In The Electric Mist With Confederate Dead by James Lee Burke

Author:James Lee Burke [Burke, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: thriller

Regardless of Rosie's intentions about my welfare, I still had not resolved the possibility that the racial murder I had witnessed in 1957 and the sack of skin and polished bones Elrod Sykes had discovered in the Atchafalaya Basin were not somehow involved in this case.

However, where do you start in investigating a thirty-five-year-old homicide that was never even reported as such?

Although southern Louisiana, which is largely French Catholic, has a long and depressing record of racial prejudice and injustice, it never compared in intensity and violence to the treatment of black people in the northern portion of the state or in Mississippi, where even the murder of a child, Emmett Till, by two Klansmen in 1955 not only went unpunished but was collectively endorsed after the fact by the town in which it took place. There was no doubt that financial exploitation of black people in general, and sexual exploitation of black women in particular, were historically commonplace in our area, but lynching was rare, and neither I nor anyone I spoke to remembered a violent incident, other than the one I witnessed, or a singularly bad racial situation from the summer of 1957.

The largest newspapers in Louisiana are the Baton Rouge Morning Advocate and the New Orleans Times-Picayune. They also have the best libraries, or "morgues," of old newspapers and cross-referenced clippings. However, I started my strange odyssey into the past on the microfilm in the morgue of the Daily Iberian.

Actually I had little hope of finding any information that would be helpful. During that era little was published in Louisiana newspapers about people of color, except in the police report or perhaps on a separate page that was designated for news about black marriages.

But in my mind's eye I kept seeing the dead man's string-less boots and the rotted strips of rag about his pelvis instead of a belt. Had he been in custody? Was he being transported by a couple of cops who had decided to execute him? If that was the case, why wasn't he in handcuffs? Maybe they had locked the chain on him to sink his body, I thought. No, that couldn't be right. If the victim was being transported by cops, they would have kept him in cuffs until they had murdered him, then they would have removed the cuffs and weighted down the body. Also, why would cops want to sink the body in the Atchafalaya, anyway? They could have claimed that they stopped the car to let him relieve himself, he had taken off for the woods, and they had been forced to shoot him. That particular explanation about a prisoner's death was one that was seldom challenged.

Then I found it, on the area news page dated July 27, 1957. A twenty-eight-year-old Negro man by the name of DeWitt Prejean had been arrested in St. Landry Parish, north of Lafayette, for breaking into the home of a white family and threatening the wife with a butcher knife. There was no mention of motivation or intent.

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