Weeks 2 and 3
A two week interlude has resulted from two concurrent investigative field trips. Two of my cases took me to 'the woods'. The details of these cases will be publicised on our website shortly. Before this, a 4th of July weekend in New Orleans. I will start with 'NOLA', so anyone who wishes to cry paid holiday can get it out of their system.
Houses looking over the Bayou St. John canal.
French Quarter
Bourbon Street...by day. By night however...
Cafe Beignet
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The surrounding fields.
A sequence of increasingly smaller country roads had led us to this area. The Program Director had brought along two older African-American NAACP agents who knew families in the area, in order to build trust and rapport, otherwise the locals wouldn't speak. As we pulled up to the residence, a tall, bearded, shirtless man strode across his property. I was asked to wait in the car.
It wasn't him, it was his neighbour. The individual we sought lived on the property over the adjoining field, and unfortunately in the past tense; he had passed away some years ago, having returned to the land he was forced to flee, but his son then continued to live there. I have heard he is interested to discover what happened with his family; hopefully I'll speak with him this afternoon.
The woods (part 2)
Not so much wooded as small town, my other case required me to travel a county's primary 'city' (a generic name for the largest town in a county, no matter how small it is). My purpose was to look into old birth/marriage/death and court records regarding individuals at the centre of the case.
Fortunately, my colleague lived in the adjoining county, and kindly invited me to stay at her parents place, again in a rural part of Mississippi. During 1964 the area had been subject to the second highest occurrence of racially motivated bombings in the state.
After hours of travelling (I have no idea how people stay awake through the mundanity of driving in a straight line for hours), we arrived.
The next morning, we drove across the county line. Local properties flashed by, tucked in amongst wooded areas.
Apparently it was common practice to buy a trailer home and have it placed on a purchased patch of land. The roadside for miles was frequently lined with rusted P.O mail boxes with little or no properties in the fields adjacent to them.
My objective for going to the town in question was to search for old records in its courthouse; chiefly to discover whether an alleged perpetrator was ever indicted for a killing.
Now here I was wary of the South's 'reputation'. I was also wary of any preconceptions I held leading me to have a skewed view on the actions and expressions of townspeople which wasn't really justified.
However, there was just something that wasn't...quite right.
First and foremost, the circuit and chancery court staff were lovely to speak to, and very helpful. I had spoken to them on the phone the week before, and they reported back that they had not dug up any jury minutes containing the names of the individuals I gave them.
When we parked in the town centre, my colleague, who is African-American, continued her bubbly habit of saying 'hey y'all' to people we passed by. This I had observed was fairly common in the South. Everywhere else this had been received by either an enthusiastic hello or a half hearted acknowledgement. Here there was nothing, maybe perhaps that sort of tenth-second glance you make when someone is shouting to another in a crowded area, just to make sure its not aimed at you. Again, the same with the local police officers. One of the older, silver haired officers heartily greeted me when I temporaily stepped past the retro-beige metal detectors and into the courthouse to ask for directions. Maybe I was just looking for it, I mean, there was an African-American clerk and part time assistant in the courthouse. My colleague said she was aware, but it was better just to ignore and carry on as normal.
We were kindly escorted by the clerk's two part-time assistants to the county's sheriff office, and into a partly-refurbished cell-like room with old records stacked onto fresh wooden shelves. As many of the cases we were looking at were swept under the carpet, the secret indictments looked most inviti 'you can look at any of the items in here, apart from the secret indictments', the clerk informed us. We found this slightly odd, as they were stacked amongst public records. To clarify, the clerk decided to call her colleague, who was in a meeting with the District Attorney and could ask him personally.
The part-time assistant, a polite, friendly guy, waited in the room with us the whole time. We never really got a clear answer as to what the situation was. His phone had a sudden burst of messages and then fell silent. We did dig up some interesting material, but, curiously, no record whatsover of the alleged perpetrator's actions in the case even being considered by a jury. He simply disappears.
I was pleased I found enough original materials to help continue the narrative of the case. After leaving the courthouse, I called a contact I had been given from Mississippi Vital Records. 'Those should be public records, if they're in there, I'm pretty sure of it'.
