Well, wow.

First, I cannot imagine finding out that my beloved grandfather [either one of them] wasn't the person I had grown up thinking he was. I cannot imagine finding out the story of how he saved another human being ended up being 100% wrong and that he was truly instrumental in the death of said human being. I also cannot imagine then doing the research behind it all, finding more of the truth and then WRITING A BOOK about it, so the world will know. There is transparency and then there is bravery in transparency and the author most certainly falls into the later.

This book is a lot of a lot and I was completely in for the roller-coaster ride that it was and I was not disappointed. The author never shies away from the truth [never makes excuses or tries to cover up] and is pretty blunt a times about all that happened. I was wishing there had been a little more about just how she [and her family] felt when they learned the whole truth, but after some thought, I realized that it would be almost impossible to put all those feelings in words and who knows how long it will take to fully absorb and accept the knowledge that someone you loved deeply was a cold-blooded killer - I know that knowledge would haunt me for the rest of my lifetime.

Well-written and meticulously researched, this is a must-read in these troubling times. Very well done.

Thank you to Grace Elizabeth Hale, for her bravery and transparency; may we all learn from her as we all face hardships and hard truths in the future. Thanks also to NetGalley and Little, Brown, and Company for providing this ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Rich in research, with tremendous personal import for the writer. I enjoyed the use of a family story as a launching pad for a historical exploration.

In the Pines is the story of the lynching of Versie Johnson in 1947 in the outskirts of Printess, Mississippi. It is also about the raging racism and segregation in the state of Mississippi. The author is the granddaughter of Oury Berry, the man who was sheriff and was responsible for the death of Mr. Johnson. Unfortunately, the author was not able to locate any of his relatives.

He lived a rather obscure life. There was very little record of him. But the author was able to learn about his parents and siblings. He was accused of raping a pregnant white woman, when in fact, it seems he and the woman were in a relationship. Had he gone to trial, his sentence would have been death.

Mississippi was the nation's hot bed for discrimination against African Americans. Under Jim Crow, they had segregated schools in spite of Brown vs. the Board of Education; for a long time they wouldn't allow their African American residents to vote and they condoned lynching. When I read about all of the injustices against Blacks, it sickened me.

I was impressed with the author's extensive research. And she didn't excellent job depicting the characters. This is a book I will read again. I gave it five stars.

This book is the research of a story/historical event that happened in Prentiss, Mississippi, 1947, pertaining to the lynching of Versie Johnson and her grandfather. Grace Elizabeth Hale spent a lot of painstaking hours researching these events and many others while uncovering the truth of a story that was passed down in her family.
This is a part of our history, as a nation, that is heartbreaking, tragic, filled with lies, violence and racial inequality.

This book started strong, with an opening chapter that set the stage for the author's discovery that her revered grandfather was likely not the heroic figure depicted in family lore. Rather than preventing a lynching, it seemed likely that he had actually been one of the several white men who were directly involved in the lynching of Versie Johnson in Prentiss, Mississippi, in 1947. But beyond that opening, the writing was dry and the narrative so poorly organized that I soon despaired of learning any more actual facts about these events. The author spent a great deal of time outlining her own ancestry, and bemoaning the lack of similar data available to many Black Americans before launching a history of Jefferson Davis County in Mississippi and its discriminatory treatment of Blacks. But so much of her tale was couched in phrases including "might have" and "probably" and "possibly" and "perhaps" that it was frustrating to try to tease out fact from speculation, and it soon began to feel pointless even to try. I abandoned the book after reading less than half, deciding that I'd learned what was important in the first chapter, and continuing to read the rest added little or nothing of value.

The amount of research that went into the writing of this book is impressive. If you go into this book thinking the author is only going to address her grandfather's involvement of the lynching of a black man in 1947 while he was sheriff, you will be mistaken. You will learn much, much, more.

Grace Elizabeth Hale grew up believing that her beloved grandfather prevented a lynch mob from killing a man accused of raping a white woman. Over the years, her family's version of the event began to concern her. It was through her research that she learned the truth, that her grandfather was involved in the man's death. Not only does she address this in the book, but she also provides a history of the area over a wide span of years.

I was not expecting all the history that was provided and I must admit, I felt as if I was reading a history book (which I was), and not the story of her uncovering the lie that was told in her family. I was hoping for more of her personal reaction, how it affected her, the outrage, and her family members reaction upon learning the truth. The author does provide as much information as she could about what she learned about the murdered man and his family's history. What happened to this man, and so many others, is heartbreaking and tragic. Racial violence, lies, coverup, and murder evoke strong emotions and are a tragic, horrific, and brutal part of our nation's history.


