In the Pines, page 5
In this way, white supremacy does not just shape the course of human affairs. It does not just kill and injure people. It also destroys evidence. It makes it difficult and even at times impossible for Americans to know the truth about their history. Without official documents or family papers and oral histories, family trees can be as stunted as pine saplings deprived of space and light.
For Black Americans with enslaved ancestors, official records produced before Emancipation offer little information. In 1850 and 1860, the US Census produced “slave schedules,” forms which listed enslaved people by age and gender and race, either Black or “mulatto,” a term used then to refer to biracial or mixed Black and white ancestry, under the name of their master or mistress. But these documents rarely included these individuals’ names. The US Census, the once-a-decade count of the nation’s population, did not provide anything close to a full accounting of Black people by name until 1870.
As a result, it is difficult to trace Versie Johnson’s ancestors in official documents back before 1870. His great-great-grandparents Jack and Rachel Baggett lived in Lawrence County then in a section surveyed as Township 6 North, Range 11 West, a rural area just west of the Pearl River and not that far from the future Lawrence–Jeff Davis County border. Rachel, about forty-five, and Jack, about fifty, worked as farm laborers. Before Emancipation, they had likely been enslaved by William Pickens Baggett, a Lawrence County resident living in an area that would become southwestern Jeff Davis County. Thirty people are listed by age and gender under Baggett’s name in the 1860 “slave census,” including a Black man age forty, a Black woman age thirty-four, and two Black girls, ages nine and five, likely Jack and Rachel and their two daughters, Anna and Clara. Jack died between 1870 and 1880. After losing her husband, Rachel moved in with her daughter Clara Baggett Cooper, whose occupation was “keeping house”; her son-in-law James Cooper, a farmer; and her five-year-old granddaughter, Anna, named after one of Rachel’s other daughters. Their household was in Beat 1 of Lawrence County (beats are political precincts). Census takers in 1880 described Rachel, age sixty, as having no occupation. In actuality, she was retired.
Like most people in bondage in Mississippi, Versie Johnson’s great-great-grandmother Rachel Baggett ended up in the state as part of what scholars called the second Middle Passage, a domestic slave trade that sent approximately one million men, women, and children west from eastern states like Virginia. However difficult the overland journey was for white settlers, enslaved people traveled all those hard miles on foot or in wagons or boats carrying a burden of unimaginable loss. Because Rachel lived long enough to be counted in the 1880 census, which collected each person’s birthplace as well as the birthplaces of their mother and father, she left a partial map of her forced journey. Like the Berry siblings, her mother and father were both born in Virginia. Her grandparents and great-grandparents might have been born at any of the points along the winding routes of the transatlantic slave trade, a nation or empire in the central or western regions of Africa like the Asante Empire, a colonial outpost in the Caribbean like Barbados, or a plantation along the James River in Virginia or in the Low Country of South Carolina. At some point in her youth, Rachel’s mother was forced to move. When she gave birth to Rachel around 1820 in North Carolina, she might already have been on the road to Mississippi. Alternately, those who claimed to own her might have migrated south to North Carolina before selling Rachel to traders or taking her with them as they migrated again, this time to Mississippi.
Emancipation gave Clara and James Cooper, Versie Johnson’s grandparents, the opportunity to stay in one area on land they rented or sharecropped in Lawrence County near the Fair River community, a rural settlement that would fall on either side of a new boundary line when Lincoln County was formed in 1870. Their daughter Lizzie Cooper, Versie Johnson’s mother, was born there in June 1880, likely right after the census taker recorded the names of her grandmother, parents, and sister.
Lizzie grew up in Fair River, taking advantage of her freedom to go to school and learn to read and write, an opportunity her parents and grandmother had been denied. On December 23, 1898, she married William Johnson in Lincoln County.
