In the Pines, page 17
But in the quest to understand what happened to Versie Johnson, the white woman is actually a distraction. In focusing on her, both the official story and the Black community’s alternative locate the attempt to make sense of Johnson’s death in the terms set by the rape myth. They shift the focus from Johnson to the white woman, from what has been done to a Black male body to what has been done to a white female one. Concern about her fate still works as many white southerners intended then—as a diversion, a way to deflect and deny the cruel, cold-blooded violence of white supremacy.
In August 1947, clerk Virginia Hartzog dared to describe what was obvious. From the windows of the Jeff Davis County sheriff’s office where she worked, she surely had seen the white men gathering outside her window on the courthouse lawn near the jail. She told at least one reporter that a mob of about seventy-five men had “given the sheriff until 8 o’clock” the night of August 1 “to get a confession” from Versie Johnson. Left unstated were the implications of the threat. If her boss failed, the mob would take over the job themselves.
In his conversations with reporters, my grandfather denied his own clerk’s statement. “About 75 people did gather around the jail as they will in any small town—out of curiosity,” he told the Clarion-Ledger. “But they were quiet and orderly and did not make any threats nor set any deadline by which I must determine which Negro was guilty of the crime.” By the end of September, Hartzog had left the sheriff’s office.
Oury Berry worked hard to control the release of information, but the story my grandfather told the press did not quite make sense. His clerk’s counternarrative was one complication. The bloodhounds and the timeline he offered were others.
The Jackson Clarion-Ledger reported that my grandfather sent word to a white man in Crystal Springs to bring his hounds the fifty miles or so to Prentiss. When the pack arrived, Johnson had already been arrested. Instead of using them to try to track suspects, the animals “were allowed to sniff Johnson’s shoes and were then taken to the scene of the crime,” where my grandfather hoped they would pick up the accused rapist’s scent and thus provide additional evidence. “But because of weather conditions and the lapse of time, the sheriff said, nothing definite could be ascertained from their actions.” At their next meeting, held about a month after Versie Johnson died, the Jeff Davis County Board of Supervisors authorized a payment of fifty dollars for the bloodhounds, making it clear that they were indeed brought to Prentiss. But the Headlight left the animals out of their account entirely, perhaps because, for a careful reader, they raised questions about the story. The weather might have been a factor—hounds have trouble following scents when they are panting heavily, and it was hot that day, with a high of around one hundred degrees. But if Johnson had been so quickly arrested and identified by his alleged victim, why did my grandfather even need to call in the hounds?
The official timeline was also a problem. A longer period of time between the alleged rape and Versie Johnson’s arrest might help explain the puzzling story about the cross: the strange scene described by both local and national newspapers in which Versie Johnson allegedly brought the white woman out of the woods following the rape, drew a cross on the wall of a nearby building, and swore her to secrecy upon it. Maybe the white woman or someone close to her made up the tale, with its implication that the alleged victim made a promise not to talk, to explain why, as Gamblin suggested, events unfolded over several days.
Beyond the odd tale of this oath, my grandfather’s official account of what happened constructed an impossible chronology. Berry told reporters that Versie Johnson arrived at the white woman’s house about 9 a.m. on Friday morning, August 1, and was killed that afternoon. That left only six to eight hours for a long list of things to happen: the alleged rape, the pregnant and injured woman’s long walk to town, her visit to the sheriff’s office and then the doctor, the hounds brought in from more than an hour away and then used, the nine men arrested, the woman taken to the jail to see the suspects and identify Versie Johnson, the gathering of armed white men on the courthouse lawn, the calling in of the patrolmen, members of the state police force whose help my grandfather would have had to ask for and one of whom lived twenty miles away, the trip back to the Lipsey farm, and the shooting during the alleged escape attempt.
Mitchell Gamblin described the story as Black people at the time understood it, including a more plausible course of events that took place over about a week. In his account, tensions built around Prentiss as Thompson spread his story about seeing Johnson and a white woman together in an intimate embrace that other white men turned into an accusation of rape. At some point, my grandfather acted. If Versie Johnson left something like his shoes behind at the white woman’s house, Oury Berry might have tried to use the hounds to track him. But it was also possible that he had already arrested Johnson and called in the pack to provide corroborating evidence by locating the Black man’s scent in or near the white woman’s home. It is worth noting, though, that neither of these efforts would have been necessary had the white woman confirmed Thompson’s story and accused Versie Johnson of rape. In Jeff Davis County as in many parts of the Jim Crow South, the white woman’s word would have been enough.
Whether or not Virginia Hartzog was right about the mob’s ultimatum, my grandfather would have had to consider his options while watching a crowd of armed voters, many of them people he knew, standing on the lawn outside his office. As he made his decision, he probably thought about the example of his predecessor, Sheriff Magee. But he also would have understood that some local white men were angry at Magee for his diligence in protecting the Sanford murder suspects. If the two convicted men had been executed as planned, Magee would have been forgiven. But the governor’s last-minute pardon of one of them meant that a Black man had gotten away with killing a white man, considered by those who knew him a leading citizen. In that light, the former sheriff’s success in protecting his prisoners looked to some local white men like a miscarriage of justice. Some of them were probably still mad. My grandfather might even have shared this feeling. And in the eyes of many whites, the current allegation that Johnson had raped a white woman was even worse than the accusation that Fortenberry and Franklin had killed a white man. What all this meant in 1947 was that if some of those armed and angry men on the courthouse lawn wanted to lynch Versie Johnson, they would not have been easily turned aside.