A lot of information was given in this book which ends around the 80% mark with the rest being footnotes. I so wanted to feel the heart and soul of this book. Everything is told in a very matter of fact way and at times this book lacked emotion and often came across to me as cold and detached.

As I mentioned, this book felt too much like a school history book. But I do appreciate the research the author put into the writing of this book.

Well written ad intensely researched

Closer to 3.5 stars - this book was meticulously researched and clearly a passion project for the author. I’m sure no one wants to think about the atrocities past generations (especially those in your family tree) have committed, and it is a noble pursuit to establish the truth when everyone tells a different story.

My biggest concern with this book is that it was very repetitive. Obviously the Berry name is going to come up several times, as the author’s grandfather is the main antagonist, but each person’s fully name was spelled out nearly every time. And while this is helpful between sections or chapters, it does not need to be within the same paragraphs.

Hale’s social commentary as well is repetitive, as though she is filling the gap of limited historical information with the same sociopolitical ideation. I don’t disagree with her at all, but it came across as someone writing a thesis paper who needed to add some fluff in order to meet the page count.

Overall I think the story and the historical relevance was excellent and extremely important, but this book could be cut down a bit to streamline the most important elements.

Thank you to Grace Elizabeth Hale, Little Brown & Company, and NetGalley for an advanced copy on exchange for an honest review.

Historical anything is my favorite kind of book, the description of this story piqued my interest and I was excited to be granted an advanced readers copy from Netgalley and the publisher, many thanks to both. The author did a tremendous amount of research getting to the bottom of the story and most importantly, the truth.

The fall in my opinion is instead of delivering the gripping lynching story in question with facts, the author has written an all encompassing 200 year history lesson of the American South. The book includes facts on the arrival of the railroads, forestry and milling, the destruction of the land by clear cutting and over farming, Jim Crow, Choctaw Indians, emancipation, homesteading, slavery, and an overall black history lesson in the south where white supremacy was rampant. I felt like I was reading a history book with no direct focus. I didn’t find this book enjoyable, I was disappointed. I gave the book 2 stars for research.

The author has a personal connection to a story from her family’s post in a small town of Mississippi from the late 1940s. She had been told for years that her white grandfather had stood up for a Black man accused of raping a white woman who was pregnant and that her grandfather tried to protect the Black man from the white townspeople, who desired to lynch him. Overnight, this white mob had dragged the Black man and taken him back to the place where he allegedly committed the crime, and he went for someone else’s weapon, which got him shot. The author believes that the Black man likely did this in order to avoid the lynching he knew was unavoidable. The name of the man who was killed was Versie Johnson, and the place he allegedly committed the crime he was accused of, Lipsey Farm. She finds out through more digging in newspaper archives that the story about her grandfather was false, and that he was one of the men who shot Versie Johnson — something that when confronted, the author’s grandmother was trying to cover up, as well.

The author describes growing up in a part of Atlanta with integrated schools, new shopping malls, etc, but also a Confederate cemetery that held the bodies of men “who had died nearby when the Union army marches on Atlanta.” Lee Park is named after General Lee, the Confederate general. A local restaurant where the author used to go before it became a Chick-fil-A, hosted meetings of the local Klan very casually. Additionally, the author relates summer visits to her grandparents back in Mississippi where she grew up comforted and loved by them.

Through vivid and engaging language, the author tells the story o f this small town, Prentiss, where her grandparents lived and where her family was from and her grandfather had been the Sherriff.

She relates how over time and with more research, she uncovered a very different version of what happened to Vernie Johnson.

The author explains that even though lynchings “went underground” beginning in the 1940s, this means that they occurred — most likely with the same frequency as in the decades before — but in a more covert way with the boundaries between “legal executions, killins committed by law enforcement officials and other white citizens” causing a blur in publicly recognized lynchings. The violence did not become invisible, but rather, “white leaders conspired to keep what had happened out of the press.” They framed it in such a way so that nothing ‘officially’ occurred, so there was nothing for the FBI agents or undercover NAACP activists to investigate. The locals talked, and they knew, however. “Sometimes, Black residents managed to pass along reports to Black papers published in places like Baltimore and Chicago.” Otherwise, these acts were deliberately kept out of the spotlight, out of lynching tallies, out of official records and police reports, covered up in a pretense to hide the truth of what occurred.

