Sons of Mississippi

by Paul Hendrickson

  He went on. “Remember the O. J. Simpson trial? What’s his name, that cop who said he’d never used the n-word?”

  Mark Fuhrman.

  “Yeah, you’d never catch me saying that on a witness stand. Ask me that question on the witness stand and I might look at my watch and say, ‘Let’s see, it’s three o’clock. Well, I may have used it an hour ago.’ I’d never try to tell somebody I don’t use it. I don’t use it in the context you’re asking about. I don’t use it to just say it. Or to insult somebody. Hey, I’ve had blacks call me ‘Nigger.’ And you know they call themselves that, don’t you?”

  “Yes, but in a sense they’re allowed to.”

  “Why? Where is that written down?”

  He was exercised. “I could use the word ‘spic’ or ‘wop.’ We don’t have to limit it to ‘nigger’ in this conversation. First of all, you have to think about the street talk of cops. They have bad mouths. They’ll say, ‘Lock that motherfucker up.’ That may offend some people. Law enforcement people have the trashiest mouths around. It’s because we’re always dealing with that lower element.”

  Has he tried hard over the years to try to avoid saying the n-word?

  “Of course. Time I was twenty-one years old, I may have used it every other word. That’s in the past.” Does he still slip and say it? “Shit, yes. You’ve heard me use it couple times in here in the last few minutes. But I wasn’t using it just to use it. I won’t allow that. I’m not in the game to offend anyone. And here’s another problem. I can remember having the name problem when I was a young deputy. The whole thing of what to call blacks went in a sense from ‘nigger’ to ‘colored person’ to ‘African-American.’ You’d be out there on the radio and you might hear somebody from the highway patrol saying, ‘Look out for a a nigger male.’ Or ‘Look out for a nigger female.’ Well, hell, every cop in the state was talking like that. I’m not saying it was right. I’m saying that’s just the way it was. We had to learn to change here in the South. I won’t allow that talk on my staff now. It isn’t right.”

  We talked of police corruption, of cops on the take. He said that he prayed every day “not to succumb to the temptation to go over to the other side. If I do, it’ll be for something big—big money. You can put that down.”

  That evening, the sheriff of Natchez spoke before a mostly white audience at a Candidates’ Forum at the Lady Luck Hotel on Canal Street. The forum was sponsored by the Adams County Chamber of Commerce. Candidates for coroner, constable, supervisor in the Fifth District, circuit clerk, sheriff of the county presented their credentials. Billy Ferrell’s son stood against a wall and awaited his turn, not patiently. He was due to appear in the middle of the bill. He talked to a crony in a loud whisper. He kept creeping further down the wall, closer to the front of the room. When his time did come, Tommy went to the lectern and pushed aside the microphone. “You elected me your sheriff in November 1987 for the first time,” he said. “I have been honored and humbled to serve and would like to be able to continue doing so. I succeeded my father, the late Billy Ferrell. I have a dedicated staff of fifty-five.” He went on for another ten or fifteen minutes. He was effective and confident and polished. His wife, Carole Anne, and his mother, Hazel, applauded him, along with everyone else. Carole Ferrell is attractive and petite and vivacious. Over the years, she has sold Mary Kay cosmetics to Natchez homemakers. I told her that I had met their daughter, Cricket, up at Oxford, and that I thought I could see some Ferrell cop genes in her. (Through the years she has considered work in some legal aspect of law enforcement.) I told Carole what I imagined her son, Ty, might be like. Carole said I was mostly right. “He’s just kindhearted,” she said. “Ty will go right up and hug and kiss people in the family if he hasn’t seen them in a while. Cricket would never do that. He’s too good to be a cop, really. So many things tear him up. You’ll see when you go out there.”

  At the reception for Tommy and the other candidates, Hazel Ferrell introduced me to some of her widowed friends. Her red hair was beautifully coifed. She had on a lovely dress. There was a great sense of refinement about her. “The old sheriff told him some stories before he died,” she said.

