December 2002 | I spent a lot of time in Holmes County, Mississippi, and the county seat, Lexington, including the period when I traveled with SNCC and stayed in their safe houses. At that time, the Mississippi Highway Patrol was, for all practical purposes, part of the White Citizens Council vigilante operation. Both persecuted civil rights workers and it was just as dangerous when in a "mixed" car (carrying both whites and blacks) to be followed by the patrol cruiser as by the Klan or the many Klan-like vigilantes. At the time, the sheriff of Holmes County was notorious for being an enforcer of segregation and a danger to the life and limb of civil rights workers from the north and to the colored people who cooperated with them.

For example, the courageous local paper was owned by Hazel Brannon Smith, a feisty southerner who was a natural rebel. She once wrote an editorial saying the sheriff simply must stop shooting Negroes in the back when they were in his custody and in shackles. I was once interviewing a young native black man working sympathetic to civil rights and when, to my dismay, I received a phone call from my office in Washington, D.C. (you always left contacts when you went South in case you remained incommunicado for an ominously long time). Less than two minutes after the phone call, which went through the old-fashioned local switchboard, a pickup truck with shotgun in its rack over the dashboard, with two men, were driving slowly back and forth on the dirt road of the house.

I finally left and when I got to the highway, the pickup truck followed me and tried repeatedly to push my car into a tree or into a deep ditch. They failed. But it was the sheriff who kept all such vigilantes informed and suggested how they could be helpful (i.e., harmful).

Twenty years later, I went with my wife to visit Hazel Brannon Smith but had forgotten how to get to her house. I went into the courthouse and asked a tough-looking white woman at the desk and she glared silently and then jerked her thumb down a corridor: "Y'all ask the sheriff." I walked down the hall prepared for a tough time and maybe the old tip-off to remaining enemies of "outsiders." As I approach the door to the sheriff's office, I saw his cowboy boots stretched out over the end of an extended lounge chair. As I got closer, I saw more and more of the sheriff's body, preparing to be insistent and unintimidated, and as I walked looked at more and more of his reclining body, for one reason to see if he had on his gun halter at his waist. Finally, I came to the door and saw his face. He was a black sheriff.

I was stunned. I explained that I had spent years in Holmes County and was looking for Hazel Brannon Smith.

"Why, sure. Old Hazel's got a fine, new place that's a miniature of Tara in Gone with the Wind. Let me draw you a map to get to her place." I found Hazel and her new place was a ridiculous, resplendent copy miniature of Tara. Everything had changed. I felt that Mississippi had rejoined the United States.

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