez blacks with whom I spoke seemed ready to accuse Billy’s son of being bigoted, and those who did seemed to be nursing personal grudges not related to specific examples of racism per se. Almost everyone spoke of Tommy as an astute politician, always a couple of jumps ahead on the checkerboard of wherever you thought you were. If you could get past the ego, they said, you could get along with the guy. He was effective and efficient. That seemed the consensus.

  The wisest perspective on the Ferrells, father and son, first and second generation, came from Judge Mary Toles, a lifelong Natchezean. She is black and upper-middle-aged. For nearly two decades, she had served as a justice court judge, which is a low-level court in the Mississippi judicial system. I sat one early morning in her home, in a black neighborhood, near the old tire-and-rubber factory, where there had once been so much Klan activity. She was in a wheelchair and had her leg in a cast. She propped it up on a red sofa in a semidarkened room. The light, clean and cooling at that hour, was trying to work its way in under the pulled blinds. Several years before, one of Toles’s children had died of AIDS, having contracted it in Washington, D.C., and the sadness in her was palpable. She had come up as a young person through the sixties and civil rights and said she knew where all the bodies were buried, literally and figuratively. She’d won election to the bench in 1982. When she decided to run for the office, she sought Sheriff Billy Ferrell’s support—and got it. He about owned the town by then, she said.

  “But by 1983, 1984, it became apparent to me that he wanted me to do exactly what he wanted. I understood then that this is why he and his son supported me. He was used to having people in town do exactly as he wanted.” But she remembered this: After deputies in the sheriff’s department began addressing her as “Mary” in her courtroom, not as “Judge Toles,” she went across the street and complained to Billy. “And he took care of that disrespect right away. He said, ‘This isn’t right, Judge. This will be corrected.’ And it was. I’ll give him that.”

  Five years later, in the summer of 1987, when she had grown more confident in her legal authority, Toles got into a bitter dispute with Billy. It played itself out in the papers. She called him “racist and uncooperative.” The dispute arose over the sheriff’s unwillingness to have his deputies deliver subpoenas for her court. Toles charged that the Ferrells had refused to serve subpoenas for the justice court because they believed the duty beneath them. Serving subpoenas for a justice court judge was the work of a constable, not a sheriff’s deputy. Toles saw it as disguised bigotry—the Ferrells didn’t wish to assist the work of a black woman on the justice court bench. Toles hauled the sheriff’s chief criminal deputy (Tommy) into court and ruled that both Ferrells had until the following Thursday to show why they should not be held in contempt. The judge also scissored out the photograph from Life and sent it to Billy in the mail. She said that she intended to print up five or six thousand copies and distribute the pictures in the black churches if need be. “He knew when he got that picture in the mail I wasn’t kidding. I wasn’t going to be on the end of that billy. He knew I was going to do whatever was necessary not to be hit with that billy. He knew I was prepared to say, See this picture? This is who he really is. This is who they really are. We can never forget.”

  The public argument over the serving of subpoenas for her courtroom was resolved mostly in her favor. “He avoided me like the plague after that. I don’t remember ever having one conversation with him after that,” Toles said. She paused. “What I believe is that he accommodated to the times because it was politically expedient, not morally necessary. It was tolerance in terms of race. It wasn’t something in his heart. But if you could somehow divorce the color issues, I’d still say he was a pretty good sheriff, a pretty good lawman. I’ll have to say that. He cleaned up the town. Again, I’ll give him that.” She paused again. “People really don’t change in their prejudice, not underneath, in their true character. It’s the rarest exception, when someone really converts. You have to have education, you have to have maybe something religious happen to you. I went to Catholic school. A sister told me, ‘If you throw enough mud up on the wall, some of it’s going to stick.’ ”

  What were her feelings now about Tommy? She answered without hesitating: “A good lawman. He’s got the respect of the citizenry, and that includes a lot of the black citizenry. Tell you the truth, Tommy’s kind of caught, and in that you can sympathize. He has to be fiercely loyal to his father, and he knows he can’t defend all that stuff that went on in the sixties. But there’s a very stubborn streak in him, too. He will do what he wants.”

  We looked at the photograph. I asked her what she thought its central message was. “Here’s the message: James Meredith wants into this school. I’m Billy Ferrell, I’m the high sheriff, and I’ll do whatever I have to to keep him out. But, listen, he was just doing what all of them were thinking. I don’t want to lay this on Billy Ferrell. You got to lay it on the entire South. The whole commu
nity thought that way. He got caught with that camera on him. You see, the names change, but the game is always the game.”

