The Ghosts of Mississippi

by Maryanne Vollers

  Bobby was walking in a dark cloud of his own, pacing around, his black eyebrows knit together. He stood in Anderson’s doorway, fretting.

  “I hate this part,” he said, looking at Myrlie. “I just can’t stand the waiting.”

  Myrlie smiled up at him and said in a calm voice, “I’m a lot better at that than you are.”

  By the next morning the storm had worsened. Rain lashed the pavement and rattled the windows. It was close and dark inside the courthouse. At 10:20 a.m., Saturday, February 5, word began to spread that the jury had reached a verdict. They had only been back in deliberation for an hour and a half.

  Nobody had expected this. The Evers family was still over at the Holiday Inn when the phone rang in Myrlie’s room. It took fifteen minutes to get them to the courthouse.

  The biggest, meanest-looking sheriffs deputies in Jackson stood shoulder to shoulder in the courtroom, facing the thirty-five or so early bird observers who had gathered that morning. As soon as the Evers family took their seats, the jury was called back to the courtroom.

  They filed in and stood before the judge in a single line, their backs to the defendant and the spectators. Elvage Fondren, the black minister, had been elected foreman.

  “Have you reached a verdict?” Judge Hilburn asked.

  “We have Your Honor,” said Fondren as he handed the judge a sheet of lined paper with some words written on it in ballpoint pen.

  Beckwith sat so quietly that the D.A.s and bailiffs speculated that he was drugged. He never moved or even flinched when the judge handed the paper to Barbara Dunn, who read the verdict in her hard hill twang: “We find the defendant guilty…”

  Myrlie clutched Darrell’s hand and held her other hand over her mouth to keep from screaming.

  “… as charged.”

  “Yes!” Darrell whooped, and when that sound reached outside, to the crowd gathered in the hallway, a cheer of jubilation rolled though the old courthouse like the sound of a slow-breaking wave.

  Since there was only one possible sentence available to the judge, he delivered it immediately. Beckwith rose to attention, squared his shoulders, and marched up to the bench. He was flanked by Coxwell and Kitchens, who seemed stunned. He kept his chin up when Judge Hilburn sentenced him to life in prison. He would not be eligible for parole for ten years.

  Beckwith straightened his gray suit with the tiny Confederate flag pinned to the lapel and raised one hand dismissively, assuring the bailiffs that he could exit on his own steam. Then he strode out the door.

  He was quiet on the way down the elevator to booking, except for a few words muttered to no one in particular. “They got what they wanted,” he said.

  As soon as Beckwith was out the door, Thelma started wailing: “He’s not guilty and they know it! I don’t care!” Finally Kim McGeoy put his arms around her to quiet her. Little Delay stood off to the side, looking at nothing, his arms folded across his chest.

  As Myrlie left the courtroom, she finally broke down. She threw her arms around Darrell and sobbed into his shoulder as he gently led her to the elevators.

  When they reached the fifth floor, the lawyers were there. Everyone was hugging everyone else like it was a reunion of long-lost family. Myrlie hugged DeLaughter, then walked over to Peters and wrapped her arms around him. She said the first thing that came to mind: “We’ve come a long way.”

  They sat around for a while and told stories, like soldiers after a battle: how it had all begun, how Peters had doubted and Myrlie had pushed and DeLaughter had found the way. Then DeLaughter and Peters went downstairs to the press conference.

  The media center was set up in an empty courtroom on the first floor. Dozens of reporters and photographers were crammed into it. A bank of television cameras, more than anyone had seen in Mississippi in years, faced a makeshift podium for the press conference.

  DeLaughter was nearly choked up. He said the first thing that had gone through his mind when he heard the verdict was a quote from the Bible: “To God be the glory for the things he has done.” He thanked the people who had helped him, the witnesses with the courage to come forward.

  Ron Smothers of the New York Times asked whether they thought the verdict would change public perceptions of Beckwith.

  Ed Peters was blunt. “Well, he won’t be bragging anymore,” he said.

