The Ghosts of Mississippi

by Maryanne Vollers

  Other old-time radicals also showed up to tell Coxwell how to run the case. Finally he banned them from his office unless they had some evidence for him.

  Beckwith’s health problems had been acting up since his return to Mississippi. He had been hospitalized twice for minor heart attacks. Up in Tennessee Thelma was not in good shape. She had been declared legally blind, and she needed an operation to remove colon polyps.

  There had been rumors all week that Hilburn was going to release Beckwith. By Friday it was a done deal. The bond would be $100,000. It was already arranged. There would be a hearing on Monday, just as a formality. DeLaughter told a reporter from the Clarion-Ledger that he had given up hope of keeping Beckwith in jail.

  This was news to Myrlie Evers. She knew that if Beckwith was released, he might try to hold up the trial with motions and appeals into the next century. She had to do something.

  So she made some calls to Jackson. She wrote a long telegram to Judge Hilburn, reminding him — courteously — of how bad this looked and how she hoped that Mississippi’s “image will not revert back to the days of hatred and injustice.” She also reminded him that a number of Beckwith’s character witnesses were known Klansmen.

  The Clarion-Ledger conducted an informal phone-in poll, asking readers whether they thought Beckwith should get bond. Seventy percent of the callers favored his release.

  To the apparent surprise of the district attorney’s office, and to the obvious shock of Beckwith’s lawyers and family, Hilburn changed his mind again after a brief hearing. He said there was not enough evidence to reverse his original ruling. Beckwith’s murder trial was now scheduled for June 1992.

  Myrlie Evers, from her Oregon retreat, told reporters that she was “relieved.” She was not going to speculate about what had happened, but she wondered privately if this trial was ever going to take place.

  She realized it was up to her to keep the pressure on. Some black politicians supported her and kept pushing for a trial. Old NAACP stalwarts such as Aaron Henry, Sam Baily, and Doris Smith backed her up. But many other voices in Jackson society were telling her, “Leave it alone; it’s too old. You’ll never win. You’re just stirring things up.” In a way it was like the old days, when Medgar had tried to get black teachers and ministers involved in the movement and so few would join him.

  The most pressing thing that Jackson’s black community seemed to be doing for Medgar Evers’s memory was raising funds to erect a statue in his honor. In almost every courthouse square in the state of Mississippi there is at least one monument to the Confederate Civil War dead. Some blind stone soldier poses in an attitude of defiance and undefeat, on foot or on horseback if the county could afford it, and always as proud and enduring as the memory of the lost cause. But in Mississippi in 1992, in a state where the symbolic gesture can be as important as the real thing, there was still no monument to Medgar Evers.

  Finally, after five years of fund-raising, the Jackson community coughed up the $55,000 needed to pay for a life-size bronze statue. The unveiling ceremony was set for a Sunday in June. Myrlie was sick with an infected throat and couldn’t attend, so Darrell came in her place. It was his first public appearance in Mississippi since his father’s funeral.

  Darrell was thirty-eight now and a good-looking man, tall and slim and stylish with his hair pulled back and twisted into a small knot at the nape of his neck. A fund-raising dinner was held the night before the unveiling in the Masonic Temple, in the same auditorium where Medgar had spoken and Lena Horne had sung, and where Medgar had lain in state.

  For years it had made Darrell sick, physically ill, to return to Jackson. Like his mother he had too many bad memories.

  It was hard enough to be the son of a martyr back in Los Angeles, where Medgar was a legend few people knew as a man. Sooner or later someone would say to Darrell, “You’re Medgar Evers’s son. What do you do?” Reena and Van always felt the pressure of being Medgar’s children, but not as much as Darrell, the first son, the boy his father had named Kenyatta, “Burning Spear,” long before African names were fashionable.

