Posted on 03/16/2003 12:08:11 PM PST by PJ-Comix
Even now, more than four decades after the fact, it is such a strange and repulsive image, so preeningly masculine, so crackling with smirky bonhomie and threat. Who are these guys, anyway? In particular, who is the handsome, slick-haired fellow in the middle, the one biting the end off his cigarette while he swats the air with his stick? And who are the cronies watching -- or pointedly not watching -- while he takes his swing? And where are they? And what are they doing there?
''And,'' Paul Hendrickson ponders early in this deeply impressionistic journey back into a blinked memory from the South's violent past, ``why are [they] dressed so uncomfortably for this Indian summer heat? Because they're on a mission from God. They're confronting history, and they know it. . . . In the mannered sixties South, if a man is being summoned to a moment of grave importance, he knows to look presentable, at least if he has any breeding in him. I'm not talking about peckerwoods and shrimp haulers and back-country trash. . . .''
In fact, on the September afternoon in 1962 when photographer Charles Moore snapped his shutter and sucked them into immortality with a two-page spread in the next week's issue of Life, these men were among the most influential public officials in Mississippi. They were sheriffs, the kingpins of their counties, charged with collecting taxes and keeping the peace. If you start on the right with the man whose back is to Moore's lens -- that would be John Ed Cothran of Greenwood -- you can count seven of them here. The youngest, the buzz-cut deputy Jim Garrison, is 27; John Henry Spencer, the cigar chomper on the left, is the oldest at 54. Four will be one-term wonders, but the club-swinger, Billy Ferrell, will rule the roost in the old river town of Natchez for 24 years.
If the reputations of Mississippi's '60s sheriffs were often shaded by their vibrantly racist culture and the temptations of opportunism and moral nuance, their power, Hendrickson writes, was absolute. Moore had happened upon this scene as he wandered through Ole Miss a few days before that lovely campus would become, briefly, the most famous university in the world. The sheriffs, some of whom had driven from way downstate in the middle of the night, are idly waiting for the federal marshals and troops who will force the enrollment of 29-year-old James Meredith as the school's first African American student. Their mission: stop it.
Hendrickson, a former Washington Post reporter, first saw the photo in a book shop in Berkeley, Calif., when he was thumbing through a bound collection of Moore's civil-rights images, some of which -- the frozen frame of Bull Connor's police dogs lunging, fangs gleaming, toward the marchers in Birmingham, say -- are far more iconographic. But this photo, a searing awl, gnawed straight into Hendrickson's gut. Still, why would one picture be worth so much time and effort or so many thousands and thousands of words? ''I wanted to know: How did these seven white Southerners get to be this way, and how did it all end . . .? '' Hendrickson writes. `` . . . Where did the hatred and the sorrow go that flowed out of this moment . . .?''
He would spend seven years trying to answer those questions, combing through books, files and documents; traveling 35 times to Mississippi to interview not only the perplexingly complicated Meredith and the two sheriffs who still survived but also those through whose lives the men had rippled: deputies and other former associates, one old Klan grand dragon and several civil-rights activists, but especially family members, in particular children and grandchildren, those whom Hendrickson calls the ''inheritors,'' those now struggling most with the shame and irony that bubble up whenever new, enlightened values collide against the terrible residue of bone-deep hatred and fear. Is it one thing for ex-Sheriff Cothran to employ in casual conversation the South's most repulsive and familiar racial slur ''as if,'' Hendrickson writes, ''there were no other useful or accurate word'' and quite another for Billy Ferrell's son, Tommy, not only his father's heir in office but also head of the whole national sheriffs' association, to use it, too, to admit ``You've heard me use it couple times . . . in the last few minutes. But I wasn't using it just to use it''?
Sons of Mississippi is punctuated with such flummoxing admissions and conflicting distinctions. They bear profoundly on Hendrickson's absorbing, vivid portraits of fathers reared to survive in one sort of world and sons and daughters trying, often with spectacular unsuccess, to navigate another. The book is part history, part travelogue, part sociological study, part emotional pilgrimage into the redemptive possibilities of elapsed time. Things are better, it seems to say, and yet: The old Klan hate sheets that once reminded white Mississippians that they were ''dealing with descendants of savage africa [sic], who will, like a wild animal turn against you. . . . In Africa they eat each other'' may be gone, but when Hendrickson stops for a sandwich at a gas station on Highway 49W, a huge white man grouses loudly about ''how blacks hereabout just plumb won't work'' and then asks, ```You got a lot of 'em like that up there where you live?'''
Such moments leave us, as they clearly leave Hendrickson, stunned into a state of amazed pain. And no matter how engaged he becomes with Mississippi's quaint charms, its breathtaking landscape, its genteel people and their steely, polite ways, he cannot shed his big-city wariness and biases, his whole stuffed carpetbag of cultural and emotional otherness. He frequently identifies himself in these pages as the ''visitor'' or ''infiltrator,'' never quite sure what the rules are, what they could possibly be, even admitting that whenever someone he is interviewing invites him to ''come for dinner,'' meaning lunch, ``I felt awkward . . . , but in the South it's so difficult to say no. . . . ''
Hendrickson's book is a brave, mournful venture into the heart of modern Mississippi and into his heart, as well. Say yes.
Believe me, even if you didn't know where that photo was taken or what the context was, AND if you saw it in detail (unlike the web photo) you just KNEW these guys were racists. The photo (actually several photos of this scene) were fascinating to look at. I even wondered a lot about the guys in the photo. Apparently Hendrickson had the same reaction and wrote this book.
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