Further on, the author makes an impassioned and moving case for the fact that history is not “a dry and abstract account of external forces, nor is it a mythic tale of heroes and villains.” It’s not, in other words, something that is mathematically precise or something you can’t argue with, like the fact that 1+1 equals 2. History is personal and intimate. “Yet, the best history is not based on people’s feelings or memories alone. It must also be built on facts — on material traces of past lives mined from documents, archives, and landscapes.” The author addresses what I think is a crucial point about history, which is that yes, of course it is about facts, and it’s about figures, and about dates. But it’s also very crucial to be aware at all times of who is telling the history, of what perspective it is being told from, and about the fact that there are history textbooks out there, especially those published in the South from the 1920s to the 1970s in many cases that are full of lies, or that omit Black and Native American history, or that teach children a white supremacist worldview and pretend that they are being “neutral” and presenting “the facts.” History is far more complex than people give it credit for, and it’s vital that we remain aware of this particularly as many have sought to weaponize misinformation in this arena in order to further their own agendas or to perpetuate lies so that white children don’t feel “uncomfortable” and so much worse.

So yes, history is about facts, and it’s about telling the truth. But we must also remember the ‘story’ part in that in our search for presenting the truth, we build it on the archival foundation of the concepts of trustworthiness and reliability — and when I use those terms, I’m not using them in the general, everyday definitions. I’m using them very specifically in the archival tradition. That when a document is purporting to be the Declaration of Independence or a diary entry from Langston Hughes, that the reliability of that document has been established and we know that yes, this is the document it is claiming to be.

The author does a wonderful and thorough job constructing the early history of this town, Piney Woods, and of the first Black people who lived there, many of them forced there as enslaved people. “The work they had to do when they arrived — building log shelters and cutting fields out of forests — wrecked their bodies. Many did not survive.” Through this, the author chronicles what she uncovered about the history of Versie Johnson and his family, and about how his great-great-grandmother Rachel Baggett would have ended up in Mississippi mostly likely as a result of the ‘second middle passage,’ which sent approximately one million people from eastern states like Virginia, all those miles on foot or in wagons or boats carrying “a burden of unimaginable loss.”

As the author reminds readers, when white people attacked Black people in the South, “they did not just kill individuals. They took aim at entire communities.” Nowhere is this more true than in the Greenwood district of Tulsa, Oklahoma, or Rosewood in Florida.

Her reconstruction of Johnson’s life is riveting as much as it is painful in the hardest parts. What she uncovers in all the layers that are found is staggering, and has far more relations to her family than she thought. I cannot imagine the difficult of taking on all of the weight of this already disturbing subject matter that is so crucial to uncover and shed light on, but also the ties to the author’s family and how she must have felt as she pored over census records, newspaper records, and tried to find people to speak to about the era of her research.

Particularly as she begins to deconstruct and peel back the layers of how her grandfather operated in the death of this Black man, of the lies he told to cover up what he did, it’s incredibly distressing to read.

Overall, this is a gripping x2 book that is painful as it is fascinating, and it’s something that many, MANY more white people in America need to reconcile with. Because this isn’t ancient history. This is Tyre Nichols. This is Breonna Taylor. This has never stopped being relevant.

I commend the author for researching this bit of family history, let alone writing about it. And the way that she writes about it is open and honest; I wonder if her family still talks to her.

Starting out with Native Americans in the Piney Woods area of Mississippi and leading up to the present day city of Prentiss, Mississippi, she does a hell of a job with her research and its presentation. Hale covers everything from white supremacy, to vigilante violence (aka justice), reparations, segregation, and lynching. And not just “Strange Fruit” lynching. Lynching in the sense of I’m going be judge, jury, and executioner at this very moment.

You can tell Hale loves what she does. She packed so much into this book, making it an engaging and quick read. This is one worth picking up.

Family legend has it that Oury Berry, when serving as sheriff of Prentiss, Mississippi saved a Black man, Versie Johnson, from a lynch mob. However, Johnson still died while under custody of the police, the official line that he was killed while 'trying to escape.' Berry was on the scene that day. Grace Elizabeth Hale's In the Pines: A Lynching, A Lie, A Reckoning takes a deep and thorough look at Prentiss and its environs. The reader learns of the settling and economic development of the county and the duel biographies of Berry and Johnson.

The book is divided into two parts. 'The Road to the Lipsey Farm' begins the book detailing Johnson life as much as possible from traces in official records as well as past instances of racial conflict, some ending in lynchings. The name of the section, noting where Johnson was killed as well as the location of the woman he was accused of raping. Part two, 'Quiet and Orderly' is more focused on life in the 1940s and after. Alongside the biographical details, history of policing and racial conflicts, Hale details the efforts and struggle of the African American residents of the county to vote, or keep the ability and right to vote. This discusses the creation and work of an NAACP chapter, the Prentiss Institute, and African American school, and the decline of the town and continued dual school system.