  When Billy Ferrell was an old used-up lawman, out of office, he used to go downtown and work as a security guard in a parking lot at the Natchez Little Theater. It was just for something to do. “You’ll never catch me doing that when the game is over,” Tommy Ferrell has said to me several times.

  Six weeks after the Candidates’ Forum, the old sheriff’s son drew almost 9,500 votes out of about 11,100 cast, a landslide victory by any measurement except Tommy’s. “Eighty-nine percent of the electorate and I’m still mad because I didn’t know I had eleven percent enemy.” (According to the paper, the percentage was 84.89.) “I owe my victory to the professionalism of my office and the employees that I have,” Tommy was quoted as saying. Ten days later, on November 13, there was another story in the Democrat. The two-column headline on page 1: “Bondsman Says Sheriff’s Policy Racist.” Two bail bond agents, both black, had accused the sheriff of preventing them from writing bonds at his jail. The sheriff denied to the reporter that he was acting out of any racial bias. “I don’t know what the color of the bondsmen are that we’re using now,” he said. “It doesn’t matter what color they are.” But it was a public embarrassment for Tommy, the more so coming on the heels of his smash victory.

  (A good while later, I talked to one of the bondsmen who accused Tommy of racism. Joe Martin, a native of McComb, Mississippi, where so many civil rights battles were fought, told me he was an old movement person. “I was in SNCC,” he said. He’d marched with Bob Moses as early as 1961. He was once thrown in jail by Billy Ferrell. Martin and others had come to Natchez to protest. “Nothing’s changed,” Martin said. “He’s still got the same policy. He’s discriminating against me. He would never interview me [for writing bonds]. He let us put our names up there on the list at the jail, but he still refuses to let us write bonds. In my mind, the son falls right in behind the old segregationist dad.” I asked Martin if his civil rights past could have anything to do with his troubles in securing licensing for bond approval at the Adams County jail. “I couldn’t tell you,” he said. “But they could pull up my file in a second if they wanted to.”)

  About a week and a half after Tommy Ferrell got nearly 85 percent of all votes cast for sheriff, his conflicted and honest son, out on the New Mexico border, within the first half hour of conversation, said, “Oh, I hate him for his pride.”

  Near the beginning of W. J. Cash’s Mind of the South, there are these lines about Southern men: “In every rank, they exhibited a striking tendency to build up legends about themselves and to translate these legends into explosive action—to perform with a high, histrionic flourish, and to strive for celebrity as the dashing blade.”

  Opponents of United States immigration policies claim that the border patrol doesn’t so much stop illegal entry as move it around, that it merely shifts the problem, like desert sand, from one community to the other. The border between Mexico and the United States is 2,000 miles long. The United States spends roughly $2 billion a year to control this line—ineffectually. It is estimated that there are now about twice as many illegal immigrants in the United States as there were a decade ago. Recent census figures suggest that the undocumented population of the country is somewhere between 6 million and 9 million, the highest since the Immigration and Naturalization Service started keeping records. Mexico is the source of about half of all illegal immigrants in the country. Critics of America’s border policies say that Washington lacks the guts to send in the Marines or the National Guard or the Army. If America really wanted to cut off the flow from the south, the country could post a sentry every ten feet along the 2,000 miles of shared border—and lock it all down. Ty Ferrell agrees. No matter how much he likes his work, there is some sense in which he feels he is just part of a hypocritical show between nations. Sometimes it seems to him that he’s not so much a co
p as a pretend cop, caught in the middle of political expediencies. And here is another predicament that grows greater in him the longer he stays on the border: How do you keep seeing them as individuals? There are so many to apprehend, every shift. No matter your best intentions, after a while they’re like faceless forms.

  (If you were just counting numbers, especially in the wake of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on America, the illegal entry problem would seem to have gotten better. In 2000, more than 1.6 million people were caught on the U.S.-Mexican border, the highest number ever recorded. In 2001, the figure dropped to 1.2 million. In 2002, it fell again. Apprehension figures are a key indicator for gauging the number of migrants trying to get across. Why the drop over the last few years? Fewer jobs in the United States, as well as increased patrols following the September 11 attacks, are almost certainly factors. Some observers also point to television commercials broadcast in Mexico warning that one migrant per day dies while attempting to get across.)

