Sons of Mississippi

by Paul Hendrickson

  Maybe the seemingly schizoid character of Natchez has something to do with the fact that, almost from its founding, in 1716, the settlement was trading hands, flags, countries, bloodbaths. It started as a fort, built by the French before they massacred the Natchez Indians, who were the descendants of earlier Indians who’d been living there on the bluffs since prehistory. In close succession in the eighteenth century, Natchez was under French, British, Spanish, and finally, in 1798, American rule. So one way to look at the Natchez story is that trouble and blood on its hands were birthrights from the beginning of its recorded history, in the same way that slaveholding by highminded and eloquent founding fathers is part of America’s deceitful birthright, and thus the legacy and shame and paradox of our seemingly insoluble dilemma these two centuries later. But that sounds too highfalutin in a story about the Ferrells, who always lived close to the ground, whose blood was never blue.

  Out of this soupy mix, the steamy jambalaya known as Natchez, in the early 1920s, came the Ferrell progenitor who’d one day bristle his bat in the middle of Charles Moore’s photograph. If you had to describe Billy Ferrell’s origins in one line, the line might be: townie, up from almost nothing, who made eventual good in the society of bluebloods. “Sounds like we moved every time the rent come due” is the way Billy once explained his earliest years. That must not have been far off. He was born in a back room in his grandparents’ house, which was where his mother and father lived. His father, who’d been raised across the river, in Concordia Parish, Louisiana, was a river man (and part-time lawman on both sides of the river). His mother was a Natchezean of modest culture but no means. There must have been some sense of Catholicity and propriety in the family, for Billy attended the local parochial school, where he was instructed in his euclid and catechism by both nuns and the Brothers of the Sacred Heart. (There’s always been a strong Catholic minority presence in Natchez, as well as a Jewish one. One of the bigoted jokes a visitor soon hears—three slurs for the price of one—is that “In Natchez, the kikes owned it, the Catholics ran it, the niggers enjoyed it.”)

  When school was done—he dropped out in eleventh grade—the war was upon him. He worked for a while out of the state. He got his draft papers on December 26, 1942. Two days later, he was wed to redheaded Hazel Hampton. In the service, he quickly rose through the low ranks to warrant officer, which is an intermediate rank between commissioned officers and noncoms. “You was an officer,” he once explained. “You wore an officer’s uniform. You rated a salute.” They sent him overseas on the HMS Arundel Castle—where they tried to feed him cod catfish for breakfast on that blimey boat. No thanks. The native son subsisted on Hershey bars until the ship docked. In England, he served in the Ninth Army and was awarded three bronze stars. Also in England, he got the news that William Albert Ferrell, Jr., his father, had died in a gothic river accident. Billy was in three campaigns in the European Theater. He was part of the D-Day invasion, although he wasn’t in the early and bloody waves. (His group went in several weeks afterward.) He came home from the victory overseas on another boat, into New York harbor, where pretty little Red Cross women, as he later put it, waved at him with flags and wanted to hand him “a quart of milk or something or a Coca-Cola or just anything that we hadn’t had in a long time.” There was this new invention called television. He and a buddy got off the boat and saw a guy with black dots all over his face talking in a box in a store window. The buddy said to Billy, “How in the hell did they get that guy in that thing there?” They went around back of it and looked for a camera or a projector.

