The Ghosts of Mississippi (39 page)

Overstreet wisely got in the pickup, and Big Delay climbed in with him. Overstreet testified that the elder Beckwith told him, “Your options aren’t too good. It’s deer season and there are a lot of stray bullets flying around.”

The judge in Monroe County found Overstreet guilty and fined him one hundred dollars for trespassing, plus court fees. Father and son Beckwith were photographed at the courthouse grinning gleefully at each other after the verdict.

When Big Delay was asked if he’d actually made that remark about the stray bullets, he coyly replied that he didn’t remember saying any such thing. Not that it wasn’t a true fact. “There
are
stray bullets in deer season,” he said. “What would make you think I would want to threaten this young man? I didn’t know him.”

Months went by with no word from Judge Hilburn about a new trial date. The rumor going around Mississippi was that a decision had been made, “somewhere high up,” that the case would never get to court, that “they” were going to drag out the process and wait for Beckwith to die. Nobody was saying who “they” were. Judge Hilburn, as always, would not talk about his reluctance to set a date.

Two and a half years had gone by since the case had resurfaced. The country had been through a war and elected a new president and Congress. Mississippi had a new governor and was about to get a new legislature.

The Hinds County District Attorney’s Office also had changed. Ed Peters was still there but grumbling that this was definitely his last term in office. Peters was warring with both the mayor and the new chief of police, Jimmy Wilson, a transplant from the Washington, D.C., force. One of the first things Wilson had done in his new job had been to take away the two police detectives assigned to the district attorney’s office as investigators. Benny Bennett had been transferred to a special anticrime unit, and Doc Thaggard had been sent to municipal court for bailiff’s duty.

That left Crisco to do everything, with no time to spend on the Beckwith case. It took a lot of political clout, not to mention a few phone calls from Myrlie Evers, to correct the situation. Thaggard was brought back as a sheriffs investigator, and Max Mayes, a smart young black detective from the Jackson Police Department, was assigned to replace Bennett.

Merrida Coxwell had gotten married since the case had begun. So had Cynthia Hewes, who was now Cynthia Speetjens. She was still trying murderers and rapists, and there were a few new pictures on her office door.

Bobby DeLaughter had divorced his wife, Dixie, gained custody of the three kids (Bill Kirksey was his lawyer), and remarried a lovely dark-haired nurse named Peggy.

Every political observer in the state expected DeLaughter to run for Peters’s job. It was a natural progression. But DeLaughter had other plans. A bill had passed through the legislature to reform the bottled-up appeals process in Mississippi, which had always been handled by an overworked supreme court. The new measure would create five new appellate judges to handle the first level of appeals. DeLaughter planned to run for one of those judgeships. But there was a problem. As the point man on the Beckwith case, DeLaughter had made a lot of powerful enemies. If it did come to trial and he lost, he might as well move to another state. His political career would be over before it began.

In March Judge Hilburn granted Beckwith permission to go back to Tennessee to take care of Thelma, who was legally blind and had developed colon cancer. The prosecution was almost back to where it had started more than three years earlier.

On June 11, 1993, a sign in the lobby of the Cabot Lodge in north Jackson said, “Welcome Heat Wavers.” The weather was one thing that hadn’t changed in thirty years. There were other things as well. But for now Myrlie Evers was noticing the superficial changes in the landscape: the friendly white face behind the desk welcoming her to the motel; the handsome African-American cashier behind the counter. These were the things Medgar had fought for, and he would be pleased. They were also some of the things he had died for, thirty years ago. And in a way Myrlie was here to finally bring him home.

This time she was coming to Jackson with a plan to donate their old house, and eventually their papers, to Tougaloo College.

On Saturday, June 12, thirty years to the day after Medgar’s death, Tougaloo hosted a symposium at the Medgar Evers Library to discuss the meaning of his life.