I guess I will never know at what point the legal process met a dead-end and was left alone. Whatever the reasons were for the decision, they could have been a foot away from me.
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That afternoon I enjoyed a meeting with the county's local historian. He ran the city's museum, packed with Civil War era regalia and reference books. I had prior discussed the location of where the incident in my case occured over telephone, in order to determine whether there was any older locals who would recall anything, and to let him know I was visiting.
The little museum was empty, and to my surprise we were joined by his brother, apparently his older brother, although they looked like twins. He seemed to work for a pest control company, as I remember a name being stitched on his shirt. He said he knew a lot of the locals in the area, and travelled around a lot. Unfortunately neither brother had heard of the case, or the individuals involved, although they knew the area well.
We enjoyed a long, pleasant exchange. I picked up a few stories that could be added to the Program's case files for future, although these seemed to be around the turn of the 20th century, and as such anyone who bore witness would be long gone. Only two cases were from 1940 onwards; one which a local had mentioned to them, and another they knew of but declined to speak about it because individuals connected to it were still around.
After leaving, my colleague and I pulled up next to a blue-painted food stall in order to buy a 'snowball', essentially a slush puppy with ice cream stuck in the middle of it. I had promised her I would eat one. As the charming, chirpy girl serving customers asked for my order in a Southern drawl, she picked up on my own accent.
'What are y'all doing here then?' she enquired. For the first time on the trip I wasn't so enthusiastic to tell people what I was doing.
I though about it for half a second and just said, 'research for a University program'.
Houses looking over the Bayou St. John canal.
French Quarter
Bourbon Street...by day. By night however...
Cafe Beignet
The Cabildo (old town hall) next to Jackson Square (previously Place d'Armes)
St. Louis Cathedral.
Republic: New Orleans (approx 1.00 am)
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Before leaving for the woods, I enjoyed a day of archive research and consolidation of work in Louisiana State University's Memorial Library...one of about four on campus.
As someone who spent four years at the University of Glasgow taking for granted the imposing, smog-stained, Gothic revivalist George Gilbert Scott building and Professor Square, LSU was again something else.
Meet LSU's School of Law.
The campus had its own police patrol.
And an American Football stadium with a capacity of 102,000, the ninth largest in the world, with a peak season attendance of about 92,000 people.
Unfortunately I never got to attend a game. The above shot was pulled from Google.
The facilities here were like nothing the University of Glasgow has ever, or probably will ever, seen.
***Update 03/08/2014***
According to financial statements 2012/13 the University of Glasgow actually turns over about the same amount c. £500 million, per annum, as LSU. My humble pie is eaten. I guess its all about putting on a show...
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And so...the woods (part 1).
One of my cases required me to locate a relative; the only known witness who gave testimony to the crime that was perpetrated, in the 1940s, somewhere between Louisiana and Mississippi. They had fled their ancestral home for safety. There were four reported variable spellings of the same name, each of them horrendously common in the South. If I found the individual, they would be in their nineties.
Thanks to a creative spike in a painstaking people search at a library desk in Baton Rouge, I managed to locate who I thought was the individual, living at an address in a very rural area of Mississippi. From now on I should probably refer to him as 'the man at the edge of the world'.
A neighbouring home.
A sequence of increasingly smaller country roads had led us to this area. The Program Director had brought along two older African-American NAACP agents who knew families in the area, in order to build trust and rapport, otherwise the locals wouldn't speak. As we pulled up to the residence, a tall, bearded, shirtless man strode across his property. I was asked to wait in the car.
It wasn't him, it was his neighbour. The individual we sought lived on the property over the adjoining field, and unfortunately in the past tense; he had passed away some years ago, having returned to the land he was forced to flee, but his son then continued to live there. I have heard he is interested to discover what happened with his family; hopefully I'll speak with him this afternoon.
The woods (part 2)
Not so much wooded as small town, my other case required me to travel a county's primary 'city' (a generic name for the largest town in a county, no matter how small it is). My purpose was to look into old birth/marriage/death and court records regarding individuals at the centre of the case.
Fortunately, my colleague lived in the adjoining county, and kindly invited me to stay at her parents place, again in a rural part of Mississippi. During 1964 the area had been subject to the second highest occurrence of racially motivated bombings in the state.