  Had justice been done?

  “Yes, I think justice was done,” Peters said. “I’m sorry it took so long, but I’m glad that it was done.”

  One reporter wanted to know what had happened to all those witnesses who said they had seen Beckwith hanging around NAACP meetings back in 1963. Why hadn’t they testified?

  “Because we wanted to win,” DeLaughter said flatly. He seemed relieved to be able to answer that, get it out of the way.

  “We were not in this to cover our tails, but to win,” he continued. “It would have been very easy to put on everything we had access to so in the event of a hung jury, in the event of an acquittal, we could have said ‘we put everything on.’

  “It was a strategic decision. Now that it’s over we can comment on this. Those leads were tracked down by the police department during the initial investigation. They did not pan out.” DeLaughter told them some of those witnesses could not identify Beckwith from a photographic lineup.

  “We would have been ambushed if we had gone down that rabbit trail,” he said. The defense had “any number of witnesses they could have put on including undercover detectives that would have testified that was absolutely not true…. We decided that any other case we would not run that risk, and we were going to win this and we wouldn’t make any exception.”

  Some other reporters brought up the lack of support the D.A.’s office had enjoyed from the “black community.”

  Ed Peters answered that one. “I didn’t want to say this, but since y’all asked, I was shocked and I was dismayed at the number of black jurors that said we shouldn’t be prosecuting this case, and they didn’t know who Medgar Evers was, and what in the world were we doing wasting money. I guess that was the last reaction I expected from black people.”

  Peters was saved from himself as all heads swung around for the arrival of Myrlie Evers and her family and bodyguards. Myrlie stood in front of the media pack, her chin up and eyes still brimming. “Is it left up to me to start?” she asked.

  She looked around for the right words, and a soft, urgent voice came from the crowd, “Let it go!” Myrlie clenched her hands and raised them in the air. She looked up at the heavens and shouted, “All I want to do is say, ‘Yay, Medgar! Yay!’ ”

  “It’s about time,” said Darrell, standing beside her. Reena stood on the other side, hiding her eyes behind dark glasses. They closed in around their mother while she collected her composure. Her voice smoothed out, and she was pensive again.

  “You all know that this has been a very long battle,” she began. “It has been thirty years and sometimes I think my children and I have lived double that, with the stress, strain, the turmoil, the emotional devastation.”

  She thanked by name the prosecutors who had seen the case through, even Charlie Crisco, who had not often been thanked in his career. She thanked the sheriff for making her “feel safe in our native home.” She answered questions about the meaning of the verdict and about the long, rough road she had traveled to learn to trust the prosecutors.

  She explained why she had been slow in coming down to the press conference. “I had to jump in the air,” she said, “and shed some tears and raise my face and say, ‘Medgar, I’ve gone the last mile of the way!’ ”

  Myrlie and her grown children spent the rest of the day giving interviews and visiting old friends at the hotel. On Sunday Myrlie got up at 6 a.m. and spent all morning with a crew from Good Morning America. They ended up using a few seconds of her interview on the air.

  Darrell and Reena were due to fly back home that night. But Darrell had one more piece of unfinished business to deal with.

  Charl
es Evers was at home in Fayette on Saturday morning when somebody, he thinks it was a reporter, called to tell him that Beckwith had been found guilty. He flipped on the big-screen TV and watched the press conference and the hourly reports on the national news.

  He could hardly believe it. The news made him happy, then sad, and then happy again. He’d never thought there would be anything other than a hung jury. He couldn’t stand to care about it again. But now — guilty! It made him proud of the whites and the blacks on that jury, the witnesses, everyone.

  Charles had kept his distance from this trial for a lot of reasons. He knew he couldn’t be in the same courtroom with Beckwith. He couldn’t just sit there and look at the man who killed his brother smirking and bouncing around in front of him. He would have to jump him and break his neck. He knew himself, and he told people that’s why he didn’t go to the trial.