It is a tragic history of violence and social codes and mores put in place to keep a society controlled by white supremacy. Hale has had to reconcile the familial memories of her grandfather with his actions as sheriff, when others with the same role and opportunities choose a more ethical path.

In the Pines is a necessary look at the decisions and narratives that can shape a community with all the complicity and unspoken acceptance inherent in this. Hatred isn't always visible, as this book amply demonstrates.

Historian Grace Elizabeth Hale was told, when she was young, that her grandfather, a sheriff in Prentiss, Mississippi, once helped to fend off a lynch mob intent on murdering a Black man. Years later, when she looked for newspaper accounts of the event, Hale was shocked to discover that the story she was told was all a fiction. In the Pines: A Lynching, a Lie, a Reckoning, Hale punctures the silence and lies covering the brutal reality of racial violence in one Mississippi county.

Hale’s scholarship—a blend of archival research and interviews with residents of Prentiss, Mississippi—creates a portrait of a divided community. (Appropriately, Prentiss is located in Jefferson Davis County, named for the only president of the Confederate States of America.) Prentiss is an idyllic place to raise a family, if that family is white. For Black families, it was a sinister town where Black residents were terrorized by White residents and white supremacist institutions for decades after the end of Reconstruction. Even the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and court decisions like Brown v. Board of Education did little to establish equal rights and equal justice in Prentiss. Hale points out that the town filled in its own public pool just a few years after it was completed so that the pool wouldn’t be integrated.

Hale’s research reveals that her grandfather, Oury Berry, was involved in the 1947 lynching of Versie Johnson along with two deputies and, possibly, others. Seventy-five years later, little is known about what really happened in the woods near Prentiss where Johnson was murdered. Hale also points out how skimpy the evidence is for Johnson’s life. His name is misspelled in several official documents. Hale attempts to recreate what Johnson’s life might have been like through imagination and extrapolation from the biographies of other Black Mississippians to make Johnson more than just another name among thousands of lynching victims. Hale is on firmer ground when it comes to her grandfather’s life. Unlike Johnson and his family, Hale can trace the various occupations Berry held when he wasn’t the local sheriff.

Hale often moves from a local perspective to a national perspective as she discusses Prentiss and its people. On the one hand, this is a very effective way to show the connections between national movements and the resistance of White Prentiss. For all Prentiss seems like a backwater untouched by time, White residents couldn’t hold back the tide of the Civil Rights movement forever. On the other, Hale’s long discussions of the history of logging in Mississippi, the establishment of Jefferson Davis County, or the founding of the private school that was the sole source of education for Black children for decades can sometimes seem like filler. I often wondered why Hale devoted so many pages to soil degradation after native trees were clear-cut and the soil farmed to within an inch of its life when the book is supposed to be a “reckoning” with racial violence. That said, I can’t blame Hale for the lack of documentation in her account. She’s very clear that there often is no documentation, especially once lynchings moved underground once federal law enforcement started to investigate them.

Late in In the Pines, Hale mentions that it was only in 2022 that a federal anti-lynching law was signed by a U.S. President. Although lynchings have occurred in the United States for over a century, it was only in February 2022, that President Biden signed the Emmett Till Antilynching Act, which made this kind of violence a federal hate crime and increased the maximum possible sentence. It remains to be seen if this legislation and increased Black rights activism will have a lasting effect.

Tell the Truth and Shame the Devil!
It took conviction and courage to seek the truth. The author could have quietly inquired and kept her findings to herself and loved ones. Instead, she openly investigated and opted to publish her findings. Bravo! This work spawned from a childhood memory espousing the bravery and righteousness of her grandfather, a small town sheriff in Southern Mississippi. Per her mother’s recollection, in 1947 her father (the author’s grandfather) seemingly single-handedly prevents a lynch mob from removing from his jail his prisoner, a black man, Versie Johnson, accused of raping a White woman. Despite Mr. Johnson’s eventual wrongful and tragic demise, her mother’s retelling makes her grandfather appear to be rather noble and heroic.
Curiosity abounds and the author chooses to begin her own investigation. There’s no surprise that her research revealed an alternative scenario – via interviews and corroborating news articles sourced from both black and white news publications – she confirms the ugly truth of murder largely sanctioned by the sheriff, her grandfather.
But the author treat history buffs with the hows and whys of Versie Johnson’s lynching and countless others in the Mississippi area. She takes the reader deep into the region’s past to its formation, the long and tortured journeys of white settlers and their enslaved captives. It also explores the forced and unfair removal of Native Americans. The ways of the South is analyzed and the tools, intimidation methods, and political tactics are called out in the use to neatly and precisely to build walls, fences, roadblocks and Terror to disenfranchise, rape malign and murder African-Americans for centuries She lays it on the table to show how Versie Johnson had little to no chance of survival given his circumstances in the clutches of White men and calls out parallels with today’s police brutality/murder as well as self-righteous, bigoted vigilantes.