  And the game is? “And the game is, black people are still subservient. Black people should not be given a chance.”

  I asked if there was any way to think of Billy as a victim of his own culturally dunned and ill-educated origins. “No,” she said. “Too smart a man. Too devious. Not a victim. No.” Justice Court Judge Mary Toles and I talked on in her shaded living room on Bluebird Drive in north Natchez. I said that my goal was to make my way down the family rungs, and that the family was allowing me to keep on with it, to my continual surprise. I said that it wasn’t beyond the realm of possibility that some distant relative of Billy could be married to a professor of African-American studies at, say, Vanderbilt or Emory or even Ole Miss. She clacked into laughter. “Yes, it’s theoretically possible, isn’t it?” she said. “At a minimum, it would have to be once removed from Tommy.”

  One day I showed the photograph to a woman named Mamie Lee Mazique. She is a black Natchezean, famous for her work in the movement. She laughed, and there seemed a certain forgiveness in it. “Yep, that’s him, bristling his nightstick,” she said.

  I showed the photograph to Louis Baroni, a white liberal in his late seventies who had worked at the tire plant for thirty-eight years. He was the widower of perhaps the town’s most visible female white activist, Marge Baroni. She had grown up Baptist and had converted to Catholicism in the forties. She became a friend of Catholic activist Dorothy Day, who had founded the Catholic Worker movement in the Bowery of New York City. During the troubles, the Baronis would get hate calls in the middle of the night. Lou would get shunned at work—or else called “nigger-lover” to his face. He worked in the curing room at Armstrong Tire & Rubber, which had about 1,100 employees. Klansmen were everywhere around him. He feared for his life, for Marge’s life, for their six kids’ lives. In the summer of 1965 (when Elizabeth Proby and hundreds more were arrested and taken to Parchman prison), a Klansman fired shotgun pellets into the Baroni living room on Monroe Street in downtown Natchez. “Did you call the police?” I asked. “That’s a joke,” he said. “You mean, you’d be reporting it to the Klan?” He answered, “Of course.” Then he said, “Well, I didn’t approve of their inhumanity to people, I guess. I’m talking about the whole town. You see, Marjorie was classified as a ‘nigger-lover’ and all that, but the truth is, it wasn’t a black and white thing. She was for people. It was people. If she could help them, she would. She didn’t believe in humiliating people. I suppose I thought the same way. She had feelings for people, is what I’m trying to say.”

  In July 1999, Ty Ferrell’s father granted a long interview in the sheriff’s office with the door closed. Once again, the sheriff of the county gave a powerful impression of having not a thing to hide about himself or his family’s past. He took the twin phones off their hooks again. He had a toothpick in his mouth. He again sat on the little sofa beside his desk, choosing not to sit behind his desk, where he might enjoy a psychological power advantage. He was balancing his glasses in his fingertips. He wasn’t in a sheriff’s uniform—he had on a sport coat and wing tips and a dark blue dress shirt with a gold tie. I told him about the mostly good things that people were saying about him as a law enforcer. “And you were surprised, weren’t you?” he said.

  He told of a reception in Washington he’d attended that winter. The sheriff of Boston, a pal, had pulled him over to meet Ted Kennedy. “I stuck out my hand, put it right there, got right in his face with it. I said, in the biggest and proudest Southern voice I could summon, ‘Senator, I’m Sheriff Tommy Ferrell, from the great state of Mississippi.’ He had his hand out. You could see his face change instantly. I won’t say he jerked his hand away. But it surprised the shit out of him. I enjoyed hell out of it.”

  I had brought along a stack of documents relating to his father. They were from the Sovereignty Commission and from other civil rights archives in and out of the state. He said he didn’t wish to look at them, didn’t need to look at any of them. “Maybe later I’d like to take you up on your offer to see them. I think you can appreciate what I mean,” he said with something that sounded almost like doubt. But he recovered and said that he knew what he knew about his father.

  I persisted anyway and asked him about Billy and the Klan. “Has anyone ever found any actual proof?” he said. I mentioned lists. “I’ve seen that list,” he said. He didn’t give a damn about any list. He believed with all his heart that it just wasn’t true. For one thing, his father was Catholic, “and it’s a known fact that the Klan hated Catholics.” He asked if I had ever found an FBI document spelling out in any hard way that Billy had belonged to the Klan—or had even attended meetings? I said I had not ever found such an FBI document.

