The Ghosts of Mississippi

by Maryanne Vollers

  The first stop was a country store in Harriston, a community just east of Fayette. Evers leaped from the van, a handful of flyers in his fist. He was the vision of an expert politician at work, of someone who had been on the campaign trail for thirty years.

  He shook the first hand he saw, which belonged to a black man in farm clothes climbing from a pickup. “Please vote for me. I sure need your support,” Evers said heartily, pressing a flyer in the man’s hand.

  “How you feeling?” Evers called to an old woman on her porch.

  “Fine, fine, Mayor,” she replied. Although he hadn’t been mayor for years, that was how folks remembered him.

  He moved quickly but stepped carefully down the paths to the small frame houses, looking for dogs. “Campaigning in the country is hard work,” he said. “A lot of walking, a lot of bad dogs.”

  Dogs were Evers’s bane. They scared him, but everybody in the country had one.

  Out behind the store he spotted a young white man and his small towheaded son fiddling with the hitch of a livestock trailer. Two brindled mutts lay in the shade of the trailer, watching Evers walk by.

  “Don’t you bite me now,” Evers muttered to the dogs. “I appreciate your support now, you know I don’t want to kill no dogs. You just stay put.”

  Killing a man’s dog would lose a vote, Evers reasoned. He didn’t want to mess with them. The dogs stood up warily as the candidate walked up to their owner, hand outstretched. The white farmer in the red cap seemed slightly stunned but took Evers’s hand. His smile was friendly if not warm.

  “I sure could use your vote,” Evers said with all his considerable charm.

  The county was 80 percent black, with just over six thousand registered voters. The whites tended to vote for Evers. He said he had been promised 95 percent of the white vote in this race. It was, ironically, the African-Americans he had to sell himself to.

  Evers jumped back into the van and tore off down the two-lane highway, beeping his horn as he passed homes, driving fast to make time. The route was lined with fields of goldenrod, southern pine, oak, and sweetgum thick with road dust.

  At a former filling station a group of young white men gathered around the back of a pickup. Since it was squirrel season, two of them wore camouflage fatigues. One held an empty quart of Jose Cuervo. There were rifles on the rack. Evers pulled over to talk to them. By now he had put some distance between himself and the rest of the motorcade. He had no backup.

  Twenty years ago men like this would have been likely to take a shot at Evers. Now they recognized him and shook his hand.

  Lou, a wiry little fellow with short blond hair and a ruddy face, told Evers that he thought he had been the best mayor Fayette ever had. He’d get Lou’s vote. The others nodded in agreement.

  “People gonna elect me for one reason — I’ll make life better for them,” Evers said as he pulled away. “They don’t give a damn about Charles Evers.”

  The two-way radio crackled with static. Bro’ Willie’s voice faded in and out. It seemed the motorcade was ready to roll into Red Lick. Evers drove faster now, weaving off the road and recovering as he fiddled with the radio. A little plastic Garfield ornament bounced on a string attached to the rearview mirror. The van was awash with empty soda cans, campaign flyers, and one copy of Evers’s eponymous autobiography, which had been published in 1971.

  The book had been placed carefully on the dashboard, facedown. The whole back page of the dust jacket was a photograph not of the author, but of the author’s brother, Medgar, positioned to look out the windshield. Because of the angle of the window and the afternoon light, Medgar’s face was reflected in the glass. For the rest of the trip Medgar Evers hovered just ahead of Charles, a disembodied face with eyes turned to the driver, floating over the wide fields of Jefferson County.

  On a September afternoon Myrlie Evers looked out her kitchen window and studied the colors of the high desert at her hideaway in Oregon. Green, yellow, lavender, tan. It was so different from the landscape she knew best, the muted shades of the Vicksburg bluffs and, later, the smoggy hills of southern California. This was a good, clean place to be.

  She had retired, reluctantly, at age fifty-eight from her job on the Los Angeles Board of Public Works. She had injured her back when a chair collapsed. She could no longer sit at a desk all day and she was in almost constant pain. Now that she had left her job, her first priority, after her family, was the case against Beckwith.