As my grandfather understood the situation, he would have had two main options. One choice was to give up and simply let the armed white men take Versie Johnson from his jail. The other was to follow Magee’s lead and do everything he could to protect his prisoner through the process of a trial and a legal execution. But whether he decided to send Versie Johnson away to an undisclosed jail in a nearby county or to the mob-proof Hinds County facility in Jackson or to hold him in his own jail, this path had significant obstacles. Versie Johnson, alternately identified at the time as a farm laborer or a sawmill worker, probably did not have the money to hire his own lawyer, so the judge would have to appoint an attorney. Then county officials would have to call a jury, the attorneys would have to select the jurors, and the judge would have to run a trial. Even in the rigged system of Mississippi justice, these proceedings would take a few days. Oury and his deputies would have to guard Johnson either in the Jeff Davis jail or in transport. They would also have to secure the courthouse and its surrounding grounds for the preliminary proceedings and the trial.
If my grandfather managed all this successfully, he would still face what he would have understood as another problem. In a trial, the pregnant white woman—his neighbor—would probably have to testify. Many white southerners would have argued that no white woman should be put through the trauma of having to face the Black man who had allegedly violated her and describe what happened to a courthouse full of people—the lawyers, the judge, members of the jury, and the spectators. Few white folks would have considered that it might have been hard for entirely different reasons, because she might have to look at Versie Johnson and lie.
In my grandfather’s mind, there was likely yet another difficulty. Given the place my grandfather lived, the job he held, and the man he was, he would have known one thing for certain. A trial of a Black man who had been accused of raping a white woman had only one possible outcome—conviction, and it was highly unlikely given the alleged crime of rape that the current governor would overturn the death sentence. After the court had gone through the motions, the state would send the truck with the mobile electric chair to Prentiss. Berry and his deputies would strap Versie Johnson in, and then my grandfather would throw the switch and watch and listen as another man died in agony. If this was the best possible outcome, my grandfather probably wondered, why go to all the trouble?
Oury might also have considered how, five years earlier, white men in the Piney Woods town of Laurel, about fifty miles east of Prentiss, had lynched Howard Wash, a Black man who had already been convicted of murdering his white employer. What happened with Wash made it clear a mob could act at any point, even after the trial. And if a lynching occurred, newspapers all over the country would report the story, and the FBI would probably investigate. If members of the mob engaged in torture, Prentiss would become the next Duck Hill—and both the town’s and my grandfather’s reputations would suffer accordingly.
But if my grandfather saw his choice as not how to protect Versie Johnson’s life but how to manage his death, then he almost certainly would have known that there was a third path: an alternative to handing Versie Johnson over to the lynch mob or keeping him safely imprisoned until he could be executed—another course of action that adhered to a different concept of law and order.
On August 1, 1947, my grandfather, Sheriff Berry, would have weighed the rights of a man Jim Crow had taught him to ignore against the future of the place he had spent most of his life, a county then experiencing a postwar economic boom. He also would have considered how his authority had already been undermined by men vying to replace him as sheriff. At least one candidate had attacked Berry’s record. Rumors had spread. Twice, it had gotten bad enough that my grandfather felt compelled to address the public. In February, the Prentiss Headlight published his words on the front page under the headline “Sheriff Makes Public Statement to the People”: “I want you to know that I appreciate everything you have done for me. I also want you, the people of Jefferson Davis County, to know that I have done the very best I could. I have made mistakes, but I assure you that they were honest ones.” He did not say what exactly these errors were, and my research has turned up no explanation. But my grandfather assured local citizens, “I have enforced the law the very best that I knew how and have fought the selling of liquor as hard as I could. And I expect to fight it as long as I am in office.” He asked white citizens to “help me and my deputies make this the hardest year the bootleggers and law-breakers have ever had.” And he closed with a plea “I will appreciate your co-operation to the end.”
In June, two months before he arrested Versie Johnson, my grandfather made another public statement. “It has come to my attention by rumor that there is now being operated in the Town of Prentiss on Main St., an open saloon.… This rumor is being spread by a candidate for the office of Sheriff of Jeff Davis County. I challenge this man, or any other person in Jeff Davis County, to substantiate this claim. I stand ready at any time, day or night, to raid any place, white or colored, rich or poor, on information that liquor is being sold at such place or places.” Again, he gestured at the vigilante actions so much a part of life there: “I have never refused to go with anyone or any group of people in the enforcement of the law, for better living and moral conditions.” Then he defended his work, in case people had forgotten all the notices in the Headlight describing Berry and Prentiss marshal Curtis Chance pouring hundreds of gallons of liquor into the concrete ditch beside the courthouse. “When I took the oath of office four years ago, I found conditions in regard to law enforcement in Jeff Davis County bad. In 1944, I made one thousand and twenty searches, personally delivering search warrants.” He ended by expressing his regret “that I am forced to protect my record as sheriff, but my books are open to any citizen of Jeff Davis County who might want to see a list of fines, arrests, and convictions that I have made in the last four years.”