Because Johnson is a common last name in Mississippi and William often gets shortened to Will, Willie, or Bill, the genealogy of Versie Johnson’s father remains a mystery. Versie’s birth certificate lists his parents as Bill Johnson and Lizzie Cooper Johnson of Nola, Mississippi, a small settlement just north of Fair River. His death certificate states his father, Willie Johnson, was born in Rankin County. The 1880 census included no Black boys the right age in Rankin County, but two lived in Hinds, the next county west. Either could be Versie Johnson’s father, but it was also possible Willie’s family moved to another part of the state or even to another state after he was born. Without this paternal genealogy, Versie Johnson’s family tree is missing half its branches.
People from elsewhere tend to think of Mississippi as somehow outside of time, stuck in the past and isolated, a place where nothing ever changes. South Mississippi, like many places in this mostly rural state and in other parts of rural America, defies this stereotype. In the Piney Woods, radical change has shaped the lives of people in every generation: Choctaws and white people fighting over the land, the Civil War and Reconstruction, a late nineteenth-century economic depression, waves of lynching and other acts of racial violence, the clear-cutting of the old forests between the 1890s and the 1930s, the Great Depression, World War II, and the civil rights movement. People who live there differ radically from one another in the degree to which they have been the perpetrators or the victims of the violence that often accompanied these transformations. Yet they do share one thing. Since the early nineteenth century, there has never been enough peace in this place to establish something as static as “a way of life.”
Oury Berry was born in Jeff Davis County in 1907. Versie Johnson was born eight years later, about twenty-five miles west of Prentiss in Lawrence County. Maybe in their separate childhoods, the two boys had a chance to run in the open green light of the giant pines, hunt quail in the grass between the trees, fish in a creek, or nap on the long, sweet needles. Maybe they caught a glimpse of what their world had been. Whether they experienced the beauty or not, they certainly saw the carnage—miles of stumps, rotting piles of slash, red clay gullies, silted-up streams, idle sawmills, lumber camps full of abandoned “cut-to-pattern” houses, railroad spurs sprouting weeds, gaunt cities, and lean towns. They spent their lives in the ruins.
2.
A GAMBLE
In 1906, before Oury Berry and Versie Johnson were born, before Jeff Davis County had even held an election or built a courthouse, a Black man named Wood Ambrose—or more likely Ambrose Wood—was lynched in Prentiss.
The trouble started with a game. Playing craps in a circle of swept dirt in the yard of a mill was a dangerous way to make a dollar. Wood must have known this when he joined the bettors on a June Sunday. He brought his gun. But just living was a gamble. Why not make a bet and roll?
Nothing Wood could do was actually safe. He might have been employed at the place where he played craps. Whether it processed logs or ground corn or both for locals, Watkins mill, about a mile west of Prentiss, was a small operation. But the big timber companies busy turning the old longleaf pine forests into lumber needed so many men that they had driven up pay across the Piney Woods. Laborers, some of them Black men, were making as much as $1.50 or even $2.00 for a twelve-hour day at the large sawmills. The problem was the risk. Human limbs got caught in the whizzing belts and blades. Boilers blew. Cables snapped. Rough logs as well as finished boards fell. Men died. Injured men who survived often had to find different jobs if they could work at all.
Other jobs wrecked Black lives in other ways. In the Piney Woods, timber companies built their own railroads. Ambrose Wood might have graded routes or laid track. He could have worked on a timber crew, running a saw through the thick-sapped pines, trimming off the branches, and loading the trunks onto railroad cars. Whatever other jobs he held, at some point he probably spent time on a farm. Some landowners hired hands, though wages were low, around 50 cents a day. Sharecropping, more common, was another kind of gamble. If Wood had a wife and kids, the family would work all year, planting and chopping and picking cotton, hostage to the whims of weather, markets, and merchants, waiting on an annual payout that rarely came. The few jobs outside timber and agriculture had their own problems. Feeding raw cotton into a gin only lasted the length of the picking season. Loading supplies into white men’s wagons outside a store required bowing and scraping and yes-sir-ing in a humiliating performance of subservience.
