Family Autopsy

TWO WRITERS HOLD THE PAST—AND THEMSELVES—TO ACCOUNT

By Jonathan Miles

BOOKS When thinking about their ancestors,” ponders the narrator of Jim Davidson’s 2000 novel, Mine Work, “everybody hopes, if not assumes, that a hero lurks back in there someplace.” Grace Elizabeth Hale didn’t need to hope or assume; she knew. Her grandfather Oury Berry had served as sheriff of rural Jefferson Davis County in the Piney Woods of Mississippi. One summer evening in 1947, family legend went, he fended off a mob gathered to lynch a Black prisoner accused of raping a white woman. “I’ve known most of you all my life, and I sure am going to hate to have to shoot you,” he upbraided them, like a proto–Atticus Finch, “but no one is taking a man out of my jail.” That the suspect died the next day, shot…

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Garden & Gun (Digital) - 1 Issue, October/November 2023

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