  Then home to sweet Natchez, having ridden down the spine of the country on a troop train like a conquering warrior, so hungry to see Hazel and his little girl, Sherry. He drove trucks and dug ditches for Brown & Root Construction Company. The following isn’t the whole list of his employers, but it can be said that he drove a pipe truck for Tom Hicks Transfer; he drove a Navy reconditioned 361-International truck for fifty cents an hour for the Stallman Lumber Company; he drove a Gulf Refining Company diesel for thirty dollars a week. He took the exam for the post office. He passed. For the next eight years, he carried the mail. His face got well known in town, not a bad thing for a guy with no funds who wishes to be elected a head lawman. For a while, before that dream fastened onto him like a lamprey, the mail carrier and Hazel lived in a kind of glorified chicken coop at 523 Union Street, behind Sheriff Conner’s house. That’s where his second child, Tommy, was born, on June 7, 1947. (Sherry Ferrell, Tommy’s big sister, was born during the war, in 1944, just before Billy went overseas.) With secure civil service employment, Billy and Hazel were able to plunk down enough down payment to get their first home, at 817 Washington Street. It was just around the corner from where the old cancer-ridden and heart-gone depressive and wasting man would die five decades later, age seventy-five, on Martin Luther King Street, originally Pine Street. It was a nifty house, 817 Washington, and in its own way, a very large reach. It was Victorian, painted white, with a porch, with gingerbread trim. Up and down that street were other nice homes, and at dusk on summer evenings, their porches would get trimmed with lamps, which were resting on tables, beside wicker, beneath lazily curling ceiling fans. Some of the homes offered side gardens, where people gathered in the evening under bowered trellises while bumblebees fumbled atop the roses. Billy and Hazel lived at 817 Washington for thirty-odd years, never gentry, but quite respectable. It’s the house that all the grandkids came to know and love, including the one whom Billy nicknamed Waddle.

  By 1953, Billy had begun to figure out that “working for the post office department you didn’t have to have anything but a strong back and a weak mind anyhow.” That’s when he went to sheriffing, as he called it—deputy-sheriffing, first for Conner and then for others in succession, with some odd-jobbing and squabbles in between. In 1959, he put his hat in for the top-cop job in the county—and got it, in the runoff with Morris Doughty. It was a dirty election, with bribes on all sides, but that is not front-page news in either Mississippi or Natchez.

  The lawman did his first term, 1960–1964, the nadir or high-water mark of which—depends on your perspective—was the business up at Ole Miss with James Howard Meredith. It’s a fact that he cleaned out numerous slot-machine and back-room casino operations, not to say moonshiners. He had campaigned on a pledge to get rid of the gamblers and bootleggers. He filed taxes for that first year on what he said was personal income of $3,600. When the four years were over, he laid out for the next term, because of that Mississippi law that a sheriff couldn’t succeed himself.

  There’s little question that he was at loose ends during his interregnum. Many things were tried for gainful employment. One was the purchase of a Gulf filling station. (Down on the dock in 1997, Billy remembered that by the time all the overhead was paid he was making 6 cents on the gallon, meaning that he had to sell 6,000 gallons just to make $600 a month, and there was no damn way that was going to happen in Natchez.) He tried employment with the Sovereignty Commission. (This was not remembered—or at least mentioned—down on the dock.) On June 15, 1964, the outset of Freedom Summer, the sheriff-in-exile wrote a letter of application to the Sov-Com. He listed his credentials and then closed with this: “I feel that my experience and contacts made in law enforcement over the last 12 years in this area would be beneficial to the Sovereignty Commission, the State of Mississippi and the residents of Southwest Mississippi, if assigned to this area as a resident investigater [sic], particularly at this time.” He didn’t get that job, for whatever reason. Still another thing he tried, not happily, was a stint as a town policeman, serving under the man who’d once been his chief deputy at the sheriff’s department, J. T. Robinson. They’d been boyhood friends, and now J. T. was top dog at the police station, and Billy was out of office at the sheriff’s department, just another guy in a patrolman’s blue uniform. That was a comedown. But he needed a paycheck. Still another thing that was tried was a small investigative service for the oil fields
of Adams County. Billy and his old boyhood friend George Gunter ran the service. Gunter was still an FBI agent; he was moonlighting.