  On the first visit, after we’d had lunch, we drove out to the line. We rutted around on broken roads in the green Suburban. He was a man in his element, a tracker, a cowboy, a cop. Even though Ty wasn’t on duty, he kept his Border Patrol radio on and listened in as he pointed out things about the landscape. A loud squawking interrupted him. “They’ve caught two over by the 489 Port One,” he said. He drove over to the vicinity of that sensor. He saw the other vehicle and pulled the Suburban alongside the van of his fellow agent, driver’s side to driver’s side, as if they were two ship captains at sea who’ve jibed their crafts close together for a little visit.

  “They were hiding,” the fellow agent said. “This one right here we’ve caught before.” He jerked his head to one of the two faces behind him. The two faces were behind a wire grate. You couldn’t make out the age of the two who had just been caught. They didn’t seem old. Their clothes looked dirty. They were hunched forward, leaning over the seats, their faces pressed up against the grate. They seemed to be listening to the conversation—which they almost certainly did not understand. The grate separated the front seat of the van from the seats in the back. The two detainees didn’t seem particularly unhappy. One waved to Ty, as if he knew him.

  “I think one’s got a fake leg or something,” the agent said to Ty, which lit something in Ty.

  “Yeah, I think I caught him once before,” Ty said.

  They continued talking over the top of the prisoners for another few minutes and then the agent drove off to headquarters. The two citizens of Mexico in the back of the van could have been bagged animals. This was suggested to Ty. “I think I still feel about them the way I did when I started this job. I think I still have that basic understanding for their situation. But it’s hard. It’s what happens to cops.”

  More than a year later, on another visit, Ty and I sat in the living room of his newly purchased home in Santa Teresa and talked of the hard subject of race and of Mississippi and of his own family’s attitudes. “Racism is alive and well in my home state, and always will be,” he had said the first time we had met, but neither of us had pursued the topic directly. It wasn’t the right time. This visit was in May 2001. A month earlier, in a statewide referendum, Mississippi had voted overwhelmingly, after more than a year of public and national teeth gnashing, to retain the Confederate battle symbol on its state flag. Governor Ronnie Musgrove and other moderates had favored a banner with twenty white stars on a blue square. The moderates and liberals had been voted down, two to one. “Our people have spoken,” the governor said. “It is important that we accept the majority vote and move forward.”

  Ty and his wife had just moved into the first home they’d been able to buy as a married couple. They were very proud. The day they moved the furniture in, Ty and Carla found they couldn’t get the sofa up the stairs—the stairs were too narrow. “The observant cop who checks everything out beforehand,” he said.

  Just before this visit, Ty’s father sent an email, in response to an email I had sent to him regarding the next trip to Mississippi. “Looks as if you might be having a tough time with Ty’s schedule. Good luck. We don’t hear from them that often either. He is very independent and secretive as such.… I will be out of town next week on Monday afternoon and Tuesday morning. I have a Blue Lighting Operation’s Center Steering Committee meeting in Orange Beach, Ala. on Tuesday morning. I am flying down Monday afternoon on a private plane (Civil Air Patrol) and back Tuesday afternoon. Range qualifications at our new range is Thursday. Yes, even old Sheriffs have to qualify and be proficient.” Tommy, a man in motion.

  Yesterday, first day of this visit, we went out riding on the line again. We stopped at a stable and looked at the two horses Ty rides on his patrols. Today, Ty is due to go to work at 3 P.M., but his daughter has come down sick, and so he has agreed to be Mr. Mom so that Carla can go to her job. Ty likes staying home with Mallory. He’s very good at taking care of her. He has traveled with her to Mississippi without Carla. Once, Ty and his young daughter rode to Natchez in the cab of an eighteen-wheeler. Carla’s brother is a long-distance truck driver, and he was coming back from California. He stopped in El Paso to pick up his brother-in-law and his niece. Ty sang to his child and told her stories on the way across. The father and his little girl were together for several weeks.