Wood’s other option was rambling, making a living on the road. If he played an instrument, he could earn food and drink and a few dollars playing at informal venues called juke joints, barrelhouses, or blind tigers. In these kinds of places, Black musicians were inventing the blues. Other men on the move worked as professional gamblers, winning locals’ money at logging and railroad camps and mill settlements through skill and trickery.
Wood was probably not a local, because no one with a name anything like his appeared in southern Mississippi in the 1900 census. Wherever he moved from, if he worked at the mill he likely lived nearby, possibly in housing supplied by his boss. If he lived on the road, he probably showed up at Watkins mill Saturday night, just as men who earned cash wages were being paid. Maybe he played cards, too, or ran the craps game himself. One newspaper report said he used the alias Bud Maston. That was not the kind of detail white papers usually lied about. He must have had a reason to hide his real name. Mill owners and foremen tried to keep known gamblers out of their camps. Most men had knives. Many had guns. Men would lose their money and get mad. Someone might get killed. Someone often did.
If the fighting at Watkins mill that Sunday summer evening had just been between Black people, nobody with any authority would have cared. But white men were there, too. In theory, in this Jim Crow world, an illegal gambling party should have been segregated. In practice, white men went where they wanted. On Sundays, the only thing officially open in the Piney Woods was church. At the mill, Black men and possibly women were having a ball betting and drinking. On the edge of the crowd, someone probably played a guitar and sang. Some white men, likely timber or mill workers or young farmers, decided to go, knowing no Black person could stop them. H. J. Berry, Oury Berry’s father and my great-grandfather, could well have been one of the white men there that afternoon. He worked in the timber industry and lived west of Prentiss in the direction of Watkins mill. He also drank. Whether or not he gambled, the liquor might have drawn him.
Somehow, the craps game turned violent. One newspaper described Wood shooting into a mixed-race crowd and also firing at John Williams, a white man, six times without hitting him. Other newspapers reported that Wood killed a white man, often unnamed but sometimes referred to as Sullivan. Wood might have been running a rigged game, and a white man who felt he was cheated got mad. It was also possible that someone else was running a crooked game and that Wood was the player who felt he had been taken. Or the game might have been fair, and Wood simply “lost his money and temper,” as one newspaper reported, or Wood won, and a white man did not like it.
Any of these things could have happened. What was clear was that white and Black men were gambling and drinking, and someone started shooting. Newspapers reported that Wood fired and then fled.
It was possible that vigilantes had killed Black people in this area before 1906, when the land was part of Covington and Lawrence Counties. The Equal Justice Initiative found no lynchings in Covington, but it did record six in Lawrence, and no exact location survived for three of them, one in 1886 and two in 1890 carried out as part of whites’ violent reassertion of white supremacy in the late 1880s and early 1890s. It was also possible that other, unreported lynchings of Black people occurred in this territory—both before and after Ambrose Wood was killed.
But because Wood’s murder became the first recorded lynching in the new county, it established a pattern for Versie Johnson’s death four decades later. The Mississippi legislature had created the county that spring, and residents had just chosen the three-year-old railroad town of Prentiss as the county seat. When vigilantes aided by local law enforcement officials killed Ambrose Wood, everything there was new except white people’s determination to assert white supremacy.
Appointed officials Constable T. E. Davidson and Marshal R. R. Berry, a future sheriff and my grandfather Oury Berry’s distant cousin, told a paper they tried to arrest Wood in Prentiss, the only place they would have had jurisdiction. They claimed he drew his pistol, and in response, they shot him in the leg. Still, Wood managed to run. What other option did he have? The two officers chased him a mile before they caught him. Then they placed Wood in whatever structure passed for a jail in the new town.