The first speaker was Bennie Thompson, who had recently been elected to fill Mike Espy’s seat in Congress after Espy was appointed secretary of agriculture. Thompson wore a well-cut, dark blue pinstriped banker’s suit. His large head bobbed above his conservative tie, and his round, baleful face looked solemnly down at the thirty or forty people in the audience as he began to speak.

Thompson had been fifteen years old when Medgar Evers was killed. But his death, and his life, had profoundly affected the freshman congressman. “I believe I am here because of Medgar Evers,” he began.

Myrlie, who was seated in the audience, looked up at the speaker and felt her heart slowly shift into place. She felt as if it had been off beat for a long time and now was settling into a comfortable, familiar rhythm. Everything began to make sense to her. She watched Thompson with a new intensity.

“As most of you know, Medgar had a firm commitment to economic justice in the state of Mississippi,” Thompson continued. He went on for a few minutes about that. He said that he did not want to be “confrontational,” just “truthful,” as he noted, “If Medgar came back today in this state he would be very disappointed. Because thirty years later we still haven’t accomplished nearly the dream that Medgar had.”

Thompson went on to name a few of the inequities in Mississippi and Washington. “One of the first realities I got when I arrived in Washington — they asked me which department did I work in? I said, ‘Wha’d you mean?’ Said, ‘You’re new, we haven’t seen you around.’ ‘That’s right.’ ‘So are you in the printing department? Or in housekeeping?’

“I said, ‘No, I’m a member of Congress.’ ‘You ARE?’ So that was my wake-up call.”

There were other speakers that afternoon — doctors, lawyers, and politicians who all owed so much to Medgar Evers’s legacy. When they had finished, Myrlie walked to the podium to thank them. “Medgar would have wanted to know that he helped make a difference in all of our lives,” she said. “He also said that once we reach our goal, that we would have to work even harder to hold on to it.”

She was visibly moved by what she had heard, and she spoke to the people in the room in a personal way, as they had spoken to her. “There is not one day since his death that Medgar has not been with me, that I have not thought of him, that I have not been guided by his life. And as I stand here now I can say that I love him, so much. Thirty years later, of course, it’s not that romantic thing because I can’t touch him. But it’s a love that goes deeper than anything that we had in this life.”

Myrlie drew a breath as she prepared to say something she had never said before. “He will live with me forever, and I think he will live with some of you,” she began. “Today I still miss him. But I don’t
mourn
Medgar anymore. What we are doing now is celebrating him, and we are also celebrating ourselves and our successes. For us, the living, he does go on.”

With that, Myrlie released Medgar at last — not the pain of losing him, and certainly not his memory, but the weight of his legacy that she had carried, alone, all these years. She carried Medgar’s life in her like she’d carried her boxes of letters and photographs from Mississippi to Los Angeles to the Northwest mountains. And now she was turning it over at last. She would now share with Tougaloo the house, and the trunks of papers, and the burden of Medgar’s legacy. The weight passed from her hands lightly, like a wreath of dried flowers laid on a grave.

On October 4, 1993, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to consider Byron De La Beckwith’s motion to dismiss. This was the last legal barrier to a new trial.

October went by, and then November, without a word from Jackson. In December Judge Hilburn finally set a date, but he made the peculiar decision not to announce it to the public. The press found out after Charlie Crisco sent out the first batch of witness subpoenas. Jury selection was set to begin on January 18, 1994, in Batesville, Mississippi. Without offering an explanation the judge also ordered that the trial itself would be moved back to Jackson, with the out-of-town jury. It would be held in the same courtroom where the first trial had taken place, thirty years earlier, almost to the day.

A week before the start of jury selection, Beckwith was — against his lawyer’s advice — answering the telephone in his house on Signal Mountain. Sometimes the reporter who called got a tongue-lashing on race, politics, and the profession of journalism. Sometimes Beckwith actually answered questions. In an interview with a local Chattanooga paper, he seemed to be anticipating the trial. He even made some coherent statements about the case.

