The Ghosts of Medgar Evers is about a lot of things: Mississippi in general, Medgar Evers’ 1963 murder by Byron De La Beckwith, the third trial of De La Beckwith in 1994 (after his first two trials in 1964 resulted in hung juries), and the making of Ghosts of Mississippi, the Rob Reiner movie about that 1994 trial.
Evers, Mississippi’s NAACP field secretary, civil rights activist, and voting rights activist, was murdered in front of his wife and children in his driveway the morning after President John F. Kennedy’s Civil Rights Address on June 12, 1963. De La Beckwith was tried three times for the murder, the last one resulting in a conviction.
When she heard about the murder, Welty stayed up for two nights writing her story “Where is the Voice Coming From?” The story is told from the perspective of the assassin. It was published in the New Yorker on July 6 1963, just three weeks after the murder.
Willie Morris is the best at taking a work on nonfiction—the making of a movie—and making it personal and autobiographical without hogging the spotlight. He writes of the strangeness of the blending of real life and fictional on the movie set:
The confluence of past and present, the day-to-day mingling of the dark ghosts and the better angels of our nature, graphically evoked for me on the sets of the movie, was strange and often painful but emotionally redemptive at the same time.
We chose The Ghosts of Medgar Evers out of all the Willie Morris books in Welty’s collection for several reasons: it ties into “Where is the Voice Coming From?”; Welty, though not a character, is referenced throughout the book; and it gives context to both Welty and Morris and the time and place in which they wrote. In the introduction, Morris writes, “To understand the world, William Faulkner once said, you have to understand a place like Mississippi. One loved a place, he wrote, not so much because of its virtues, but despite its faults. Faulkner understood Mississippi in his soul, and so did Medgar Evers.”
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| Willie Morris's inscription in Eudora Welty's copy of The Ghosts of Mississippi |
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