“Yes, he’s home. You can go in there and talk to him,” she says. She stands aside, with a curve of smile. She’s in late middle age, in a blue dress, thin, with glasses, momish. Is this his wife?
He’s sitting in a wheelchair at the end of a dining room table, eating breakfast cereal. He’s in a white T-shirt, pajama bottoms, slippers. He’s angular and has on wire glasses. He’s nearly bald. He’s spooning in the cereal with his right hand. His other arm is limp. His left hand is resting like a fleshy knob on the table.
“Take a seat,” says the former Grand Dragon of the United Klans of America.
He’s in his late sixties. He suffered his stroke on August 29, 1999. He has five grown kids and has been married to the same woman for forty-odd years. He has never really been convicted of anything, unless you wish to count that time in 1959 when Eddie McDaniel, not yet the Dragon, was axed from his job at the Johns Manville plant for stealing coins from a milk-vending machine. His name and shrouded story are in almost any book or civil rights archive or government report you can find relating to the sixties and the Klan and Mississippi. To quote from John Dittmer’s book Local People, in its sections on Natchez and the revival of the Klan: “Its leader in Adams County was twenty-nine-year-old Edward Lenox McDaniel, a Natchez native with a tenth-grade education.… Under E. L. McDaniel’s leadership, the Klan struck quickly in Natchez, terrorizing the black community as the local police looked the other way.” In early 1966, at the HUAC hearings in Washington, E. L. McDaniel was identified as one of a core group of Natchezeans who “advocate violence and are extremely strong segregationists.” He was subpoenaed to those hearings. Over and over, the witness took the Fifth.
And here he is, in Natchez, this morning, spooning cereal, in his pajamas, out of time and memory, like Emmett Till’s grocery store in Money, like Black Mammy on the south side of town. His useless left hand is curled in a half fist. There is such a disconnect.
Directly behind him is a double-door closet. The closet doors are open, so that you can see several dozen uniform shirts and pants on hangars. They’re not Klan robes, but that’s all you can imagine. The shirts and pants are bunched together—maybe thirty or forty densely packed, identical-looking uniform shirts with their dark trousers. Small American flags are sewn on the sleeves of the shirts. There is lettering on each shirt: ALL STATES SECURITY. Eddie McDaniel owns a security-guard company. The company provides guards for schools, hospitals, corporations. These days, because of the stroke, one of his sons takes care of the business.
He’s being friendly as pie, regular as tap water. He’s open, intelligent, courteous, just some old retired guy with a disability. “No, I have no regrets about anything I did,” he says. “I am not embarrassed about any of it, and if I had to do everything again, I’d do exactly the same—unless I had some different information.”
Over the years, he has participated in oral histories—such is a supremacist’s notoriety on the far side of apartheid. He did a lengthy and valuable oral history with a scholar at the University of Southern Mississippi, relating how his grandpa got him started with the dream of the Klan. According to Eddie, the forebear spoke to the oldest of the seven McDaniel children in an alley behind the family home: “Son, I’m going to give you a little advice. I don’t want you to say this to anybody else, but if you ever have a chance to join the Klan, join the Klan.”
In the early sixties, having come back to the South after another failed try in business in California, he joined the Original Knights of the KKK. They recruited him from their Klaverns across the river in Louisiana. His job was to begin establishing cells in Mississippi. The Originals expelled him for alleged misappropriation of funds (which he denies). Next, he helped form the White Knights of the KKK of Mississippi, which soon emerged as the most dangerous Klan faction in the state. In their judgment, violence was a justified response to the federal government’s intrusion in the affairs of Mississippi, most notably in the case of Meredith at Ole Miss. From the ex-Dragon’s oral history with the scholars of USM: “Then the Meredith deal hit on September 30, 1962…. There’s no doubt in my mind that he would eventually enter. But the way they did it, it showed me that something had to be done. And I got very bitter toward the federal government. I saw that my kids were going to suffer in the years to come.” After he was expelled from the White Knights, the Klansman threw in his luck with the United Klans of America. In September 1964, at the Imperial Klonvokation of the UKA in Birmingham, Robert Shelton, the Imperial Wizard himself, announced the new Grand Dragon for Mississippi: Eddie McDaniel. This was just before the former sheriff of the county and two ex-deputies got stopped on Liberty Road after dark and then suffered the search of their car.