  Besides he and Myrlie still weren’t getting along. He admitted it was his fault. He was bitter, he had always pushed her away, and pushed the kids away. But now, with this verdict, maybe they could be a family again. Maybe there was something could be done to correct the problem. It was up to him to make the change in himself.

  Darrell called his uncle and asked him to drive up to Jackson. Darrell had to see him. He wasn’t going to hear his uncle tell him that nobody loved him, or let his uncle keep up that wall, that tough-guy act. To Darrell the outcome of the trial was a transcendence, a moment that shimmers like a rare jewel, and his father’s brother had to be there to make it perfect.

  Charles met them Sunday afternoon at a restaurant in Jackson. Darrell, Reena, and even Myrlie hugged him.

  “Uncle Charlie,” Darrell said, “you’re the closest thing I’ve got to Daddy.”

  Darrell was crying, and so was Charles. Charles told them he was going to make an effort to come out to see them in Los Angeles. Get to know them and their families. And they were all invited to come be part of the homecoming this June. It was important to him now.

  After lunch Myrlie and her kids left to visit Medgar’s statue, but Charles didn’t go with them. He thought, No need to push things too fast.

  Ed Peters went fishing right after the press conference on Saturday afternoon.

  Charlie Crisco drove home to his house by the lake. He intended to spend time with his wife and daughter, lie in the hammock, drink coffee, chew tobacco, and play golf until he was ready to start all over again. A new court term would be starting in another week.

  Bobby DeLaughter went right home after the Everses left for their hotel. He told friends that he got some beer and a fistful of video westerns and he didn’t get up from the couch all day and all night. He just sat there with a beer in one hand and the remote control in the other. The idea was not to think about anything.

  On Sunday he went to church and then rode horses in the beautiful springlike weather. On Monday he finally started to come down, wandered around in his bathrobe all morning, and just did a lot of nothing until his mind settled down.

  On Tuesday Bobby was sitting alone in his office, paying bills. He hadn’t planned to come in to work at all, but he’d realized he had left all his mail on his desk and he needed to pay the phone and electric bills. He was wearing a white sports shirt and khakis. He was still not taking calls — not from Hollywood, Good Morning America, or anyone he didn’t know their mother’s name.

  The phone rang. He picked up the receiver and listened, frowning. “Newsday?” he said. “What’s that? Tell him to call the Clarion-Ledger.”

  DeLaughter intended to stay scarce as long as he could. He was planning to announce his candidacy for judge in a few weeks, and he didn’t want anyone to think that he was capitalizing on the verdict. Then the phone rang again, and he heard a request that he just couldn’t turn down.

  On Wednesday night, at 8 p.m., Charles Evers had a surprise visitor to his weekly talk show on WMPR. “Tonight our guest is Bobby DeLaughter, the assistant district attorney of Hinds and Yazoo Counties,” Evers purred in his deepest, softest public-radio voice. “Welcome to ‘Let’s Talk.’ ”

  Charles poured syrup all over Bobby, introducing him as “a young man who has gone out of his way to bring justice in this state, justice that was so long overdue. It made my family feel proud of you. .. . But first I want to ask you about the trial. What made you so interested in it? Why did you work so hard at it?”

  Bobby cleared his throat and repeated his now-familiar answer. He talked about the “intriguing facets” of the case and how the back-shooting assassination had chilled his blood, had really got to him.

  He praised the teamwork of blacks and whites. He sounded very much like a politician now. He said the case showed “that when we all pull together as a community, we can see that justice is done in our courts, whether the case is thirty days old or thirty years old.” He was very relaxed and polished.

  “I understand that you are anticipating running for office,” Evers said. Bobby said nothing.

  “I want you to know that if you do run, there are a lot of people who believe in what you stand for,” Evers continued. “I want you to know this is one old seventy-one-year-old man who will love you as long as there is breath in my body … for what you did for us.”

  A week later, Bobby DeLaughter stood on the front steps of the Hinds County Courthouse. With local television cameras rolling and a small crowd gathered, he announced his candidacy for appeals court judge. He ran unopposed in the Democratic primary.