I applaud her impeccable research and the courage to tell the truth in the midst of so many who want to bury it. I applaud her willingness to share a shameful and dishonorable act of her beloved ancestor. I applaud her efforts to find Versie Johnson's family and tell his story knowing that her grandfather and the men who attended his murder got away unscathed and left to live their lives into old age. Hard truths are difficult to face but she did so admirably.

Thanks to the publisher, Little, Brown and Company, and Netgalley for an opportunity to review.

I think this is a really interesting premise of looking at both local and familial history. However, the author's writing style and my reading style just did not match up. I found myself skimming the book rather than actually reading it.

This story got my attention as describes being somewhat like “To Kill a Mockingbird when Oury Berry the sheriff of Piney Woods in south-central Mississippi, acted as did Atticus Finch and prevents a lynch mob from killing a Black man who was in his jail on suspicion of attaching a white woman.

Story starts when a pregnant woman was found walking along a road in the awful heat heading to the courthouse to report that she had been attached by a black man when she was left alone as her husband wasn’t home.
She said the man asked for a drink of water and after she got the water he attacked her.
The black man Versie Johnson was quickly found and arrested. He later tried to escape and was shot. Although the sheriff was upset with the police, he thought the accused man may have rather died this way than being lynch or executed in an electric chair.

Later Oury’s granddaughter Grace is working on her dissertation and had decided to do it on what really happened to Versie Johnson. In her research she finds that there was a difference between the newspapers account and her mother’s story; although the newspaper account was also somewhat unclear.

Grace turned her dissertation into a book about the history of southern segregation, lynching, and white supremacy.

When I read in the description of this book that: "it was a tale straight out of To Kill A Mockingbird" I knew I was interested. This was originally a dissertation and it makes for a powerful book.

Title: In the Pines: A Lynching, A Lie, A Reckoning
Author: Grace Elizabeth Hale
Publisher: Little Brown and Company
Genre: Nonfiction History
Pub Date: November 7, 2023
My Rating: 4 Stars
Pages: 236

This story got my attention as describes being somewhat like “To Kill a Mockingbird when Oury Berry the sheriff of Piney Woods in south-central Mississippi, acted as did Atticus Finch and prevents a lynch mob from killing a Black man who was in his jail on suspicion of attaching a white woman.

Story starts when a pregnant woman was found walking along a road in the awful heat heading to the courthouse to report that she had been attached by a black man when she was left alone as her husband wasn’t home.
She said the man asked for a drink of water and after she got the water he attacked her.
The black man Versie Johnson was quickly found and arrested. He later tried to escape and was shot. Although the sheriff was upset with the police, he thought the accused man may have rather died this way than being lynch or executed in an electric chair.

Later Oury’s granddaughter Grace is working on her dissertation and had decided to do it on what really happened to Versie Johnson. In her research she finds that there was a difference between the newspapers account and her mother’s story; although the newspaper account was also somewhat unclear.

Grace turned her dissertation into a book about the history of southern segregation, lynching, and white supremacy. .

I love that Grace’s grandfather told her ~ to keep her mind open to the traces of the past and learn
to tell a good story; that way she could bring to life the history that was everywhere around us.

Oh so true!

Story is a quick but powerful read.
I am not as old as her grandfather but grew up at a time when we accepted things as ~ ‘that’s the way it is’.
I lived in a small town (not in the Deep South) and am an Italian Catholic; I was teased and bullied as I walked past the public school to go to the Catholic school. I learned to walk to school using another route as ~ that is the way one dealt with – - ‘that’s is just how it is’.- - Of course, as I got older I learned that it doesn’t have to be ‘that is the way it is”!
Loved this true story! However, also sad that that although we have had progress there is still so much more than needs to be done.

Want to thank NetGalley and Little Brown and Company for this early eGalley.
Publishing Release Date scheduled for November 7, 2023.