Rare Book Monthly
A Death in Texas by Dina Temple-Raston: Not all Books are Equal
James Byrd
Jasper County Sheriff Billy Rowles immediately decided he would need help and called the FBI, a decision to bring in outsiders. In making that call he committed his community and his county to addressing its responsibility. In taking that step he committed the town and county to an honest accounting. In taking this step he moved away from the history of the south. The crime would not disappear. It would be reported, investigated and if, as seemed immediately likely, the culprits apprehended, they would be tried.
Ms. Temple-Raston then paints the historical background. Jasper isn't just a place. Here is how she describes it.
"Jasper was about as deep as Deep East Texas could get, seventy miles closer to Natchez, Mississippi, than to the capital city of Austin. Sitting at the easternmost edge of the state, at the top of the long skinny county that shared its name, the town of 8,600 was more Dixie than Lone Star. It sat just under an hour's drive from Vidor, Texas, the capital of Klan country, where until the early 1990s one could still see signs warning "Niggers Get Out of Town After Dark." At one time a modestly prosperous timber town, Jasper had been reduced to a curious thing, a place near noplace. By the end of the twentieth century, its poverty showed like the wrists and ankles of adolescents exceeding their cuffs. The entire community, from the Aarant family to the Zunigas, filled just 79 pages of large type in the Southwestern Bell phone book. The yellow pages, in the same thin volume, added only 129 pages more. Each year the directory seemed to get slimmer, proof positive of what everyone already knew: Jasper was a town in decline."
The suspects were quickly captured. The county handled the trial and the outcomes never seemed in doubt. Only the sentences were uncertain. Two of the men, Bill King and Russell Brewer, received death sentences and the third, Shawn Berry, a life sentence with the possibility of parole at age 60. At the time of his sentence in 1999 he was 24. King and Brewer are now on death row awaiting execution [Links to the Texas executions site are provided at the end of this article].
The murder was viewed, from the outset, as a hate crime and local and Federal officials united to obtain convictions. For a time the community also seemed to speak with one voice, both the black and white communities working together, to present a united front and mutual support to bring Jasper, the town and the county, through the pressure and national humiliation of being branded as a place where racial hate had survived deep into the 20th century. The book reports that later, the united front broke down as the community seemed to revert to the long established pattern of racial and economic separation that had always characterized the area. Like the Mississippi that sometimes spills its banks, in time the water recedes.