  What could Darrell say? He was an artist whose conceptual pieces were freighted with political content: the Rodney King beating, the invasion of Panama, South Africa. He spoke out through his art and in an even more subtle way. His activism, he would try to explain, was on a spiritual level. He had been a follower of the Indian guru Mahara Ji for almost twenty years. He had received “knowledge,” he said, in a way that could not be described in words.

  Darrell had been searching for this knowledge all his life. As soon as he met the Mahara Ji, Darrell realized that his was the face of the child in his dream, the boy who had spoken to the United Nations and made the audience weep.

  Tonight it was Darrell who spoke. He stood up and gave a speech without notes. He had inherited Medgar’s charisma.

  “I don’t know what to say, except that you all are my immediate family,” he said. “That’s the way I feel about everybody, no matter what race, color. ’Cause inside, we’re all the same color … We are human beings that love, that’s all we want.”

  There were three hundred people at the banquet tables, and some of them started calling back to him. “Say it!” a woman shouted. “All right!”

  Darrell described for them the night his father had died, how he felt Medgar’s spirit rise up and enter his own body. He said there “was a feeling in my soul that was more powerful than anybody else had put in my head. That was his soul!”

  This was slightly different from the usual after-dinner fare in Jackson. But folks continued on with him. “Tell it!” they cried.

  When Medgar’s spirit had risen out of his body, Darrell said, “his mission was accomplished. It was time for him to go…. It brings tears to my eyes that people still see that my father’s name is kept alive. Sometimes people forget about that other ‘M’: Malcolm, Martin, and Medgar.”

  The next day Darrell attended the formal ceremonies dressed like a Nigerian oil tycoon. He wore gold-and-white robes, a tall hat, and dark shades. He had spent the morning with his Uncle Charlie. They just drove around Jackson. It was the first time they had ever really talked. Darrell wanted his uncle to know that he didn’t hate him, that they were family.

  Charles sat in the front row for the afternoon ceremonies, wearing his blue seersucker jacket and looking proud of his nephew. When someone asked him if he was going to speak, he said, “Naw, naw,” as if that were the last thing he wanted to do. He sat there alone while the speeches were given and the names of Mississippi’s great civil rights heroes were recited as if in a litany: Medgar Evers, Fannie Lou Hamer, Aaron Henry. Nobody mentioned his name. It was as if he had been erased from the books.

  He didn’t care, he said. He was happy being chancery clerk of Jefferson County. Things were moving down there. He had contracts out to build a new jail and courthouse. And he had plans to bring jobs and tax revenues to the county: he wanted to start a big landfill out in the woods and charge out-of-state companies huge fees to dump there.

  “We got nothing else to sell,” Charles said. “If Detroit is the Motor Capital of the World, we’re going to be known as the Garbage Capital.” If the landfill was a success, Charles hoped to expand the business to include toxic waste, maybe even nuclear waste. The government paid good money to take care of that.

  When the unveiling ceremony was over and the television crews had left, a few people stayed behind to stare at the statue. It seemed so small, dwarfed by the wide green field. A car pulled up, and a couple got out, walked over to read the inscription, stood quietly, and then left. Medgar Evers looked, with his hand in his pocket and a serious expression on his tired face, as if he was in a deep, deep studying, gazing out over the hill in the direction of Capitol Street.

  25

  Hurricane Season

  Here’s latest mailing — going out over Mississippi like shingles on your roof! Gee those niggers had a ball in L.A. As you know. I’m a native son of Calif.
— but it will be hotter than that here in Jackson — you’ll call it chimneyville #2 — Remember your Confederate history. The damned Yankees did it 1 time. But this will be a Peters DeLaughter NAACP Jew Bum Out! Yep. Lot’s of real estate bargains when it cools off.

  Ta Ta. De La IV.

  A dozen officers guarded Judge Breland Hilburn’s small courtroom on the morning of August 3, 1992. A nervous police captain muttered into a walkie-talkie and hassled journalists who tried to bring briefcases past the sign-in desk. Inside two rows of polished wooden benches, like church pews, were loosely filled with reporters and assorted friends and relatives of the defendant.