“Shelton paid me the grand sum of a hundred thirteen dollars a week when I quit my job to go full-time on the UKA,” he says. “Couldn’t get rich on that, no sir.” When the call came, he’d been driving a truck for the Red Ball Motor Freight Company.
Does it bother him having his name in the history books as a hater of blacks?
“Nope.” He puts down the spoon. He slaps the useless knob of his left hand. It’s sitting there like Play-Doh.
Joan McDaniel has both hands up in the air and is making quotation marks with her fingers. “Take ‘hatred of blacks’ out of the quotes, please,” she says. “His thing was government encroachment. That’s what it was really about.” She’s originally from Idaho. She met her husband in California in the early sixties, before he went bankrupt, before he listed debts of $4,522 against assets of $200.
During the troubles, her husband used to tell reporters that the UKA was “100 percent Pro-American.” He was leading “non-violent soldiers of Christian civilization.” At cross-burning rallies in Natchez parks, he vowed that the Klan would “fight to our last breath” to defend the Southern way of life.
He flew to the HUAC hearings in Washington with Shelton. They left from Birmingham on a big airliner. A couple of Klan speedsters drove the Dragon’s car from Natchez to Washington, so that Eddie could have wheels in the nation’s capital. Only thing, the damn redneck speedsters burned up his damn automobile. Still gets his goat to think about it. “Just overspeeding the damn thing,” he says. “Practically brand-new car.” But he’s laughing. It’s okay, an old memory, and the deep burn of it is gone.
“Cold up there at those hearings,” says Joan. “Snow. Ice. Ugh. Remember, honey?” She shivers.
Joan “was one, too,” her husband says. “I’ll tell you this, she was a good old Klanswoman herself. Yessir.” He reaches over and gives her an affectionate pat. The fourth finger of his good hand has a huge ring on it. There are six diamonds set in a square gold band. The diamonds flash in the fluorescent light.
His wife had her own robes? Joan’s nodding, smiling. “Sure did. Marched in those parades.”
Does he worry, in his advancing age and infirmity, that the government will come after him for unpunished offenses?
“Doesn’t bother me a bit to think of it. They could indict me tomorrow and I wouldn’t worry for a minute. Because I know I didn’t do any of that violent stuff.”
It isn’t fair, he adds, “the way they get all these black juries and convict people. Just like that guy over in Birmingham—what’s his name?” He means Thomas Blanton, Jr., convicted (on May 1, 2001) for his role in the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. “Well, if he done that, if he blowed up those little girls, sure, he should go to prison. But my point is, they should’ve done it at the time, not wait all these years later.” Besides which, he says, they know how to stack the juries.
He quit the Klan altogether in 1966, he says. (Other accounts have him quitting much later.) “Too much violence, out of control.” He says that the biggest years for the Klan in Mississippi, in terms of membership recruitment, were in late 1962, after Meredith at Ole Miss, and continuing through all of 1963 and 1964, especially during Freedom Summer.
How many Mississippi Klansmen were there at the height
of Freedom Summer—10,000?
“Way over ten thousand. But I never paid any attention to numbers. But I know way over ten thousand. Oh, I’d hate to say how many.” (Historians have doubted many of his claims, not least his claims about numbers. He is famous for telling different versions of different stories to different people.)
“When it was all said and done,” he ended up being good friends “with one of my sworn enemies, Charles Evers. I got to know Charles personally.” After Medgar Evers was murdered in Jackson in 1963, his brother Charles—a far more controversial and self-promoting figure—took up a self-proclaimed leadership role in the movement. He became state NAACP field secretary. In the late summer of 1965, Evers came to Natchez to lead protests.
Did the eventual change in his feelings about his sworn enemy, Evers, have anything to do with religion?
“Nope. Just change in attitudes, getting to know more things about some of them.”
What do his kids think of his role in civil rights history?
“Just proud of me as they can be.”
Was Billy Ferrell ever in the Klan?
He shakes his head in a no—emphatically.
Without warning, he instructs Joan to leave the room. There is command in his voice. “I don’t let her in on all this stuff,” he says. This seems to surprise her. She gets up. She understands what is happening. Her husband is going to start his crying again. She goes around to the other side of the wheelchair. She’s on his right side, the side that the stroke didn’t touch. He’s struggling to control his emotions. He looks up and hugs her. She bends down to the wheelchair and hugs him, kisses him sweetly on his forehead.
“Damn good woman I got here,” he says.