  The phone had been ringing all morning. Reporters wanted a comment on the latest news. Beckwith had lost his appeal in Tennessee. He was about to be extradited to Mississippi, but his lawyers had slapped down a writ of habeas corpus. Another delay. But it was close; DeLaughter almost had him. She felt like kicking something, she was so frustrated.

  She was surprised at how emotional she could get after all these years. For a while life had seemed almost normal: marriage, a job, grandchildren.

  Her husband, Walter Williams, was with her, and that kept her together. He never complained when she was distracted by the case.

  But now the old fears were back, along with the anxiety of hope. At least something was happening with the case. But she was riding an emotional roller coaster, and it was ruining her health. The bad back was worse now. Her stomach was acting up again.

  Sometimes all she wanted to do was disappear. But then she would hear Medgar’s voice. Not literally, she would tell you with a laugh. She wasn’t crazy. She would feel him, though. He was saying, “Speak, girl! Speak your mind. You can do this thing.”

  On Thursday, October 3, 1991, a federal judge in Tennessee cleared the way for Beckwith’s extradition. Tim Metheny and Sammy Magee from the Hinds County Sheriff’s Department were standing by in Chattanooga when the ruling came down. They dressed Beckwith in his pinstriped suit, cuffed him, and whisked him into a waiting car before his lawyer could file yet another appeal.

  Thelma Beckwith got to the courthouse too late to say good-bye. It was hard to tell who was angrier, Beckwith or his wife. Thelma shouted at the gathered media, “He may die anytime! I hope you all are happy.” She told anyone she could corner that she knew the true identity of the man who had killed Medgar Evers: it was Lee Harvey Oswald.

  Beckwith was fuming as he sat in the backseat of the sedan. He told Metheny and Magee that they’d never make it out of Tennessee. There would be roadblocks. “They” would never let him go. The deputies knew the old man was just blustering. Still they didn’t relax until they’d left Tennessee, Georgia, and Alabama behind and crossed the state line into Mississippi.

  By the time they pulled up to the Hinds County Detention Center, a small herd of cameramen and reporters were waiting. Beckwith’s eyes flashed angrily behind his glasses as the reporters shouted questions.

  “Did you kill Medgar Evers?”

  Beckwith wheeled and glared into the television cameras.

  “Did you kill Medgar Evers?” he snarled, mocking the question. “I didn’t kill him, did you?” He raised a gnarled, handcuffed hand and pointed a finger at one red-bearded reporter.

  “Are you a Jew?” he hissed before the deputies hustled him away.

  The next morning Beckwith was arraigned before circuit court judge Breland Hilburn. Jackson didn’t have a public defender at the time, so two experienced local defense attorneys were appointed to represent Beckwith. He was confined to a private cell in the hospital unit of the jail while his court-appointed attorneys, Jim Kitchens and Merrida Coxwell, drew up a motion for bond.

  Beckwith probably couldn’t have found better lawyers in Mississippi if he’d had a sack of money to spend. Kitchens had been district attorney for the counties south of Jackson in the seventies. He was a seasoned, white-haired, country-style lawyer, the defense counterpart of Ed Peters.

  Coxwell, whose friends called him Buddy, was one of Jackson’s rising young stars. He was a junior partner at an old, established downtown law firm. Coxwell was something of an oddity in Jackson, a city so conse
rvative that a woman who didn’t wear stockings in August or a businessman with a beard was considered eccentric. Coxwell was thirty-five years old and he wore his sandy hair trimmed on top and long in the back. He bombed around town in a not-yet-vintage Mercedes with Jimi Hendrix or James Brown blasting on the speakers. Coxwell was divorced, living out in singles paradise in a condo on the reservoir. He didn’t eat meat. He was good-looking and painfully thin, with high cheekbones that made his features seem both fragile and tough.

  Before Beckwith he was best known for taking on the most difficult death penalty cases, usually for indigent black defendants who ended up costing him a fortune in lost billable hours. But he did it out of a sense of obligation, because he was good at it, and because he flat out believed that everyone was entitled to the best defense. Even, his friends noted, a raving seventy-year-old racist who couldn’t keep his mouth shut.

