Alex Heard

Santa Fe author Alex Heard grew up in Mississippi in the 1960s, just as the civil rights movement was gaining national momentum. After nearly two decades working as a freelance journalist, he moved to Santa Fe, where he’s been editorial director of Outside magazine since 2001. He returned to Mississippi to research The Eyes of Willie McGee: A Tragedy of Race, Sex, and Secrets in the Jim Crow South(Harper, 2010), about a black man who, in 1945, was sentenced to death for allegedly raping a white housewife, a true story that is echoed in the themes of Harper Lee’s novel To Kill a Mockingbird (Lippincott, 1960). As Heard tells Tom Clagett, his exploration of race and retribution in the Deep South was “a search for truth.”

Q: How did you go from the topic of fringe cults in your first book, Apocalypse Pretty Soon: Travels in End-Time America (W.W. Norton & Company, 1999) to a grim chapter in the history of American civil rights?

The first book came about by accident. It grew out of reporting I was doing about people thinking the Earth was trying to kill us. McGee came about by luck. I’d heard of the case while a student at Vanderbilt University [in Nashville, Tennessee] from a professor there. It stuck with me—an interesting piece of history that got sidetracked.

McGee’s story drew worldwide attention from the late 1940s. Yet incidents like the 1955 beating and shooting death of Emmett Till, a black teenager accused of whistling at a white woman in Mississippi, and others are better known. What was the significance of this story for you?

There were quite a few cases like those that stood out at their time, like the Martinsville Seven, but they’ve been forgotten. McGee’s was a hallmark case from an unpleasant era that needed to be rediscovered.

You don’t provide an answer to the conflicting stories of witnesses, family members, neighbors, and others regarding McGee’s guilt or innocence. How did the elusiveness of the truth affect you?

If I’d been able to find the definitive answer, I’d’ve given it. None of the lawyers on either side knew the answer. There was no certainty about McGee’s innocence. The case was murky. I think McGee may have been guilty, but he was not given justice.

How did your Mississippi roots affect your telling of this story?

Not strongly. The key to this story was that it was a brawl between people as far apart geographically [New York vs. Mississippi] as they were politically [liberals vs. segregationists]. Some told the truth, some lied. Also, sometimes people don’t want to look at the past due to guilt. There’s a tendency to turn it into good-guy/bad-guy. Coming from Mississippi taught me not to make those kinds of assumptions, and that was crucial.

Describe your research process.

Working from Santa Fe, I began with what I found online. Then I went to Mississippi to do interviews and search the archives for news stories and court transcripts. Slowly, I assembled it all. Some of the interviews took two years to get. Nobody really told me to go away.

What was your most gratifying experience writing the book?

I had a purpose to knock on doors and talk to people. Sometimes it was nerve-racking, but mostly it was a blast.

Who are your favorite writers?

Locally, Hampton Sides and Kevin Fedarko.

What brought you to Santa Fe?

To work at Outside. The chance to be at a good magazine in a fun place is a great combination.

What’s the best part about living here?

You can be hiking or skiing in minutes.

Tom Clagett is the author of William Friedkin: Films of Aberration, Obsession and Reality (Silman-James, 2003).

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