“If you got a good man, hang on to him,” she says. She’s crying now.
Joan leaves the room. The man bound to his steel wheels can’t hold it back. He’s crying copiously. His face has deeply reddened. He takes off his glasses, wipes his eyes with a tissue. “I’m sorry,” he says. “You’ll have to pardon me. It’s because of my stroke. It just comes on like this. I can’t control it. I never know when it’s about to happen.”
I ask: “You say that you never know when the crying is about to happen, so is it possible that the way it comes over you is related to what you did back then?”
He’s already shaking his head. “No. I don’t have any guilt. It ain’t that at all. It’s my stroke.”
Having recovered, he permits a few more minutes of talk. He says that he knew Billy Ferrell very well over many decades. “Helluva good sheriff, no question.”
And Tommy Ferrell? “Better than his father even as a sheriff. Smarter, more educated.” He says it again: Neither Ferrell was ever in the UKA or any other Klan that he knows of. “I’ll say it categorically.”
Would he call Tommy a friend? “I think so. I know I feel I am certainly a friend of his. I hope he thinks he’s my friend. I’d like to know.”
That afternoon, at the sheriff’s office, Tommy Ferrell is told of the impromptu meeting with Eddie, and of some of the things the ex-Dragon had said. Tommy is asked if he thinks of him as a friend. There is only momentary hesitation. “Yes, I am a friend. I consider him a friend in need. I think he’s been in anguish, maybe not enough. I think he’s still in denial. He needs a friend. I’ve been to his home. I would be a pallbearer at his funeral. You see, in the South we’re into forgiveness, when death comes.”
The same day, on the editorial page of the Jackson Clarion-Ledger, there are the usual back-and-forth arguments about where Mississippi is in its race relations. One female letter writer from Vicksburg opines: “Regarding the recent flag vote: The boat sank—get over it! All of the wailing and teeth gnashing is getting really old. The voters turned out and the people spoke, loudly and unequivocally.”
In Mississippi, nothing ever changes, and everything always changes, and sometimes it seems as if God put Mississippi on earth purely for our moral and confounding contemplation.
And still there is the land. “In Africa,” the British novelist Doris Lessing once wrote, “when the sun goes down, the stars spring up, all of them in their expected places, glittering and moving.” It is like that in Mississippi, too. “To me,” James Meredith once wrote, “Mississippi is the most beautiful country in the world, during all seasons. In the spring, all is green and fresh, the air is clean and sweet, and everything is healthy. As a boy I knew that any running stream of water was fit to drink. I feel love because I have always felt that Mississippi belonged to me and one must love what is his.”
In the Family of Meredith: Loving What Is Theirs
The conflict between the will to deny horrible events and the will to proclaim them aloud is the central dialectic of psychological trauma.
—Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery
When Cricket Ferrell was a law student at Ole Miss, she bopped around Oxford in a black Ford Explorer with a sheriff’s star on the license plate. This was a nod to her father. Tommy and his wife Carole were picking up the monthly payments on “my truck note,” to use Cricket’s phrase. Cricket was as secretly proud of her father as she was sometimes openly disdainful of him. Her parents, who were 250 miles away, down in Natchez, in the southwest corner of the state, weren’t putting her through law school—Cricket paid her own way with loans. She said she wished to try to be free of Tommy’s control. Ty Ferrell’s little sister was in her mid-twenties (she hadn’t gone straight to law school after college at LSU, but instead had worked for a casino in Natchez) and, unlike Ty, gave every impression of knowing exactly what she wanted from the world. Among her goals were a husband and a nice house and a job that paid good money. Cricket wasn’t long out of Ole Miss Law (she got her degree in May 2000) when she secured all three. The big traditional August wedding was held at the First Baptist Church of Natchez, and the evening reception was at an antebellum mansion on the Natchez Trace Parkway. She seemed so in command of her life, possessed of all the alpha-male Ferrell characteristics. At the same time, there was a very feminine quality about her—she was slender and attractive. It made for a potent combination. But it was clear that when push came to shove, Tommy’s daughter was always going to act much more like Tommy than like her soft-spoken mother. Maybe this explains in part why Cricket had had such battles with her father when she was a teenager living under his roof: They’re too much alike. One summer during law school, Cricket interned for a corporation in Nashville that staffed and built prisons. For a while she considered going into the family business after graduation. She joked that she could picture herself as some kind of white-collar pistol-packing mama, perhaps doing behavioral studies of the criminal mind for the FBI. (Tommy and Carole weren’t thrilled to hear that.) In the end, the intellectual of the family chose a more conventional law job, at a firm in Nashville. The man Cricket chose for a husband was a certified public accountant, mild in personality.