Beckwith denied killing Evers, for instance, saying he had been in Greenwood on the night of the shooting. “That’s ninety-three miles away,” he said. “It would have been a mighty powerful rifle for me to have done it.”

He offered an opinion of the pending court proceedings, which he called “a Roman circus to entertain the people. It’s strictly political — money-squandering tomfoolery and tommyrot.”

When Mike Riley of
Time
magazine called, Beckwith told him that he was packing his sea bag for the trial, ready to do battle again. “I feel just like I felt when I went down to Tarawa to fight the Japs,” he said amiably. “I’m just as confident I’ll come back with honor [he pronounced it “ahwunnuh”] and dignity and good health.”

He told Riley he wouldn’t be giving interviews once he was back in Mississippi. “If I talk to you down there, my lawyers’ll take a stick and beat the hell out of me! Heh heh heh.”

Did he plan to testify?

“What do you think?”

“Well, I would guess no.”

“Well, I’m going to do whatever it takes to win this case with honor and dignity. But win.”

He was confident he could win with the right kind of jury. “I plan to get a jury of my peers, you know,” he said. “That’s white and Christian. If there’s anything else on that jury, we might have problems.”

Riley asked him if he was innocent.

“What the hell kind of question is that coming from a white man!” he snapped.

Back in Mississippi the
Clarion-Ledger
was running ecstatic walk-up stories to the big trial. There were articles about Panola County, where the jury would be chosen, directions to the scene of the crime, and a story in which local psychologists analyzed Beckwith’s writings. The newspaper had gotten its hands on the latest bill from Beckwith’s court-appointed defense team. So far the lawyers’ fees alone totaled more than forty-eight thousand dollars — a real bargain for two years of work, but enough to stir up resentment. Taxpayers complained that it was a waste of money over an unnecessary trial.

Despite all the hoopla in the media, it was hard to find a white person in Mississippi who thought it was a good idea to try Beckwith. In fact, you could talk to just about anyone — black or white — and hear at least one complaint: the trial cost too much, it was unfair to try a sick old man, it was a useless dredging up of unpleasant memories, it was a political maneuver, and it was futile symbolism — they’ll never convict him, what was the point?

Symbolism was, in many ways, precisely the point to those who favored the trial. The intangible benefits of concepts such as “justice” and “retribution” were worth the price of admission. In Mississippi, where words are such valuable currency and so little is actually accomplished, symbolism takes on a special importance.

For instance, as the new year began — in the face of crushing poverty and crime, schools closing because the buses had no brakes, and teen pregnancy rates at an all-time high — the legislature prepared to debate whether or not to change the state song. Black legislators felt that “Go, Mississippi,” a modified version of Ross Barnett’s racist campaign song, was offensive.

“It would be good to remove all our racist images,” said Aaron Henry. Henry and other legislators also were fighting to change the state flag, which still featured the Confederate banner in one corner.

In a way all these exercises amounted to a form of community exorcism. It was an act of cleansing, of rubbing out the relics of a shameful era. Although changing a song nobody knew anyway or sending Beckwith to prison wasn’t going to solve the problems of racism, crime, or poverty, at least it was something that could be accomplished. It made some people feel more hopeful.

Meanwhile, in January 1994, five hundred summonses were being delivered to potential jurors in Panola County. In Jackson Bobby DeLaughter and Charlie Crisco were literally dusting off the evidence from the courthouse vault. Visitors to the D.A’s office could find the two men huddled over a table where the Enfield rifle, the photographs, and the boxes of files were being laid out in order, as they would be presented at the trial.

What the visitors would not know was that Crisco was still hunting for new evidence to use against Beckwith. Specifically, he was trying to locate a certain letter that Beckwith had written to his ex-wife, Willie, ten years after Evers’s murder.