  Coxwell took his job seriously, and he fought to win. Up until now, he and DeLaughter had been fairly good friends. Even though they were so often on opposite sides of the table in court, they could usually put that aside and see each other at parties and hang out together. Not now. This case was a war. After the arraignment, Coxwell walked up to DeLaughter and shook his hand. “I’ll see you when this is over,” he said.

  The skirmishes began at Beckwith’s bond hearing a month later. First DeLaughter laid the foundation of his case. Beckwith looked like Scrooge, forced to confront the ghosts of his Christmases past, as DeLaughter called witness after witness from the defendant’s earlier trials. Ralph Hargrove, the old crime lab chief, identified the physical evidence: the fingerprint cards, the crime scene photos, and the Enfield rifle. Ben Windstein was called out of retirement in New Orleans to tell the judge how he’d had to fly to Washington, D.C., to arrest Beckwith as a fugitive after his Louisiana bomb conviction. And DeLaughter called an agent from the FBI’s domestic terrorism division to talk about the hate groups to which Beckwith had been linked, including a new, shadowy outfit called the Phineas Priests.

  Coxwell pointed out that his client should get bond because he was not charged with capital murder. The rules had changed since Beckwith’s first trials. The death penalty was reserved for killings in which there was an underlying felony, such as rape or robbery. Beckwith’s alleged crime was, in modern jurisprudence, a “simple murder.” Coxwell reminded the court that unless it was a death penalty case, some sort of bond had been granted to every other accused felon who had passed through this courthouse. That included suspected drug smugglers and gang killers.

  To show the court that Beckwith was not dangerous and would not be a flight risk if released, the defense called some character witnesses to testify. One of them was Gordon Lackey.

  Lackey was fifty-five years old. He was a tall, hearty man with steel-gray hair combed back from his forehead. He wore plastic aviator glasses and his sun-hardened face was set in a look of righteous determination.

  Lackey made his living selling irrigation systems and spraying fields — he called it “aerial application” — from his own crop duster in the summer months. He had a teenaged son in private school, kept a collection of a hundred or more guns in his house and had a clean record with the law.

  When Jim Kitchens asked Lackey the nature of his acquaintance with Beckwith, Lackey replied that he had known Delay most of his life, and that they’d had “many different relationships,” including business, social, and “fraternal” relationships. They had been fellow Masons and Shriners.

  Lackey assured the court that Beckwith was a man of his word and was not a danger to the community. “I have never seen a single act of violence from this gentleman,” he said in his deep Delta voice.

  Ed Peters rose to question the witness. “You’ve managed to tell us all the organizations that you belong to with this defendant,” he said. “You’ve omitted one, haven’t you?”

  “What might that be, sir?” said Lackey.

  “The Ku Klux Klan.”

  Lackey appeared to be indignant. “I am not a Klansman, sir,” he said.

  “You deny that you swore this defendant into the Ku Klux Klan?”

  “How can a person that’s not a Klansman swear a person into the Klan?” Lackey said.

  “So you deny that?”

  “Oh, yes, sir.”

  “Thank you.”

  When the hearing ended, Judge Hilburn decided to keep Beckwith locked up until his trial date, which he set for February 1992.

  Nobody expected that date to stick. But few suspected that the case would drag on for two more years.

  Meanwhile there was an election in Mississippi. Charles Evers made his political comeback when he won the job of chancery clerk for Jefferson County.

  Peters was reelected for his seventh consecutive four-year term as Hinds County district attorney. Since he had been unopposed, this was no shock.

  The big surprise on November 5 was that the incumbent governor, Ray Mabus, was defeated by an unknown conservative businessman from Vicksburg named Kirk Fordice. No one was more stunned than Mabus himself, who quickly went into seclusion. The black voters, who had put him in office and whose support he’d apparently taken for granted, did not go to the polls for him. The state that was barreling headlong into a decade of change had suddenly slammed on the brakes.

  Almost overnight the mood in Mississippi turned as hard as the dour new governor-elect. Some columnists made unkind comparisons between Fordice and David Duke, the baby-faced ex-Klansman who ran for governor of Louisiana on the Republican ticket. Duke lost his race, but some of his stands sounded uncomfortably like Fordice’s platform — anti-big government, anti-affirmative action, anti-welfare — the modern code words for keeping black folks down.

