IN THE PINES

A painful tale of “a lynching and a lie.”

Hale is a University of Virginia professor of history and American studies and author of Making Whiteness and Cool Town. Her grandfather, Oury Berry, was “a great bear of a man I called Pa” and a white man who, as sheriff of Mississippi’s Jefferson Davis County in 1947, carried out the extrajudicial killing of a Black man, Versie Johnson, accused of the rape of a white woman. The lie is the family legend that Berry held off a lynch mob at the jail and had nothing to do with the murder. It is also the lie of white supremacy that sustained Jim Crow in the majority-Black county. Hale undertakes the exposure of the lie to do her part in “dismantling” white supremacy and to “lay the groundwork for repair, for acknowledgement and apology [and] also for reparations.” She also strives “to place Versie Johnson himself at the center of this particular historical tale.” In this way, the account that unfolds is a study in historiography as Hale parses both Black and white media and census for what scraps of truth about Black life in Mississippi she can find. The historical neglect of Black stories combines with the efforts of mid-20th-century white record-keepers to conceal lynching, and thereby suppress anti-lynching campaigns, to make this a tale of inference and speculation; words such as possibly and likely abound, underscoring the many gaps Hale struggles to understand. The frequent repetition of another phrase, my grandfather, however, simultaneously undermines the author’s attempts to center Johnson even as it makes clear her determination to accept her family’s implication in white supremacy. Still, Hale’s thorough focus on what locals still call Jeff Davis County ensures that readers emerge with an appreciation of the variations in Black experiences of Jim Crow. Some one-third of the county’s eligible Black population was registered to vote in 1954, for instance, and many were landowners.

A worthwhile addition to the literature on lynching.