  There is tension in his voice and face and body—we’re talking of race. Two cats are meowing and making an annoyance of themselves beneath our feet, and he sweeps them up almost roughly and puts them in the next room and closes the door.

  “How have you escaped it, or largely escaped it, racism?”

  “I don’t know that I have. I can’t explain or put words to it why I’m not a racist person per se. But I do know how to be racist. Maybe it’s my age or generation, to think about always trying to treat somebody with more dignity.”

  I ask his feelings about affirmative action. “I’m against it. Of course,” he says. Affirmative action “has kept friends of mine from getting the job they deserved. They’re victims of affirmative action. Why do you think I would be for that?”

  What does he think about the vote over the Confederate flag?

  “It embarrasses me. It embarrasses me to hear what people living out here in New Mexico think of Mississippi. You know what the Confederate flag means to me? It means rednecks drinking beer. It means magnolias and girls in hoop skirts. I remember parades in Gulfport when I was a deputy sheriff. These redneck hippies would be riding on flatbed trucks waving the Confederate flag. It was just an excuse to get drunk. That’s all it meant to them to be waving that flag.”

  It’s not a coded emblem of support for racism?

  “Not to me it isn’t.”

  Then: “If anything, I’ve been a victim of reverse racism. That’s the racism I’ve seen. That’s the racism I’ve experienced in my lifetime.” His voice has gotten hard. Several times, his hand has shot out toward an old magazine on the table between us. The magazine is opened to a photograph of his grandfather.

  “Does it come back, not just the n-word, but everything about racism, when you go home to Mississippi?”

  “Yes. But I don’t go home, get off the plane, and say, ‘Hey, let’s go shoot some niggers’ and put on my KKK hat just because I’m home, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “Do you slip and use the n-word?”

  “Yes. When I go home and people are saying it, it’s such a shock to my ears—at first. Then I can almost find myself saying it. I know it’s not right. I don’t want to say it. It’s all around me. That’s what I’m saying.”

  Does the photograph from Life embarrass him?

  Quickly, defiantly, with his hand shooting out toward the magazine: “No. I asked for it, the copy that’s laminated on the board. I’ve had it on the wall of several places where I’ve lived. I had it for a while in college. I had it hanging in a house in Jackson for six months when I was managing a restaurant. It doesn’t embarrass me at all. ‘That’s my grandfather.’ That’s t
he way I look at it. I wish I had it now. ‘That’s my grandfather in Life magazine.’ That’s exactly what I’d tell friends of mine when they asked. ‘See that? That’s my grandfather, center of the picture, with that bat in his hand. All the law enforcement of the state is there. James Meredith is trying to get in the University of Mississippi. My grandfather is there. He’s part of that show.’ ”

  He’s resting his hand on Billy’s face. “I think anybody in the United States could look at this and understand what this moment is.” He’s looking at me hard.

  Has he ever wondered if his grandfather was a Klansman?

  He softens a little. “Honestly, I love my grandfather to death, but it wouldn’t surprise me if he was in the Klan back then. An elected official in a little Mississippi community? I can almost not imagine him not being in the Klan.” (A few minutes later, he’ll change his mind and say he guesses that Billy never did join.)

  Did his grandfather ever talk to him about the photograph and the events surrounding it?

  “He never said, ‘I was trying to keep James Meredith out of Ole Miss,’ if that’s what you mean. I think he just might have said, ‘Hey, Waddle, look here, boy, that’s your grandpop in Life magazine.’ ”

  The talk drifts to Billy’s funeral, two years previous. At 2 P.M. on that early spring day in Natchez, when many things were already in bloom, there’d been a solemn procession from Laird Funeral Home to St. Mary’s Basilica. “It’s real hard to talk about,” he says. “If I do, I’ll start crying.” And a moment later, he does.

  Nothing changes in Mississippi. And everything changes. Two days later, about 9 A.M., the door of a little brick rambler in Natchez opens. A woman is smiling, beckoning inward. A green garden hose is coiled on the front step. This is a modest subdivision north of town; this is the home of anybody who ever worked for hard wages in America. You’ve knocked here many times in the past few years, but no one was ever home, or at least didn’t answer, until now.