Panola County, population thirty thousand, is a media dead zone suspended between Memphis and Jackson. Radio reception from both cities seems to drop off at the county line. The cable TV stations come from Tennessee and Tupelo, not Jackson, so the Beckwith trial had not been covered to such a degree as in the capital. In fact, as the assembled lawyers were soon to find out, most potential jurors — black and white — could argue convincingly that they knew nothing or next to nothing about either Beckwith or Evers.

The county is a microcosm of Mississippi. It is, like Hinds County, nearly half black and half white. It straddles the Delta and the hills. Rich white neighborhoods are neatly separated from poor black and middle-class districts by the Tallahatchie River, which runs east to west through the county. People joke that the football teams from Sardis, the main town in the wealthy north county, and Batesville, on the south side of the river, could never play each other peacefully because of a fierce and intractable class rivalry.

But whatever divisions of education, and race, and class separated the Panola Countians who trudged through the icy air to the courthouse on Tuesday morning, January 18, 1994, most all of them shared one unifying goal: to avoid jury duty at all costs.

Rumors abounded. The trial might last six weeks. If you got on the jury, it was said, the Klan, the black radicals, or the media would hound you and your family no matter which way you voted. It was a no-win situation.

Security was rigid around the courthouse. The state police set up a communications trailer in a nearby parking lot. Law enforcement officers provided by the state, town, and two counties, not to mention shadowy federal plainclothesmen and at least one hapless “undercover” detective took their positions around the building. A bomb-sniffing dog checked the premises before the doors were opened. A brand-new metal detector shrilled its warning all day as businesslike deputies demanded keys, belts, and loose change from spectators and media people.

There were perhaps twenty-five reporters and cameramen covering this phase of the trial. To the surprise of everyone except local Panolians, crowds of protesters and gawkers never materialized. The people of Batesville were underwhelmed by the spectacle.

To the disappointment of feature writers hoping for some local color, the Panola County Courthouse was a modern, industrial-style building, the kind of soulless box that has replaced the grand old courthouses that once graced the squares of every county seat across the South. The austere main courtroom, which held about two hundred people, was decorated in dark wood veneer paneling and pea soup-colored walls.

DeLaughter and Ed Peters, both dressed in their matching, dark gray murder-trial suits, pored over stacks of paper at the prosecution table. Beckwith, who had arrived that morning sporting a curious old-fashioned fedora, wore his Confederate gray suit with his signature white French cuffs, a wide red paisley tie with a diamond stickpin (a gift from Thelma), and a little Confederate battle flag pin on his lapel.

He was sensitive about the pin. Later, when a courtroom artist asked what kind of flag it was, Beckwith stomped over to her and said, “If you don’t know what a Confederate flag looks like you’ll go to hell in Africa!”

Judge Hilburn was somber and pale, and he looked, with his dark hair and full beard, more like a Civil War colonel than a circuit court judge. The only clue to his hidden, playful nature was a red tie festooned with cartoon drawings of Tasmanian devils carefully tucked under his black robe.

The first 140 or so potential jurors filed in, nervous and cold, and took seats on the hard wooden pews. The winnowing process, called voir dire, began immediately.

Right off five blacks disqualified themselves from the jury for not being able to read or write. Then Hilburn asked whether anyone was physically unable to sit through a long trial. Within seconds the courtroom started looking like Lourdes as people — mostly white people — hobbled up the aisles on walkers and canes, limping, shuffling, wheezing, and waving notes from their doctors. Soon only fifty-eight potential jurors remained. Most of them were black.

“The only people getting on this jury are the ones who haven’t figured out a way to get off of it,” mused Joe Reid, the county clerk, as he sucked on an unlit cigar during a break.

Beckwith seemed subdued during the first hours of jury selection. As the morning wore on, he brightened visibly, craning his neck and looking around the room for people he recognized. Thelma had arrived on his arm, wearing a hot-pink coat, a fresh honey-blond wig, and open-toed platform shoes. She sat in the front row throughout the proceedings, mostly quiet but sometimes shaking her head in her hands and spouting tears, particularly when the lawyers were talking about the penalties for murder.