Versie Johnson’s case offered my grandfather a chance to burnish his reputation just as primary voters chose his replacement. Given my grandparents’ financial circumstances—both Oury and Grace would be out of a job in early 1948 and they had sold the dairy—his reputation was not merely a matter of preserving his dignity. It was also the central qualification he would bring to any future livelihood. He could not serve two consecutive terms as sheriff, but after his replacement had run out his time in office, my grandfather would be eligible to run again. Proving himself capable of delivering what the white citizens of Jeff Davis County wanted now would help Oury Berry ensure that he’d get another chance to serve them later, as a future sheriff or in some other elected or appointed government position.
As my grandfather decided Versie Johnson’s fate, he most likely consulted other local leaders, members of the Jeff Davis County Board of Supervisors perhaps and possibly the mayor of Prentiss. At some point, he must have spoken with F. A. and Ruth Parker at the Headlight. He also called in those state police officers, Patrolman Spencer Puckett who lived in Prentiss, and Patrolman Andy Hopkins, who had to come from Mt. Olive, a town in neighboring Covington County. Whether or not he sought the counsel of any of these people as he planned his course of action, he would need them to help him carry it out. And he would need them to stick to the story.
I’d like to think that my grandfather’s choice was hard, that he made it reluctantly, that he did not want to do what he ultimately decided his personal interests and his duty as sheriff required. But no evidence survived to suggest that was true. In the Jim Crow South, only a fool or a saint would put the interests of a doomed Black man before the interests of white friends and neighbors who also happened to be voters. My grandfather was not a fool, and he would run and win two more times, serving as sheriff from 1952 to 1956 and from 1970 to 1973. Despite being a dedicated member of Prentiss Methodist Church, he was also not a saint. He did not seem to think about what Jesus would do. Neither did he discover within himself a heroic measure of character. When tested, he acted as many, perhaps most, white people would have acted. Without really looking at it closely, he upheld the racist order in which he lived and worked. He managed the situation.
My grandfather might not have been a hero as my mom remembered, but she was right about one thing. He did not turn Versie Johnson over to the mob at the courthouse. Instead, in what must have been a premeditated plan, he and the two patrolmen, Puckett and Hopkins, took Versie Johnson out of the jail and carried him to the Lipsey farm themselves.
While it was possible that the armed men from the courthouse lawn followed my grandfather’s car there, it was more likely that my grandfather told them what he intended to do. However they figured out what was happening, some of them also drove to the Lipsey farm, where they would serve as an audience as that plan unfolded. Ultimately, my grandfather would not let them kill Versie Johnson, but he was willing to let them watch.
Later, my grandfather explained to reporters that he, the patrolmen, and Versie Johnson ended up back at the scene of the crime because the Black man asked if he could show the officers what had happened. In other words, they had transported their prisoner there at his own request. I know this statement is a lie. No Black man accused of raping a white woman in Mississippi would ask to be taken out of the relative security of a jail cell, through an armed “crowd,” and out into a field on the edge of town.
What I do not know is whether my grandfather alone came up with the plan and shared it with others, like the patrolmen Puckett and Hopkins, or whether all three officers and possibly other white leaders collaborated on this course of action. I also do not know exactly what happened when my grandfather, Versie Johnson, and the two patrolmen got out of the car after the short drive from the courthouse to the Lipsey farm. Did they go right to the spot where the alleged rape had occurred, or did they park near the house where the white woman and her husband lived and walk from there? Did my grandfather actually ask Versie Johnson to explain what had happened, so that the assembled white men could hear his “confession”? Did all these preliminaries take a while or did he and the two patrolmen get to the business at hand quickly? Did the armed men watching stand back from the knot of officers around Versie Johnson or did they push in close?
One thing is clear. Versie Johnson knew. From the moment they arrested him, he would have realized it was a possibility. By the time they took him out of his cell, he would have been sure. As he sat handcuffed in the back of a car as one of the officers drove him to the Lipsey farm, Versie Johnson would have understood that my grandfather had made a deal with the mob. He knew he was about to die.
In logistical terms, for the white men, it was easy. The three officers fired three shots directly into Versie Johnson’s body. Protected by their allegation that Johnson tried to escape, they openly stated afterward that they shot him. They even admitted that there were witnesses, some or all of the people who had made up that mob, although an investigation conducted by justice of the peace C. V. Sutton after Johnson’s death never determined how many. The biggest challenge for my grandfather would have been getting the spectators who witnessed the killing to agree that Johnson had tried to escape. Maybe that had been an explicit part of the deal, that mob members could watch as the officers killed Versie if they promised they would not interfere then or talk about what happened afterward. As long as most white residents and the local paper stuck to the story, Oury Berry could be confident he and the highway patrolmen would get away with killing their prisoner. For a time, he was right.
