Thermopylae In Mississippi

On the murder of Medgar Evers

In the days following Medar Evers's murder, Eudora Welty wrote "Where Is the Voice Coming From?” which was published in the New Yorker a few weeks later. I've always felt connected to this story because she wrote it just a few blocks from where I was born as I was being born. It took a while for justice to be done in the murder of Medgar Evers. I was just edging into middle age when the murderer was finally brought to justice.

In the story, she changes the city's name from Jackson to Thermopylae. Thermopylae is the name of a narrow mountain passage where, in 480 BC, a small group of Spartan Greeks, under the leadership of King Leonidas, held off a much larger Persian army under the leadership of Xerxes. If you've ever seen the movie 300, you'll be familiar with the story's basic facts.

I've never found where Miss Welty explained much about why she named Thermopylae. Sometimes, her explanation about why she did things only made more questions.

Since she was writing the story from the point of view of the killer, a man we would learn was Byron De La Beckwith; I wonder if maybe she's saying, as she imagines herself as this white man filled with hate, that white men like him are defending Mississippi from an onslaught of racial progressives communists. His hiding in the bushes to shoot this black man who has the audacity to appear on television is equal to Leonidas and his army fending off the Persian horde in the narrow pass of Thermopylae.

In 1972, William F Buckley came to Jackson to film a special edition of The Firing Line with Eudora Welty and Percy Walker. When Buckley asked her about the story and her writing of it, she said, "I thought to myself, ‘I’ve lived here all my life. I know the kind of mind that did this." Even though she and Byron De La Beckwith were more than fifty years older than I was, that sense of "knowing what kind of mind did this" was very familiar to me.

When the second trial for Byron De La Beckwith was in the news, I spent some time in the dark at the bar of the old Cherokee Inn. I liked their roast beef sandwiches, and I was still drinking pretty heavily. As the talking heads discussed the trial, an older gentleman in a plaid workshirt sat on the opposite corner of me.

"It's been thirty years," he said. “They outta let him alone. He could have done a whole lot worse, you know."

I don't think this man had enough initiative to murder anybody himself, but in his heart, I'm sure he murdered an awful lot of race war agitators. In that moment, I felt pretty familiar with the kind of mind that would murder a civil rights worker. In the end, Jackson wasn’t Thermopylae. Those Spartan racists willing to commit murder to stave off the progressive horde didn’t prevail; the men with that kind of mind ended up selling their homes and moving further and further out into the suburbs of Rankin and Madison counties.