Pride and Prejudice
by Dina Temple-Raston, published by Henry Holt and Company
Dina Temple-Raston talks about her book on racism and her experience in the small Texas town of Jasper.
DINA TEMPLE-RASTON KNOWS REJECTION. It took the journalist seventeen proposals to convince publishers that A Death In Texas: A Story of Race, Murder, and a Small Town's Struggle for Redemption (Henry Holt and Company, 2002) was a story that hadn't been told. Her book chronicles the town of Jasper as it deals with issues of race and segregation after the dragging death of James Byrd, Jr., on June 7, 1998.
A "Yankee," Temple-Raston approached Jasper as an outsider working her way in, armed with only a newspaper clipping that discussed how race relations in Jasper had improved after the Byrd dragging. Temple-Raston wanted to investigate that article's claim. Before traveling to the East Texas town, she approached a fellow White House correspondent from Arkansas for advice on Southern culture. Her friend suggested a few fashion changes, as well as a secret phrase that could help her with difficult sources: "Don't worry. Maybe we can help each other down the road." The saying opened more doors for Temple-Raston than she could have imagined. After contacting Ronald King, the father of perpetrator Bill King, for an interview, those two sentences got him to agree to meet with Temple-Raston and to pour out his soul to her for forty-five minutes.
Her book, like that interview, is extremely intimate, taking the reader into homes and businesses where racism in all its forthright and subtle forms has dwelled for years. I spoke with Temple-Raston at a meet-the-author event hosted by BookPeople in Austin and e-mailed her my questions to get her thoughts on her first book.
texasmonthly.com: You were a foreign correspondent in Asia, the White House reporter for the Bloomberg Business News, and a correspondent for USA Today. Most of your writing has been in the field of business and economy, so this book is very different from your work in the past. What drew you into this story?
Dina Temple-Raston: Actually, I don't see A Death in Texas as such a departure from what I've done before. I did a lot of cultural and social reporting when I was in China in the late eighties and that helped me a lot in my reporting when I arrived in Jasper. I decided early on that I was going to try to cover Jasper just as I would a foreign country—after all I wasn't a Texan. As a result, over the course of two and one-half years I read everything I could lay my hands on about Jasper and Texas history. Just as I learned about the Chinese by studying their culture, I focused on Texas culture and its mores, and that allowed me to build the book from the ground up. The goal was to find out why the James Byrd murder happened in Jasper. Was it a fluke or was there something there that made this a crime just waiting to happen? What I eventually discovered was that this kind of murder could have happened anywhere, and it happened in Jasper because there was a lethal combination of prejudice, unemployment, boredom, and opportunity. I think people assume the book is about a murder. It isn't. It is really the story of a place and its people and the way they reacted when they were forced to take a long look at themselves and their attitudes about race.
texasmonthly.com: Out of all of the characters in your book, I found it interesting that James Byrd, Jr., is always there as the story unfolds, but that in some ways, the story isn't really about him. It discusses the hate crime and its perpetrators more than the victim. Was that intentional when you started? Why did you choose that focus?
DTR: I knew from the start that a book rehashing the Byrd murder wouldn't have much of an audience. It was too grim. The book had to be about something bigger, and it had to be about race. Eventually, the town of Jasper evolved into a character in the book, and then it became obvious how the book needed to be structured—a split between what the black community saw and then what the white community saw.
texasmonthly.com: What was the most intriguing moment during your research? Your most terrifying?
DTR: The first time I drove down Huff Creek Road—where the murder occurred—was scary. It was about six in the morning, and I had a bad map and even worse directions from the manager at the hotel. I drove out to FM 1408 and stopped at the convenience store where King, Brewer, and Berry had stopped that night: the place—according to District Attorney Guy James Gray—where they probably decided they would kill him. I drove past Huff Creek Road three times. Back then it wasn't marked. Finally, I found a woman standing in her yard and stopped and asked her. She lived almost on the corner of the farm-to-market road and Huff Creek Road. About an eighth of a mile down the way there is a bridge over the creek made of railway ties. It said the maximum load it could take was five thousand pounds. I was in a rental car, and I had no idea what it weighed. I remember getting out of the car and taking a long look at it and wondering whether it was more or less than five thousand pounds. I thought it was less. Though, I'll admit I punched the gas when I drove across the bridge. Almost right away I noticed how rough the road was. Then I started seeing the circles of paint that marked the evidence. It was chilling. I didn't sleep for days.
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