She and I met a couple of times when she lived in Oxford. Right off, you could see the masculine qualities—but also a kind of residual Southern belleness. “I’m waiting for my ring,” she said, holding up the fourth finger of her left hand and flashing both the toothy Ferrell smile and the bright enamel of her painted nails. (She got her engagement ring a month or so later.) This was a good while before I traveled to the Southwest to meet her brother. Once Cricket and I sat in the grill at Alumni House, which is directly across Grove Loop, maybe forty yards distant from where her grandfather swung a club in an old photograph. The photograph itself didn’t come up in the conversation, although James Meredith did—indirectly. I asked her if she knew that Meredith’s son Joe Meredith was also a grad student on campus. In fact, they didn’t live far from each other. Cricket looked across the table. The expression on her face said, What’s that have to do with my life? I didn’t try to arrange an introduction.
It would have been a flop from the other end as well. Joe Meredith graduated magna cum laude in economics from Harvard. He prep-schooled at Phillips Academy at Andover and fin
ished with honors. He has an MBA from Millsaps College in Jackson. He has worked for a large Jackson bank and as an oil-and-gas-industry analyst for a large consulting company. And yet he has long had terrible difficulty meeting and talking to strangers, the more so if they’re female and confident. In his tortured, nervous, slow-to-answer-anything way, Joe would have probably impressed Billy Ferrell’s granddaughter as an ignoramus. She wouldn’t have been able to appreciate his extremely alert mind; she would have experienced only the socially stricken man.
“I realize at least I don’t like this about myself. I want to meet people. But I always use the shyness and inability to talk as an excuse to just … do nothing,” Joe said one night over dinner. This was in the summer of 2001. We’d known each other for not quite three years. He’d been at Ole Miss since September 1998. And very few people, relatively speaking, either on or off campus, knew he was there. Fewer still had ever made the connection between his name and that of the man who’d made such a dent in history on that campus and in that town forty years before. It’s exactly as Joe wanted it.
“No, almost no one knows it. They don’t understand it. It doesn’t come up,” he’d said—not that evening over dinner, but the very first time we met, at a bookstore and café called Square Books. This was in the spring of 1999, two and a half years earlier. It was clear how inwardly turned he was, but the fact of his anonymity in tiny Oxford didn’t make any sense: Why don’t they know he’s here? Why isn’t the university, no matter Joe’s introvertedness, seeking to employ him in some crucial way to reflect on the past? Ole Miss could hold a piece of its own past right in its hand, explore it, honor it, as a way of trying to move forward.
Here was one reaction to the news that a son of Meredith was working on a Ph.D. in finance at the university: “What? I am shocked. I don’t know this. This is an incredible story. I just can’t think we lost this story. I am baffled and ashamed. How did this blood son of James Meredith get on this campus, and we didn’t know? That’s a story in and of itself, isn’t it?” Those words are historian’s David Sansing’s, and he said them after Joe had been on campus for a full academic year. Sansing is the author of the authorized and respected book The University of Mississippi: A Sesquicentennial History. It had recently been published. After the emeritus professor recovered from his shock (I had called him on the phone, suspecting he didn’t know), Sansing said that the only thing he could think was that there must have been some kind of unofficial and secret deal to keep things quiet that was hatched at the outset between the Meredith family and the chancellor’s office. He was wrong, though. There was no deal. The grad student’s presence in town was a virtual secret because Joe was Joe and because the University of Mississippi—for all of its progress racially and academically in the previous four decades—was still capable of being retrograde and blind, fixed in a pre-sixties, frat-school, football amber. Not that Sansing saw it this way when we next spoke about it. By then, he’d come to believe that the obliviousness only proved how far his university had come in its race relations. “You see, the irony of the fact that Meredith’s son is getting a doctorate here is just not important to us anymore. We can just leave him be to do his work. We don’t need to connect his name with James Meredith’s name at all. We don’t see it as irony. We’ve gone right past that.” Sansing added, “There is no university in America that’s had more racial trouble than this one. But we’ve been open and honest about it, in trying to solve that trouble.”
Sons of Mississippi Page 39