  And yet still another thing that was tried, among at least half a dozen more that could be mentioned during his four-year interregnum, was the Ku Klux Klan—or so goes the legend. To this day, nobody really knows for sure if Billy actually joined, or just flirted around the edges. You hear it both ways. You hear an awful lot of such talk, even now, forty years afterward. Nobody seems to have any real proof one way or the other. The documents that are available in the post-totalitarian society wouldn’t prove it—they’d just suggest it. Certainly, his family denies he was ever in the Klan. As noted earlier, it’s a fact, however, and his family wouldn’t deny it, that the name Ferrell showed up on several Klan lists compiled by investigators and civil rights groups in the sixties. (Billy’s brother, Robert Earl Ferrell, who served as a town policeman in the sixties, was also on at least one such list as having formerly been a Klansman.) But again, what does a name on a list really prove? The Klan was a secret organization, and rumor swirled constantly around it. The town was full of accusations as to who was wearing a hood and who wasn’t. I have talked to Natchezeans who can remember coming on little Klan cells in the middle of nowhere—out in the woods—and being terrified out of their minds. A Natchez native named Arlen Coyle, who works now as a clerk in the U.S. District Court at Oxford, remembers going swimming as a kid naked in the ponds and sliding down clay banks. This was in the late fifties. Suddenly, there before Coyle and his pals was a little cabin with Klan flags in the windows. Yes, the Klan in Natchez and the rest of Mississippi had its renaissance after Meredith, but it had never truly died out in the forties and fifties.

  Besides George Gunter and other agents, there was an FBI investigator living and working in Natchez in the mid-sixties named C. G. Prospere. Allegedly, he was going around saying that Billy was a Klansman, along with some of those who’d served under him in his first term. Even Billy’s family doesn’t deny that this story and many others were afloat in a town that has always seemed to thrive on its gossip and rumor. Billy and Prospere had never gotten on in the first place. One day, Billy confronted him out front of Top’s Grill, on Main Street. (Top’s Grill had a jaunty little top hat glowing atop its front.) It looked like they’d slug it out. “You’re full of shit, I ain’t Klan,” he said to Prospere. To which Prospere grunted and reputedly said he knew what he knew from his informants and that Billy had better watch his backside.

  Forty years later, when I contacted him, Prospere, an old man going deaf, who lived out of town in a community called Church Hill, declined to talk about it or to see me. He did acknowledge that some kind of confrontation on a downtown street did take place. As for Billy actually being in the Klan, as opposed to only sympathizing with it, Prospere said: “I’m not going to comment one way or another on any of it.” He said that there’d been “too much stuff misreported already.” When I asked Billy’s son, Tommy, about Prospere’s reputed claims (Billy had been in his grave for five months), the sheriff of Natchez said, “The thing is, those informants were derelicts and urchins and miscreants, no-counts.” Tommy didn’t seem upset in the least.

  The man who succeeded Billy as sheriff in 1964, Odell Anders, appears to have been a Klansman. He served one term and is dead now. In the late nineties, when a prizewinning investigative reporter for the Clarion-Ledger named Jerry Mitchell confronted Anders with the fact that his name was on old Klan lists, the old sheriff said, no, he’d only attended a few meetings back then. Most people who outlived the Klan’s heyday and have survived into modern times as esteemed Mississippians have professed to reporters that they “only attended a few meetings.” Mitchell—whose reporting has broken open many old civil rights cases and led the way to convictions in the courts—called up Sheriff Tommy Ferrell in November 1999 and talked to him about still-unsolved crimes from the ugly era. To which Tommy replied, “Hell, I’d like to put ’em all away.” His father had been dead for nine months.

