A Bullet from the Back of a Bush

 The Samuel Johnson Birthplace Museum is also, as is only fitting, a bookshop, and the other day there were a few books outside on offer at £1 each. One caught my eye immediately – The Still Moment. Eudora Welty: Portrait of a Writer by Paul Binding, a book I never knew existed. Naturally I snapped it up. 
  The Still Moment begins, arrestingly, with the murder of the black civil rights activist Medgar Evers outside his home in Jackson, Mississippi, the town where Eudora Welty lived and died. Evers was shot from behind in a targeted attack by a white man, and his death caused an immediate outcry, sparking riots all over the Southern States. Welty's immediate reaction was to write a short story about the killing, writing it in the first person because 'I am in a position where I know. I know what this man must feel like. I have lived with this kind of thing.' The story, 'Where Is the Voice Coming From?', was written at one sitting on the day of Evers's death, and sent immediately to William Maxwell at The New Yorker. He decided to publish in the next issue, but it turned out that Welty's insight into the mind, motive and modus operandi of the killer was so uncannily accurate that details had to be changed for fear of prejudicing the case against the man who had now been arrested for Evers's murder. 'The route taken, the hour, the how and why of the crime – Eudora Welty had divined them all.'
  Welty's protagonist, exasperated by the attention given to a high-profile black activist in his town, decides to take the law into his own hands and get rid of him. He drives to his target's house late at night, parks his borrowed truck behind a tree, and awaits the man's return. The shooting exhilarates him – 'I was on top of the world myself. For once' – and he feels he has done his duty by his community, acting true to his own and that community's convictions. 'I done what I done for my own pure-D satisfaction,' he boasts, unrepentant, revelling in his notoriety, and facing arrest and the possibility of the  electric chair with equanimity. In the event, the real-life killer, one Byron de la Beckwith, was tried twice in Mississippi and acquitted twice when the all-white juries failed to agree. It was not until 1994 that he was finally convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment. 
  The murder of Medgar Evers inspired Bob Dylan's 'Only a Pawn in Their Game' – not his best or most successful protest song, though it gets off to a cracking start – 'A bullet from the back of a bush Took Medgar Evers' blood...' (Oddly, and coincidentally, reminiscent of the opening of Geoffrey Hill's 'The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Péguy' – 'Crack of a starting-pistol. Jean Juarès dies in a wine-puddle.'). Here is young Bobby singing 'Only a Pawn' at the March on Washington in 1963...