Wading into Mississippi’s racist past
moral waters as muddy as the river that gives the place its name.
This is complicated by the fact that Pete Banning is one of the “good” white people of the day. He provides a school for the black children of workers on his 640-acre cotton-farming spread and is kind to the help.
But the slavery and white supremacy that has shaped Banning’s world is not something that he contemplates, nor is the way his family built its wealth by exploiting black labor.
Liza, his city-born wife and new to the neoplantation, once rides out to the woods where the field hands live in abject squalor. She is appalled.
Later, when an attorney seeks to claim the Banning estate as civil damages for the slaying of the pastor, he finishes the inventory of land and housing with:
“They have half a dozen outbuildings, fine structures all, plus the farm equipment, and livestock, and how many Negroes?”
“Please, Burch, they don’t own those people,” the Banning attorney says.
“For all practical purposes they do,” the lawyer snaps back.
This is an accurate portrait of Mississippi in the 1940s, and it illuminates one of the difficulties in writing about the era today. The Banning family’s casual arrogance in assuming that they are “good” whites to their poverty-stricken black employees can grate on the modern reader’s nerves, as can the irony-free, subservient attitudes their most trusted servants display.
The Bannings are “the only white people” who Nineva, the elderly house maid, trusts. Her gardener husband, Amos, “adored” Liza at first glance, thinking her “the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen.” The couple have four children and “a yard full of grandchildren.” Their teenage grandson, Jupe, is a “strapping, muscular boy who was fascinated by Liza but terribly shy around her.”
Small wonder. Good white men in Mississippi of that era had no hesitation killing black teens who were fresh with white women, and juries composed of other good white men had no hesitation in acquitting them for it. (See: Till, Emmett.)
It may be, if Grisham is being cleverly subversive, that both the title and the denouement of “The Reckoning” addresses the state’s racial mores with a wicked, devastating twist. Maybe, in the end, there really is a rough-hewed justice at work, even in 1940s Mississippi.