Deer Creek Drive: A Reckoning of Memory and Murder in the Mississippi Delta

In 1948, in the most stubbornly Dixiefied corner of the Jim Crow south, society matron Idella Thompson was viciously murdered in her own home: stabbed some 150 times and left facedown in one of the bathrooms. Her daughter, Ruth Dickins, was the only other person in the house. She told authorities a Black man she didn't recognise fled the scene, but no evidence was uncovered. When Dickins herself was convicted and sentenced to life in prison, the community exploded. Petitions pleading for her release were drafted, signed, and circulated, and after only six years, she was set free. The governor of Mississippi granted Ruth Dickins an indefinite suspension. In Deer Creek Drive, Beverly Lowry-who was ten at the time of the murder and lived mere miles from the Thompsons' home-tells a story of white privilege that still has ramifications today, and reflects on the brutal crime, its aftermath, and the ways it clarified her own upbringing in Mississippi.