| Racism is as foreign to me as Monkey's
Brains or Whips and Chains. I mean, I know what the word actually
insinuates, but my understanding of it is quite limited. Details
aside, I wasn't brought up that way. Although my family was spawned
from the most bigot infested portions of south Alabama, by the time this
little "accident" was actually old enough to percieve the difference between
brown and pale greenish pink, my mother had long since banished any reticent
racist attitudes. It was simply unheard of to use "nigger" in a sentence,
although "backwards-ass country dumbshit" could still be caught coming
from the lips of my father. So even though I'm sure that those northern
Indians are quite fond of live Monkey's Brains, and though I've heard that
beating someone with a cat-o-nine can induce the most astoundingly sensual
experiences known to man, I can honestly say that those culinary fixations
and physical sensations are about as comprehensable as understanding bigotry.
It's another culture... another time... another world. |
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| So let's travel to another world.
Tuning the Way-Back Machine to June 12, 1963, we find ourselves watching
the murder of Medgar Evers. Evers was a Mississippi cival rights
activist who traveled the area disguised as a sharecropper, uncovering
injustice and observing the oppressed plight of southern blacks.
After pulling into his driveway and grabbing a batch of "Jim Crow Must
Go" T-shirts from his car, Medgar Evers was assasinated with a simple shot
to the back. His wife and children rushed out to see what happened,
only to watch their husband and father slowly bleeding to death before
their eyes. The killer was radical white supremist, Byron De La Beckwith.
Beckwith is currently serving a life sentence for this murder and considers
himself to be a political prisoner, but the most astonishing factlet of
this little jaunt into our beloved past, is that Byron "Dee-Lay" Beckwith
wasn't convicted until 1994. |
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| Willie Morris, author of The Ghosts
of Medgar Evers attended that hearing and remembers it well.
He remembers the original crime and observed the kind of bigotry that spawned
hatred and violence against the blacks of the south. He watched a
white policeman shoot a black criminal on the streets of Jackson, Mississippi,
then hold his ground over the bleeding suspect until life had drained from
him. He loves his home state, but like all people born into wars
and conflicts that make no damn sense, he had visions of unresolved justice.
Thus, when discovering that stories of 1964 jury tampering had reopened
the murder case of Medgar Evers, Willie Morris returned to see the fish
that got away. This time, the good-ole-boy network of Mississippi
wasn't going to be able to save the poster child of the plantation generation.
This time, "Dee-lay" was going to pay the piper he jilted twice before
in 1964. |
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Forfront in this dramatic tale of
"Justice Delayed" was the main investigator and soon-to-be movie icon Bobby
Delaughter. Months and months of intense investigation and an astonishingly
impressive moral character earned him accolades after the conviction, drawing
the attention of Frank Zollo and eventually, Rob Reiner. The tale
of Beckwith's conviction was soon to be a major Hollywood production
with Delaughter as the main character. The tale of Medgar Evers would
be told, and historical accuracy was the flagship for this expedition into
the racist background of Mississippi. With Mississippi Burning having
been released just before this "Untitled Mississippi Project", the stage
was set for less than hospitable responses from the natives. But
this is just a stage within a stage... a setting for Willie Morris' recount
of the making of Ghosts of Mississippi. And although it took me four
paragraphs to set up the primary conflict explored within Ghost of Medgar
Evers, I hope you see the potential this context provides as I did. |
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| Unfamiliar with the background of
this book, I sincerely looked forward to the myriad reflections available
within this arena. I anticipated watching as the efforts of the film
crew were inhibited by fearful villagers with torches. I imagined
my appreciation for the historical events would grow through first hand
accounts of the character and workof Medgar and the recollections attributed
to Beckwith. I hoped to see new sides of the film creation process
exposed through witty tales and intense dilemmas. And I especially
appreciated the binding force of Willie Morris, a man who sat through all
four acts of Beckwith's tragedy and stood beside Rob Reiner for six
months of re-creation. It seemed the novel combination for a multi-leveled
analysis of true racism and triumphant justice. |
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| For the most part, if one takes every
adjective from the previous paragraph and replaces it with a much more
mild synonym, then one understands what was actually delivered.
Individually, the events described in Morris' book are far more low key
than expected. The film crew's troubles were mostly financial, such as
individual location owners trying to charge more money than the land
was worth, or histronic, such as finding small details difficult to recreate
for one reason or another. The historical ramifications of Medgar
Evers are largely ignored. It is assumed that the reader accepts
Medgar's greatness through a few interesting tales, but a more detailed
image of the inspiration for all this trauma is never painted. Oddly,
more attention is payed to Bobby Delaughter's inpecable character and Byron
De La Beckwith's abominable zeal for disharmony. The stories of the
film creation process were repetitive, often bordering on the mundane.
Many pages were spent reflecting on the conglomerate cluster-fuck that
has somehow unknotted itself into the film industry. Amazement about how
improbable movie-making seems in the face of average opposition wore thin
after the few few dozen comments. I expected magic-makers and titans,
but I got something more real and less interesting. |
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| So let's pitch the fiction Ghost
of Medgar Evers COULD have been out the window and look at the assets left
by good non-fiction. First, I still found myself immensely impressed
by the author's knowledge, exposure, and verbiage. I felt "in the
know" while reading quotes from various stars, movie-makers, and historical
relevants. These were not comments mentioned during an interview
or a press conference, these words came fron the heart while driving to
dinner or viewing memorable portions of the film. And although many
of the stories sounded like outtakes from Chicken Soup for the Soul, I
found myself engrossed in many of the recollections. Additionally,
the author had exposure to producers, writers, directors, and actors.
He knew the cops, the Evers family, and other prominent figures in the
real life drama. We get to read about these events from dozens of
angles thanks to Willie Morris. |
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Additionally, I found the lead-up
to the making of the film and the reprocussions after the film was released
highly compelling. Seeing the struggles for historical accuracy amid
desires for a box office hit compared only to the savage commentary quoted
upon the films release. Knowing how much work went into this film
and the devotion of everyone involved, it's truly distrubing to watch the
critics savage it over mild historical discrepancies and compare
it to the movie they think should have been made in its stead. Much criticism
revolved around the choice of a white hero for this tale of black justice.
One black critic commented that the african-american community had it's
cause injured once again by Hollywood's portrayal of the white man solving
the black man's troubles. Pages and pages of commentary also contain a
list of actual historical inaccuracies within Ghosts of Mississippi, and
although I haven't seen the film, I was really fancinated by how
little was changed for artistic license. It's nice to know that titans
and magic-makers do walk the earth of the mundane, even if they are only
aluded to in this account. |
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| The Ghosts of Medgar Evers seems
to tell a story about racism, but ends up telling a story about people.
Some of the people in his book are racist, but this tome offers no more
insight into the motivations and machinations of bigotry than one finds
on TV. Racism is still that spectral boogyman hiding in people's closets
and scaring them when they least expect... no rhyme... no reason.
Oddly, I think that the closest point I got to real racism in this book
was in that black reviewer's commentary that a white hero degrades the
black cause. It seems to me that racism is about division. Seeking
justice in the Medgar Evers case should be everyone's heroic cause,
not just a particular color or creed. Making declarations of
"turf" or "dibs" on heroic capacities based on one's COLOR just adds more
division to our people and reduces the ranks of those heroicly seeking
justice. But what do I know? It's all Monkey's Brains and Whips
and Chains to me. |
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