The Ghosts of Mississippi (35 page)

Coxwell pointed out that his client should get bond because he was not charged with capital murder. The rules had changed since Beckwith’s first trials. The death penalty was reserved for killings in which there was an underlying felony, such as rape or robbery. Beckwith’s alleged crime was, in modern jurisprudence, a “simple murder.” Coxwell reminded the court that unless it was a death penalty case, some sort of bond had been granted to every other accused felon who had passed through this courthouse. That included suspected drug smugglers and gang killers.

To show the court that Beckwith was not dangerous and would not be a flight risk if released, the defense called some character witnesses to testify. One of them was Gordon Lackey.

Lackey was fifty-five years old. He was a tall, hearty man with steel-gray hair combed back from his forehead. He wore plastic aviator glasses and his sun-hardened face was set in a look of righteous determination.

Lackey made his living selling irrigation systems and spraying fields — he called it “aerial application” — from his own crop duster in the summer months. He had a teenaged son in private school, kept a collection of a hundred or more guns in his house and had a clean record with the law.

When Jim Kitchens asked Lackey the nature of his acquaintance with Beckwith, Lackey replied that he had known Delay most of his life, and that they’d had “many different relationships,” including business, social, and “fraternal” relationships. They had been fellow Masons and Shriners.

Lackey assured the court that Beckwith was a man of his word and was not a danger to the community. “I have never seen a single act of violence from this gentleman,” he said in his deep Delta voice.

Ed Peters rose to question the witness. “You’ve managed to tell us all the organizations that you belong to with this defendant,” he said. “You’ve omitted one, haven’t you?”

“What might that be, sir?” said Lackey.

“The Ku Klux Klan.”

Lackey appeared to be indignant. “I am not a Klansman, sir,” he said.

“You deny that you swore this defendant into the Ku Klux Klan?”

“How can a person that’s not a Klansman swear a person into the Klan?” Lackey said.

“So you deny that?”

“Oh, yes, sir.”

“Thank you.”

When the hearing ended, Judge Hilburn decided to keep Beckwith locked up until his trial date, which he set for February 1992.

Nobody expected that date to stick. But few suspected that the case would drag on for two more years.

Meanwhile there was an election in Mississippi. Charles Evers made his political comeback when he won the job of chancery clerk for Jefferson County.

Peters was reelected for his seventh consecutive four-year term as Hinds County district attorney. Since he had been unopposed, this was no shock.

The big surprise on November 5 was that the incumbent governor, Ray Mabus, was defeated by an unknown conservative businessman from Vicksburg named Kirk Fordice. No one was more stunned than Mabus himself, who quickly went into seclusion. The black voters, who had put him in office and whose support he’d apparently taken for granted, did not go to the polls for him. The state that was barreling headlong into a decade of change had suddenly slammed on the brakes.

Almost overnight the mood in Mississippi turned as hard as the dour new governor-elect. Some columnists made unkind comparisons between Fordice and David Duke, the baby-faced ex-Klansman who ran for governor of Louisiana on the Republican ticket. Duke lost his race, but some of his stands sounded uncomfortably like Fordice’s platform — anti-big government, anti-affirmative action, anti-welfare — the modern code words for keeping black folks down.

Fordice was fifty-seven years old and had thinning white hair and a craggy, weathered face. He smiled with his lower teeth. His abrupt, seven-minute inaugural address covered the usual topics: fiscal responsibility and cooperation among people. His new motto, “Together Forward,” was as blunt and graceless as the man himself.

He quickly set the tone for his administration. His favorite book, he told a group of elementary school students, was Machiavelli’s
The Prince.
At a meeting of the Mississippi Press Association, Fordice vowed to fight the Supreme Court-ordered equalization of funding to traditionally black and white state campuses. “We may have to call out the National Guard,” he said. In the uproar that followed, Fordice said he regretted his choice of words, but grumped, “C’mon people, if you can’t use a metaphor…”

Kim McGeoy was upset, just ticked off in general. The more he thought about it, the more it tortured him that his cousin Delay was still in jail.

McGeoy was twenty years younger than Beckwith, a distant cousin on Beckwith’s mother’s side. His full name was Morgan Kimbrough McGeoy, a nod to three old Mississippi families. He had grown up in Greenwood knowing the scandal surrounding Beckwith. But McGeoy had always liked Beckwith; he thought he was funny. And as ugly as Beckwith could act sometimes — such as calling a young boy “nigger” to his face, which was ungentlemanly behavior — McGeoy couldn’t believe that Beckwith was a killer.

Ever since this new trouble had started, McGeoy had visited his cousin in jail at least once a week. He did it out of kinship and loyalty, and because the old man was so entertaining.

McGeoy cornered patrons at the Dutch Bar on weekday afternoons and tried to get them to chip in for bail. He called Beckwith’s lawyers to push them to keep trying. He called Judge Hilburn to complain. To his surprise Hilburn invited him to come down to the courthouse and make a formal statement on the matter.

On January 14,1992, McGeoy met with Hilburn in his chambers. He started off by reminding the judge of Beckwith’s war record and that he deserved bond “due to the fact that the man has never run” from his previous charges. McGeoy reminded Hilburn of Beckwith’s good family name, of how he was descended from the founding families of Mississippi, and that he had “three or four hundred” relatives in LeFlore County alone.

Finally he got around to what he really wanted to say. “We’re letting one man stand alone, just like Jeff Davis stayed two years in manacles for the sins of us all. . . . We’re letting one man pay for the sins of people like Ross Barnett, people like Paul Johnson, who stood up for us at Ole Miss.”

This situation reminded McGeoy of the movie
Spartacus
that he had just watched on television. He told the judge about the crowd scene in the movie, where the soldiers wanted to arrest Spartacus and the slave leader stepped forward and turned himself in, saying, “I’m Spartacus.”

Then all the other slaves stood up and said, “I’m Spartacus.” The scene reminded McGeoy of the case against his cousin.

“Well, there were a lot of people, actually in my feeling, killed Medgar Evers,” he said. “Who pulled the trigger, I don’t know.”

“I understand,” the judge said. But he didn’t seem to. He suggested that McGeoy advise Beckwith’s lawyers to ask for another bail hearing.

That was just what the lawyers had in mind. Coxwell had drawn up fill-in statements for friends who would attest to Beckwith’s character, his ties to the community, and the unlikelihood of his flight.

On February 24, Coxwell submitted to the court eighty-eight completed affidavits. Most were filled out by old friends from Greenwood, but some signers had interesting political associations. Two were Mississippi sheriffs. Robert Patterson, the aged founder of the Citizens’ Councils, wrote Beckwith a recommendation. More than a dozen others were reputed members of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.

Although Sam Bowers did not fill out a character reference for his old friend, he did take an active interest in the case. One day he showed up, unannounced, at Coxwell’s office. He handed the receptionist a business card that said his name was “Mr. Bancroft,” apparently one of his aliases. Coxwell recognized him and invited him in to talk. Bowers came several times to offer Coxwell long treatises on legal strategies to defend Beckwith. Coxwell listened politely.

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.”