  We talked about his father’s letter of application to the Sov-Com in 1964. Tommy glanced at a copy of the letter, then said: “Well, again, that was in that era when men like my father would sort of see the Sovereignty Commission as just another branch of Mississippi law enforcement.”

  We talked about the question of alleged payoffs and other financial improprieties. None of the documents I had obtained proved anything conclusively—only inconclusively suggested it. Again, the son was having none of this. He said he would have known if his father was on the take. “I was there,” meaning that he had worked in the sheriff’s tax office before switching to the department’s criminal and investigative side. He said he would have seen the difference in how his parents lived. And then he went into a story that I had not heard before and was surprised by: In the 1970s, the IRS came after his parents and put liens on the family property for something like $30,000 in back payments. It was all pretty innocent and mistaken, the son said. His chief tax deputy, Mario Hernandez (formerly the chief criminal deputy), had inadvertently screwed things up and not made a proper reporting. “My parents lost everything they had,” Tommy said. “They had to start over.” He said that the feds attached a little farm that his father had bought out of town, trying to get a cattle business started, which was futile anyway, because Billy knew nothing about farming and didn’t have the time in any case. “That farm was mortgaged to its eyeballs, and what wasn’t mortgaged, the feds took,” Billy said. They also took his parents’ first lake house over in Louisiana, he said.

  I wanted to move the conversation in the direction of Tommy’s own tenure, more than a decade old, growing yearly in its national esteem. I asked about Jerry and Bill McDaniel, brothers of the ex–Grand Dragon. Jerry had retired from Tommy’s staff two years earlier; Bill was at work in an outer office as we spoke. “Well, I was leery of the name, of course,” Tommy said, knowing exactly where the topic was going. “But, you see, you got to realize a few things that you don’t understand about the South and about the Ferrells. First, there is the loyalty factor. Very loyal man, Jerry. Just like his brother Bill, who I have out there working for me now. And then a very good deputy, Jerry. Very good at his work. For a long time. Then he sort of topped out. We all reach a burn-out stage, and he reached his, but he was good for a very long time.” He hesitated. “I don’t let the attitude of other people influence me one way or the other.”

  But wasn’t it politically risky, just in terms of the name and sibling identification, resurrecting all those old sixties ghosts, the more so in terms of Tommy’s own growing visibility on the national stage of law enforcement?

  His answer: “I had many people telling me I shouldn’t have the McDaniel brothers working for me. It pisses me off, these smart guys in suits or whatever coming by my office to say, ‘Now, Tommy, don’t you do that; that guy Jerry’s going to cause you trouble, just with his name, do you harm, you’ve got to think of your national reputation.’ These politicians and lawyers are coming into my office and sitting in my chairs and they’re saying this shit and I’m looking at them and I’m saying right back, ‘Who the hell are you to tell me how to be a sheriff?’ I’ll run my sheriff’s depa
rtment as I see fit. I measure an individual on his individuality. I don’t believe in guilt by association.”

  At the end of the visit, we walked down the hall and looked at some old framed photographs from his father’s time. At least two of the seven policemen lined up with Sheriff Billy Ferrell in one of the photographs had been identified as Klansmen in sixties government documents.

  Two months later, the sheriff again made himself available for several hours, and this time the talk was even blunter. He wore a blazer with gold buttons and had on expensive-looking half-frames. The candidate for reelection looked like a prosperous small-town bank president. Connie Chung of ABC-TV had recently been in Natchez to do her interview with him. While the tapes had rolled, Chung had asked whether it was racially sensitive for the sheriff of the county to keep a framed picture in his office of a cofounder of the KKK.

  I asked the same question now. “I’ll be damned if I’ll take it down,” he said. “For you or Connie.”

  But what would he say if a black woman in the community came into his office to tell the sheriff her troubles and suddenly looked up and saw Nathan Bedford Forrest’s picture above her head or on the other side of the room? “I’d tell her what I just told you,” Tommy said. “I admire the man’s military tactics. I’m a student of the Civil War.”

  I asked him if it was awkward discussing race with non-Southerners. “I think we’re more open about it than in other parts of the country,” he said. “I think we’re more honest in saying what we really feel. I’ve been around blacks my whole life. I live in a predominately white neighborhood. There are some blacks there. They don’t bother me.”