  Ed Peters decided he might run for D.A. again after all.

  In the weeks after the trial Beckwith lived in his familiar cell in the hospital wing of the Hinds County Detention Center. All the guards knew him. Friends who visited him found him hobbling around on crutches. It turned out he had tripped over the trailer hitch on his car up in Batesville. He had sat through the whole trial with a small fracture in his lower leg, but he hadn’t told anyone about it.

  Coxwell worked on the appeal and tried to organize bail for his client. If he got Beckwith out on an appeal bond, he would probably be out for the rest of his life. But Judge Hilburn had left town for a vacation, so it was hard to get a hearing scheduled. Two months later Hilburn officially rejected Beckwith’s request for a new trial. There would be no bail. Coxwell and Kitchens intended to appeal right on up to the U.S. Supreme Court, but Beckwith would stay in jail.

  Coxwell’s new wife was expecting a son that summer. It would be his first child. It was too soon to tell how much the Beckwith case had harmed his practice, but he suspected it hadn’t helped him. Slowly his life came back to something like normal. In the beginning, he had thought that he and Bobby DeLaughter could get past this trial and come out friends. He didn’t think so anymore. All he would say when asked about Bobby was, “I wish him well with his career.”

  Myrlie Evers spent the next month on the road, stopping in at the national NAACP convention in New York, fulfilling the speaking engagements she had put off. By the middle of March she was back home in Oregon. She had started writing her memoirs while sitting in her lonely motel room in Batesville. She wanted to record everything — how it felt, how the old memories came rushing back. She needed peace and time to write.

  Myrlie wanted to see spring settle over the Cascades, sit at home with Walter, and let it finally sink in: it was done. Knowing that lifted weight off her shoulders, lightened her very bones, and she let the relief wash over her like a breeze.

  She thought: This must be how it feels to be free.

  The Klan was surprisingly placid in the days and weeks following the verdict. Richard Barrett was the only neo-Nazi to try to capitalize on the trial. He announced a “symposium” on the Beckwith case titled “Blackballing Beckwith, Whitewashing Evers.” Barrett booked a room in the Old Capitol Building, now a museum, for Tuesday, February 8. He undoubtedly thought the trial would still be going on and he could attract some of the national media on their lunch break. As it turned out, only three of his own black-shirted acolytes and one old man in a busi
ness suit showed up for the seminar. A photographer came but left without taking pictures.

  The only reported Klan incident, which seemed to have no connection with the case, happened a few weeks later. Three luckless young white boys burned a cross in the yard of an interracial couple in Walthall County. A friend immediately ratted them out to the FBI, and now they were facing a minimum of five years in federal prison.

  Not only right-wing ravers were unhappy about the way the trial had turned out.

  Since the case had been handled like a murder trial, not a political trial, there was a lingering feeling of unfulfillment among those who’d wanted it to be more. The conspiracy crowd was disappointed that the dirty laundry had not been dragged out. The man, and not the state, had been put on trial after all. The alleged complicity of the police, the culpability of the politicians, and the likelihood of at least one accomplice — these issues had been handled so lightly and fleetingly by Beckwith’s defense lawyers that suspicious-minded people, and there were enough of them in Mississippi, started to wonder whether it hadn’t been a deliberate cover-up.

  Before long there were stories circulating that “the government” had rushed the case through the court, that “they” had prevented the real criminals from being exposed. The conspiracy crowd was muttering for blood.

  They might still have their day. The Beckwith verdict had kicked open the way for new trials in the twenty-eight-year-old Vernon Dahmer case and possibly the Neshoba County murders of Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner, which had never been tried in state court. Sam Bowers was, again, the target. Before long an African-American CBS correspondent would be chasing him through a church parking lot in Laurel, demanding to know whether he had ordered Dahmer’s murder. A panicked Bowers squealed, “You’re not listening,” as he scrambled to escape.