  Beckwith marched in wearing a dark navy suit, soft gray leather shoes, a white shirt with French cuffs, and gold cuff links. He sat at the defense table and seemed chipper, laughing and flirting with a female legal assistant until Merrida Coxwell finally turned to him and said sharply, “Mr Beckwith! Shhhh!” Beckwith pouted, and Coxwell went back to his papers.

  The point of this hearing was for the defense to argue that the charges against Beckwith should be dismissed before he went to trial. When you hear editorial writers and man-on-the-street interviewees complain about all the crooks getting off on “technicalities,” these loopholes more often than not can be found in the U.S. Constitution. The technicalities that could free Beckwith were in the Bill of Rights, specifically the Sixth Amendment, which says the following:

  In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and the district wherein the crime shall have been committed… and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the assistance of counsel for his defense.

  Any reasonable person could see how trying a man for murder twenty-nine years after the fact might raise some doubts about the speediness of his trial. Then there was that other clause about a defendant’s having the right to confront witnesses — a problem here because so many of them were dead. If that wasn’t enough, there was also the Fifth Amendment to deal with, the one that guarantees “due process of law.” Dozens of court cases over the years had bolstered a defendant’s rights to due process and “fundamental fairness,” concepts that Coxwell and Jim Kitchens were arguing had been trampled by the prosecutors of their client.

  The still-missing evidence, the lack of a transcript of the second trial, dead lawyers, and absent witnesses were just a few points of prejudice the defense planned to bring up. Worst was the problem that Beckwith couldn’t seem to remember enough about his first two trials to help defend himself.

  Coxwell and Kitchens had tried to talk Beckwith into claiming diminished capacity to avoid the trial. They’d wanted to order a psychological profile of their client to use as evidence. Beckwith had been insulted. “What do you think I am, an idiot?” he had shouted.

  There were times when Beckwith threatened to fire his attorneys. He and Kitchens couldn’t stand each other. But Coxwell usually could calm him down. Coxwell knew how to handle Beckwith’s tantrums, but nobody knew what Beckwith was likely to do next.

  At 9:20 a.m. the bailiff said, “All rise,” and Judge Hilburn flapped through the door in his black robe. The state announced that it would call no witnesses. This seemed to surprise the defense lawyers, who conferred for a moment. Then Kitchens stood up and called Beckwith to the stand. Two dozen people gasped. This was not expected.

  Beckwith seemed composed and alert when he took his seat to the left of the judge. He shot his French cuffs, arranged his hands on one knee, and offered the spectators his three-quarter profile.

  Kitchens wore a boxy blue suit that looked slept in. His white hair was perfectly combed into a slight flip above his left brow, which he smoothed with his hand as he questioned the witness.

  “Mr. Beckwith, have you ever been prosecuted on this same charge before?” Kitchens asked.

  “I have, sir.”

  “Can you tell the court how long ago that’s been?”

  “It’s been quite a while ago, 1963 and ’4. In those years.”

  As the questioning continued, Kitchens established that Beckwith couldn’t remember more than 50 percent of what had happened at his first trials, that two of his previous lawyers were dead, and that another of his lawyers, Hardy Lott, was eighty-three and unable to help out with the defense. Beckwith himself was now seventy-one and in bad shape.

  “How would you describe your level of energy or stamina at this time, Mr. Beckwith?” Kitchens asked.

  “Well, for about a year every morning when I get up I walk around my room, and I am exhausted and I have to go back to bed and sleep until … I have enough strength to do my reading, writing and arithmetic…. I just seem to be going down all the time.”

  Beckwith was so clearly enjoying the chance to talk that Kitchens had trouble getting in his questions.

  “Mr. Beckwith, how is your ability to concentrate at this time?”

  “It’s diminished mightily.”

  “Now, sir, I want you to compare these several infirmities that you have described —”

  “May I interrupt you, sir?” Beckwith interrupted.

