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Zusatztext Jonathan Yardley The Washington Post Wilkie's tale ends on a grace note: not merely reconciliation with his native South but a grateful return to it. Informationen zum Autor Curtis Wilkie was a national reporter and correspondent for The Boston Globe . He teaches journalism at University of Mississippi. He is the author of The Fall of the House of Zeus , which The Wall Street Journal wrote "reads like a John Grisham novel." Tom Brokaw described Wilkie as "one of the best journalists of our generation." Klappentext In this riveting political and social history of the American South during the second half of the twentieth century, acclaimed journalist Curtis Wilkie tells the story of a region and a man -- himself -- intimately transformed by racial and political upheavals. In 1969, in the wake of the violence surrounding the civil rights movement, Wilkie left the South and vowed never to live there again. But after traveling the world as a reporter, he returned in 1993, drawn by a deep-rooted affinity with the territory of his youth. Here, he endeavors to make sense of the enormous changes that have convulsed the South for more than four decades. Through vivid recollections of landmark events, "Dixie" becomes both a striking eyewitness account of history and an unconventional tale of redemption full of beauty, humor, and pathos. Chapter 1 "We all knew Beckwiths" The voice sounded faintly menacing, even though he spoke by telephone from hundreds of miles away. . At the beginning of our conversation, he used an old Southern pronunciation that fell just short of insult -- "nigras" -- but within a couple of minutes his manner degenerated. As he talked, the old man became more exercised, and his reedy whine bristled with malevolence. "Niggers," he told me, "are descendants of the mud people," unworthy of respect. Or life, for that matter. Then he began ranting about "Babylonian Talmudists." "Excuse me?" "The Babylonian Talmudists. Don't you know what a Talmudist is?" "I think I just figured it out." "Babylonian Talmudists are a set of dogs," he explained. "If you read in the King James Version of the Bible, you'll see that a dog is a male whore. And God says kill them." Racial mixing, he continued, "is a capital crime, like murder is a capital crime. But the Bible doesn't say, 'Thou shalt not kill.' It says, 'Thou shalt do no murder.'" As he spoke, I took notes furiously, because the commentary was coming from Byron De La Beckwith, soon to be standing trial again for the murder of Medgar Evers, once the most prominent black man in Mississippi. Our talk took place in January 1994, more than thirty years after Evers had been shot in the back in the driveway of his home in Jackson. In connection with an article I was writing about the coming trial, I had called Beckwith at his home in Tennessee, where he had been living, free on bond, unrepentant and flying the Confederate battle flag from his porch. In the background, I heard his wife, Thelma, imploring him not to talk with me. But after Beckwith had determined that I had been born white and raised a Christian, he had agreed to an interview. Perhaps my own Southern accent had beguiled him, though I suspect he had simply seized on what would be one of his last opportunities to expound publicly on his racial theories. By this time, Beckwith was seventy-three years old, cornered, yet still defiant. An erstwhile fertilizer salesman, he reveled in his reputation as an unconvicted assassin, a champion of white supremacy who had exterminated an upstart leader of the "mud people." After his first two trials had ended in hung juries, he had run for lieutenant governor of Mississippi in 1967, assuring his campaign audiences that he was a "straight shooter." He said it with a grin. But even then, he was becoming an embarrassm...