  On September 29, 1964, in the middle of a series of Klan bombings and other terrorist acts in Adams County, Billy Ferrell and two of his former deputies were stopped on a rural road outside town by the Mississippi Highway Patrol. Governor Paul Johnson had recently sent a special detachment of highway patrolmen to the city to try to calm things. Billy had been out of office for nine months and was at loose ends. The previous month, the United Klans of America (headed by E. L. McDaniel in its Mississippi divisions) had established a Klavern in Natchez under the cover name of the Adams County Civic and Betterment Association. Most of its members had previously belonged to the White Knights of the KKK, the most violent of Klan factions operating in the state. It was nine o’clock at night when Billy and his two cronies were pulled over about five and a half miles beyond the city limits on Liberty Road. In the days immediately proceeding, the Klan had bombed two Jitney-Jungle grocery stores, a Cadillac car agency, the home of a prominent black contractor, and the home of the mayor, John Nosser. Liberty Road is a winding two-lane, unlighted. The road goes past the Johns Manville plant, out into a black community. What were three men, former cops, doing on that road that night?

  The highway patrolmen said they wanted to search the car. Billy refused. One of the patrolman said he was going to take a look in the trunk. Billy again refused and demanded to know if the cop had a warrant. Billy was ordered to get out of the car. He asked if he was under arrest. From a news story two days later in the McComb Enterprise-Journal, under the headline “Former Adams Sheriff Ired by Patrol Search”: “Former Adams County Sheriff W. T. Ferrell asked the FBI today about the possibility of filing civil rights violation charges against the Mississippi Highway Patrol.… The former sheriff said he and two others were riding down Liberty Road when they were stopped by Patrolmen A. L. Rutland and B. J. Ray. Ferrell said they were told to get out of the car and show a driver’s license, which they did.… Ferrell said he was told he was under arrest, but no specific charge was given. He said that he, Mario Hernandez, his former chief criminal deputy, and Layton Wingate, had to stand by while the car was searched. Ferrell said they were then released and told to drive on.”

  In an account published the day after the incident in the Natchez Democrat (“Ex-Sheriff Ferrell Tells of Car Search”), Billy described the treatment as inexcusable and shameful. He said it was harassment. He called his former deputies “both reputable citizens.” Nothing illegal or unlawful was found—no hidden explosives, no rifles hidden under blankets. The riled ex-sheriff, who felt his civil rights had been violated, didn’t explain—and maybe the reporter didn’t ask—why he was out riding around with two former deputies on a dark road in the vicinity of a black settlement in the time of intense troubles in the county.

  One theory is that they were on their way to a UKA meeting. Another is that they were acting as sentries for a bombing about to take place. And still another is that they were just riding around, taking the night autumn air.

  One of the highway patrolmen who stopped Billy’s car that night is dead. The other, B. J. Ray, is long retired. He lives in the center of the state, in McCool, Mississippi. He said he couldn’t recall the incident except in the vaguest terms. He remembered the general time context of the many bombings and beatings in Natchez. He remembered the recalcitrance of the man who was told to get out of the car. No incident report was ever filed by either officer.

  “Must have been something that made you suspicious,” I said to Ray.

  “Bound to have been,” he said. “If we stopped them, there must have been something. Bound to have been. We would have had some kind of report or rumor we were trying to check out. There was something going on that night, or that was about to go on, even if we never found it.”

  When I asked Tommy Ferrell about this incident, he was not in the least disturbed. “Well, you gotta remember. This is almost before television, and guys in the South in a place like Natchez, that’s what they did. Cops and ex-cops were know
n to ride around. They were agitating.” The sheriff repeated it: “They were out agitating.” He used the word in an innocent context. Those guys were just seeing what was going on.

  In 1967, with a powerful thirst to have that thing again, the “thing” being the office of sheriff, the top dog, Billy put almost everything he and Hazel owned in hock. He needed campaign funds—for posters and handbills. He needed money so he could take time off from work to do the stumping. He hocked the family car to two different banks, he took out a second mortgage. Hazel went to Billy’s closest friend, Premo Stallone—who’d given Billy a foreman’s job during the interregnum. “He’s hocked all the furniture,” Hazel wailed to Premo. Billy had done this the first time he’d run, too, in 1959. Some folks around town heard him remark that the first time he was sheriff he’d “gone in poor and come out poor, too,” but by damn if he was going to have that thing again, he’d sheriff “according to local custom,” meaning, of course, payoffs.