Trigger warnings for racialized violence, brief descriptions of torture, and lynching.
Historian Grace Elizabeth Hale was told, when she was young, that her grandfather, a sheriff in Prentiss, Mississippi, once helped to fend off a lynch mob intent on murdering a Black man. Years later, when she looked for newspaper accounts of the event, Hale was shocked to discover that the story she was told was all a fiction. In the Pines: A Lynching, a Lie, a Reckoning, Hale punctures the silence and lies covering the brutal reality of racial violence in one Mississippi county.
Hale’s scholarship—a blend of archival research and interviews with residents of Prentiss, Mississippi—creates a portrait of a divided community. (Appropriately, Prentiss is located in Jefferson Davis County, named for the only president of the Confederate States of America.) Prentiss is an idyllic place to raise a family, if that family is white. For Black families, it was a sinister town where Black residents were terrorized by White residents and white supremacist institutions for decades after the end of Reconstruction. Even the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and court decisions like Brown v. Board of Education did little to establish equal rights and equal justice in Prentiss. Hale points out that the town filled in its own public pool just a few years after it was completed so that the pool wouldn’t be integrated.
Hale’s research reveals that her grandfather, Oury Berry, was involved in the 1947 lynching of Versie Johnson along with two deputies and, possibly, others. Seventy-five years later, little is known about what really happened in the woods near Prentiss where Johnson was murdered. Hale also points out how skimpy the evidence is for Johnson’s life. His name is misspelled in several official documents. Hale attempts to recreate what Johnson’s life might have been like through imagination and extrapolation from the biographies of other Black Mississippians to make Johnson more than just another name among thousands of lynching victims. Hale is on firmer ground when it comes to her grandfather’s life. Unlike Johnson and his family, Hale can trace the various occupations Berry held when he wasn’t the local sheriff.
Hale often moves from a local perspective to a national perspective as she discusses Prentiss and its people. On the one hand, this is a very effective way to show the connections between national movements and the resistance of White Prentiss. For all Prentiss seems like a backwater untouched by time, White residents couldn’t hold back the tide of the Civil Rights movement forever. On the other, Hale’s long discussions of the history of logging in Mississippi, the establishment of Jefferson Davis County, or the founding of the private school that was the sole source of education for Black children for decades can sometimes seem like filler. I often wondered why Hale devoted so many pages to soil degradation after native trees were clear-cut and the soil farmed to within an inch of its life when the book is supposed to be a “reckoning” with racial violence. That said, I can’t blame Hale for the lack of documentation in her account. She’s very clear that there often is no documentation, especially once lynchings moved underground once federal law enforcement started to investigate them.
Late in In the Pines, Hale mentions that it was only in 2022 that a federal anti-lynching law was signed by a U.S. President. Although lynchings have occurred in the United States for over a century, it was only in February 2022, that President Biden signed the Emmett Till Antilynching Act, which made this kind of violence a federal hate crime and increased the maximum possible sentence. It remains to be seen if this legislation and increased Black rights activism will have a lasting effect.