Sitting down to reflect upon Grace Elizabeth Hale’s memoir “In the Pines” — named the best Mississippi History Book by the Mississippi Historical Society last year — I encountered “A House at Auschwitz Opens Its Doors to a Chilling Past” in The New York Times:
“More than two million people visit the former Auschwitz camp each year and, [according to American architect Daniel Libeskind, commissioned to redesign the home of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss], come away ‘horrified and mesmerized by death’ but also need ‘to engage with contemporary antisemitism and other extremism in our political culture.’
“Jacek Purski, the director of a Polish anti-extremism group, who is involved in the project, said he wants to use the house and the past Nazi horrors as a weapon against what he sees as a resurgence of extremist ideologies.
“‘A house is a house,’ Mr. Purski said, looking out of a second-story window of the former Höss house toward the chimney of a former Nazi crematory. ‘But it is in uninteresting, regular houses like this where extremism is happening today.’…
“While awaiting execution in a Polish jail after the war, Mr. Höss, the former commandant, wrote an autobiography that Primo Levi, the Italian writer and Auschwitz survivor, described as the work of a ‘drab functionary’ who ‘evolved step by step into one of the greatest criminals in history.’”
(If only one book is read about the Holocaust, Primo Levi’s “Survival at Auschwitz” [1947] might be commended).
Hale, Professor of History at the University of Virginia, confronted personal history with the extremist ideology which is white supremacy. Her maternal grandfather served three terms as the Sheriff of Jefferson Davis County. Her mother distorted an incident to suggest that Sheriff Oury Berry thwarted a lynching as if Atticus Finch in “To Kill a Mockingbird.” The reality appears to have been the opposite: Sheriff Berry and his confederates apparently acted as judge, jury, and executioner, taking an African American prisoner from the jail, one step ahead of a lynch mob, and dispatching him at the scene of the crime; suggesting that forensic investigation of alleged wrongdoing occurred when circumventing the Rule of Law — safeguards, standards, enshrined in American democracy.
Hale indulges in speculation — my bête noire — excessively. The book might have been abandoned if factual certainty was prioritized. Yet, at some point, speculation becomes conjecture and conjecture descends into historical fiction, detached from objectivity.
That begs the question: Hale considers segregation under law — de jeure segregation is the proper legal term, as opposed to de facto segregation — in one specific county, undertaking mea culpa, examining her family’s part in systematic discrimination, indefensible under contemporary standards.
Mississippi resisted confronting its racist roots, through Massive Resistance. No Truth and Reconciliation Commission considered pattern and practice — and its effect upon the present and future — in a meaningful time and manner. County by county histories such as Hale pursues in Jefferson Davis County present a practical procedure for pursuing truth and reconciliation belatedly.
(It is fitting that Hale considers Jim Crow in Jefferson Davis County, not unlike Clanton — an intersection between Canton and Klan — in John Grisham’s “A Time to Kill” [acknowledging that Clanton, Alabama exists]).
In so doing, Hale confronts inconvenient truths about her family — fact versus fiction, what individuals want to believe versus what occurred — the threshold for a society to move beyond its regrettable past. How can anyone accept broad responsibility for a nefarious history without confronting one’s own family legacy?
One need not indulge in a public cri du cœur to reflect upon familial engagement in wrongdoing. Racism was too widespread for white people with deep and wide Southern roots to have not benefited from white supremacy.
Hale advocates reparations. “The devil is in the details.”.
What can be done is to conclude as did God to Noah: “Never again”: Inability to admit wrongdoing and accept responsibility therefor is tantamount to eternal damnation.
Jay Wiener is a Northsider