As they worked to capture Wood, the two officers probably had some help from local white citizens. Like many of their counterparts across the South, Piney Woods white men had always taken the law into their own hands. Rather than an abstract set of rules and principles, the law was whatever respectable white men did to preserve their vision of the local order. The law was their collective authority to act. And their collective actions—their hands—were the law. Most of the time, white men delegated their authority to people they voted for, like sheriffs and constables. These men then became the hands of the law. But this delegation was always contingent. Government officials, even local men they knew, never held a monopoly on the right to threaten or use force. When those officials could not or would not act for them and even sometimes when they would, many white men believed they retained the collective authority to act for themselves. A mob, as the Jackson Clarion-Ledger declared in 1889, “may almost be termed a jury of the whole people.” Thirty years later, the Meridian Star argued, “The men who do the lynchings are not the men who flout the law, but the men who sincerely believe they have the best interest of their fellow men and women at heart.” In this way of thinking, white men were not vigilantes opposed to the rule of law. They were the citizens who embodied and created it. Their collective authority made abstract law live in the world.
While there were always some whites in the region who openly criticized other whites for taking the law into their own hands, many understood lynching and other acts of vigilante violence as community policing. This practice had deep roots in slave patrols, loosely organized groups of white men who threatened, assaulted, and killed Black men and women in the antebellum era. Sometimes, these patrols branched out into collective violence targeted at other white people, too. In the 1840s, a Piney Woods white man named Gallendee ran up to a traveler “shouting murder.” “Judge Lynch”—a self-appointed group of white men who lived nearby—had accused him of stealing hogs and whipped him so harshly that his shirt hung in tatters. Half a century later, a mob accused another Piney Woods white man named Virgil Keene of raping a young white woman in Fair River near the border of Lincoln and Lawrence Counties. Keene was Oury Berry’s father-in-law and another of my great-grandfathers. He survived because the woman took back her accusation. Other white men were not so lucky. The year a white mob killed Wood, several Mississippi white men lynched another white man after an argument about the treatment of a dog.
These exceptions notwithstanding, most of the victims of this kind of community law enforcement were Black. Before Emancipation, enslaved people who ran away or refused to work or did something else their owners or local law enforcement considered a crime could simply be sold. Freedom eliminated this check on white violence. Vigilante behavior exploded during Reconstruction, and in an era when Black men were still able to vote, whites in places with large Black majorities were often quicker to resort to violence. Between 1865 and 1877, white southerners lynched almost two thousand Black people.
In the late nineteenth century, violence again increased across the South as Black people struggled to hang on to their citizenship rights and white voters divided into factions that fought one another for control. Formerly enslaved people played a pivotal role in a variety of local and state-level political organizations in this period, creating alliances with white voters to form new branches of the Republican Party as well as new parties, and more rarely, to run alternative slates of Democratic candidates. They were opposed by members of the Democratic Party establishment and other white people working to reinstate white supremacy and elite control, an act they called by the euphemism “redemption.” In the Piney Woods of Mississippi, a region with many more small farmers than planters, white and Black residents created branches of the Republican Party that successfully ran candidates. Local Republicans in Lawrence and Covington Counties remained competitive and elected local officials through the 1890s. In this period, it was not yet clear who would control the post-Reconstruction South. But as “redeemers” resorted to force to break up the political alliances that opposed them, lynchings and other acts of violence surged across the South. Between 1883 and 1905, lynchers in Mississippi murdered at least 379 Black people.
Sometimes, white men created more organized groups to do this work. During Reconstruction, terrorist militias like the KKK and less well-known groups like the Society of the White Rose, the Seventy-Six Association, and other white “protective” leagues killed around three hundred white and Black people in Mississippi and assaulted and threatened many more in an ultimately successful effort to disfranchise Black voters and their white allies and reassert racist rule. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, white residents of the Piney Woods organized armed militias called Whitecaps, a new version of the outlawed KKK with its white hoods. All around the territory that would become Jeff Davis County, these groups beat Black residents and fired shots into and burned their homes. They also attacked white merchants they accused of being foreigners and Jews. Three years before a mob killed Wood, members of a Lincoln County militia lynched two Black men who owned farms.
