Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, November 14, 1995 TAG: 9511150005
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: OVERTON McGHEHEE SPECIAL TO THE ROANOKE TIMES
DATELINE: CHARLOTTESVILLE LENGTH: Long
"What could they be trying to sell me?" Maryanne Vollers wondered. "Some CD ROM I can't afford?"
At first it didn't occur to her that the call might have something to do with her book. After spending most of three years in Mississippi, probing one the most painful unhealed wounds of the South's past, she was prepared to accept that her book about the murder of Medgar Evers and the three trials of Byron De La Beckwith was headed for the remainder shelves after a single printing.
What Baldwin was trying to tell Vollers was that her book is one of five finalists for the National Book Award in nonfiction. The winner will be announced Wednesday night.
``Ghosts of Mississippi: the Murder of Medgar Evers, the Trials of Byron De La Beckwith, and the Haunting of the New South" is Vollers' first book. The 39-year-old author had been a folk singer, an editor at Rolling Stone and a free-lance magazine writer and television producer in Africa before she immersed herself in one of the South's most painful stories.
In 1989, Vollers and her husband, Bill Campbell, a Time magazine photographer, returned from Kenya and settled in Albemarle County, near Charlottesville. Two years later, she went to Mississippi to begin work on her book.
The National Book Award nomination is the beginning of a second life for a book that was barely promoted by its publisher and largely unread by reviewers the first time around.
``It didn't get reviewed by the New York Times or the Washington Post or the L.A. Times or anybody like that,'' Vollers recalled. ``I was thinking, `What if you wrote a book and it fell over in the woods? Would anyone know?'
``I had accepted that it was over for this book. A couple of weeks ago I was putting flowers on its grave. Then I got this phone call.''
The nomination and accompanying book promotion may cause more people to read about one of the most amazing sagas of our recent history, a story some want told and some want forgotten.
One June night in 1963, Beckwith crouched in the weeds with a World War I rifle and shot a man in the back as he came home from work. The man he killed was Evers, Mississippi field secretary for the NAACP.
Evers was a black Mississippian who had returned from World War II determined to make a difference. As an NAACP official, he had become known for his courage and for his ability to bring together groups with different visions of how best to end racial inequality.
Vollers' spent a lot of time with Evers' widow, Myrlie Evers, and felt that she came to know Medgar Evers, as well. ``He must have been a wonderful man because 30 years later, people still couldn't talk about him without weeping,'' Vollers said. ``I came to feel very strongly about Medgar Evers and, like his widow, wanted him to be remembered.
``Myrlie Evers was determined to keep her husband's legacy alive,'' Vollers said. ``In the process, she became his greatest legacy.''
A few months after Vollers' book went to press, the leadership of the NAACP elected Evers to lead the national organization for which her husband gave his life.
Beckwith was tried for murder twice in 1964. White policemen supplied him with an alibi and each trial ended in a hung jury.
Even some white Mississippians viewed Beckwith as a race-obsessed crank and possible murderer, but his beliefs weren't too far from those of the White Citizens Councils that were virtually running Mississippi. And to many members of the Ku Klux Klan, he was a celebrity.
So, after his first two trials, Beckwith was free to recruit for the Klan and to boast, ``Killing that nigger caused me no more inner discomfort than our wives endure when they give birth to our children.''
The Evers murder case was dormant until 1989, when a young prosecutor named Bobby Delaughter noticed a newspaper article about newly-uncovered evidence that a White Citizens Council had tampered with Beckwith's second jury. He renewed the investigation and in 1994 Beckwith was tried for murder for the third time.
Vollers was in Mississippi for most of three years, tracking the investigation, the pretrial legal combat and the trial.
``It was my first book,'' Vollers said. ``I was afraid that if I came home for too long, I'd miss something.''
Her book portrays a changed Mississippi that judged Beckwith 30 years after Evers' death. The jury was integrated, fewer people were willing to cover for Beckwith and more were willing to come forward with what they knew about his crime.
This time, Beckwith was convicted and sent to prison.
Some white Mississippians had dreaded the re-opening of the Evers murder case for fear that it would revive old antagonisms. Vollers believes the effect of the trial was not strife, but healing.
``I really believe that in order to shake off the past, you have to deal with and take care of that unfinished business,'' Vollers said. ``Symbolism is important. It gives people hope.''
In ``Ghosts of Mississippi,'' Vollers quoted Myrlie Evers' answer to that concern.
``We have to settle these dastardly acts of old,'' she said. ``If we don't, we will live with ghosts that will haunt us forever.''
by CNB