Sons of Mississippi by Paul Hendrickson

Author:Paul Hendrickson [Hendrickson, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-8041-5334-8
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2015-02-18T05:00:00+00:00

I once showed Charles Moore’s photograph to a man named Will D. Campbell. He is an ordained minister and a prolific author and a lifelong student of the South. For many years, he has lived outside of Nashville, but he is Mississippi in his origins and predilections. In the fifties, he had been a chaplain at Oxford. Now, in his little writing cabin, which is a hundred or so yards from his house in Mt. Juliet, Tennessee, the historian and man of God and lover of Mississippi and the South spread the magazine out on his knees and said, moving his head side to side, “Well, these are our people, aren’t they?” There was something so accepting in it.

I once showed the photograph to a Southern historian and Mississippi native named David Sansing. He is another gentle and gracious man. For years, he taught at Ole Miss; he is mad for the school, its traditions, its football glories, and finds that he can’t stay away from it even in his retirement. A couple of years ago, Sansing authored the sesquicentennial history of Ole Miss. He said that he has his young grandkids already preregistered for enrollment. He got very excited looking at the picture, which, curiously, he’d never seen before. He hunched forward and touched it, as so many have done. “You know what this is?” he said. “It’s life imitating life. These guys are posing for this picture. They know the rest of the country knows what they look like, and, hell, they’re just gonna show them that that’s exactly what they look like.”

I stood up from the table we were sitting at in the Alumni Center. “These are American white Southern bigots,” I said.

The retired professor stood up. He looked down at the photograph. “Yep, authentic bigots,” he said.

“But they insist on being taken as individuals?”

He hesitated. “Yes and no. What is that old thing? There’s security in numbers. Safety in it. They want to stay part of the group. Because they break down into their humanity when you get them one-on-one. They’re a little afraid of that. I think they’d rather stay part of the mob. This guy swinging that stick knows in his heart it’s wrong. He can’t help it. See, these guys are both individuals, and they are part of a much bigger face. They’re just freckles on a larger face. They couldn’t do what they’re doing if their wives and communities weren’t endorsing it.” None of this was said with rancor, and indeed I got the feeling that if the faces in Moore’s photograph could come to life off the flat page, Sansing would immediately be inclined to invite them into his home, to get a better fix on them, maybe.

“You sound like a man in conflict,” I said.

“Damn right,” he said. “Faulkner wrote about me. Remember his Nobel Prize speech? He talked of the human heart in conflict with itself. That’s Mississippi.”

I once showed the picture to John Herbers, another wise, gentle Mississippi son and retired reporter for the New York Times.

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