November 1st 2023.
Author and historian Grace Elizabeth Hale has spent over a decade trying to understand the truth behind her family's history. A key figure in this narrative is her grandfather, Oury Berry. Throughout her childhood, she had believed that her grandfather had saved a Black man named Versie Johnson from a lynching, due to his alleged involvement in the rape of a pregnant white woman in 1947.
However, Hale soon discovered that Johnson had been allegedly murdered by law enforcement on orders from her grandfather. After the harrowing events in Charlottesville on Aug. 11, 2017 - where the white supremacist Unite The Right rally ended in the death of Heather Heyer - Hale felt the need to confront the horrors enacted by a member of her own family. This realization led her to write her book, In the Pines: A Lynching, a Lie, a Reckoning.
“I realized the story couldn’t have actually been true the way it was described to me. But at that point, I didn’t really want to know. I had grown up with a story of my grandfather’s heroism. And I thought my not wanting to know was symptomatic of a lot of white Americans. I wanted to make the point that this erasure of history is foundational to why racism and white supremacy persist,” Hale expressed.
She also discovered that the sheriff before Berry had, in fact, stopped a lynching multiple times. This was heartbreaking to Hale because it showed that it could have been done. She hopes to use her grandfather’s story to illustrate an even darker truth in American history, one that highlights the connection between law enforcement and vigilante behavior often carried out by white men.
“When there’s an understanding of citizenship as limited to a certain group of people, whatever they do is somehow justified. We saw that with Ahmaud Arbery and with January 6th. Most Americans don’t think about how different levels of the government — local, state, federal — are at cross-purposes with each other, and that these various levels often turn the other way or even encourage vigilante violence,” Hale said.
Finally, Hale revealed that she wanted to honor Johnson’s life. “There’s nothing that I can do about these actions and his death, but I could bring him to life on the page to whatever degree I could and acknowledge his life,” she explained.
Grace Elizabeth Hale's book, In the Pines: A Lynching, a Lie, a Reckoning, is a remarkable and devastating account of her family's history, and a powerful reminder of the importance of truth and acknowledging the lives of those affected by injustice.
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