In the Pines: A Lynching, a Lie, a Reckoning

by Grace Elizabeth Hale

Overview

“Courageous and compelling…essential and critically important.” —Bryan Stevenson

An award-winning scholar of white supremacy tackles her toughest research assignment yet: the unsolved murder of a Black man in rural Mississippi while her grandfather was the local sheriff—a cold case that sheds new light on the hidden legacy of racial terror in America. 

Grace Hale was home from college when she first heard the family legend. In 1947, while her beloved grandfather had been serving as a sheriff in the Piney Woods of south-central Mississippi, he prevented a lynch mob from killing a Black man who was in his jail on suspicion of raping a white woman—only for the suspect to die the next day during an escape attempt. It was a tale straight out of To Kill a Mockingbird, with her grandfather as the tragic hero. This story, however, hid a dark truth.

Years later, as a rising scholar of white supremacy, Hale revisited the story about her grandfather and Versie Johnson, the man who died in his custody. The more she learned about what had happened that day, the less sense she could make of her family's version of events. With the support of a Carnegie fellowship, she immersed herself in the investigation. What she discovered would upend everything she thought she knew about her family, the tragedy, and this haunted strip of the South—because Johnson's death, she found, was actually a lynching. But guilt did not lie with a faceless mob.

A story of obsession, injustice, and the ties that bind, In the Pines casts an unsparing eye over this intimate terrain, driven by a deep desire to set straight the historical record and to understand and subvert white racism, along with its structures, costs, and consequences—and the lies that sustain it. 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781668640388
Publisher:	Hachette Book Group
Publication date:	11/07/2023
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 5.70(h) x (d)

About the Author

Grace Elizabeth Hale is the Commonwealth Professor of American Studies and History at the University of Virginia. An award-winning historian and internationally recognized expert on modern American culture and the regional culture of the US South, she has written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, the American Scholar, and CNN’s website, and has appeared as an expert on southern history on CNN, C-Span, and PBS. A recent Carnegie Fellow, she is the author of three previous books, including Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890–1940, and lives in Charlottesville, Virginia.

graceelizabethhale.com

Matt Godfrey was raised on O'Connor, Welty, and Lee, and spent most of his teenage years in Yoknapatawpha County. But he traveled wherever the books took him, from Alabama to Tokyo, Twain to Murakami. Now he has the privilege of bringing those books to life as an audiobook narrator. He works in all genres and in a lot of accents, but specializes in his beloved Southern Gothic.

He is a two-time nominee for the Society of Voice Arts & Sciences Awards and the Audiobook Reviewer Listener's Choice Awards. He has a fully equipped home studio and works with major publishers, small presses, and indie authors alike.

With a voice described as having a vivid, silvery tone with a bright and sunny dynamic, Nicole Swanson’s narration conveys a warmth and charm informed by her Southern roots and experience as the mother of three amazing daughters. Nicole’s strengths lie in her flexible range, ear for accents, and character development skills. Nicole loves escaping into her home studio to entertain her faithful listener, Blackjack the Studio Dog.

John Grisham, whose name has become synonymous with the modern legal thriller, used to work sixty to seventy hours a week at a small Southaven, Mississippi, law practice, squeezing in time before going to the office and during courtroom recesses to work on his hobby—writing his first novel. When finally published, A Time to Kill met with little success, but when he sold the film rights to The Firm to Paramount Pictures, Grisham suddenly became a hot property among publishers. Spending forty-seven weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, The Firm became the bestselling novel of 1991. The successes of The Pelican Brief, which hit number one on the New York Times bestseller list, and The Client, which debuted at number one, confirmed Grisham’s reputation as the master of the legal thriller. His success even renewed interest in A Time to Kill, which was then republished. This time around, it was a bestseller. Since first publishing A Time to Kill in 1988, he has written one novel a year, and all of them have become international bestsellers. There are currently over 275 million John Grisham books in print worldwide, which have been translated into forty languages. Nine of his novels have been turned into films, as was an original screenplay, The Gingerbread Man.

Editorial Reviews

In this utterly absorbing narrative, Grace Hale reckons with America’s history of white supremacy through the lens of her own personal inheritance. In the Pines is intimate, devastating, and historically meticulous—a must-read, and more relevant than ever.

Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Devil in the Grov Gilbert King

In confronting her family’s involvement in the lynching of a Black man in 1940s Mississippi, Grace Elizabeth Hale deftly mines Southern history and gives voice to its unspoken truths. In the Pines is a brave exploration of the persistence of white supremacy not only in the South but more broadly in American culture.

author of A Place Like Mississippi and Ever Is a L W. Ralph Eubanks

Grace Hale is a phenomenal historian, a dogged researcher, and a gifted writer. In this fascinating new book, she trains her talents on the troubled racial history of her own family, with riveting results.

author of One Nation Under God and co-editor of th Kevin M. Kruse

A profound act of narrative repair, in which a sheriff’s granddaughter, now a renowned historian, rolls up her sleeves to rip the dressing off one of the nation’s deepest wounds—one in which her own beloved grandfather was complicit. Fierce and unflinching, with moments of startling beauty as well as horror, this myth-breaking history dives into our nation’s darkest past, exposing not just what we have done but how we must learn to speak of these realities. In Hale’s essential recounting, Versie Johnson cannot return to life, but the memory of this murdered man’s life and death are justly summoned, and past becomes powerfully present.

New York Times bestselling author of Master Slave Ilyon Woo

Lies, distortions, and ignorance have obscured the pain and tragedy of racial terror lynchings in America for decades. We will never recover from this violent history without truth-telling, which makes Grace Hale's courageous and compelling book so essential and critically important.

#1 New York Times bestselling author of Just Mercy Bryan Stevenson

Grace Hale writes with the power of fiction as she uses her family’s past to reveal the long, tragic history of violence against Black Americans to preserve white supremacy. An intimate, wrenching story, In the Pines deserves to be read by every American.

author of The Storied South and Grammy Award– William Ferris