  Fordice was fifty-seven years old and had thinning white hair and a craggy, weathered face. He smiled with his lower teeth. His abrupt, seven-minute inaugural address covered the usual topics: fiscal responsibility and cooperation among people. His new motto, “Together Forward,” was as blunt and graceless as the man himself.

  He quickly set the tone for his administration. His favorite book, he told a group of elementary school students, was Machiavelli’s The Prince. At a meeting of the Mississippi Press Association, Fordice vowed to fight the Supreme Court-ordered equalization of funding to traditionally black and white state campuses. “We may have to call out the National Guard,” he said. In the uproar that followed, Fordice said he regretted his choice of words, but grumped, “C’mon people, if you can’t use a metaphor…”

  Kim McGeoy was upset, just ticked off in general. The more he thought about it, the more it tortured him that his cousin Delay was still in jail.

  McGeoy was twenty years younger than Beckwith, a distant cousin on Beckwith’s mother’s side. His full name was Morgan Kimbrough McGeoy, a nod to three old Mississippi families. He had grown up in Greenwood knowing the scandal surrounding Beckwith. But McGeoy had always liked Beckwith; he thought he was funny. And as ugly as Beckwith could act sometimes — such as calling a young boy “nigger” to his face, which was ungentlemanly behavior — McGeoy couldn’t believe that Beckwith was a killer.

  Ever since this new trouble had started, McGeoy had visited his cousin in jail at least once a week. He did it out of kinship and loyalty, and because the old man was so entertaining.

  McGeoy cornered patrons at the Dutch Bar on weekday afternoons and tried to get them to chip in for bail. He called Beckwith’s lawyers to push them to keep trying. He called Judge Hilburn to complain. To his surprise Hilburn invited him to come down to the courthouse and make a formal statement on the matter.

  On January 14,1992, McGeoy met with Hilburn in his chambers. He started off by reminding the judge of Beckwith’s war record and that he deserved bond “due to the fact that the man has never run” from his previous charges. McGeoy reminded Hilburn of Beckwith’s good family name, of how he was descended from the founding families of Mississippi, and that he had “three or four hundred” relatives in LeFlore Co
unty alone.

  Finally he got around to what he really wanted to say. “We’re letting one man stand alone, just like Jeff Davis stayed two years in manacles for the sins of us all. . . . We’re letting one man pay for the sins of people like Ross Barnett, people like Paul Johnson, who stood up for us at Ole Miss.”

  This situation reminded McGeoy of the movie Spartacus that he had just watched on television. He told the judge about the crowd scene in the movie, where the soldiers wanted to arrest Spartacus and the slave leader stepped forward and turned himself in, saying, “I’m Spartacus.”

  Then all the other slaves stood up and said, “I’m Spartacus.” The scene reminded McGeoy of the case against his cousin.

  “Well, there were a lot of people, actually in my feeling, killed Medgar Evers,” he said. “Who pulled the trigger, I don’t know.”

  “I understand,” the judge said. But he didn’t seem to. He suggested that McGeoy advise Beckwith’s lawyers to ask for another bail hearing.

  That was just what the lawyers had in mind. Coxwell had drawn up fill-in statements for friends who would attest to Beckwith’s character, his ties to the community, and the unlikelihood of his flight.

  On February 24, Coxwell submitted to the court eighty-eight completed affidavits. Most were filled out by old friends from Greenwood, but some signers had interesting political associations. Two were Mississippi sheriffs. Robert Patterson, the aged founder of the Citizens’ Councils, wrote Beckwith a recommendation. More than a dozen others were reputed members of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.

  Although Sam Bowers did not fill out a character reference for his old friend, he did take an active interest in the case. One day he showed up, unannounced, at Coxwell’s office. He handed the receptionist a business card that said his name was “Mr. Bancroft,” apparently one of his aliases. Coxwell recognized him and invited him in to talk. Bowers came several times to offer Coxwell long treatises on legal strategies to defend Beckwith. Coxwell listened politely.