  “No, you may not,” Kitchens answered curtly.

  “I will hush,” said Beckwith, chastened.

  It went on like this for some twenty minutes. Beckwith claimed he had dim memories of some of the old witnesses. Except for Delmar Dennis, he didn’t recognize any of the new witnesses, and he couldn’t recall making statements to any of them.

  Kitchens handed over his witness.

  Ed Peters looked like a hungry man stepping up to his meal. He didn’t waste any time.

  “Did you know an individual named Cecil Sessums?” he asked.

  Beckwith raised his chin and leveled a scornful stare at the district attorney.

  “The name is familiar, and I do know a man named Cecil Sessums,” he said with almost comic haughtiness. “And I do not—” he stopped himself, as if remembering instructions. “Go ahead. What’s the next question.”

  Peters moved closer to Beckwith. “Go ahead, you can finish answering,” he said.

  “You’ve got the floor. I’m listening.”

  “How did you know Cecil Sessums?”

  “I can’t recall, but I do know Cecil Sessums.”

  “Did you go visit him in the penitentiary?”

  At his seat behind the prosecutors’ desk, Charlie Crisco stiffened. He had been trying for months to pin down this information, and he hadn’t had much luck.

  “I went to the penitentiary to visit some people,” Beckwith said. “And I would say that they were men that are accused of being to the far right, but I don’t know who or what persons or what day it was or anything about it.”

  Peters let him ramble on and then asked, “If in fact you went to visit him with Peggy Morgan… would you say that you don’t remember that?”

  “I don’t remember any Peggy Morgan. I remember a woman or a girl, a wife of a man, and that’s all I remember,” Beckwith replied.

  Crisco let out his breath. He had been trying for months to verify that Beckwith had driven to Parchman with Morgan, one of the witnesses who said he had bragged about killing Medgar Evers.

  “Don’t [you] recall going to see Cecil Sessums who had been convicted of a civil rights slaying?” Peters asked, moving closer still. Peters’s voice, which could be so soothing in private conversation, took on a wheedling, annoying cadence in the courtroom. It never took him long to rattle his witnesses.

  “I just told you that I went to Parchman penitentiary in the company of some other people,” Beckwith snapped.

  “And if —”

  “That’s how blank my mind is, sir!”

  Peters abruptly changed course.

  “If I recall correctly what you told your attorney, you told him that this was quite an embarrassment for you to have been even charged with having ki
lled Medgar Evers, is that correct?”

  “You just going to have to go all over that again, please, sir!” Beckwith said coldly. “Make it — just talk slow and distinctly and loud and look at me when you talk to me and I will, I will answer your question.”

  Peters repeated his question again and again, and Beckwith got angrier and angrier, until Coxwell objected. The judge ordered Peters to rephrase.

  “You are saying that this was an embarrassment to you and your family,” Peters said. “I am asking you if it was a badge of honor to you, if it was something that you were proud of that you had been charged with that.”

  “Well I don’t think it’s any badge of honor to be charged with murder…. I am very enraged over it.”

  “And you were enraged over —”

  “And I am still mad about it, and I will remain mad about it. I am indignant about it.”

  “You were enraged over —”

  “And I will not look with kindness upon those that attack me and, and those that are supporting me” — Beckwith was staring hard at the prosecutor — “….all of this heinous, scandalous, ridiculous charge!”

  Peters kept baiting Beckwith, and the old man kept swallowing it. Beckwith even argued while his lawyers voiced their objections. At one point Kitchens had to yell, “Be quiet, Mr. Beckwith!” to stifle his client.

  The cross-examination went on for the rest of the morning, until Judge Hilburn called a recess for lunch.

  Bobby DeLaughter and Crisco walked off the elevator and onto the fifth floor like football buddies who had won the big game. “I couldn’t believe they put him on the stand!” DeLaughter kept saying. “I smiled at him the whole time.”