After hours of travelling (I have no idea how people stay awake through the mundanity of driving in a straight line for hours), we arrived.
The next morning, we drove across the county line. Local properties flashed by, tucked in amongst wooded areas.
Apparently it was common practice to buy a trailer home and have it placed on a purchased patch of land. The roadside for miles was frequently lined with rusted P.O mail boxes with little or no properties in the fields adjacent to them.
My objective for going to the town in question was to search for old records in its courthouse; chiefly to discover whether an alleged perpetrator was ever indicted for a killing.
Now here I was wary of the South's 'reputation'. I was also wary of any preconceptions I held leading me to have a skewed view on the actions and expressions of townspeople which wasn't really justified.
However, there was just something that wasn't...quite right.
First and foremost, the circuit and chancery court staff were lovely to speak to, and very helpful. I had spoken to them on the phone the week before, and they reported back that they had not dug up any jury minutes containing the names of the individuals I gave them.
When we parked in the town centre, my colleague, who is African-American, continued her bubbly habit of saying 'hey y'all' to people we passed by. This I had observed was fairly common in the South. Everywhere else this had been received by either an enthusiastic hello or a half hearted acknowledgement. Here there was nothing, maybe perhaps that sort of tenth-second glance you make when someone is shouting to another in a crowded area, just to make sure its not aimed at you. Again, the same with the local police officers. One of the older, silver haired officers heartily greeted me when I temporaily stepped past the retro-beige metal detectors and into the courthouse to ask for directions. Maybe I was just looking for it, I mean, there was an African-American clerk and part time assistant in the courthouse. My colleague said she was aware, but it was better just to ignore and carry on as normal.
We were kindly escorted by the clerk's two part-time assistants to the county's sheriff office, and into a partly-refurbished cell-like room with old records stacked onto fresh wooden shelves. As many of the cases we were looking at were swept under the carpet, the secret indictments looked most inviti 'you can look at any of the items in here, apart from the secret indictments', the clerk informed us. We found this slightly odd, as they were stacked amongst public records. To clarify, the clerk decided to call her colleague, who was in a meeting with the District Attorney and could ask him personally.
The part-time assistant, a polite, friendly guy, waited in the room with us the whole time. We never really got a clear answer as to what the situation was. His phone had a sudden burst of messages and then fell silent. We did dig up some interesting material, but, curiously, no record whatsover of the alleged perpetrator's actions in the case even being considered by a jury. He simply disappears.
I was pleased I found enough original materials to help continue the narrative of the case. After leaving the courthouse, I called a contact I had been given from Mississippi Vital Records. 'Those should be public records, if they're in there, I'm pretty sure of it'.
I guess I will never know at what point the legal process met a dead-end and was left alone. Whatever the reasons were for the decision, they could have been a foot away from me.
That afternoon I enjoyed a meeting with the county's local historian. He ran the city's museum, packed with Civil War era regalia and reference books. I had prior discussed the location of where the incident in my case occured over telephone, in order to determine whether there was any older locals who would recall anything, and to let him know I was visiting.
The little museum was empty, and to my surprise we were joined by his brother, apparently his older brother, although they looked like twins. He seemed to work for a pest control company, as I remember a name being stitched on his shirt. He said he knew a lot of the locals in the area, and travelled around a lot. Unfortunately neither brother had heard of the case, or the individuals involved, although they knew the area well.
We enjoyed a long, pleasant exchange. I picked up a few stories that could be added to the Program's case files for future, although these seemed to be around the turn of the 20th century, and as such anyone who bore witness would be long gone. Only two cases were from 1940 onwards; one which a local had mentioned to them, and another they knew of but declined to speak about it because individuals connected to it were still around.
After leaving, my colleague and I pulled up next to a blue-painted food stall in order to buy a 'snowball', essentially a slush puppy with ice cream stuck in the middle of it. I had promised her I would eat one. As the charming, chirpy girl serving customers asked for my order in a Southern drawl, she picked up on my own accent.
'What are y'all doing here then?' she enquired. For the first time on the trip I wasn't so enthusiastic to tell people what I was doing.
I though about it for half a second and just said, 'research for a University program'.
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