The potential jurors were given numbers, and the first thirty or so took seats for some questions.

Peters stood up and introduced himself. He spoke slowly and gently, and he moved with an aw-shucks gawkiness that put country people at ease. Jury selection is an act of seduction, and Peters played the perfect suitor. It was agreed that nobody could pick a jury like Peters, and DeLaughter happily took a backseat during this crucial phase of the trial.

Although Peters often repeated his contention that this was not a “racial” trial, race and racial attitudes were on everyone’s mind. Peters’s unstated goal was to get as many white people off the jury as possible.

Meanwhile Merrida Coxwell and Jim Kitchens were going to do everything they could do to get a white jury for the trial. They would have to come up with excuses for removing blacks.

Peters asked the potential jurors to search their hearts and confess whether they had already made up their minds in the case, whether they thought it was too old, it was about politics, or they couldn’t convict the old man no matter what evidence was presented.

“If you feel that way,” Peters said, “don’t put yourself in the position of lying under oath before God. Just put your hand up!”

Three white arms shot up and one black one. The potential jurors were taken into chambers and interviewed privately. Before long most of the whites in the first group of jurors had excused themselves, and the count was ten blacks to five whites.

At Beckwith’s first trials the district attorney, Bill Waller, had brought the race issue right out in the open, asking whether the jurors thought it was a crime to kill a “nigger.” Peters was more subtle. Did they send their children to private school? Did they feel times were “different” thirty years ago?

Peters knew his Mississippians. Instead of asking the religion of each panelist, he simply asked everyone who wasn’t a Baptist to raise his or her hand. There were very few.

By the time Kitchens took over the voir dire, there wasn’t much left to ask. Kitchens looked for all the world like Peters’s stockier brother, right down to the flowing white hair. He was just as folksy and smooth, but there was something annoying about him, something bulldoggish that got on your nerves.

Mostly the process was excruciatingly boring. The main event every day was lunch, which took on a surreal cast, since there was only one place to eat on the town square.

At noon break the sheriffs went through the elaborate ritual of escorting Delay and Thelma to the beige Suburban that was used to transport them to and from court. A deputy drove it, and another veteran sheriff was assigned to their protection. The small, polite knot of photographers was kept at bay until the truck pulled away. Then everybody — press, prosecutors, lawyers, defendant, deputies, and bodyguards — disembarked at the homey little Bankery cafe to line up for the $3.99 plate lunch.

The Bankery had never done so much business. Local motels were enjoying an off-season boom. While the prosecution team and the out-of-county cops stayed at the modest Ramada Express, Beckwith and his team, along with most local TV people, were bunking at the equally modest Comfort Inn on Highway 6.

Right from the start there was a problem with Delay and Thelma’s room. It was something about no heat or no water, and complaints were lodged with one of the managers, who happened to be an immigrant from India. The manager had figured out that Beckwith was some sort of VIP, but it was unclear whether he knew more than that. He was mortified that his most famous guest was unhappy with the room, so to make it up to Beckwith he personally brought over a complimentary tray of lunch meats. Beckwith eyeballed the dark-skinned man as he carried in the tray.

The manager muttered something about his unworthiness. This must have appealed to Beckwith because he looked the man in the eye and told him he could tell he was really a white man. He then proceeded to quote Scripture and lecture the Indian about the origins of the white race, and this seemed to impress the manager. When Beckwith asked him how he could repay his kindness over the cold cut tray, the manager asked to be blessed. To the astonishment of the others in the room, Beckwith drew himself up to full height and placed his hands on the manager’s head while reciting all manner of Identity Movement gibberish and, perhaps, a few lines from the Koran and Omar Khayyam. The hotelier left, apparently satisfied that he had been anointed by some sort of holy man.